The Online Photographer

Mike's Great Empirical Milwaukee Bookstore Walkabout

There's something I've been meaning to mention at the end of each of about the past five months: just "thank you" to all the people who have ordered anything from Amazon through the links on this site. The income for me is not generous, but it's substantial, and I'm grateful for it. So, thank you. Very much. I really mean it.

The empirical survey method
That said, I don't write about books exclusively in the hope that you'll buy a book from Amazon after linking to it from T.O.P. and put, say, 72¢ or $1.51 in my pocket. Fact is, to write this present series of posts (three from me—one down, two to go—plus we'll have three Guest Lists) has cost me more money, easily, than I'll make from it. Why? Because I've bought a stack of books as high as my kneecap in order to write about them.

I'm not necessarily complaining. But it has been expensive.

I've also done a city-wide store survey. And you know what the cost of fuel has been. This year I went through the months of January and February on one tank of gas, which tickles my "cheap gene." Rabbiting all over town looking at books, wantonly burning car fuel as I go, has also been a sort of sacrifice, although I guess only because it has injured my self-concept as a tightwad.

So why a survey? Well, I fancy that I'm an empiricist. Basically, empiricism is a mode of inquiry based on observation, as opposed to thinking or theorizing or experimentation or any of the other modus operandi by which we might acquire knowledge.

I'll give you an example of one of my empirical surveys: I used to like stereos. I was what is known as an "audiophile." It's basically a generational hobby among us baby-boomers. We were young when music briefly experienced a Renaissance phase in which its cultural importance was temporarily greatly magnified. (The period began in 1963 when the Beatles arrived in America, serving to distract the populus from the shocking gundown of John Kennedy, and lasted for twenty or twenty-five years thereafter; now known, roughly, as the "classic era" of rock and roll.) Stereos were a high-status toy to males of my generation, like electric trains to the generation previous and video game consoles to the generation after. Anyway, when I moved abruptly to Chicago in 1993, I didn't know anything about the audio salons in the area, so I decided to do a survey.

I made a list of all the stereo stores in town. The idea was that I would visit each one dressed in nondescript clothing, take note of how I was treated by the staff, then ask to listen to the best demonstration equipment they had available and evaluate it purely on the basis of sound quality—that is, regardless of how cool it looked or how esoteric it was or how much money it cost.

(I should explain (confess?) that I hoped to write an article about the experience, for one of the big audiophile magazines. But I never did.)

The Great Chicagoland Audio Emporium Survey was more interesting than you might think, however. For one thing, one inescapable conclusion I came to is that some extremely expensive stereos didn't sound very good. Even some hoity-toity high-end salons apparently aren't competent to put a decent-sounding system together. Another is that even a tall WASP-y looking white guy wearing jeans can get treated with almost unbelievable rudeness in certain types of retail stores. If I were black and got treated the way I was treated at one shop, I would definitely have ascribed it to racism. But that wasn't their motive—they were equal opportunity a-holes. That place is out of business now, a fate it well deserved.

Anyway, the survey served its purpose: I was able to identify what I thought were the three best audio stores in the Chicagoland area at the time*. In all three cases, the best demo sound at each was very different than at the others, but all three knew how to do it up right. The stores' reward for winning my contest was that from then on, I hung around and wasted lots of their salespeoples' time. Heh.

(Not really. I'm always honest about whether I intend to buy anything, and I did spend a lot of money at one store.)

The bookstore survey
Anyway, last week I decided to do the same thing with Milwaukee area bookstores, specifically looking for photography books. I'm sure I didn't find every store in Milwaukee and environs that sells photo books, but I hit the major ones.

The news is good and bad.

My three regular stops in my own immediate area include two stores that stock a decent number of photography books. One sells new, and the other used. I formerly considered this paucity of sources to be a hardship—yet another unavoidable drawback of living in the boondocks. The good news I discovered is that I'm much better off than I thought I was: both my regular new store (a Barnes and Noble) and my regular used shop (a Half-Price Books chain store) compare favorably to anything else around here. The bad news is that there's no really good photo book store in the city. The two biggest used shops I found in my area both had lame motleys of shabby, old, and undesirable photo books, and the "big" Borders store in the heart of downtown had one of the worst photo sections I've ever seen in a major retail bookstore: two and a half two-and-a-half-foot shelves, and half of what they had was trashy pop stuff. Woeful. (I guess Borders isn't doing so hot these days: it made the wrong decision when it decided not to sell online, and there have been rumors that it's going to be up for sale soon. Still, no excuse.)

I checked only one of the big University book stores, but I didn't find much reason to go back.

Best discovery? The museum store at the Milwaukee Art Museum (MAM). So that's a tip: If you're looking for good places to find excellent photo books, check your local art museum if you have one. It might not have a lot, but if it's like the MAM, it might have some things you'll see nowhere else.

The Milwaukee Art Museum

Otherwise, the only trend I noticed was that the best chain stores are those in or near the wealthiest suburbs, rather than downtown. I don't know if that would hold true for your area, but it might.

Single copy searches
If you're looking for one particular book (and, if you become enthusiastic about collecting, sooner or later you will), the best sources are Ebay and ABEbooks. Originally "Advanced Book Exchange," a name they now downplay, abebooks.com is one of the great etailer success stories of the web; it has never required any venture capital to fund its growth, and now facilitates almost $200 million in book sales annually between consumers and small and medium-sized bookshops all over the world. Abebooks owns JustBooks in Europe and recently bought Bookfinder, and has many country-specific websites. It makes up in selection and volume what Ebay lacks.

Despite the great convenience of these online sources, I've had decidedly mixed experiences with each. I've had it take excessively long times to receive books I'd purchased; I've had books arrive really poorly packed, and/or damaged; and I've gotten books in much worse condition than they were described. Because the books come from hither and yon, from all sorts of sellers, there's no consistency at all. A recent "like new" paperback purchased through Abebooks, for instance, proved to have underlining throughout the first half of the book. (What I imagine is that the store's buyer grabbed the book, glanced at the cover, flipped through half the book starting from the back, scribbled "like new" on the manifest, and moved on to the next book.) To the seller's credit, he immediately refunded my entire purchase price, including shipping. But the whole rigamarole is a PITA nonetheless.

Still, there are some things you might want that you just can't find any other way, and both of these resources are important—especially abebooks.com.

The Great Remainder Showdown
The other major source of fine photo books in excellent condition is to buy remainders. Don't think remainders are all garbage just because some of them are: I remember when I was in art school in the early '80s I saw a whole stack of remainders—sitting on the floor, no less—of one particular book that now can simply not be purchased for less than $300, with $400 more the norm. Price then? Five bucks for each pristine copy. That was 80% off the new price at the time. (Do I wish I'd bought the whole stack? Not really, because then I would have had to store and move them in the years since. If you have a huge house and never plan to move, buying up remainders might be a smart idea. For most of us, it's not.)

The two major online sources of remainders are Edward R. Hamilton (its photography page is here) and Daedalus Books (photography page here). As part of my survey I bought this book from Hamilton, and I can recommend it, especially if you have a scientific and historical cast to your interests—it's a handsome, well-made book with lots of pictures in it I'd never seen before. Note the price: $7.95 for a $60 book, which is the effective equivalent of "free." On the same day, I ordered a couple of books from Daedalus, including this one. (Again, note the price.) I figured I'd pit the two against each other and see whose service was quickest and most efficient and whose products were best. (All in the service of research, of course. See what I do for you?)

So who won? Both outfits confirmed my order by email within hours, and the books were on my doorstep within a few days. Both came very well packed, and all the books were in pristine new condition, most of them shrinkwrapped. In other words, I got ideal service from both places.

The only downsides I can see to ordering remainders from these suppliers is a) you kinda have to know what you're after, which requires a fair amount of familiarity with the current book market; and b) you're not rewarding the people who put their blood, sweat, and tears into making the book in the first place. In some cases this latter consideration might not be important to you, but in some cases it might be.

Meta-conclusion
One lesson of the survey is that I am personally simply not in a position to act as an omniscient observer and reviewer of the photo book market, on your behalf or for myself, because I don't have physical access to an acceptable percentage of currently available new books. Milwaukee's not a big enough city to support a really good specialist photo-book bookstore, and the sum total of the books available to me for direct inspection is limited. I can do a pretty good job—I certainly have a lot more books to look at than I can afford to buy for myself—but omniscient, no. A really serious photo book reviewer would either have to buy a large number of photo books or live in one of the world's cultural capitals. (Or both.)

I suspect, also, that unless you live in a large city (two million population or more), you might not have great access to photo books either. It could require a fair amount of persistent sleuthing to locate your own best local sources.

Upshot? Just that some combination of methods is the best way to build up a collection. Order books from Amazon through T.O.P.'s links, yes. (Please.) But also find a good used bookstore in your area with a generous and rotating selection; know where your best local stores are; and check out the museum store at your local art museum, if you have one. Use Ebay and Abebooks.com to find specific out-of-print titles you want, and keep an eye on the remainder houses. Even if you buy only one book a month, the more informed you are, and the better a selection you have from which to choose, the better your choice will be.

____________________

Mike

*In case you're a Chicagoan and you're interested, the stores I thought had the best demonstrations at that time (and the salespeople I got the most knowledgable treatment from) were Van L Speakerworks (Van), Audio Consultants in Evanston (Simon), and Holm Audio (Albert), which was then at a different location than it is now. Bear in mind that this was 15 years ago.

Featured Comment by John Camp: "There are a bunch of Half-Price Books stores in the Twin Cities, and that's where I buy probably 70% of my photo books. One thing I like is that they buy books from locals, so that the stock in the different stores is somewhat variable—and occasionally you'll run into a pile of books from what is apparently an estate sale. If I'm still alive when Mike J. kicks, for example, I plan to hang around his Half-Price Books for a while....

"The problem with museums is that they're expensive. If you're buying several books at a museum, look into buying a membership first—they're usually cheap, offer a discount on books, and you can often get back the price of the membership with a couple of purchases, plus you get free admission to the museum  for a year or so.

"Borders is in desperate financial condition, and the company is looking for a buyer (which may well turn out to be Barnes and Noble, if they can clear away some anti-trust questions.) In any case, there have been several reports that Borders is no longer buying many expensive, low-turnover books, i.e. art books. They used to be a good source for photo books, but since sometime last summer, have not been.

"I can vouch for the book stores in Santa Monica, mentioned above, but they are expensive. I found a gorgeous book in one of them—can't remember what, probably because of post-traumatic stress—and they wanted like a thousand dollars for it. Hint: if it's wrapped in hard shiny plastic and rip-resistant tape, you can't afford it. (You may be able to afford it financially, but your karma will take a big hit.)"

Featured Comment by Janne: "If you happen to be looking for some no longer in print photo books in the Japanese market (hey, it can happen), your best bet is probably Rakuten—Japanese site similar to Ebay (if you're looking for used lenses and stuff there's plenty here too). It's all in Japanese of course, and many sellers won't deal with foreigners (too much risk and too much hassle), but there's a site set up to help:

http://photojpn.org/istore/proxyrakuten.php

"Basically, you tell them what you want to buy, they buy it locally, charge you in turn, and send it on. And if you have any questions but are hampered by your lack of Japanese, they can translate and forward the answers. A caveat is that I have not used them myself (I live here already) but I have heard good things about this service from others. I should add that they help you buy from all kinds of sources, like Japanese photography museums and such too, not just Rakuten and Yahoo auctions."

Olympus E-3 Review: SWD Lenses and Autofocus

By Eamon Hickey

When Olympus sent me the E-3 to review, they also sent their two new Zuiko Digital SWD lenses, the ED 12–60mm ƒ/2.8–4.0 (24–120mm 35mm-e) and the ED 50–200mm ƒ/2.8–3.5. (100–400mm 35mm-e). The "SWD" acronym stands for Supersonic Wave Drive, which is Olympus's marketing name for piezoelectric autofocus motors (what Canon calls "Ultrasonic" and Nikon calls "Silent Wave"). These are the first lenses from Olympus to use such motors.

Playing Fields at Pier 40, Hudson River Park, NYC.

They are both part of Olympus's mid-range lens line, which they call the "high grade" class and which doesn't really have an exact equivalent in other manufacturers' product catalogs. I think the high grade line is an interesting approach. These lenses combine top-notch optical quality, very good build quality (including full weather-sealing), and moderately fast variable apertures. The variable aperture construction helps Olympus keep weight and bulk down. Typically, with other manufacturers, to get uniformly similar levels of optical and mechanical quality you need to stick with their pro-level constant aperture (usually ƒ/2.8) lenses, which are all pretty big. Their variable aperture mid-range zoom lenses are smaller, but nearly all are not as well made as the Olympus high grade line, and optical quality is more variable (some are very good; some not so much). The upshot is that the high grade lenses can be part of a recipe for putting together an advanced SLR system that is a little less bulky but compromises little or nothing on durability and optical performance. It would, of course, compromise some low light capability, especially given the modest but real high ISO deficits of the smaller Four-Thirds format sensor, but I think Olympus is offering a worthwhile alternative here. As with many things, it's a matter of picking your poison. I won't make an exhaustive analysis of either lens (detailed tests are available in several places on the Internet). Like all other Zuiko Digital lenses I've used (half a dozen), they're very, very good. Because it can be hard to correct, I will mention one thing I noticed in some shots with the 12–60mm lens at 12mm, which was a modest amount of mustache, or wavy line, distortion.

Autofocus is hard
The Supersonic Wave Drive component of these new lenses is clearly a major ingredient in Olympus's effort to upgrade their autofocus, which has inevitably been a big hurdle for them. Only Canon and Nikon really pushed hard on the development of AF in the 1990s when the SLR business was flat and not very profitable, and they (especially Canon) opened up a big lead on everyone else as a result. And autofocus, it turns out, is hard. Who knew? It's especially hard when you try to track moving subjects while running the motor drive at high speed. (During a motor driven sequence, autofocus detection can only happen during the brief moments when the mirror is fully down.) I did not expect Olympus to easily catch up, and the early history of the E-system did not cast doubt on my powers as a sage.

Playing Fields at Pier 40, Hudson River Park, NYC.

With that in mind, I was curious to see how far Olympus had come with AF and spent some time shooting a few different sports (not normally a subject I'm overly interested in). The E-3 is a major step forward for Olympus autofocus. With either SWD lens, it's extremely fast on stationary subjects in decent light. But that's the easy job in autofocus. Much more impressively to me, the E-3 is also capable of credible focus tracking of moving subjects while maintaining its high frame rate (5 frames per second). I got a reasonable percentage of sharp pictures in two and three second bursts of soccer, basketball, and even rugby players (in a very dark stadium). Now, it should be noted that there is still a substantial gap between the E-3 and the very best AF cameras in the world, which can give good percentages of sharp pictures at eight or nine frames per second. The E-3 is not the right camera for a professional sports photographer shooting for competitive media clients (but neither are its direct competitors, the D300, 40D et al). But for more general photographers who might occasionally need to get a few good shots of a sporting event, the E-3 can do a credible job. Taking that idea of a general photographer with modest action shooting needs a step further, the 50–200mm SWD (below) would pair nicely with the E-3, offering an appealing combination of excellent quality and durability with a lot of capability at reasonable size and weight. (All of the pictures accompanying this post were shot with it.)

In low light
I've seen complaints about the E-3's low-light AF performance, but my experience was fairly good. The camera slows down somewhat in low light, but I found it perfectly adequate all the way down to EV-Really-Dark. I did not experience any notable problems in light levels typically faced by an event shooter (parties, weddings, and the like) and had no trouble in a fairly dark (no modeling lights) studio setting.

Three shots from a 12-shot sequence where the player covered 30–40 yards. I was on and off the motor drive a bit during his run, but 9 out of 12 of the images were well focused. Playing Fields at Pier 40, Hudson River Park, NYC.

All in all, the E-3 gets Olympus autofocus into the game, offering good performance and reliability across a wide range of subjects, including some hard ones.

______________________

Eamon

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Olympus E-3 at Amazon U.S.
Olympus E-3 at B&H Photo

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Olympus E-3 Review Part 1 (preface)
Olympus E-3 Review Part 2 (first impressions)
Olympus E-3 Review Part 3 (lenses and autofocus)
Olympus E-3 Review Part 4 (live view)
Olympus E-3 Review Part 5 (miscellanea)
Olympus E-3 Review Part 6 (conclusion)

David Gahr 1922–2008

David Gahr died on Sunday. He was born in Milwaukee, the son of Russian immigrant parents, and gave up a career as an economist to photograph musicians. He was perhaps most closely associated with Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen, but he photographed hundreds and hundreds of musicians and artists. Above and below, a couple of examples of his work.

______________________

Mike  (Thanks to Greg Heins)

Featured Comment by Richard Carlin: "Check out some of my personal memories of working with David."

Featured Comment by Kevin Avery: "Thanks for remembering Dave and his work. I wrote about him, too, over at my blog."

Down with the U.S.A.

I'm off to work on the New Camera Recommendations page (this website is getting to be more and more like work...), but I thought first I'd respond to the criticisms that the foregoing list is U.S.A.-centric.

The whole point of what I've been saying about reissues over the past few weeks can be summed up like this:

• Even many great books don't stay in print forever.
• Recently, the trend is for out-of-print photo books to become instantly collectible and rise in price, sometimes dramatically.
• This tends to make them inaccessible.
• Every now and then, a great book is reprinted.
• While the reprint is in print, the book is accessible again for a while for an ordinary retail book price.
• Often, even reprints rise in price after they're no longer available new.
• You can never tell what's going to be available when, or for how long.
• You can never tell what's going to rise in price, or how much.

Ergo:

• "Buy what you can when you can" is what I'm advising.

See? In yesterday's list, I'm not picking and choosing great books from the past that everyone should own, and I'm certainly not making any sort of argument that all good books are American. That's misreading the evidence. I'm trying to point out reprints of significant books of the past sixty years that you happen to be able to buy at a normal retail price at this particular time. The fact that there are no reprints on the list by French or Czech or German photographers (or whatever) is not some sort of critical thesis; it's merely an accident of the current market. Wait a year or two, and half of the titles in yesterday's list will be unavailable, and there will be a few new reprints available (we hope). Believe me, if and when Cartier-Bresson's The Decisive Moment or Koudelka's Gypsies or  Gursky's Photographs 1994–1997 are reprinted, I will be advising you to be opportunistic and get them.

Get the picture?

_____________________

Mike

Great Photo Books You Can Buy New—Part I: Reissues

By Mike Johnston

8 Recommended Reissues
Mike's pick of the current crop of classics.

1. Robert Frank, The Americans (Steidl, 2008). For some reason, despite a lot of hoopla about re-releasing this book on the 50th anniversary of the original's publication in France—May 15th—the book is still not shipping. But don't let that stop you—it'll be along. Get yours piping hot off the press. Here's my original post about it.

2. John Szarkowski, William Eggleston's Guide (Museum of Modern Art, 2002). Like it or not, this book is an important part of how color photography came of age in America. Also, a very enjoyable little book. I've returned to mine many times over the years for pleasure. Before this reprint came out, the book had become a rare collectible in the $300–$400 range. When this reprint expires and current supplies dwindle, that will happen again. I notice that Amazon is currently "Out of Stock," which sometimes evolves into "Unavailable," so now could be—I say could be—your last chance. Please don't blame me if you can no longer get it.

While I'm on the subject, I have to add that I'm tired of people claiming ostentatiously that they don't "get" Eggleston. It's not that hard, folks. It's snapshot-aesthetic Americana, circa 1976, the apotheosis of the old 3R (3 1/2 x 5") Kodacolor drugstore print which was the form of demotic photography in America for a couple of decades. Read the essay, look at the pictures. They're just pictures; it's not some sort of secret society with a little peephole on the door with a secret password no one's told you about.

3. John Szarkowski, The Photographer's Eye (Museum of Modern Art, 2007). I laughed (out loud, as they say on the internets) at one "review" of this book that said, essentially, "it's just a bunch of pictures." ...Which, if you habitually scan pictures like you're leafing through a fashion magazine, might indeed not be enough. What with the demotic and democratic rag-and-bone shop of the online world heralding detritus from every forgotten corner of everywhere nowadays, it might be not be recoverable that academic photography once needed this sort of...broadening. There are pictures from historical societies in here. There are snapshots. The works of "photographers unknown." Art mavens once found it shocking. I still find it bracing, although that might be the honoring of old memories. In any case, this was the book that did the trick at the time.

However, you have to bring it to this book. Do not browse; peruse. Look carefully, look long. Think of it like the great curator handing you pictures to look at from out of an endless pile, and attend.

4. Bill Owens, Suburbia (Fotofolio, 1999). The original 1972 book had a hint of the subversive about it, some iconoclasm, typical of inscrutable critiques of America in those old hippie days. But Owens' take on suburban living is really essentially neutral and accepting, equal parts fond and sardonic. The pictures are rich with detail and truly document a style of American life both specifically and generally.

The new book is not a reprint, strictly speaking. It's a new edition, a rethinking. Weak pictures have been deleted, new pictures (many color ones, most obviously, but also some black and whites) have been added, the ordering's been changed, and a new introduction's been added. Overall it's the same book, though, just better in every way—better reproductions, better sequencing, better picture selection—"new and improved" indeed, as the starburst on the cover brightly proclaims.

Sadly, I can't recommend Bill Owens' recently published retrospective from Damiani, the one with the beautiful weed-whacker cover. The B&W reproductions  just do not meet my minimum standards.

5. Lisette Model (Aperture, 2007). (The name, by the way, is pronounced "moe-DELL," not as if it's the word for pretty women who pose for fashion photographers.) A reprint of the 1979 original, which was the first book ever published of Model's work—pretty amazing when you consider that the one-woman show at the Photo League that made her famous took place in 1941. The Aperture monograph, a surprise best-seller, came out a mere four years before her death.

Steichen said of Model's pictures that they "...are often camera equivalents of bitter tongue lashings. She strikes swift, hard and sharp, then comes to a dead stop, for her work is devoid of all extraneous devices or exaggerations."

6. Robert Adams, The New West: Landscapes Along the Colorado Front Range (Aperture, 2008). You've probably noticed that Szarkowski (his name is pronounced "shar-COUGH-ski," not "zar-COW-ski" as it is often mispronounced) is all over this little list—but that's only because he was all over American photography in the second half of the 20th century. He wrote the introduction for this book, a landmark of the "New Topographics."

Some "movements" in photography are essentially back-formations—"The New York School," which John Gossage and Jane Livingston pretty much made up out of whole cloth for a 1992 book about a bunch of disparate photographers who all happened to have worked in New York, is a case in point. (Good book, though.) The New Topographics was a more coherent movement. It took its name from a seminal 1975 exhibition curated by William Jenkins at the George Eastman House in Rochester (I used to have the catalogue, and I gave it away, if you can believe that, which I still regret). Again, the work needs to be seen in its historical context: the heroic, unpeopled landscape photography of Adams and Weston et al still prevailed in those days, at least among the public, but was becoming increasingly alien to the actual condition of the American West. Robert Adams reputedly promised himself early in his career that he would not take a picture that didn't contain some trace of human presence. I personally think Adams's From the Missouri West is a better book, but this one was more closely tied to the movement and was more influential. And you can get this one. The New Topographics as a whole had an enormous influence on photography in both the U.S. and Europe.

This is a straight facsimile reissue, a solidly well-made book, as clean as sunlight. Some of Adams's most memorable work.

Two I haven't seen
Rather than straight recommendations, these last two are books I recommend you look at yourself before buying, because I haven't seen either of them. Recently, I drove all around my city, surveying the available bookstores. I'll post about that experience separately, but nowhere in my peregrinations did I see either of these titles. Of course I know the originals very well, but you should look at these for yourself and only take a flier on them if you accept the risk for yourself. Sorry about that, but I can't buy everything—this writing-about-books project is already costing me a bloody fortune.

7. Stephen Shore, Uncommon Places: The Complete Works (Aperture, 2005). I have to say Stephen Shore is too goddam lucky to like. No disrespect intended, but he's no better than any of a hundred or even a thousand other photographers who never got any attention at all, but he seems to have been given infinite and infinitely tender credit and attention for everything he's done literally since he was a kid. Still, there's no denying the influence of Uncommon Places (the hortatory title of a book of pictures of eminently, one might even say quintessentially, common places). I think you almost have to be a photographer to appreciate these pictures; Shore really does have an exquisite eye for framing. There a fine mini-video flogging around YouTube of Shore working, and the most revelatory comment he makes in the program is when he says, "I've discovered that this camera [the 8x10] was the technical means in photography of communicating what the world looks like in a state of heightened awareness." Amen, and bravo. The current book is not a reprint—it's more like an anthology, containing the work from the original book and a lot more like it.

8. Lee Friedlander, Self Portrait (Museum of Modern Art, 2005). As a young art-dawg in photo school in D.C. I grew up puzzling over Friedlander, but he had nearly limitless cred. I and my friends attempted photographing ourselves with bare lightbulbs in the frame and with the camera on self-timer on the hood of the car, of course with results nothing at all like these. Friedlander's startling iconoclasm and unflinching self-regard set the tone of introspective art photography in America for half a generation.

Any I missed?
So that's Part I of my list—I also plan to add sections about great current books and great didactic titles. What do you think—did I miss any worthy reissues you would have named?

Next in this series: Martin Parr's list.

_______________________

Mike

Featured Comment by _#_: "One of the most important books on the early days of color photography that I am aware of and have been impressed by is by photographer Saul Leiter, titled Early Color. Now there's a painter taking color "snapshots." Eggleston Schmeggleston!   ;-)  "

Mike replies: That's true, but Leiter's Early Color is one of the paragon examples of the current mania for photo book collecting, whereby recent out-of-print books are bid up to price levels that put them out of reach for most of us. The whole point of my current lists is to name books that are both sure bets and are also available new for no more than retail price. Take a look at this page, which lists a few "used" copies of Early Color for sale. What's more, copies are scarce even at those prices.

Featured Comment by Allen George: "I used to feel the same way about Stephen Shore. I passed up Uncommon Places multiple times—found the subject matter banal, found the photos unappealing. That changed completely last year. I don't how to explain it or why it happened; it was as if it suddenly expressed how I saw the world. There's a certain...distance (maybe dispassion?)...when it comes to the photographs in it. It's almost as if an outsider stepped into the 1970s and started very intently staring at things. I guess that's one of the strongest sensations I got from Uncommon Places: that of being an outsider. And I don't know if this comes under the heading of framing, but another aspect of Uncommon Places that struck me: that so many of the photographs—especially the outdoor ones—are about geometry, about the relationship between blocks of color, between lines and forms…Anyways, if you've passed up Uncommon Places in the past give it a try again—you may be surprised."

 

Random Excellence: Portrait of Klimt

Moriz Naehr, Gustav Klimt, at his studio on Josefstaedter Strasse, Vienna, 1912. Photo: Getty Images

Gustav Klimt, Portrait of Eugenia Primavesi, 1913. Photo: Toyota Municipal Museum of Art

There's a Klimt show at Tate Liverpool from the 30th of May—lucky Liverpudlians. JPEGs from guardian.co.uk, mod. auct.

_________________________

Mike  (Thanks to David E.)

ADDENDUM: Artnet provides an auction record for a print of the Klimt portrait from November of 1999, spells the photographer's first name Moritz (and his last Nähr, although æ is an acceptable way of rendering ä), gives the date as 1910, and shows a whole print thus:

Artnet will also provide auction sale price searches, but ten searches in a month's time costs $30, and I'm not that curious! —MJ, thanks to Antonis

Olympus E-3: Our First Few Dates

By Eamon Hickey

For reasons partly explained in my earlier "preface" post on the E-3, I didn't get a chance to start shooting with the camera until early April. And because the E-3 began shipping last November, a fair number of comprehensive reviews of it have been published by now, so I don't see much to gain by duplicating those efforts. Instead, I'm going to ramble a bit and see where the discussion leads me. Back in 2003, I took a skeptical-but-hopeful early interest in the Four-Thirds system that Olympus launched that year with the E-1. I was attracted by its potential for smaller gear, and the idea of an open (or quasi-open) lens mount standard, as well as a desire to see an expansion in the number of manufacturers having success in the DSLR business. Ultimately, I ended up buying a refurbished (read: cheap) Olympus E-1, which I've used quite satisfactorily for a couple of years now. (I also own or have owned Canons, Nikons, and Pentaxes, and have reviewed and/or used 15-odd other DSLRs of all types.)

My dream for the E-1's successor, to the extent that I had one, was for a camera of similar build quality and basic capability level but shrunk by about twenty percent. Dashing my faint hopes, the E-3 turned out to be a little bigger than the E-1, but the obvious rejoinder to my irrational obsession with compactness is that Olympus has added a lot of good new stuff to the camera. This includes a big new viewfinder, in-camera image stabilization, and an articulated LCD (paired with Live View)—all in a body that is, by all accounts, quite weather resistant. As highly capable DSLRs go, the E-3 is not that big. But the same can basically be said of the Nikon D300, Canon 40D, and Pentax K20D. Still, if you add in the size and weight of good quality lenses, especially if you need telephoto focal lengths, it is possible to put together an advanced photographer's E-system kit that is a little bit lighter and less bulky than similarly capable gear from the Big Two. This remains for me a moderately attractive aspect of the E-system, but I've been disappointed that Olympus (or Panasonic, also a Four-Thirds DSLR maker) hasn't done more in this area. I'd love a camera the size of the Olympus E-420 but designed for a serious photographer. (I personally would not even consider buying a Canon 1-series or Nikon D-series behemoth, whose owners, in my firm opinion, should sue those two companies for aggravated assault. But it is undeniable that those cameras are in their own league in several ways and if you need them, you need them. And then you need a chiropractor.)

So, after unpacking it, I took the E-3 out for an initial getting-to-know-you walk around the East and West Village. (All of the pictures accompanying this post are from that first walk, taken on one of the few really nice evenings we've had in New York so far this year.) On the responsiveness front, the E-3 is more or less indistinguishable from similar DSLRs (such as those named above). It does stuff fast. Shutter response, image display and saving, buffer size, menu response, mode switching, autofocus (more on this later)—all those kinds of things are very responsive in this camera. I like responsive cameras a lot, so I don't mean to sound blasé about it, but really this is almost a given in an advanced DSLR at this point. The basic user interface is also pretty much the same as every other serious photographer's DSLR. I don't mean that the button placement and menu arrangement is identical—it obviously isn't—but the experience of operating these cameras is, overall, far more similar than different. This is really apparent if you test a lot of different models. And mostly, it's a good thing—the E-3, like its competitors, is efficient to use in nearly all ways. Bottom line is that on the overall user interface and responsiveness fronts, there's nothing that remarkable either way about the E-3, which is just fine.

In my first version of this post, I spent some time carping about the E-3's limited functionality in record review—i.e. when the picture you just took pops up on the LCD for review. If you were using, say, the histogram view in playback, you'll see the histogram view in record review, and you can't change it, nor can you delete the picture. I've subsequently learned that this default behavior can be changed, enabling full playback functionality in record review, including the ability to delete the shot you just took or change the display view (from histogram to highlight warning, for example). The setting that makes this change is a bit obscure and oddly described, and I think full playback functionality should be the default, but those are quibbles. I'm chagrined to have gotten this wrong in the first place.

The playback mode itself could use one major improvement. You press the "INFO" button to change from one view to the next—from histogram to highlight warning, say—but it operates only in a fixed-sequence loop. If you are viewing the highlight warning, you have to press the "INFO" button six times, looping through five views you don't care about, to get to the luminance histogram view. You should be able to toggle directly between the histogram and the highlight warning views. It's not the end of the world, but on the other hand, it's a small irritation, and causes a small delay, every single time you want to analyze an exposure, which, for me, is nearly every time I shoot a new scene. This is probably fixable with a firmware upgrade, and I hope Olympus does so, but really, by now—2008, for cripes sake!—it should be an elementary component of digital camera design. (Nikon's D300, for example, gets all this exactly right.)

I'm guessing here, but things like this make me wonder how much the legacy of film camera thinking hampers the designers of these cameras. But just to undermine my own theory, I'll give Olympus credit for going some way towards understanding that the camera's ISO setting, in the digital era, really should be treated like shutter speed and aperture—i.e. as a setting that you might want to be able to change quickly from shot to shot. I would, in fact, consider adding a third control wheel to any serious camera I was designing, so that you could have direct control of shutter speed, aperture, and ISO in manual exposure mode. On the E-3, the button to change ISO is right behind the shutter release, as easily accessible to your right forefinger as the exposure compensation control, so you can change ISO very quickly, even with your eye to the viewfinder. Nikon's D300, which I praised above for its good digitalness, flubs this by default, sticking ISO over on the left top-deck, where it's harder to change from shot-to-shot. Puzzling, sometimes, the way these guys think.

Since I'm on the topic of digitalness, I'll quickly mention two of the E-3's major digital-enabled features: in-camera image stabilization and Live View. Mike has written about in-camera image stabilization before, so I'll keep my comments brief, but I just want to add two cents: this one is a no-brainer. Built-in IS is a really good thing. Every digital camera of any type that isn't dirt cheap should have it, and eventually they all will. It's like automatic exposure was in 1975—new-ish but soon to be universal. (I hope this doesn't trigger the in-camera vs. in-lens IS debate, which I find goofy—Canon and Nikon were forced to start with in-lens IS because they developed the feature when film cameras were their dominant business, but they can easily commingle in-camera IS with their in-lens IS systems, and the market will probably force them to in upcoming years, no matter if in-lens IS is better in some ways or not.) I did not do any careful tests of the E-3's IS, but it's clear to me that it works very well. None of this is to say that you can't take good pictures with a camera that lacks IS—all the cameras I own lack it, and for many, many pictures it's irrelevant—but in the not-too-distant future, we'll all have it and we'll be glad we do.

Live View is also really interesting to me, and on that subject I have much more to say (it's a no-brainer, too), but I'm saving that for a post of its own later in my E-3 ramblings.

______________________

Eamon

______________________

Olympus E-3 at Amazon U.S.
Olympus E-3 at B&H Photo

______________________

Olympus E-3 Review Part 1 (preface)
Olympus E-3 Review Part 2 (first impressions)
Olympus E-3 Review Part 3 (lenses and autofocus)
Olympus E-3 Review Part 4 (live view)
Olympus E-3 Review Part 5 (miscellanea)
Olympus E-3 Review Part 6 (conclusion)

Joe McNally

Making its way around the photo-blogosphere (I heard about it from Jason Anderson at Canon Blogger who heard about it from David Hobby at Strobist) is a terrific Talks@Google video of Joe McNally giving one of the presentations on which his current book is based.

Joe McNally

I have to admit I don't like watching video. Video just means I have to turn the music off, which I find almost physically uncomfortable; I work at my desk, of course, but what I'm really doing here—what keeps me chained to the leg of the desk—is music. I can do without it for 22 minutes a day to watch Jon Stewart (although sometimes—mea culpa—I skip the author interview), but that's about my limit. Voluntarily turning off the music for an hour and ten minutes is like going without a sufficient amount of air for that long. I'd much rather read something than have to sit still for the same information to go by on a video.

The Joe McNally video, however, was worth turning off the jazz. It's one of those "windows into the world of photography" that you find every so often (another is "At Close Range," about Joel Sartore). It's a great talk, even if most of McNally's laugh lines don't get laughs from the Google wonks. (The lines are still very funny. I laughed a number of times when the non-virtual audience didn't.) There's a whole lot of insight here—earned insight. Lots to look at, lots to think about. Worth giving up your air for an hour.

It's eloquent when he asks his audience things like, "Anybody remember Ozzie Smith?" and the response is silence. Right there is one of the problems of being an assignment location photographer—news doesn't stay news. (Nobody ever forgot Ozzie Smith who ever saw him.)

Here's the book. It's called The Moment It Clicks: Photography secrets from one of the world's top shooters (New Riders Press, 2008). The video version makes you sit in an audience, but it's a lot cheaper.

Some photo enthusiasts like the tech stuff; they want to know every detail of how pictures were made, as if the tech stuff is either the secret or the point. (Not.) Me, I like to look at pictures. The Moment It Clicks splits the difference; call it a guided tour of a thirty-year career in photography and you're not far off. Hardcore techies won't find every nut and bolt. But there's more than nuts and bolts to living a life as a top-dawg pj—and a whole lot more to the pictures, really.

Is there anybody out there who wouldn't a) learn something from, and b) enjoy the hell out of this book? I'm not seeing it.

Anybody read it? I'd love to hear what you think.

I remember so many of these pictures.

_______________________

Mike  (Thanks to Jason)

Featured Comment by Gerry Morgan: "The day this book arrived, I started dipping into it late at night, always planning to just read another couple of pages and then put it down. I finally got to bed at 2 a.m. having read it from cover to cover but in completely chaotic order. Since then, I've dipped into it so often that I've effectively read it through at least once again. It strikes a wonderful balance between being an instructional manual, a collection of photos, and a great read. I started watching the YouTube video but turned it off after ten minutes because it was all taken from the book. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but I like being able to access this type of material randomly and the book is perfect for that."

Featured Comment by Stan Banos: "Interesting to see how he managed to integrate  his commercial assignments with his personal interests, relate how he took time off to shoot the 9/11 portraits and then have to reestablish his commercial cred—only to have someone ask if he shot any 'personal work.' "

Featured Comment by Scott Jones: "Even my wife who is not a photographer read this book almost cover to cover. She loved the stories and distinctions and creativity displayed. Great read...."

Featured Comment by Stephen: "One of the best books (of any kind) I've read in a while. It's also probably the only book I've ever read that's really inspired me in my photography, especially to pick up and do some personal projects. I was wondering if or when it'd come up on TOP...."

Olympus's E-3 and A Great City Losing Its Edge

By Eamon Hickey

About two years ago I wrote somewhere around my 125th magazine camera review, turned it in, deposited the (depressingly paltry) check, and made a firm resolution to give up the camera reviewing habit altogether. Mostly, I've made good on that resolution since then, but last fall, the nice folks at Olympus America—they really are nice—contacted me to ask if I was interested in testing an E-3 and reviewing it. They caught me in one of my periodic bouts of play-with-cameras-itis, and the upshot is that in three or four posts over the next couple of weeks I'll write up some of my impressions of Olympus's current flagship DSLR—not so much a review as a meander through various topics-of-interest (to me, at least) related in one way or another to the E-3.

But my first E-3 post, a kind of preface, is a short tale that touches on another topic-of-interest to me: the nature, changing and otherwise, of New York City, with the added bonus of a tiny bit of inside dope on the camera reviewing game.

Olympus wasn't able to get me an E-3 as soon as they had first implied they could. They were nicer than to tell me this directly, of course, but the main reason was that changing circumstances caused them to send the camera to a more important reviewer. I say this without the slightest ill feeling. It's completely right and proper. They have a limited number of review units to loan, and they must get the maximum marketing and public relations value out of them.

Fast forward three months to late February of this year, and Olympus now has a sample E-3 to send me. At this point, a miscommunication occurred, and let's just leave it at that. The package they sent to me—containing an E-3, a Digital Zuiko 12-60mm SWD lens, an FL-50R flash, an FL-36R flash, and a complete E-510 two-lens kit (about US$4,000 worth of stuff)—was left by the Fedex driver in front of the door to my apartment in New York city, where I live alone. But as fate would have it, I was not in New York. I was in California for several weeks and didn't know that the camera had even been shipped. Twelve, count 'em twelve days passed before Olympus and I realized that the box full of gear was sitting, all by its lonely lonesome, in an open hallway on the second floor of my busy six-floor apartment building in Manhattan's East Village. Incredibly, it was still sitting there—forlornly, I like to think—when I called a friend who lives in the neighborhood and sent him after it.

We can't know, of course, all that transpires in the life of a New York City apartment building over twelve days, but some things are certain. Neighbors from the eight other apartments on my floor and the floor above must've walked past that large-ish box two or three times a day, day after day, as it sat there, unmoving. (Did they absently wonder if I, their friendly, agreeable, not to say charming neighbor was in jeopardy inside my apartment, perhaps wasting away in the bathtub, paralyzed from an unlucky slip in the shower?) Oliver, the industrious building superintendent, would have mopped around that box twice on his regular Friday cleaning rounds. (Did he curse me, in his lovely Irish brogue, for leaving my junk in his way? Twice?) This being New York, at least twenty-five, but more likely as many as fifty, restaurant delivery guys, arms laden with Chinese food and pizza, must've stumbled past the package. (Did they pause and check over their shoulder for observers while they pondered what the box might contain and the odds of quietly carrying it away?). And that is not even to mention the legions of carpet layers and kitchen remodelers, UPS and Fedex delivery dudes, subletters and Parisian apartment-swappers, partygoers and neighbors' friends and friends of friends and their proverbial cousins from Staten Island, and God knows who else who passed within a foot or two of that apparently abandoned $4,000 box, and nobody touched it. For twelve days. What kind of weird New York City is this?

When I finally got back home and opened the box, I found, accidentally left inside, a shipping label from the camera's previous user—the more important reviewer, in other words. It was none other than David Pogue of The New York Times, recent participant in a minor contretemps with Mike J. on this very website. It's a small, odd world.

______________________

Eamon

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Olympus E-3 at Amazon U.S.
Olympus E-3 at B&H Photo

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Olympus E-3 Review Part 1 (preface)
Olympus E-3 Review Part 2 (first impressions)
Olympus E-3 Review Part 3 (lenses and autofocus)
Olympus E-3 Review Part 4 (live view)
Olympus E-3 Review Part 5 (miscellanea)
Olympus E-3 Review Part 6 (conclusion)

Sigma DP1 Update

by Edward Taylor

This is an update to my original review, as I have now had the Sigma DP1 for long enough to know it well.

I still stand by most of what I wrote originally. My main complaint about the camera then was that it was painfully slow. It was and it is. A few people wrote me to tell me that I really didn’t give the camera a chance to be fast. They said that if I turned off autofocus, and turned off auto exposure, and bought a super fast SD card, and used the rapid sequence mode (3 frames), and turned off the LCD, and didn’t use the flash, and made sure not to accidentally depress the shutter button halfway (which locks up the screen), then actually it was a pretty fast little camera. Well, I tried all those things; and for good measure even placed my DP1 under a small pyramid at night. Even the mysterious forces of the pyramid could not turn this camera into a speedster. With all modern day contrivances turned off, it was still slow—and also fairly useless as a camera. Clearly, this camera was not built for speed.

But you don’t always need speed. I adapted to its slowness. I was also not as impressed with the manual focus mode as some other users seemed to be, and I am still not impressed. Since my review, several more reviews have been written about the DP1. Most are in agreement with me that the camera needs some work in the areas of ease of use and speed.

I still believe the image quality is by far the best I have seen from a camera this small. In my previous review, I said that the DP1 has the best image quality of any point and shoot. My only real regret about my original review is that I compared this camera to other point and shoots like the Canon G9. The DP1 is small, but it is not a point and shoot and, when you think about it, it really isn’t pretending to be. It is not a Decisive Moment Digital camera either. As some astute readers pointed out to me, the DP1 is in a class by itself. What it is, is the only camera that you can put in your pocket and, with a little practice and the right conditions, produce images that rival the quality of those from a consumer-grade DSLR.

Not too infrequently, the Foveon Sensor will produce images that just look a little different than images from other cameras. I described these images before as smooth and luxurious. I wish I could describe them better or learn how to consistently get that smoothness and luxuriousness. It seems like all the right forces have to come together to produce it. To put it another way, every so often, the DP1 will give you a little gift of an image that far exceeds your expectations.

And I learned about Sigma’s customer service. One day, I grabbed my DP1 to view a photo on the LCD screen and as soon as the power turned on, the photo zoomed all the way in. The zoom button was broken and permanently depressed. I do not know how this happened as I was very careful with the camera. There was no visible sign of damage. I sent it back to Sigma for repair, and in exactly one week, I got it back, all fixed, and no charge.

Knowing what I know about this camera, I would buy it again because of its size and image quality and also, because the DP1 rewards my loyalty regularly with an unexpected "Foveon masterpiece."

_____________________

Ed

Featured Comment by Mike Allen: "I also have a DP1 and my attitude is exactly the same as Ed's. Horses for courses—I don't take it with me for available light pictures of people at a party, to a lacrosse game, or for anything requiring speed or optical reach. I do actually have it with me all the time, though. I like the view camera comparison, and I liken it to having a mini-view camera in my pocket—if I'm prepared to be slowed down a little (and let's not exaggerate), I can produce an image that meets fairly high standards, and way above what most similarly-sized cameras produce. And yes, I'm among the Foveon Faithful—every once in a while it produces an image that pushes me way back in my seat. I'd buy it again in a flash. Do I wish they would fix the myriad problems? You betcha."

Featured Comment by Charles Maclauchlan: "Well put. I am somewhat new to digital, three years vs. a bunch with film. I was anxious for a small camera with a large sensor. I knew nothing at all about the Foveon sensor but have come to love the 'every so often gift.' Good turn of words. I noticed a quality not easily described but akin to film's subtleness with color transitions. In retrospect if this camera had the sensor I am used to in my Nikon I probably would have stopped using it by now...the other problems would be too high a price for compactness. This camera has replaced all other cameras for about 95% of my work. I'm just addicted to those 'little gifts.' "