The Online Photographer

Mastery in Digital Photography

The digital revolution—mostly an enabling phenomenon—has had a few downsides for me. It disrupted my personal photography, by bringing to an unplanned end twenty or so years of work in 35mm B&W. (I wish I'd been more aware that that was what was happening when it happened.) It disrupted my camera hobby, because I used to like to buy cameras and lenses (used), try them for a while, maybe write about them, and then resell them for more or less what I purchased them for. The product cycles in digital are too quick for that—by the time cameras show up on the used market, nobody's interested in reading about them any more, and the risk of substantial loss while "holding" them even for a short time can be unacceptably large. 

Fortunately, TOP is now popular enough that I'm again getting cameras from manufacturers for launch announcements and for review, not to mention loans (and even gifts!) from readers, so the pipeline is full again. Or full enough.

For me, the biggest problem of digital is not the cameras. It's that mastery itself has become more fugitive. Where computer photography is concerned, everything has a time-stamp, a sell-by date. No matter what it is, everything seems to march past on a steady progression from cutting edge to mainstream to obsolescent to unsupported. As soon as you're used to something and begin to master it, it changes. It hardly matters what it is: sensor, file type, color characteristics, image editor, calibration issues, printer models, even papers and inks. 

Mastery of the old methods wasn't easy, lord knows. It required what my friend Nick called "the room-sized accessory," a.k.a. the darkroom, and a lot of time and practice, which in turn worked best if they were directed by knowledge, testing, and experimentation. More time spent and knowledge gained usually equaled improved or enhanced mastery. But many photographers spent a relatively short time mastering their craft and a very long time simply practicing it.

With digital, by contrast, you have to keep up: you have to invest substantial time and effort just to stay in the same place, and hard-won mastery can be obliterated by a change in one or another aspect of the process.

I mastered my first printer, for instance. Of course, now you can't buy paper or inks for it. Landfill.

I calibrated my first DSLR to a fare-thee-well. Of course it no longer works, and the company that made it left the camera business.

I mastered Photoshop...

...7, I think it was. (Or was it 5?) Photoshop hasn't stood still. Soon, I'll have to learn CS 4. Or 5. I'm several generations behind now, which won't be tenable for much longer.

I learned ACR when it appeared as a plugin to Photoshop. Of course, a friend who keeps up with technical issues says that ACR is not a good raw converter for the camera I've been thinking about buying next. He's recommending a third-party converter that has a "steep learning curve." Great.

And on it goes.

I'm guessing none of this is unfamiliar to you. A change in one link of the chain changes other links; and something or other is always changing. And if it hasn't changed yet, you know it will. Maybe not soon, but probably sooner rather than later. You have to keep up. To put it overly simplistically, it's the difference between running, and running on a treadmill.

This isn't necessarily worse, just different. But I would say that, for me, this is the biggest difference between the practice of photography now and what photography was like when I built my first darkroom in a bathroom under the basement stairs.

A little gain, a little give.

Mike

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Featured Comment by gene lowinger: "While the digital age is always moving forward in a way analog film and chemicals did not, I find it a wonderful challenge. Practicing the craft of getting things right with my current software is as fulfilling as getting it right in my wet darkroom. And it keeps changing, so I have to constantly be upgrading my skills. This massages my aging brain cells and keeps my thinking tack sharp. I've found over the years that if I let version upgrades go by with the idea that I'll pick up another upgrade down the line, the more space there is between upgrades the harder the transition is. I don't buy the upgrades to keep software developers afloat. I buy them to keep my brain afloat!"

Featured Comment by Rodger Kingston: "The digital revolution in photography that we are swept up in today is very much akin to the first several decades after 1839, when photography was first invented. Then, as now, constant improvements in both equipment and light sensitive materials proceeded one another in a headlong race that makes ours today seem tame indeed.

"From Daguerreotypes to Ambrotypes to Tintypes; from Calotypes and paper negatives to albumen on glass, then wet collodion negatives; from salted paper prints to albumen prints; all  were cumbersome processes that required taking the darkroom into the field and coating the plates immediately prior to exposure, then developing them before they dried.

"All of this (and countless more subtle refinements) took place in the nearly half century between 1839 and the late 1880s, when the first dry plate negatives and pre-sensitized printing papers were introduced, thus ushering in the modern age of photography that has ended so recently.

"The point of all this history is that some of the finest photographs in the entire history of the medium were made in these early years, when "operators" (as photographers were first called) had not only to master their cumbersome and ever-changing equipment and materials, but also had to invent the practice and profession of photography itself.

"Over my many years as both photographer and collector, I have often wished I could have experienced the excitement and sheer adventures of those amazing first decades of our medium. Well, now I am doing just that.

"This digital revolution we are all a part of is almost exactly the same as those first heady decades: the infancy of a whole new means of human expression and endeavor, with the same sorts of challenges that faced Fox Talbot and Daguerre, Roger Fenton, Frances Frith, and all the other early masters.

"They didn't complain about how slow their collodion on glass negatives were, or how inadequate their bulky cameras and crude lenses were; they worked to improve them, and more important, learned to make great photographs despite (or perhaps because of) the limitations under which they were forced to work.

"I love digital photography, and I come from a long career as a film photographer and Cibachrome printer. And if I have to struggle sometimes to keep up with the latest equipment and software, I know that I am simply walking hand-in-hand with Mathew Brady and Julia Margaret Cameron and all the others who brought photography into being."

Settling Down (Redux)

Somewhat to his surprise, Ctein found he had nothing to add to the comments to his "Settling Down...or Not" post of the other day. He felt peoples' comments were covering all the angles and he didn't have a lot more to add. With due humility, however, I'd like to register a few of my own thoughts. I'm just chiming in. Consider this just another comment to Ctein's thread.

I say "with due humility" because where this topic is concerned, I'm really just like most readers. I have a history with cameras; I have tastes and preferences and needs; I have a particular budget, and a fairly stable ongoing relationship to money (which in my case is that I'm fortunate enough to be able to afford decent cameras but not wealthy enough that the choice is easy or trivial); and I suffer from certain bugbears that conspire to keep me from being totally satisfied.

A few random thoughts, in no particular order:

• It's worthwhile highlighting at the outset that disaffection with cameras is usually a consequence of not working hard enough on your photographic projects. People who are deeply involved in working tend to adapt to their equipment, learn their equipment thoroughly, and learn to work around whatever flaws and idiosyncrasies the equipment presents to them—sometimes, they even learn to love their camera's particular foibles. The best "cure" for equipment angst, therefore, is to get to work, or work harder.

• The converse of this is that sometimes people focus on equipment shortcomings as a way of avoiding getting to grips with photographic problems or activities they don't really want to get to grips with. "I can't start building a portfolio until I find the right camera." "I can't start doing portraits for pay until I can afford a good camera." Et cetera. They use the perceived shortcomings of the camera as a means of procrastination, in effect.

• The notion of "value" is highly mutable. It depends on many things, including your relationship to money, how much money you have or don't have, how much use you get out of a product, how much you can earn with the product, even how much pleasure you get from shopping for it, buying it, or owning it.  

• The notion of "clarity" is very helpful. That is, if you get clear about what you're really doing and why, you're likely to be much happier. (A warning, though: what you're really doing might not be "being a photographer." I gave a lecture a long time ago in which I was describing the photography scene in Washington, D.C., where I lived, and I presented a diagram that looked something like this:

Where green was professional or commercial photography, orange was editorial photography or photojournalism, and blue was art photography and academic photography. A hand immediately shot up from the back of the room: "And what kind of photographer are you?" Without thinking, I replied, "I'm a writer." What can I say? Clarity.)

• Empiricism helps. Actually looking at things for yourself will clear away a lot of the fanaticism, obfuscation, and cant* that clouds public discussion of cameras and technical issues. Of course, this is concomitant to the degree to which you've achieved the aforementioned clarity about what you're doing; it doesn't help to "see for yourself" if you don't know what you own standards or goals are.

All that said, my personal experience with digital cameras echoes what Ed Hawco said, in the featured comment to Ctein's post: two of the four digital cameras I've purchased ended up totaled. That is, they broke, and would have cost more to fix than they would have been worth once fixed. Their value went from a lot to zero, and I had to throw them away (well, one of them—the other I haven't been able to bring myself to actually add to the landfill).

So, thus far, anyway, I'd have to say that for me, settling down isn't an option, because digital cameras are akin to electronic appliances like computer peripherals, with finite lives. Other considerations don't enter in. They're not able to, given my track record so far.

Of course, that's just "so far." Things could change as digital photography matures. (As Ctein pointed out.)

Mike

*And fanboyism, and flaming, and put-downs, and....

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Why They Invented Cameras

Photo by D. Shumake

TOP reader Jim Tiemann sent me this picture, with a note:

"Sometimes we need reminding why they invented cameras...

After watching my wife give birth to our new son, they gave him to me. My sister-in-law took my camera, and I got to cry my eyes out in utter amazement and joy. I'm eternally grateful that she pointed the camera towards us...."

Big congratulations to Jim and his family. And a happy weekend to all.

Mike
(Thanks to Jim)

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Bright Spots

One of the many leitmotifs of my days is that readers send me tips about all sorts of things, and, not infrequently, every one or two days maybe, I'll get an excited message saying, in effect, "look at this! Isn't this cool? I know you'll be interested in this!" And it will be something I've known about forever, consider old hat, haven't thought about in years, or have long been jaded about. Or just something I'm...over.

Far from minding those emails, though, I get a particular sort of happiness from them. They remind me that anything can be new to someone who hasn't encountered it before, who is discovering it for the first time.

These events in our lives are occasions for us, no matter how blasé anyone else might be. Art itself is like that. You always have a right to respond to art as if your experience of it is a significant event for you. My friend Jim Schley taught me that, when he spoke once with his characteristic feeling and wisdom about how reading a book is an occasion. A book isn't a static thing, unchanging, that sits on a shelf, outside of time; it's a potential interaction, because the volatility between what's written and its reader can be a sort of alchemy under the right conditions. How good a book is for you depends on when you come to it, what you bring to it, whether it fits what you need or what you're ready for when you encounter it. Any "great" book can be dull and flat for us unless some or all of those conditions pertain.

Every day, someone discovers photography, or some new potential in it, or even just some bit of equipment, or an artist, or a body of work, or an idea that seems to them worth getting excited about. Every day, lots of things that are old hat to me are new to someone, and hold energy, and life, and promise, and newness for them. I like being reminded of that.

Mike

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Featured Comment by Robert Howell: "I was this morning reviewing Tsure-zure Gusa (Essays in Idleness) by the 14th century Yoshida Kenko-boshi, having discovered it last night while reading an Italian essay on post-war Japan! One of Kenko's observations: 'To sit alone in the lamplight with a book spread out before you, and hold intimate converse with men of unseen generations—such is a pleasure beyond compare.'"

Featured Comment by Catherine: "'In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities; in the expert's mind there are few." Shunryu Suzuki-roshi (1905–1971). As a tonic for the jaded, I heartily recommend his book Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind. And, for visual accompaniment, John Daido Loori.

Mike replies: Catherine, I agree. I love that book. And it's amazing how much of the discussion in it, as well as the advice in Eugen Herrigel's Zen in the Art of Archery, applies to photographing.

A Leica Won't Improve Your Photography

By John Camp

I enjoyed the Veblen-value essay; a terrific piece of writing.

My problem with Leica has never been that the cameras are expensive, or that much of their cost is in Veblen value. Hey, it's your money, do with it what you wish. I don’t even have a problem with Veblen value. I drive a Mercedes-Benz, when I know perfectly well that I could buy three Toyotas for the same price. They’d be more reliable, and, for the way I drive, they’d move me around just as efficiently. But, I like the status.

My problem with Leica is that for the overwhelming number of photographers, they're not good value—not even good Veblen value. I worry that people who are serious about photography, in the earlier stages of their interest, can be led to believe that Leicas will improve their work, to their great cost and disappointment. There's a reason few professionals use Leicas, and that's that the Leicas are not as good at producing professional-level shots as a DSLR. Almost any DSLR.

In other words, if you must try a Leica, and you can easily afford it, go ahead. But don’t be a victim of cult-think: "What an unbelievably great camera; I could never do this with a DSLR." That’s what we call serious BS.

There have been a number of people in the last few days, commenting on TOP's Leica threads, saying they'd love to buy a Leica if they could afford one. Why? Your pictures almost certainly will be worse, and have less range. You won’t be able to do true telephoto work, or macro work. You will have to deal with constraints that you don't have with DSLRs—you won't have autofocus, image-stabilization, dust removal, weather proofing, precise framing, or even decent service. You name it, you probably won't get it. It's not that Leicas are simple, it's that they are in many ways archaic.

Take framing, for instance. People seem to think that the rangefinder frames are precise. They're not. Not only are they not precise, they are different for differing focus distances with the same lens. If you are one of those people annoyed by 98% coverage with a DSLR, a rangefinder will drive you nuts.

Tina Manley, an excellent professional photographer, was singing the praises of Leicas in the Comments section of another TOP thread a couple of days ago, and she says Leicas are much quicker to focus than autofocus cameras. Well, that's something that's certainly testable. Perhaps TOP should sponsor a competition. I tried it with my Nikon D3—and the camera can focus faster than I can recompose. Swinging back and forth between one target that was eight feet away and another that was about thirty feet away, 180 degrees apart, I could get off ten focused shots in approximately 13 seconds. I bet there's not a Leica user in the world who could do that; or damn few, anyway. And I'm not a hotshot DSLR shooter; I'm just a guy.

(There is one common situation in which Leicas may focus as fast or even faster than autofocus, and that’s probably the kind of shooting that Tina was referring to. That is, if you have your hand on the focusing ring and you're shooting almost continuous pictures of a relatively static subject—a child sitting in one place, where you are continuously refocusing to keep the eyes sharp. Those continuous tiny adjustments are probably best done in manual mode, if you have lots of practice doing it. But, top end DSLRs also have a manual mode, and I find it as easy to use as a Leica’s.)

So, do I think people shouldn’t buy Leicas? Not at all. I own two, an M7 and an M8, and ten Leica lenses. I enjoy Leicas. I don’t think there’s any harm trying them, but unless you are very well-off, I’d suggest borrowing, renting or buying an older film Leica just to see if you like it. I suspect you won’t—in the end, I believe most people don’t. They like the idea of the Leica; they like the mind’s-eye image of themselves carrying a Leica; they like the Veblen-value; but, if they’re serious about images, they prefer the function of a DSLR, and will feel seriously handicapped without it.*

The people most likely to really get into Leicas, IMHO, are people who love cameras as cameras, and love the process of shooting perhaps more than the images they get. Also, I think, some fine-art photographers, especially street photographers, may really enjoy an M9. And then there’s the guy who’s sort of bored with photography after doing it a long time. Shooting a Leica is so different, and pushes you so close to your subjects, that it might revive a dying interest. A Leica perhaps can be less clinical than a DSLR.

The M9 is not a magic wand. It won’t improve your photography. If you’re not happy with what’s coming out of your DSLR, you won’t be happy with comes out of your M9, because the problem isn’t the camera.

As for high-end sound equipment, well, I listen to country music on my Mac speakers, so I have, er, little to say about that.

John

Bestselling author John Camp writes thrillers, mysteries, and other novels under the nom de plume John Sandford.

*Please don’t comment that “I love my Leica, so you’re wrong.” There must be a name for this logical fallacy, but I don’t know what it is—in any case, I’m generalizing. I’m talking about most people. Some people love Leicas and shoot brilliantly with them. I know that. You may name your children Barnack and Wetzlar. Fine with me. But you’re not most people. [I believe what you're talking about would be the material fallacy a dicto secundum quid ad dictum simpliciter, or the converse fallacy of accident—deriving a generality from a special case. "I like anchovies and I'm a human being, therefore all human beings like anchovies." —Mike]

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Featured Comment by Tina Manley: "I would never try to convince someone who does sports, wildlife, wedding, studio, or macro photography that a Leica is the perfect camera; but for my kind of work, documentary and editorial work, it is perfect. The cameras are unobtrusive, quiet, durable, easy to carry. But it's not just about the camera. It's the lenses. Leica lenses are the best and the best way to use them is on a Leica camera. I'm hoping the M9 will be the digital camera that I've been waiting for since I switched to digital from my film Leicas.

"P.S. I can focus my Leicas faster than I can my Canon 5DII or 1D Mark II.  :-)"

Featured Comment by Matt Needham: "I can't say whether a Leica will or won't influence anyone's photograph-creating ability, but I know one thing for sure: never tell the guy holding the $7,000 camera that the gear doesn't matter. ;)"

Featured Comment by David S.: "I find it interesting that there's all this focus on the M9. The far-more-important camera in Leica's line is the S2, because it represents a larger-than-'full-frame' sensor in what is essentially an SLR body. What is now a $20,000 camera for professionals and the superrich will be the standard SLR five years from now. Why is a 'full-frame' Leica important? What makes a sensor 'full-frame'? Because it roughly approximates the size of a piece of 35mm film that was itself considered small when it was introduced? Today's full-frame is tomorrow's 'small.' Sensors will keep getting larger, better, more efficient, and cheaper. High-ISO performance will continue to improve, until today's ultrafast and ultra-expensive lenses become meaningless. Today's $10,000 Noctilux will represent a very poor investment, because an ƒ/4 lens will be able to see in the dark just as easily. Something to keep in mind for those considering the M9."

Featured Comment by ronin: "Leicas are great and I've owned several Ms, but a lot of the supposed appeal is really a holdover list from years past.

"'Unobtrusive?' Probably a holdover from Cartier-Bresson in the '30s; 35mm cameras were new then, and replaced larger two-handed cameras that were held at waist-level. People did not expect to be photographed at eye-level with 35mm cameras.

"That would be like saying that 10 years ago people didn't expect to be photographed with cameras held at arm's length, but today it is the norm.

"In fact, read the literature of the '30s and '40s, and they referred to 35mm cameras generically as 'miniature cameras.' If eye-level 35mm SLRs were available in the 30s they would have been just as 'unobtrusive.'

"And Leica Ms are not particularly small or light. The Pentax ME, Nikon EM, Olympus OM1 were very near the same size and weight (give rangefinders props for small lenses,however).

"The Leica M is not particularly 'silent.' Its focal plane shutter is about the same loudness level of any 35mm focal plane shutter, although of course it benefits from the lack of a flipping mirror. But any of the hoards of lens-shutter compact 35mm rangefinders of the '60s could quietize rings around the Leica M.

"While we may romanticize the Leica, there were many makers of rangefinder 35s into the '50s, when the market collapsed. The market collapsed because people realized they could make better, easier, quicker pictures with SLRs.

"Of course, we (especially me) are superior to those simple masses, and realize they are deluded. And I am glad there is still a Leica to put out their wonderful archaic masterpieces."

What Does 'Expensive' Mean?

Long ago, when I was a wee camera reviewer writing for the internet that came on pieces of paper bound along one edge and monitored through the mailbox or the newsstand, I decided not to tell people how to feel about money. I can't claim that I've always stuck by this resolution, but at least I can report that it bothered me to be told how to feel about what things cost.

The reason is mostly contained in the Christmas legend of the Little Drummer Boy, whose offering to the church is especially prized because it's such a great percentage of everything he has, even though it's a pittance in absolute terms. (I always thought that lesson was sinister, but that's a whole 'nuther story—let's not get into talking about the medieval church.)  But it points up the fact that those who claim the Leica M9 will be "ridiculously" expensive aren't saying anything real, because they're making relational statements without knowing the exact objects of those statements. That is, some people are poor and strapped for cash and some people are rich and aren't, and it's meaningless to generalize across both categories and everything in between. It might come as a shock to working stiffs beset with debt and expenses, but there are people out there who actually own six late-model automobiles purchased new; there are country clubs that cost $60,000 a year to belong to; there are people in crappy little apartments-gone-condo in Manhattan who paid a million dollars and more for them. Some people have money. Like it or not, there are people who are just not price-sensitive to the price of a camera...

Resistance is Futile

Scan courtesy of The Wheeldon Family

In the world of the future, there are no technical complications. Everything can be done with the utmost ease. You know you are going to give in eventually—why not now? Don't resist. Sooner or later you will change to the way we all do things now.

Here's the part I really liked about this ad...on the second page, which I haven't reproduced here, it says, "A turn of the focusing wheel brings the picture into exact focus—full size, full colour, the right way up, during and after exposure." The right way up...that was a feature worthy of the ad copy. Blink detectors and pixel binning, begone!

We're still arguing about viewfinders and focusing, of course. Some things never change.

Mike
(Thanks to Oren)

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Recommendations: Looking for the Group

By David Bennett

We all know that Netflix and Amazon use ratings to make recommendations.

Recommendations tap into the force that public relations counsels have been writing about—from Edward Bernays in the 1920s in his book Propaganda, through to Chris Anderson in his 2006 book, The Long Tail.

That is, we look to others whom we respect to guide us to what we want. And what we want is often a product of the groups with which we want to identify.

Opinion leaders, peer recommendation, group identification, tribes, niche markets, the wisdom of crowds—recommendations and ratings are the life blood of all of them.

Google depends on it; Amazon thrives on it.

An interesting point that Chris Anderson makes in The Long Tail is that eBay has a problem. It wants to recommend products to us, but the users define their own products when they write their ads. So eBay simply does not know what it is selling and so it cannot recommend the products for which it acts as middleman.

That insight into what eBay doesn’t have helps us get a clearer view of the power of recommendations and ratings.

Edward Bernays
Edward Bernays set himself up as a propaganda consultant or public relations counsel as he described himself in Propaganda, the book he wrote in 1928.

He was Freud’s nephew and because he was well connected he had access to the industrialists of the 1920s—with whom he found common ground. What is interesting is his view of the human condition.

Having seen the slaughter of the First World War, he believed that the majority of human beings had to be controlled and that without something to divert them they would, if given the excuse, tear each other limb from limb.

Bernays believed that the men follow leaders in different fields and that their sense of identity and identification with the leaders and the groups was generally more important than the underlying truth or falsity of what they believed as individuals.

Sometimes, without the group mind, the individual was lost.

Bernays believed that as a consequence, men would often rather sacrifice the truth than lose the fellowship of the group.

Therein lies the power of ratings and recommendations. The individual is not looking for the best book, film, or whatever. He or she is looking for the group.

Whoa! But not me. (Say we all.)

David

Originally published on David's blog no more pencils. Republished here with kind permission of the author.

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Ratings: Bah, Humbug

This morning in my inbox I got an email from eMusic asking me to "rate" Hank Crawford's album "Tight." Ratings seem to have become a ubiquitous feature of the internet. When I read audio equipment reviews on audioreview.com, I have to be told how many stars the piece got from how many reviewers (i.e., readers). When  I look at pictures on PhotoSig, I have to learn how many people gave it however many "thumbs up" symbols. (The maximum being three. What?) I have to say, the rating culture of the internet is not for me.

As a sometime critic you might not suppose I'd say that. Isn't "rating" things what criticism is all about? The Sony A900 gets five stars. The Sigma DP2 gets two. Done and out.

That's not it, of course. "Rating" anything—especially, taking averages of many peoples' ratings—misses all the subtlety. First of all, whether an album of music gets five stars or two stars doesn't concern me at all. I would hope that I can have great experiences with music that leaves the mass audience cold. Certainly, what turns on the mass audience—broadest spectrum, lowest common denominator—leaves me cold. Mass ratings systems are just looking for common agreement. They're setting community standards, if you will. That might work for refrigerators. Maybe. It doesn't work for art.

I'm looking for an experience with art. An immediate connection between it and me, now. However many of my fellow humans think crasher squirrel is cute or approve of a Celine Dion song, that does not necessarily predict a good experience for me. My taste isn't mass taste. Mass taste isn't for me. (In fact I have a bias the other way—against mass taste—because historically that's been a better-than-neutral indicator for me.) I love discovering music, books, pictures, and so forth that I love, but I have no condition attached that other people must agree with me.

Plus, how can I know when something will hit me? I recently had a fantastic experience with the first three cuts of Duke Ellington's Piano in the Foreground, an album I've owned forever. (The fourth cut, not so much—it tries to make up in length what it lacks in interest.) Thirteen beautiful and brilliant minutes of music that a 15-year-old Kanye West fan would give one star. Me? Last week, three stars. This week, five. No, that does not average to four.

Even when I "rate" cameras, I assume people will disagree with me, and I completely endorse their right to. I go into writing about a camera knowing that somebody out there will love (and, more importantly, do good work with) what I think is the worst piece of glack in the world, and that somebody else will dismiss out of hand a camera that I think is well nigh on the Holy Grail. That fact does not confront me.

It also matters to me who's doing the rating. It gratifies me that when I recommend a photography book as being outstanding (my current ga-ga favorite is this one, which I totally freakin' love and which you might as well bury me with), lots of my readers go buy it. But when I recommend a random non-fiction book on a random topic, like this one, which I found immersively fascinating and a great read, well, pretty much nobody goes and buys it. Why? Because you know my taste and opinions about photography. You give me credit for expertise, and you probably have a sense whether you are going to enjoy my recommendations or not. But you have no such faith and confidence in my general taste about items outside of my expertise, in which case I am just another guy on the internet.

That's fine. You're allowed to be wrong about my general recommendations, which are spectacularly insightful and rock-solid reliable. Just kidding. How'd you like this post? How many stars would you give it on a scale of five? How many thumbs-ups? The maximum is two, if you're a humanoid, one if you lost an arm in battle. You may additionally give it up to two big-toes-up, if you're barefoot.

That Danny Lyon book has totally reordered my opinion of him as an artist. It gets eight stars on a scale of five. And I don't care if 41 raters on netnet.com agree with me, it does.

Mike

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Doctor My Eyes

I hope I'm not one of those new-media types that belabors readers too regularly with personal trivia, like the best meals I've eaten recently (a chicken Marbella my sister-in-law made at the Lake) or what's happening outside my window this morning (it sounded like someone was killing the neighbors' children—at least two of them must have been having a total wailing, screaming go-to-pieces at once), or quotidian meanders like doctor's visits. But I thought perhaps a doctor's appointment I had yesterday might actually be apropos to our subject.

About eight or ten years ago, an optometrist who was fitting me for glasses I don't often use (I was slightly nearsighted and mildly astigmatic) looked long and hard into my right eye and first asked me if I had health insurance (I didn't, and still don't) and then suggested, enigmatically, that I might want to get checked out by an ophthalmologist. I asked him why, but he wouldn't say, suggesting without saying so directly that if he told me anything it would make whatever it was into a pre-existing condition.

I remembered that incident only in the last year, as my right eye has progressively started to go bad. At the same time, I started getting mysterious headaches on the right side of my head, which sometimes, but not always, seemed to respond to treatments for muscle tension.

In camera-lens terms, my right eye has developed excessive flare in bright light and lost some contrast and a lot of resolution. And I fancy I feel some discomfort in it, sometimes, like there were something in it, or like the beginnings of pain.

I have to admit I've been preoccupied with this for some time now, and it's one reason why I took such a lengthy vacation—I'd made an appointment at an eye clinic for Monday, and, though I may be guilty of hypochondria, I feared bad news.

To my great relief and somewhat to my surprise, the news was not bad. My left eye is still 20-25 (as both eyes were ten years ago), but my right eye is now 20-40, and my astigmatism has worsened. I have the beginnings of cataracts (which I was told I will probably have to deal with "in twenty years or so"), but my pressure is perfect and the ophthalmologist couldn't find anything worrisome in the eye or on the retina. He suggested that the headaches might be due to eyestrain.

So I've ordered two pairs of glasses—one a lined bifocal for computer use and reading (corrected for 24" and 15" respectively) and one pair for driving and distance. I presume I'm about to become a regular glasses-wearer for the first time in my life. Doubtless this will make me even more cranky about camera viewfinders, a subject I am already plenty cranky about. But I will try to remember that it could have been worse. We all go blind in the end, but, as long as we are blessed with sound enough eyes and, more importantly, a living mind with which to see, sight remains the soul's perfect delight.

Mike

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Featured Comment by Geoff Wittig: "It's really ironic that many of us start reaching our peak of photographic skill...just about the time our eyes start going to pot.

"Under the best of circumstances our eyes lose about 50% of their light transmission capacity by the age of 40, and it's downhill faster after that. The accelerating inability to focus close up (presbyopia) puts most of us into reading glasses or bifocals by age 50, and this can be maddening with some viewfinders.

"Then there's the steady accumulation of floaters. I used to visit a well-known hawk watch site every spring to see and photograph migrating birds of prey. I gave up a few years ago because a retinal tear in my left eye produced so many floaters I saw a dozen 'birds' with every turn of my head. Sigh.

"Might as well make lemonade. The decline in absolute acuity and light transmission as we age can actually facilitate clean composition. It's easier to appreciate dominant visual elements when the smaller details get murkier.

"Or at least I tell myself this as I squint through that danged dark viewfinder."

Featured Comment by R. Edelman: "Mike, if you are developing cataracts, corneal refractive procedures such as LASIK are relatively contraindicated. You don't want to have a procedure on your corneas, and then have cataract surgery just a few years later. Procedures such as LASIK also make the predictability of determining the intraocular lens implant power more difficult than if the cornea had not been reshaped. (For you folks who have had LASIK or similar procedures, get a copy of your pre- and post-procedure eye measurements and lock them in a vault. They may prove helpful if you eventually need cataract surgery.) LASIK also doesn't truly correct presbyopia.

"On the subject of intraocular lens implants, the 'holy grail' of cataract surgery is the correction of presbyopia. There are some intraocular lens implants that address this problem, but hopefully better ones will be available in the future. You might be interested to know that two of the lens implants that are approved by the US FDA, the ReStor and the Tecnis Multifocal, use diffractive optics (think Canon DO lenses) to allow simultaneous distance and near, and some intermediate range vision. The trade off is some glare when looking at point sources of light.

"One should never trivialize eye surgery, no matter what the procedure. But if you had to pick an operation, cataract surgery beats the hell out of open heart surgery."