The Online Photographer

Now, Where Did I Put That Hacksaw, Mama? Merry Christmas 2009

Well, it's that time of year again—as I have every year since we began, I'm closing up shop for a few days to celebrate the ancient Solstice holiday, joining in whilst much of my culture commemorates Mithras and Mammon and honors the Christ Child. We're hoping to raise a flagon of nog with friends and relatives, smell the scent of pine indoors, trade gifts, and eat. Well, overeat, but overeat well. (Hey, a palindrome.)

I'll be back before the New Year gets here. We've got a lot of good stuff coming up: I spent a couple of hours on the phone yesterday with Peter Turnley, and it looks like we might be able to bring you his selection of his work from every phase of his career, which is going to be interesting to say the least. Howard French is working on an interview with one of our favorite photographers, and Christopher Lane has written a guide to a category of products that's been stirring great enthusiasm amongst equipment nuts recently (I can use that disparaging term because I'm one). I've been working on the next TOP Ten Cameras, we have in the hopper some more good book reviews from Geoff Wittig and from myself, and of course we'll name the Book of the Year 2009 and the Camera of the Year 2009 as part of our eagerly-awaited pointless end-of-the-year awards. And, perhaps best of all, we have a very pleasant surprise coming up on or about the 20th of next month. I cannot say more now. I'm pretty sure I wasn't supposed to say that much.

I know the following has made the rounds on sites of every description and innumerable email forwardings already, but I can't resist one more time because I love it:

(Photographer unknown)

And with that, a Happy Holiday Season to all. Back soon. I'll leave you with a nice little post by my friend-I've-never-met John K. about how our subjects choose us, which I'll put right above this one.

And now, back to working on that chain between my ankle and the leg of the desk—now, where did I put that hacksaw, again?

—Mike, TOP's M. of C.'s and and Longsufferin' Bob Cratchit Figure

Mike and Zander, a few years back

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Commercial Advertisement

I don't know if you realize this yet, but there are some holidays coming up later in the month, some of which customarily involve gift-giving. A brief commercial advertisement, then: Our friends at B&H Photo have created three pages of shoppers' bargains for the season, with some good prices on popular stuff.

SLR holiday specials from B&H

Point-and-shoot holiday specials from B&H

Video/Camcorder holiday specials from B&H

I'm not telling you to spend your money, but if you are going to do so anyway, TOP gets a little grease when you order through our links. As you hopefully already know. I'm just sayin'.

End of Commercial Advertisement; we now return to our regular programming.

The TOP Keep-The-Lights-On Committee

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Blog Notes: Oh, Dear

I'm sorry to trouble you with self-serving administrative concerns so soon after the Birthday post, but I wanted to pass this along. I've just learned, definitively, that TOP does not get credit for any items you buy from Amazon that were previously placed in your cart, whether you linked from here when you placed them there or not. We only get credit for items you both select and buy after linking to Amazon from here.

I should have known this two years ago. I've been telling people the opposite, all this time. How discouraging.

Never did have much of a head for business.

Mike

Blog Notes: TOP Turns Four

Rather incredibly (and by incredible, I mean difficult to believe), TOP turns four years old on Saturday. I think I've mentioned before that when I started doing this in 2005, my ambition was to keep it going for a year, and, frankly, at the start, I wouldn't have given a farthing for the chances of that. And yet here we are, still chasing the great white squirrel.

To date, there have been a few dozen shy of 3,000 posts, well over 21 million visits to the main page, and very close to 50,000 comments.

Now, I hate to do this to you, I really do, but you know what's coming: as I always say, it's time to buy yourself our birthday present. If there's something you want from either Amazon or B&H Photo, you must* buy it for yourself. Look, you have to do something to support TOP and help pay for all the good free stuff you enjoy, right? So if there's a book you want, or a lens, or a CD, anything, I'm sorry, but it's your duty; you really have no choice—your hands are tied—your obligation as clear as...optical glass. And if your spouse or partner, child or parent complains about you spending money, well, you can tell him or her in good conscience that you didn't want to buy yourself a present, but you had to, Mike forced you to.

Mike with hottie and tool of trade in front of TOP World Headquarters

Meanwhile, I'm going to take a couple of days off. I won't be slacking, however: I plan to use the time to finish up this year's "TOP Ten Cameras" list. This time, though, I'm trying something different. I know we all just love the cute way that the "top" in "top ten" matches the site's acronym, but let's face it, the concept of the "best" cameras is incredible (and by incredible, I mean lacking in credibility. Kinda silly, in other words). I'm planning to try a new format for it, too. Hope you'll be entertained, and possibly even enlightened.

Okay, mostly entertained.

And Happy Thanksgiving to all of you who celebrate it—what the heck, even if you don't.

Cheers,

Mike, TOP's Chief Artificial Coffee Creamer Officer**

*(I kid, of course. As I also always say, you're always welcome here whether you buy anything through our links or not. Especially if you are un- or under-employed, my thoughts are with you this Thanksgiving, and please keep your money for more important things. You can catch us when prosperity smiles on you again, as surely it will.

I'm very grateful for all the support we get from so many people. TOP has felt the economic downturn but is still surviving. More than 270 people "subscribe," i.e., give a recurring donation of at least 25 cents a month; a number of people have sent cash "tips"; somewhere between 1% and 4% of our readers have bought things though our links at least once; and various "Friends of the Site" have made donations in kind of everything from professional advice to equipment loans. Plus, we have some great advertisers. And let's not forget the many individuals who have written the guest posts or the great comments that add so much to the conversation. I have a lot to be thankful for this Thanksgiving.)

**

ADDENDA:

 

Out-of-camera JPEG version

 

Mike K2 filter version

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(P.S. There are sometimes some hidden jokes on the site that I put in just to amuse myself. People hardly ever notice. Hit the permalink for this post and check out the URL....)

Thanks!

Since the first of the month just went past again, I'd like to say thanks to all of you who ordered something from Amazon or B&H Photo (our major affiliates) through our links.

It's a painless way to support the site because those companies then share a little bit of their profits with us. You don't have to pay anything more, but a small portion of your purchase price goes to us.

Here's our links page. It includes links to Amazon in Canada, Germany, and the U.K.

I get this question a lot, so I'll answer it in advance—anything you order from B&H or through Amazon (doesn't matter what it is, and third-party vendors count) gets credited to TOP as long as you go directly there from here when you actually make the purchase. You can save the Amazon link URLs but not the B&H one.

If you've ordered anything through our links, it's just really kind of you. Merci beaucoup!

Now back to work on Part II of the GF1 / E-P1 post....

—Mike, TOP CFO, Balayeur de plancher, and Generalissimo of Dunning

Illustration by Cheryl Jacobs Nicolai from this post

Blog Notes: Angering the Gods

I wonder if I've angered the gods lately? I seem to be suffering from a spate of technical problems, unrelated but arising in succession.

I was preparing my epic GF1 vs. E-P1 post for publication this morning when...certain keys on my keyboard stopped working. It made it hard to type certain special characters and cut and paste. After forty-five minutes of prying off the keys and cleaning out the schmutz that has somehow collected beneath them (when is somebody going to invent an un-dirtiable keyboard?), I gave up and ordered a new keyboard for express delivery. This has been an on-again, off-again problem for about the past four days. I'm really hoping it's the keyboard and not something in the e-brain of the blog compositor.

Last weekend our freshly serviced lawnmower failed to start. The service guy showed up in his pickup truck last night to cart it away again. He tells me that although I bought a lawnmower that has "Honda" emblazened on it, it's not a Honda lawnmower—it's a Sears Craftsman lawnmower, with an engine built by Honda to Sears' specs—meaning, of much lower quality than "real" Honda engines.

Oh.

Wish I'd known that before I overpaid for it.

I will probably sort out my ongoing bad lawnmower luck someday. Probably just as soon as my son moves away and I move back into an apartment.

There have been other incidents. Most notably: I came across a cache of brand new, still shrinkwrapped jazz records recently, at a local used bookstore. Bought 'em all. Thought I had made a real score. So guess what? About half of them are faulty. One is perfect but for a neatly scribed scratch that runs most of the way across one song. Another is intolerably noisy, with pops and ticks throughout the whole record. Mind you, these were unopened. They're all manufacturing defects. 

I suppose there had to be some reason why they were bargain priced and stuck in a bin in an out-of-the-way used book store.

Of course, with the 9,000 or so music files I have on the hard drive, I don't have that problem. I have a different problem. Every time iTunes updates, which is frequently, it can't find any music that wasn't purchased from iTunes. I have to go search manually for the files before I can play them.

It's always something. Maybe if I bought an iTunes how-to book to not read, it would help.

Zeus? Buddy? What have I ever done to you, man?

Regular programming will return when the new keyboard gets here. With any luck, that is: I ain't killing no goat.

Mike

UPDATE: I got the new keyboard on Thursday (a nice Microsoft Natural Ergo 4000) after learning that the problem was indeed in the TypePad interface and not in the old keyboard at all. But I put a lot of miles on my keyboard, and the old one was in pretty grubby condition. Fortunately, I really do learn something every week here on TOP, and this week I learned about washing dirty keyboards in the dishwasher (the amusing link is from a reader named charlie—thanks, charlie), so the old one is in the dishwasher right now.

Meanwhile, I'd forgotten how nice these keyboards feel when they're new—they're not mechanical, but the type with the plastic membranes under the keys—but they're still very nice.

Featured Comment by Riley: "I believe the proper sacrifice for a keyboard is a hamster."

Featured Comment by Stan B.: "To this day, don't know why keyboards don't come equipped with a crumb tray...."

Featured Comment by Hugh Look: "I think you've been a victim of a unique and very secret collaboration between Apple and Microsoft, the little-known Critical Task Detector (CDT), now built in to all small computers. CDT monitors the speed at which you strike the keys, the force with which you strike them, the number of times you use the backspace key and the sweat on your fingertips. Clever software then computes the probability of an impending deadline by adding these up, and when it gets a suitably large number it decides that indeed a deadline is looming and you need to be punished for leaving it so late, so that You Will Never Do It Again. You know what happens next.

"I'm taking Microsoft and Apple to the European Court of Human Rights on the grounds that CDT is discriminatory against a) freelance newsletter editors (as I used to be until CDT forced me out of the business) and b) people with ADD (as I still am)."

Featured Comment by Fred: "If you have a goat—put it to work on your lawn!"

Featured Comment by fmertz: "Pullleeeeze! The proper sacrifice for a keyboard is, wait for it...a mouse!"

John Nuttall

When TOP posted the pictures of the Prius/Tesla/Toureg wreck the other day, I failed to give credit to the photographer (I found the pictures at a third-party website which also didn't attribute them). Turns out the photographer is John Nuttall, a.k.a. skagman, who has alternative views on his flickr page. He says the pictures have been extremely popular and that he's gotten more than 13,000 hits on his flicker photostream since putting them up. Thanks to John for setting us straight.

Mike

Featured Comment by Bill Mitchell: "OT: since I got my Prius, when I drive in the local State Park the wild animals seem to pay no attention to me. Last weekend I came on several flocks of wild turkey, and they let me drive right up in the midst of them as though I weren't there (they were on both sides of the main road, running back and forth between them). Turkeys are the most skitterish wild life, but deer act the same way towards the Prius. I haven't run across our resident Florida panther lately, so I don't know how it would react."

Mike replies: On the contrary, this might not be off topic at all! I imagine this might be something that certain wildlife photographers might very much want to know about....

Blog Notes: Bear With Us Please

I've been experiencing some technical problems with the website lately. This may result in a higher than usual number of errors surviving in posts for longer than they should. Also, some readers have been having trouble leaving comments. We are working on the problems. I'm sorry for any inconvenience and I hope you will bear with us.

Mike

Featured Comment by Roger Bradbury: "There's a bear with you? I'd be very careful, then. Remember, when photographing bears it is not necessary to run faster than the bear, just faster than your assistant."

TOP in the Times

The New York Times published an obituary of Marty Forscher yesterday, written by Margalit Fox. I was pleasantly surprised to see that TOP was cited, and TOP reader Marshall Arbitman's Featured Comment was quoted.

Mike
(Thanks to Will)

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FTC Guideline Changes Affects Blogs and Websites

The Federal Trade Commission today announced that it has approved final revisions to the guidance it gives to advertisers on how to keep their endorsement and testimonial ads in line with the FTC Act.

The notice incorporates several changes to the FTC’s Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising, which address endorsements by consumers, experts, organizations, and celebrities, as well as the disclosure of important connections between advertisers and endorsers.

The Associated Press puts it a wee bit more succinctly, saying, "The FTC will require that writers on the Web clearly disclose any freebies or payments they get from companies for reviewing their products."

I've been racking my small brain, and I can't come up with anything I'm going to do differently here on TOP as a result of the new guidelines. Except maybe to make sure that I make the rules more explicit to outside contributors...most of whom know said rules just fine already. Basically, we disclose up the wazoo. I disclose stuff I'm not supposed to disclose. Because...well, I'm a blabbermouth.

As David Vestal says, we are in the disclosure business. And you, dear Reader, shall be kept apprised, FTC or no FTC. On that you may rest assured.

Mike, TOP's End-of-Line Destination for Proverbial Passed Buck