The Online Photographer

Mike Gets Mail

Hi Mike,
I greatly enjoy reading TOP. I hope you will pardon me for asking a question that may drive you to despair.

I was at Hikone castle last weekend and snapped the two pictures below, maybe a minute apart.

• The picture with the boat was taken using my Pentax K-7 and 21mm lens.
• The other picture was taken using my iPhone 5.

Both are JPEGs using the default settings. (No choice with the iPhone. "Bright" colors for the K-7.) The lens on both cameras have a similar field of view, and the shutter speeds for both pictures happen to be close.

What did I do wrong? I'd like the Pentax picture to look better than the iPhone. But even excluding the differences in colors and framing, details on the Pentax are not much better.

Should I have picked a wider aperture? Used a tripod? (It's really more of a weekend snapshot, so I would not use a tripod there. But I'd take that advice and maybe make the investment for other occasions.) Is the focus off? Would a better / newer camera address some of these issues? (K-5 IIs for the supposedly better autofocus, or a mirrorless to avoid the calibration problems?)

If there's no major issue with the photographer or the camera, maybe I will simply forget about a larger camera and use the iPhone full time. No point carrying anything else around if it can't help me making better pictures.

Thanks again for your website—and I will understand if you can't find time to reply.

Regards,
François M.

Hi Francois,
Not a mystery really.

Most cameras will do well when the conditions are ideal, and for "lowest common denominator" uses (like small onscreen JPEGs, which are a great equalizer).

The better the camera, the better it will cope with conditions further and further from ideal, and the better more demanding applications (like large fine prints) will look.

In my own mind I think of this as the "center" of camera performance vs. the "edges." The "edges" are where the imaging system as a whole is stressed in any way—working at or near the limits of any of its various capabilities. I wrote quite a long article about this once, although that discussion is limited to lenses.

It just depends on your uses and your needs. If you will only ever take pictures outdoors in full daylight of medium-distant, moderate contrast subjects, destined for onscreen JPEGs, then (presuming you're happy with the results, as you seem to be here) the lesser camera should serve you fine.

Usually, it's frustration that indicates the need for upgrading—butting up against limitations. If you use your iPhone camera a lot and never feel the need for anything more, then you're fine. If you use it a lot and frequently find yourself frustrated or limited by it for one reason or another, then it's probably time for a better camera (or in your case, to get the Pentax out).

Hope this helps—

Mike

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Hello Mike,
I would be very interested to hear your take (and Ctein's) on Adobe's new cloud-only licensing. I presume lots of others have sent this in, but wanted to make sure. One interesting place to read is Scott Kelby's site, which has just exploded with angry comments.

Cheers,
C.

Hi Mike,
They're burning up the keyboards over at DPReview, talking about Adobe's new monthly pricing model for their Creative Suite products [...].

B.

Hi Mike,
Why aren't you covering the Adobe furor?

M.L.

Mike replies: Because it is a furor (aptly chosen word, good work) and I've been unwilling to open the floodgates of the furor into the placid precincts of TOP. I have other things I'd rather be thinking about.

Everybody hates taxes, and yet they have to be paid. We're all aware of "the Photoshop tax," which many of us have been paying uncomplainingly for years. On the surface of things, it looks like Adobe has just cruelly slapped loyal Photoshop users with a drastic and Draconian tax hike.

On the other hand, I have a good friend who was very bitter about the announcement of OSX—he thought it would break all his legacy software, be difficult and painful to implement, and so forth. He went around saying for some while that he was going to leave Apple because Apple had abandoned him.

Then he switched to OSX—and said "oh." He found it was easy to implement, didn't cause him any inconvenience, and that it worked much better than System 9. Oil was cast upon the roiling waters, and he's been using it ever since. So I think it's probably a good idea to fully understand what Adobe is envisioning here before damning them to the heavens.

Fu•ror, n., 1. a public outburst, esp of protest; uproar. Late 15c., from M.Fr. fureur, from L. furor, related to furia: "rage, passion, fury."*

Mike

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Hi Mike,
You’ve written at some length about the pros and cons (mostly cons) of editioning photographic prints (and I agree with what you say ). My main problem, and I’m sure that many other photographers have the same problem) is on pricing my prints. I am of the opinion that non-editioned prints are infinitely reproducible and therefore should be priced accordingly. I currently charge £75 (US$115) for an A2 sized inkjet print—is that reasonable? Am I shooting myself in the foot with this relatively low price—will people not take my work seriously because it is not 'seriously' priced? This really frustrates me! Sometimes I think that I should lower my prices as artwork should be accessible to everyone and other times I think that my prices are too low and people are put off by cheap artwork.

Any comments would be greatly appreciated!! Cheers,

—Simon Robinson

Hi Simon,
Couple of issues:

1. You are not going to sell very many prints. No insult to you; the only reason I say that is that almost nobody sells very many prints. Therefore, why not make a little money on the rare occasions when you do sell one?

2. Marketing sells prints, not the picture, and not price. So spend your time marketing. And if you spend time marketing, again, why not earn a little money on those occasions when it actually works?

3. You've already said it yourself—people equate high price with high quality and low price with low quality; and, with "Veblen goods," high price with high value and low price with low value. Many people who are rich enough to have a nice photograph to frame and hang on their walls not only don't mind paying the price for a good print, they are actually put off by low prices. When I was an art student in the 1980s, there was a pretty firmly established custom: $250–$350 (£160–£225) was the accepted price range for "student prints," while self-respecting independent working artists charged $600 (£387) and up.

Let me ask you this. A friend in England a while back sent me a link to her "dream home," a former lighthouse keeper's cottage on the coast near Brighton. It was on a cliff overlooking the sea. She was groaning because despite being a modest cottage it cost something like £850,000—very far out of her reach. Then, when the property sold, she sent me a good-naturedly bitter note to the effect that it sold to Londoners who will only use it as a weekend getaway. My question is: How many people who can afford an £850,000 weekend getaway will find a £75 print to be a delightful bargain, much better than a £500 or £5,000 print? You would lose that sale JUST ON PRICE, never mind the picture or print.

Two suggestions on editions:

1. Consider an edition year. When you have a nice new picture, work hard to make your best print of it and run off nine copies or whatever. Label them "Image created 2013, First Printing 2013 in a recto signed edition of seven prints and two artist's proofs." Then you are perfectly free to run off nine more three years from now and label them "Image created 2013, Second Printing 2016, in an edition of seven verso signed prints and two artist's proofs." ("recto" is print-speak for "on the front" and "verso" is "on the back.") You'll never run out of prints to sell, yet the original "vintage" prints are severely limited. And Simon Robinson aficionados can happily disputate over which edition is really "best," which we humans always like to do.

2. Consider doing "real" prints and "repro" prints. The "real" prints must be large and very fine, hopefully superbly crafted in some special technique; sign and mat those and slap a price of £2,500 on them. Then, make a series of much smaller "repro" prints that are unsigned or signed on the back and sell those as "studio prints" to your friends and Aunt Hortense for £75. Make sure everybody who buys a repro print understands full well that they are not buying the "real" print, which is something very different and oh so much finer.

The first option requires you to be organized and consistent, but lets all your prints be uniform, in case that aspect of the second option doesn't appeal to your sensibilities. The second option allows you to tailor your prices to the economic strata of your potential buyers: a high-prestige print for people who don't mind that price and in fact want the assurance that they're getting really good, carefully-done workmanship, and a high value print for those who must stretch their dollars (er, pound notes). Same picture either way, but not the same print.

Hope this helps your thinking…at least a little.  :-)

Mike
(Thanks to our many far-flung correspondents)

*Definition from Collins English Dictionary, etymology from Online Etymology Dictionary, both via dictionary.com.

Original contents copyright 2013 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

TOP's links!

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Featured Comments from:

Justin Watt: "François, clearly the Pentax takes a superior photo. The iPhone missed the boat! ;-) "

Jonathan: "The main difference between the iPhone and a DSLR is that it's easier to whip out your iPhone on a busy street and photograph people without having anyone turn away or make a fuss."

All the Nikon Hate

If I'm reading the tea leaves right, the reaction to the Coolpix A seems to have traveled about the following course:

• Irritation at the uppity price
• Pleasure at the news with expressions of personal reservation
• Annoyance at what the product is not and disapproval of what it is
• General rejection
• Antipathy toward the product
• Antipathy toward Nikon
• Questions about Nikon's competence, judgment, and direction in general

Now, I could be reading way too much into much too small a sample. Perhaps forums which divide participants up into brand camps are experiencing more enthusiasm and less disapproval. But I have to say the pattern feels familiar...it's quite similar to the reaction I observed to the Nikon 1-Series, the just-discontinued (and future collectible) Pentax K-01, and the Canon EOS M.

It doesn't seem very warranted. Look, Nikon is a leading maker of SLRs, and of lenses and accessories for SLRs. Mirrorless cameras and smartphones seem to be showing they have serious "legs"—might be more than a fad, might prove to be more than a confined market segment—and might be starting to change the entire camera market in ways none of us quite understand yet. But isn't it possible that Nikon doesn't want to pour all sorts of resources into being a big player in an emerging category already dominated by others? In other words, we might be assuming we're seeing strategic moves, but the company might simply be dabbling dilettantishly in a sandbox it doesn't consider its territory.

Second thought: difficult though this might be for the English-speaking world to swallow, we ain't everything. The Nikon 1 was built with the home market in mind; maybe the Coolpix A is too. Or maybe it's tailored to the Chinese; they're an increasingly important market now too.

Nikon 28Ti, a "premium point-and-shoot" from 1994, with its delightfully steampunk (but unecessary) "stopwatch" dial panel. This one's for sale right now from Breguet in Hong Kong.

And a third thought: I wish we could not be so harsh on companies that try to raise product quality past market perception. I witnessed an amusing and revealing little scenario in the '90s. Leica released a four-element lens based on an ancient design—the collapsible Elmar-M, 1994–2007—that was hard-sharp but that I found almost offensive for its poor build quality, especially when compared to earlier Leitz collapsible Summicrons. That lens was praised for being economical: despite being ridiculously expensive for what it offered, it was cheaper than any of the same company's other offerings, which made it a "bargain" in the general perception. During that product's lifespan, Nikon released a better lens* of the same basic type (a modified Tessar), the 45mm ƒ/2.8P, 2001–06, that cost something like a third of what the Leica lens cost. Result? Nikon's offering was slammed for being excessively expensive, because it cost so much more than the same company's mass-market, high-value (and Chinese-made, and mostly plastic) consumer lenses of similar focal length. Which created one of those situations that make me chuckle: the shoddier, three-times-as-expensive product was getting praise as a bargain, while, simultaneously, the better-made, one-third-as-expensive product was getting slammed for being too expensive. Few people (well, besides me) thought to compare the Elmar-M to the 45P and conclude that the latter was a bargain.

It's the Volkswagen Phaeton phenomenon. (Ferdinand Piëch's 2002 luxury car, an attempt to threaten Mercedes, has been described as "spectacularly slow-selling" [Car & Driver]). If a company known for expensive products  makes a shoddy product, it will be praised for being affordable (cf. the McIntosh C15) and continue to be traded for high prices, but if a company known for value-conscious pricing tries to make a luxury product that's perceived as being too uppity for its neighborhood, it will be treated harshly—even if the product itself is outstanding!**

Sony is struggling in the same handcuffs. The A900 was perceived as aspiring above its label. (Too purist for its roots, too.) Now the RX1 is being subjected to some of the same prejudices. People are slaves to established brand hierarchies. Or perceptions of same. Remember, ladling in the value means leeching out the quality. And I like quality. I liked the 35Ti and the 28Ti back in the day, too—they had quality, even if it wasn't all needed for the photographic results. (They, too, got slammed at the time for being more expensive than necessary.)

So, summing up this post:

• Negative attitudes seem to calcify quickly.
• Just because Nikon is a big player in one area doesn't mean every product is a grand strategic market statement.
• Maybe the Coolpix A is made "for" the Japanese, or someone else other than us entitled English-speakers.
• We shouldn't be such price hawks.

My conclusion: a) as ever, we need to wait for real tests and hands-on reports before coming to judgement; b) the Coolpix A could be a nice option for a certain kind of customer, a sort of 28Ti for today. Regardless, the Coolpix A is just one product. Just because it comes from Nikon doesn't mean it's a major statement of where that major player is going, or what that major player thinks of us. My prescription for the hate: Take a few deep breaths. They're only cameras.

Mike

*I don't care how it tested, I thought its image quality was prettier.

**The exception is (sometimes) when they create a new brand. A Toyota LS400 never would have sold in 1989, but Lexus was allowed to be a different breed.

Original contents copyright 2013 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Featured Comments from:

Keith H: "I feel you have summed up this situation perfectly."

foresmac (partial comment): "I think you're just way off base with this analysis."

Mike replies: And there's the blogger's life in two brief comments.... :-)

MM: "I noticed this phenomenon with the Canon EOS M, which was very similar to the Leica X2. Despite the price difference (Canon: $800; Leica: $2000) and despite the fact that instead of having a fixed lens like the Leica the Canon could accept any of dozens of EOS lenses, guess which camera was pilloried in the blogosphere and forum world as hopelessly misguided and which camera was largely given a free pass?

"I think that photographers who buy multiple expensive items from a given manufacturer (or even merely plan to do so) feel more like shareholders than like customers. Not surprisingly, they're not not shy about speaking out when they think 'their' company is heading in a direction they don't personally like—or offering a product in which they don't have any personal interest.

"Your point about unfamiliarity with other markets is a very important one. I only read online forums in English, and I've often thought that the discussions would be very different if those forums had as many participants from Asian countries as from primarily English-speaking countries and western Europe."

cgw: "Not all criticism of Nikon amounts to splenetic rants. Their recent financials point to problems shared with other older Japanese tech companies: complacency, organizational rigidity, numb accounting, and indifferent market research. At present, North America is the only market that's not suffering. Chinese per capita GNP isn't stellar. Japanese domestic demand isn't enough. Like Canon, Nikon can't see beyond DSLRs. They're making product that doesn't sell strongly without profit-shrinking rebates. The Coolpix A, along with the CX fiasco and stumbling PR in the wake of issues with the D800 and D600, aren't encouraging."

JBerardi: "I can't comment on the wider market, but for me personally, it's absolutely accurate to call the A 'too little, too late.' I've always been a Nikon guy and I've wanted to see a compact camera with DSLR-grade image quality from them for nearly a decade now. Well, I got tired of waiting. About a year ago I picked up a Pany GF2/14mm kit for peanuts and really enjoyed it. Cut to today and I've added a G3 body as well as the 20/1.7 and 45/1.8 primes, and they're all great. And all those pieces together didn't even cost me as much as Nikon is asking for these things. So when the A was announced, I was hardly filled with regret for jumping ship. In fact I felt really smart for not waiting around.

"You know what the real kicker here is? My Nikon DSLR stuff now sits collecting dust. I enjoy my Micro 4/3 stuff more. I clearly prefer using mirrorless cameras. I have access to the small, affordable, high quality primes that Nikon has forever neglected. In their efforts to not introduce compact digital cameras that would compete with their DSLR line, they've effectively driven me away from buying any Nikon body, or any Nikon stuff in general. It's a little like Apple deciding to stay away from the smartphone market because smartphones compete with iPods. Well, either you can undercut your existing products, or you can let your competitors do it for you.

"Again, this is all just a personal account. But still, as far as a personal account goes, one would have to say it's a rather damning one for Nikon."

Thom Hogan: "The question is 'balance.' Is the Coolpix A the right balance of things? Size, capability, lens choice, price, etc.

"Funny that you should bring up the 28Ti. It, too, wasn't the right balance in choices, which is one reason why it sold in low quantities. The camera most of us were using at the time was the much cheaper Olympus XA. It was a better balance. I actually moved to a Minolta (TC-1?, can't remember the name at the moment) after looking at the 28Ti closely. Why? Better balance.

"A carry-everywhere camera is all about balance. If it's not going to get you a shot or compromise the shot or be too expensive to risk for a shot, it's no better than not carrying a camera at all.

"The camera that raised my eyebrows a bit in Nikon's announcement was actually the P330. Nikon fixed the two key problems I had with the predecessor. Might that be enough to get my shirt pocket? Maybe, but the Fujifilm X20 has a viewfinder, which in my experience adds about two stops to my handholding ability (braced against face versus two arms in front of me).

"I remind everyone that cameras are tools, not trophies. The tool has to work for you. My negative assessment of the A on specifications is that it isn't the right tool for most people.

"The complaints I hear from users of existing cameras all have a very common theme: missing something I need; or the corollary of forces me to do something I don't want to do. To get balance right in a tool, designers have to be well connected to users. What strikes me about the A and the criticisms of it is that people are saying that the designers weren't well connected to the users. On the other hand, the P330 shows that Nikon heard the users' complaints. So in a single set of announcements we see both sides of the coin."

William: "Don't co-mingle Nikon hate with disappointment and loss of respect.

"Nikon could have made this camera before Sony, Fuji and others entered the market. That is a disappointment. So the only way Nikon thought of to distinguish its first APS-C compact was to make a pocket camera...another disappointment.

"Steve Jobs said if you are afraid to cannabilize your own products, somebody else will happily do it for you. It seems to me Nikon's primary strategy for the past three or four years was to protect the DSLR cash cow from attackers in the Micro 4/3 and now APS-C mirrorless segment. This perception reduces my respect for Nikon. Where is the vision and leadership? How come the CoolPix A does not have built in Wi-Fi? I have a thermostat in my house with built in Wi-Fi.

"I own about $10k worth of Nikon products. This equipment provides me with all of my non-investment income. Since the X100 came out, I've spent zero dollars on new Nikon products and $3,600 on Fuji X APS-C products (and I will buy two more Fuji XF primes as soon as they are released). This is not Nikon hate. I would have never spent a penny with Fuji if Nikon sold the tools I needed for my personal work."

Alan Fairley: "I think that there is a reservoir of ill-will towards Nikon in forum-land that has built up from its handling of the D800 and D600 QC issues that may be feeding into this...."

Mike replies: You got that right, I think. I have, ahem, been hearing from people.

About Those Record Shots...

A dear family friend died yesterday. I was gone for the day yesterday and returned home to the news.

And I fear I am about to confront the inadequacy of the other side of my photographic ambitions...my longstanding habit of taking record shots. (What others called "memos" or "memory shots.") Sometime soon I'm sure I'll be combing through my hard drives and contact books to see what pictures I have. Too few, no doubt. What will I have of Ned?

At least I have this. And glad of it.

As his son (my best friend in second grade, still a dear friend) correctly said, "this was a man whom essentially everyone liked."

We had a lot of warning—Ned has suffered health setbacks for years now, almost never complaining. Still, the dreaded event, when it comes, creates an unbalancing wave of loss and sorrow.

Sometimes I feel like I have so few record shots that I would have been better off as a photographer dispensing with any pretense of art or expression and simply put all my energy into recording the mundane but important personal details of my life, days, travels, and friends. I wonder if I would have made just as much "art" that way anyway? It's possible.

Mike

ADDENDUM: And speaking of departed friends, you might remember this post from a year ago about a lost college friend. Well, look what the scallopers on Nantucket Island did for her:

So nice.

Original contents copyright 2013 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Featured Comments from:

Stephen S. Mack: "'...Recording the mundane but important personal details of my like, days, travels and friends.'? Sounds like a winner to me. It's what I have decided that I'm best at doing, and I'm comfortable, very comfortable with this."

Derek: "My condolences to you, your friend, and everyone else affected by this loss. Given your posts of the last few days about working styles and goals, I've been doing quite a bit of reflecting on what I've been trying to achieve with my own photography; I had basically come to the place where I had decided to lose any pretense at trying to produce something 'artistic' with my photography and simply enjoy photography's exceptional ability to record our lives and the people and events that matter to me/us. And then you post this, a poignant reminder of one of photography's most important roles. Thank you for sharing with us."

Lúcia: "My father died last Friday, his funeral was the following day, and I could hardly watch it. I was there, but I kept my eyes down during the whole service. I'm a visual person and I didn’t want to see anything, to have that scene recorded on my mind.

"The first thing I did when I came home was looking for the only 'recent' shot I took of him. It's on my desk now.

"Last August my photography teacher had asked us an assignment, we should make a portrait of someone close to us for the next class. I didn't want to choose him because I didn't want to have a photo that would remind me of a time he wasn't very well (in health and psychologically), but because of the lack of time, I didn't have other option.

"Every morning after breakfast he used to sit on his favourite spot on the living room to read the newspaper. This was his routine for the last decades. And this was the moment I thought would represent him better.

"I study photography every day, I try to practice on a regular basis, and I never had the 'idea' of photographing him the last couple months, when he was so calm, happy and smiling. I’ll regret this for the rest of my life...."

Malcolm Myers: "I have never really attempted to be artistic; it's simply not something I'm good at. My primary reason for being a photographer has always been to capture the lives of those around me, my nearest and dearest. It always gives me a sense of pride when I walk into friends' homes and see my pictures of them on the wall."

Robert Roaldi: "I have noticed that my parent's generation cherished old photos more than mine. I look through my mother's photo albums and see really interesting family, friend, and rural scenes from pre-WWII Italy. I don't have any such pics of my life, or very few. I wonder if it's because we take photography for granted or because we sort of know instinctively that our temporary suburban "landscape" was not interesting enough to record. Still though, it would be nice to have pics of some people I used to know."

Disorganized Thought

I mentioned last week that I hired an Organizer. She's seriously wonderful, and we're making great progress now.

Uncovering many old photographs and seeing them suddenly again, I'm struck by one overriding thought: I wish to hell I hadn't f@#$!ed around with cameras and techniques so much.

Granted, part of that was necessary: I wasn't talented, focused, driven, or psychologically clear enough to make it as a pure photographer. Not sure I was even interested enough to keep up pure visual work on a day-in, day-out basis. I might not be multi-aptituded, but I have a multitide of interests. And I love to read and write, which isn't part of the pure shooter's brief. And I ended up cracking the monthly nut by learning a variety of techniques, teaching, reviewing cameras, writing articles. It was seldom my job to just take pictures. Gotta make a living.

Still—I had a good, solid, serviceable, robust technique from early on, and I was a much better than average craftsman. How I wish now I'd just stuck to it. Owned my one chosen technique and moved on from there, never deviated. I would have been a much better photographer by now if I had. Well, maybe not better, but much more accomplished.

The irony here is, it's what I always wanted to do. It was always my goal. But I wasn't able to do it.

"Word to the wise."

Mike

"Maturity is realizing you used to be an idiot; common sense is trying not to be an idiot now; wisdom is knowing you could still be an idiot in the future."

Original contents copyright 2013 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Featured Comments from:

Alan Fairley: "From early on, I've had a definite 'eye' and self-defined as a photographer but for various reasons having to do with the vagiaries of life have completely dropped photography for close to 10-year stretches a couple of times. There will always be the thoughts of 'what if' but, in the end, so what? The important thing is that I am getting such deep soul-satisfying pleasure from it now."

'Record Shots'

I'm feeling the need to change the subject this morning, but before we do, I thought I might mention one more thing. As I was reading more about Shaw-Pellegrin yesterday, it occurred to me that maybe the contest organizers need to make it more clear exactly what it is they're rewarding...good photographs, or good journalism?

There does seem to be a disconnect between the two, frequently. I've found the same thing in my infrequent attempts at "photo essays": there are some pictures you get along the way that are good pictures; and then there are some pictures that are needed in order to tell the story accurately, but that aren't good pictures. No matter how good you are, nobody can tell a story in pictures honestly in which every picture is as good as the best one.

It's always seemed to me that this is a very major tension in photography...almost all photography. You can make it look good, or you can make it true to the subject, but, very often, you can't do both at the same time.

I even have a name for those aesthetically drab 'n' dispiriting but accurate and informative frames: "record shots." And I've always conceived that about half my shooting consists of record shots, meant to record a memory: I was here. I did this. I was with this person. I saw this. That sort of thing. Sometimes the record shots do turn out to be good photographs too, and I love it when that happens. But it's relatively rare.

Despite my fealty in principle to the ideal of honesty in photographs, I almost always fall on the side of good pictures. Those are the ones that move me, that I care about.

Of course, I'm not trying to be a journalist, nor am I charged with being one. I'm just an amateur, doing what I want to do. That's the way I like it. Saves me from having to worry too much about this sort of thing.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2013 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

MM: "'Maybe the contest organizers need to make it more clear exactly what it is they're rewarding...good photographs, or good journalism?'

"Very interesting observation. I see corollaries in the fields I work with: publication design (readability and larger type vs. smaller type that is treated more as a graphic element than as the main point of the publication); interior architecture (day-to-day livability vs. the kind of visual drama that photographs well); signage design (practicality, prominence, and clarity vs. the kind of subtle/spare/elegant stylishness that looks beautiful on a wall); and website design (fast-loading, structurally simple pages vs. stylish but complex and slower-loading pages). We won't get started on vehicles—or industrial design of things like cameras—but in all of these cases one can see how prominent industry awards may reward something other than what many end-users might assume the awards would be 'about.'

"As you note, there is no consistently 'right' approach, not even within a single individual (a guy may care what his car looks like but not his apartment, while his spouse may feel the opposite). But there's no doubt that awards usually reward one kind of excellence in a way that many end-users actually may not care too much about. Online commentary and discussions like this can help the public figure out which kind of excellence the award is honoring—and how that relates to what each individual thinks is important."

Michel Hardy-Vallée: "Whenever I read about photo-reportage controversies like the current one, I can't help but go back to the famous 2009 Paris Match award-winning (then award-losing, as soon as they revealed the hoax in the acceptance speech) faux-cumentary essay 'Mention Rien' ('graded nil') on the poverty and precarity of French students.

"The premise is simple: by respecting all the codes of 'concerned' photojournalism, the two students convincingly submitted to a major news contest a reportage that was 100% staged. The captions under the portraits describe the situation of students having to forage to eat, share cramped spaces, work many odd jobs, prostitute themselves, or live in dire conditions, in order to be able to continue their studies.

"They won the prize because photojournalism is essentially constructed on a trust contract: the only guarantee for the veracity of the images is ultimately the photographer's word (Ctein addressed that below). But there's a Borgesian paradox as well: you cannot distinguish a staged image from a non-staged one just by looking at it.

"In other words, they destroyed the idea that photos have essentially any intrinsic truth-value, and showed that whatever truth-value they have must be governed by a practice of interpretation (which obviously can be fooled).

"It is nevertheless an interesting, and I would say touching work, even when you are well aware of the forgery. On the one hand, these guys know their aesthetics, and if you're sensitive to that kind of style, you can only admire their eye. On the other hand, student poverty is a reality, and most people experience dire straits during the course of their studies, especially if they happen to fall outside of the ideal life style enshrined in official policies: students living at home or benefitting from parental support, allowing them to work little and spend time on their studies.

"Student loans are calculated on a purported parental contribution, not on an actual one, so if your parents are rich bastards, the government considers they support you and won't provide loans.

"The set of imaginary characters the two fauxtographers have devised is a fine collection of problem cases, and the verisimilitude is polished: their troubles are not too extreme, despite being beyond what anyone would consider an ideal situation, and their distress is at the same time counterbalanced by a will to get by and not linger pathetically on their misery.

"It's a great work of fiction. And unlike the case at hand, there has been no sidestepping of all the ethical and ideological issues their action involved. These are people who wanted to wreck the system, but at the same time they reinforced the power of storytelling beyond its truth-value. They took full credit for the controversy, and never attempted to have their cake and eat it too."

robert e: "'...What it is they're rewarding...good photographs, or good journalism?'

"Apparently more the former. After some reading and listening on WPP's website it's pretty clear that the priority is to find 'dramatic,' 'powerful,' 'beautiful,' 'poetic' images and series that 'reach out and grab' and 'pull you in.' This seems consistent with the stated purpose of the contest, which is to promote the 'inspirational role of photojournalism.'

"The jury chair statements are here.

"I think the Nature prize winner is a perfect example of great photographs being great journalism, and even good science. But that, I suppose, is not very surprising given what nature photography entails vs. documenting human news.

"On a meta level, the most disturbing winner for me—even more so than Pellegrin's infamous staged shot, though there are important similarities—is Xiaoqun Zheng's second prize in the Nature category. This series simply and shockingly takes familiar tropes from photojournalism about incarcerated humans and applies it to animals in zoos. It of course raises questions about our treatment of both humans and animals, but to my mind it also raises questions about the practice and conventions of the craft, and about what it is we're looking at, looking for, and honoring with contests like these.

"I also found interesting the Nature jury chair's account of demanding the Raw file of an eventual winning image to verify that its striking colors were not the result of post processing, and his comment about 'documentary' pretensions."

Stuff

I have an organizer coming today. She's actually appeared on the A&E show "Hoarders." (She says I'm not a hoarder and my house "isn't bad." It's possible she's being nice to me.)

Regarding stuff, I can recommend the book Stuff (see below). But I especially recommend this recent post on Eolake Stobblehouse Thoughts. Carlin really was the Master: funny enough but very true.

Eolake is also enamored of the Paperwhite, and I keep waffling over it. I want one. My problem is that my first-gen Kindle is still fine...(re the "Featured Comment" in the D7100 post).

Mike

Original contents copyright 2013 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.
A book of interest today:

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Little Truths

I probably shouldn't admit this, because I'm supposed to act like big serious Mr. Expert and all (although I'm not much for pretense and ostentation, as you might know if you've been reading me for a while—cf. the book link at the bottom of this post), but here goes: I actually kind like those jokey collections of cutesy/funny pictures that the Internet is full of. Not the sort of pictures I should be looking at? I guess. But we all look at more kinds of pictures than we can even categorize. It's almost like breathing the air. Lot of chaff in those, of course, but the gems that fall past really are gems.

A photograph at its most basic can tell us something true about the world, or about human beings, or animals, or about something that happened...not "Truth," capital T, but just truths. Little ones.

It's the main thing that separates it from art. It can be more about Observation than Creation. Note caps.

I have a friend who passes these along sometimes. Here's one that made me actually "LOL" (he's all gung-ho about the start of baseball season):

Hilarious. Very human, seems to me. Also very photographic in its essence—not something an artist might think to invent. (Also something you might look at and not even "get" unless you were thinking about it. I think we humans "see mindlessly" the great majority of the time.)

Here's one the same friend also sent me:

He has no idea where it came from. Anybody know anything about it?

This picture strikes me as funny, yes, but poignant as well, and layered—it says a lot about photography, about human concerns with image, in the sense of status and appearances, meta-concerns about truth and falsification, about imagination, about the ideal versus the real, even about hope in the face of despair. It's a wonderful photograph about photography.

I want to know more about it.

Mike
(Thanks to Kim)

UPDATE: It's from the AP, captioned, "A photographer uses his own backdrop to mask Poland's World War II ruins while shooting a portrait in Warsaw in November of 1946. (AP Photo/Michael Nash)." A big thanks to sepp and several others for the information.

Original contents copyright 2013 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.
A book of interest today:

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Featured Comments from:

Kenneth Tanaka: "'...Not something an artist might think to invent.' Exactly. These are scenes that only work as photography. Paintings and drawings might be cute but they would not carry the testimonial value that a photograph carries. Further, one way to measure your progress as a photographer is whether or not you're consistently able to see and capture such moments."

John Wilson: "The camera the photographer is using is interesting. It looks like one of those old street box cameras which used paper negatives and were developed inside the camera. Apparently they are still being used in Afghanistan and Pakistan. There's a very interesting site that goes into some depth about how they are used."

Stan B.: "Apparently, they've reconstructed Old Town Warsaw down to the very last detail—not necessarily as it once was, but as an Italian painter once imagined it to be...."

Mike replies: Good post; good find. I'd like to see it anyway, just for what it is. They don't have this reputation here, so much, but Polish craftsmanship can be amazing.

Chris Lucianu: "After looking at the picture of the photographer using a trompe-everything-backdrop, read the entry on the planned destruction of Warsaw, then look again at the picture. I think it deserves quite a caption.

Likewise, if you look at the page linked to by Stan B., don't just read the brief intro (which I find condensed to almost the point of flippancy). Do yourself a favour and listen to the audio feature untangling the threads of a story as poignant as it is complicated, courtesy of Amy Drozdowska, Michał Murawski and Dave McGuire. Or, taking a somewhat less post-modern view, read art historian Małgorzata Omilanowska's Views of Warsaw by Bernardo Bellotto Called Canaletto and their Role in the Reconstruction of Warsaw's Monuments. Vana Tallinn (2010), if you can obtain it (and kudos if you do).

It becomes clear that the post-war reconstruction team led by Jan Zachwatowicz aimed at re-creating the aspect of an ideal late-Baroque Warsaw (with its Gothic and Renaissance heritage) as it would have existed at the time of Stanisław August Poniatowski, the last Polish king. Bernardo Bellotto's alleged 'imagination' can hardly be faulted. On the contrary, Bellotto was an astonishingly accurate painter of urban landscapes, who used a camera obscura to draw minute documentary sketches which were then integrated into a grand veduta. (Perhaps it is a good opportunity to remind ourselves of the synthetic aspect of painting as opposed to snapshots.)

I spent some time last year studying Bellotto in Dresden, the other center of the painter's activity; and also a city victim of the war, although, unlike Warsaw, a a more haphazard victim. It takes some time to realise that Bellotto was a painter of the social fabric as well as of architecture. The passing of time would have sufficed to transform the buildings he minutely documented into as much a trompe-l'esprit as the Warsaw photographer's canvas. But now, with his paintings more 'original' than the very cityscapes they depicted, we might as well be painting on a mirror.

Andrew Molitor: "I actually wrote a little thing about the 'meme' thing, where you take a picture and apply a caption and get that pseudo-motivational poster.

"It's actually a great lesson in how a caption alters our perception of a photograph. You can take the same photo of some dumb cat, apply 30 captions to it, and create 30 quite different 'experiences of the image.' The captions tend to drive a little imagined narrative to go with the image, and the successful ones drive quite a strong narrative.

"So, they're not just silly funny fun things! They have a little something to teach us about art and the human brain!"

 

Reflections

I've spent the last several days of "time off" doing a number of things—working on my old list of "226 Books by Genre," which has already sucked up hundreds of hours of time and could stand another hundred; thinking about the past and future of TOP (including a few odd 'n' ends, pace Ctein on Wednesday*); and writing down some of my personal aims and ambitions, so I can attempt to prioritize.

Of course, that list turns out to be rather funny. A few items plucked from it that are cases in point:

• Fix up my old Miata
• Sell my old Miata and use the dough to buy something else cheap and fun

• Use the D800 more
• Sell the D800 while there's still time

• Rehab the house**
• Consider moving

• Increase the number of daily posts on TOP
• Make the posts fewer in number but longer and better

• Print a portfolio of old 35mm Tri-X negatives
• Forget printing old negs, publish a book of them instead

...And so on. It's a good thing I'm a blogger; it seems well adapted to the limit of my attention span.

I see the doctors next on Monday. I have very high hopes for what adequate sleep might do for me. Will it improve...decisiveness? Organization skills? Will I suddenly be able to play the piano?

Mike

*I've left quite a few loose ends dangling in the past, turns out, such as the Canon Pro-1 printer and the Reader Print Sale.

**"Redecorate" is far too grand a word here, take my word.  :-)

Original contents copyright 2013 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.
A book of interest today:

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Oren Grad: "This is the fate of a pack rat."

richardplondon: "I keep getting distracted from my 'to do' li [sic]"

Ed. Note: Oren's link above was to an eBay auction entitled "Huge lot of old cameras collection for Sale [sic]. 1,000+ pieces":

It was being offered at $35,000. (I'd actually seen it before on eBay, for higher prices.) And what do you know, it actually sold!

Even odds as to whether it will be worth it for the buyer. The price of $35 per camera seems low, but I'll bet an awful lot of the cameras aren't worth $35 and I'll bet they're also not very liquid, meaning it'd take a lot of time and effort to get $35 back out of each of them.

On the other hand, throughput is how collectors find the gems—I actually knew a camera collector in Chicago who opened a used camera store just so he could cherry pick what came through. It's not impossible that a few dozen of the cameras could make the whole pile break even. Interesting situation. I'd love to know more about this, too. —Mike

 

Room for Poetry

We're finally getting a little winter here, which is nice. This morning like most Americans I'm watching the Inaugural. Fifty-seven of them and counting...although I recently finished reading a book about the end of the Roman Republic, which is casting a slight pall on the horizon of my mood. But it's a nice day in Washington.

Big day for poets, too—the Inauguration is probably the highest-profile appearance of a poet in public life these days. This time it's Richard Blanco, whose poem is sounding a bit like a speech—but then, the official poetry of occasions has never been that medium's highest height. Too bad we don't have a little more room for poetry in public life these days.

More soon....

Mike

Original contents copyright 2013 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.
A book of interest today:

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Featured Comments from:

Bob (partial comment): "The book of interest, The Country Between Us, is a remarkable book ,and its author a remarkable person. It was one of the first serious and political poetry books to be recognized by the mainstream press in a very long time. 'The Colonel' is a particularly powerful and accessible poem.

"I had the pleasure of taking a week long workshop with Ms. Forche soon after the book was published. She stressed that poets needed to be more political. People were listening to her. It was an exciting time to be following poetry."

James Rhem: "I think you are being a little hard on Blanco's poem. For occasional verse, it was not bad at all. A photographer ought to have appreciated his use of 'light' as a recurrent device aiming at bringing 'enlightenment' and thoughtful observation to the great daily sweep of America."

2012 P.S.

The fate of beautiful new technologies: an autochrome of a gramophone.

I trust no one missed my main point in the previous post: 2012 was a very good year for cameras. Interesting ones, useful ones, good ones. It was a year of just the sort of creativity in the cameramaking universe that five years ago I was bemoaning the absence of. And that despite setbacks economic, environmental, and corporate. So: bravo to the cameramakers!

I've always thought that the inevitable evolution of digital has to be a layered sensor like the Foveon, and I still feel that one day, the Bayer array will be as antiquated as a top hat. (Or, more on point, as Lumière Autochromes. Or even more on point, as tricolor cameras.) When that happens, all of this year's cameras will be lost in the mists of history, along with Exaktas, Mirandas, and Niccas.

But then, that's what I was saying eight years ago, and I've been wrong about it so far.

For the moment—for our times—2012 was a very good year for cameras.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2012 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Manuel: "Cameras are indeed much more interesting now, and both Panasonic and Olympus deserve the credits for having started the ball rolling when they introduced Micro 4/3. Crucially, Olympus sent the message that it was OK to make beautiful cameras again when they launched the E-P1. If it weren't for this brilliant little machine, mirrorless cameras would all probably look like DSLRs (like the Panasonic G1/GH1) or point-and-shoots on steroids like the insipid Canon EOS M.

"This is, in my humble opinion, the reason cameras have become so much more interesting than what we had five or so years ago. The new designs brought back pride in ownership, something that got lost in the way when all camera makers started making ergonomically oriented bodies. (I wouldn't go so far as to call them 'melted soapbars,' as some do.) Now we can have cameras that are a delight to behold, the Fujis being currently the best example of the kind.

"Re the Foveon sensor, I believe it nods to the future. I may be wrong, but it is so clever and effective (at least from what I see on the 'net) that most sensor makers will adopt this technology sooner or later. It's all up to Sony...."

Andre: "Well, the interwebs claim Sony has filed a patent for a layered sensor and Michael Reichmann claims that a major manufacturer will introduce a sensor that bypasses the Foveon patents within 18 months. Assuming this comes to pass, and the manufacturer provides enough information that the major RAW software makers can support it, the Bayer array sensor might be consigned to being a transitional stage in sensor development."

Mike replies: Really? I hate to admit ignorance (never let 'em see you sweat, etc.), but I did not know that. In any event, I've been predicting this since 2002, so my prediction is ongoing...and not based on any actual information. [g]

Huw Morgan: "I went back in time via the Interwebby and found your landmark article in Luminous-Landscape on the DMD (Decisive Moment Digital) camera. At that point in time, a DMD seemed like a distant vision of the future, but we are now suddenly surrounded by 'em. Take your pick: Olympus OM-D, Sony Nex-7 and Nex-6, Fuji X-e1, Canon M, Nikon 1, etc. etc. All fulfil the purpose of a DMD quite handily. All focus quickly, have access to fast primes and have sensors that range from perfectly adequate to verging on humongous. You can find one that fits every hand, from the smallest to the largest. Plus, we've made excellent headway with electronic viewfinders that make it possible to pre-chimp our photos. I like pre-chimping! Aren't we all so lucky to have our fine Japanese and Korean friends making our wishes come true?"

XK50: "Don't you love that Autochrome palette? One for DxO Optics' Filmpack!"

The Unwanted Portrait

By John Kennerdell

Handing out the occasional print, it seems to me, is one small thing we photographers can do in return for our intrusions into the lives of our subjects. It's also its own reward, at least in the corner of the world where I live. Most people hereabouts in rural Southeast Asia have never seen themselves in anything other than random snapshots or a stiff studio portrait. Give them a decent casual headshot and almost always they react with surprise and pleasure.

But this is the story of an exception.

The photo here is one of only two I ever took of this fellow, a moment after we smiled a greeting at each other at a weekly market some years ago. The shot was nothing special, but I liked the guy. He had a look of his own, something jaunty and indomitable. So I printed it up and slipped it into my bag with the other prints I would give out the next week.

As hoped, I found him again. That's when things went wrong. He stared at the photo for a long moment, as if almost unsure who it was. Then, without looking up, he said: "And what do I do with this?"

It was a question nobody had ever asked, and it brought me up short. Well, I started to say, give it to your wife. Then I realized that I'd never seen him with anyone. What if he lived by himself? What indeed would he do with a crinkly, wrinkly replica of his own face? Put it on a wall to make himself feel even older and more alone? Finally I came up with the only thing I could think of. "Maybe your grandchildren would like it," I said. The comment felt lame even as I said it. Kids love gifts from grandparents. But a geezer portrait?

It couldn't have satisfied him, but at least he didn't hand it back. It happens all the time here—you commit a faux pas and people treat you with a quiet graciousness that makes you feel like even more of an oaf.

Whatever he thought of the picture, it seemed to cement a small bond between us. Every week from then on he always made a point of coming over and, in a touchingly un-Asian gesture, shaking my hand. We never talked of much, but more than once he told me he was 79 years old, hale and hearty and still enjoying every day. Until one week when he admitted that no, he wasn't doing so well. It was a statement of fact, nothing else. I saw him a few times more but then, at some point, no more.

Life went on, as it does. I kept returning to the market whenever I was home between travels, still shooting and still occasionally giving out prints, just not to solitary old people. I mean, what had I been thinking?

And then one day I was passing around some prints to the usual general amusement when a pair of young women came up as if on a mission. They began thanking me repeatedly for something I didn't understand. Only when one of them kept saying "Taa...Taa"—Granddad—and I looked into her face did I somehow realize they were talking about this very fellow.

"We have an old wedding photo," she said. "But your picture looks the way we remember him."

So here's to you, Granddad. We barely knew each other but I still smile when I think of you, your hand-rolled cigarettes, your ancient sputtering motorbike, the pleasure you took in having a friend as unlikely as me. Despite your doubts, and mine too, our photograph seems to have found a good home.

John

John Kennerdell, an American who has lived and worked in Southeast Asia for most of his adult life, writes several posts a year for TOP. His website is Indochina Photoelectric. More of his writings for us can be found through the Categories list in the right-hand sidebar.

Original contents copyright 2012 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Dalen Muster: "Love the shot, and love the story! I had a similar experience in a sense. I was shooting candid portraits of sufferers of dementia in the lock-down section of a rest home. I decided to hang a half-dozen interesting ones in a nearby Starbucks. Within a day or so I received a phone call from the manager of Starbucks stating that there was an incident regarding the daughter of one woman's portrait, and that I needed to call her. Apparently she works nearby that Starbucks, and was in line to order her drink. Unaware that I had displayed the photograph of her mother she was caught by surprise when she saw the photo. She then stepped out of line, and proceeded to weep. I had somehow captured an expression that had not been seen in the years since dementia had overcome her.

"Thankfully she was thankful, and not angry. I gave her the print."

Richard Alan Fox: "Many years ago on a walk with my Plaubel 670 through Greenwich Villiage I happened across the artist Chaim Gross sitting on a chair in font of his studio. I asked if I could do a quick portrait and he agreed, click click and I walked on. I made a print and sent it via USPS; two or three weeks latter I saw his obit in the Times.

"Two months later I received a letter from his widow, Rene Gross, saying that Chaim saw the picture before died and was pleased at what was his last portrait. As he had a decades long relationship with Arnold Newman, I felt proud of the image. The letter continued that oh by the way at his Shiva (a Jewish wake) the portrait was on display and was stolen by a member of the public who came to pay respects, and could I please send another copy. I sent it on and that became the beginning of many photos and portraits I did for the family and the Chaim Gross Museum."

Crabby Umbo: "Love this story...

...Moved into a cheap one-room apartment in the center of the city I live in, starting to get on hard times myself, and keep most of my stuff in a storage space. My building is filled with people of all colors, creeds, and ages, with single retirees a big part of it all. Just to keep sharp, I've started doing 'one-roll' portraits, on 120 film, of people who come out for a few minutes to sit in front of the building or have a smoke. They always let me do it, but think I'm crazy, as 'who wants a picture of me?' I always give them a contact sheet, and they're always surprised at how they look. I get a lot of history of all those 'faces', and hear a lot of interesting things, and like to think I make a few of them happy. Not to put a political spin on it, but more than once I've remarked to friends than my life feels far more interesting than if I'd have moved into a cheap apartment in the far-west, all-white suburbs of my metro area...."

Get It Done While You Can

A reader/friend-I've-never-met just wrote to me this morning. He's over the moon about a fabulous print he just had made from a scan by a particular service bureau. It had him talking like he's solved the problem of getting prints made from his archive of 35mm negatives.

Maybe. My advice, from experience: If you get to a point where you're happy with what you're getting, act like there's no tomorrow. Get as much accomplished as quickly as you can. Because it's not going to last.

We get into these sweet spots. And we think they're all "from now on," that they're going to last forever, stretching into a rosy sunset. It's hard to keep in mind that happily ever after only happens in fairy tales.

In 1994, I bought a loft condo just west of Chicago and converted the powder room to a tiny darkroom. I hadn't had a real darkroom in years and I was all happy about finally getting some prints made. Before long, I was doing really the best printing of my life—I had all the equipment on song and was using two papers and two developers for just the right degree of control. I was working a day job and had a small child who couldn't be left alone at night after he went to sleep. Hours after dark with nothing to do but print. I had a large backlog of unprinted negatives. I was making a good salary and had money for supplies. My skills were at their peak. I made the best prints from my own work I'd ever made. I was cranking 'em out, cruising along.

And at some point I got the notion that I should do a portfolio, a sort of master set of all my favorite pictures. I settled on the idea of printing 100 pictures that represented the best of my shooting up till then. I started making the selections, happily poring over old contact sheets. (Made some real discoveries, too, things I'd overlooked when I shot them, including that "floating canoe" I showed you a while back and now can't find.) I got started.

And that's all.

I had no sense of urgency. There was no hurry. What could happen? Nothing was going to change.

But things change. Within ten years, my kid was a teenager, the companies that made my two standard papers were both out of business, I didn't have a darkroom in my home any more, and I was self-employed, meaning my free time was no longer my own.

I sure wish now that I'd been a little more disciplined and actually made that "master set" when I had the chance. That window is mostly closed now.

Same thing happened again c. 2007. I'd bought my first DSLR, I'd gone through all the calibration rigamarole with a certain inkjet-printer-which-must-not-be-named*, I'd done all the experimenting I needed to do with papers, and I was making nice prints that I was happy with. I was set from then on, right? What could go wrong? Surely the camera wouldn't break, the company that made it wouldn't go out of business, and the printer wouldn't develop so many problems that I had to disconnect it and put it in the corner of the living room for the sake of my blood pressure. Except all those things happened. Once again, I should have made more prints while I had everything on song and humming along. (Annoyingly, I even made dozens and dozens of prints of one picture for a print sale, and didn't even keep one for myself. I could always print another one if I ever needed it, right? Except now I can't.)

The specifics don't matter. The moral of the story does matter: thing are going to change. I don't know how, I don't know when, but they will. If you've got everything down pat right now and you've found your perfect service bureau, or you've got plenty of time to do x, or Filbert is making all your prints for you and man oh man is he ever a great printer, or you've found some way of working that's allowing you to work the way you want to...assume a sense of urgency, is my advice. Work hard while you can. Get things done. Because someday someone is going to say to you, "You want us to match an inkjet print? Wow, I haven't even heard that word in five years," or, "Sir, no one works with files from the old Bayer array cameras any more." Or you'll get transferred to Bongo Bongo in the South Pacific and the company has a no cameras rule because the native women don't wear tops. Or Filbert the master printer will win Lotto and enthusiastically devote his life to cocaine. I don't know. I don't know what it will be—all I know is that whatever is, isn't forever. The windows that open, close. When things are on song, sing. Please take my advice.

Mike

*If you say its name you invoke its shrieking curse which will cloud the sky and blot out all sunlight.

Original contents copyright 2012 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.
A book of interest today:

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Featured Comments from:

John Robison: "'I returned to see under the sun that the swift do not have the race, nor the mighty ones the battle, nor do the wise also have the food, nor the understanding ones also have the riches, nor do even those having knowledge have the favor; because time and unforeseen occurrence befall them all.' Eccl. 9:11."

Will: "In other words: Carpe the dang Diem."

Francisco Cubas: "I was in charge of a fine art printing business for two years. I learned through tutorials (mostly from The Luminous Landscape) to decently use an Epson 9900; I had access to Moab and Hahnemuhle papers; I deeply improved my editing skills using DxO, Lightroom and PS. Three months ago I quit and realized I had just two portfolio prints of my own. Great advice Mike, you never know what's going to happen."

Joe: "'Some day,' I said to myself. 'Some day soon I'm going to sit down and spend the time to transfer those irreplaceable reel-to-reel recordings of my old bands onto cassette tapes.' And then a few years later: 'Some day I'm going to sit down and spend the time to transfer those irreplaceable reel-to-reels to my computer.' The reel-to-reel machine is dead. I can't find a way to record onto cassettes, anyway. And how did I used to digitize audio? I forget. I think all that stuff is in a box in the basement. Right next to the moldy reel-to-reel tapes."

Mike replies: I fear you've just told the eventual tale of 99.99% of the world's digital photographs.

Getting Better...Naturally

Last week I got carried away and bought my youngest brother a Pentax for his birthday. A profligate gift*, but he assures me it'll count for birthdays and Christmas for several years. I bought him a Pentax K-01. It hasn't been popular, so the price has plunged to as little as $316.95 at some places. [UPDATE Tuesday: B&H Photo now has the best current bargain on the K-01. —Ed.] At the same time, several people I've talked to who use them really like them. I just thought he might like the offbeat style, and the high image quality. He's very happy with it so far. I got him the black one with the 40mm pancake lens. (That one should be called a crêpe lens.)

I'm looking forward to seeing some of his pictures. (Hint, hint, Scott.)

Also last week, I found myself sinking slowly into a muck of agony about black-and-white conversions. Comparing Raw converters. Reading about this and that conversion technique. Does this look better, or this? Playing with tones, trying to get things just right.

But of course there is no longer a helpfully limited number of controls. There's an effective infinitude. Crazy-making.

It took me a few days to find the key: just do it. My new strategy is to take a few dozen pictures every day and convert two or three of them. Get them looking okay, then move on.

The hope is that I'll get better with practice. Maybe "hope" is too wishy-washy a word: I know I'm going to get better with practice. Because that's just what happens naturally.

My brother called me after he took his first JPEG. He's new to digital photography and I think he was feeling a little overwhelmed by all the options and the newness and unfamiliarity of all the procedures. I gave him the same advice—just take pictures, correct them as best you can, move on. The more often you take a few pictures, the better. I told him to pick up the camera every day, or as often as he can.

Of course, you do have to try to get better as you go. Mindful, not mindless. But I think a lot of things in photography are susceptible to this strategy—keep doing it, keep up the do-think-do-think-do servo mechanism, and you gradually get better at it. You might only make barely perceptible progress from one go to the next, but barely perceptible progress over a long period of time = major progress.

That's my kernel of wisdom for today.

Mike

*Thought process: first I was going to give him one of the old cameras I have hanging around here. Then I thought, wait a minute, he's going to have to invest a lot of time and effort into learning how to operate the camera and work on the pictures—why make him do that with an old, out of date camera that he might not be happy with for very long? A new camera makes much more sense because really, his time is worth a lot more than the cost of the camera. That's my story and I'm stickin' to it.

Original contents copyright 2012 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Featured Comments from:

Doug: "My favorite B&W tool is still LightZone. Unfortunately, it's not available to new users at the moment. But for those who already have a license, continuing support—including updates to handle Raw files from recent camera models—is available from the volunteer LightZombie Project. I'm one of the founders of the LightZombie Project, so this is sort-of a plug. But we're not selling anything, and we don't have ads on the site. It's purely a volunteer project, done out of love for the LightZone software and a desire to help fellow LZ users."

It All Boils Down to Mario and Zombies

A funny and slyly perceptive post about "latent objects" on Tea Leaves, by psu. Good reading for a Sunday morn. And he's right, it really does all boil down to Mario and Zombies against Final Fantasy and cult Japanese imports, doesn't it? I have no idea what that means, yet I know exactly what it means.

I suspect you will too. I used to call it the "search for specialness" or the magic bullet, and to me it was capsulized nicely by Ana Jones's story about rejecting a portfolio from a man who wouldn't leave her office: "But you don't understand," the man told her, apparently in a state of considerable anguish, "these prints were developed in Amidol." Ana said she was thinking, no, you don't understand—they're not interesting pictures.

By the way, I've rented the D800E and AF-S 35mm ƒ/1.4G for five days, taking Jeff's and Bernard's suggestion from the Comments. I'm not good at photographing during a small window—and we'll probably have bad weather for precisely the duration, with my luck—but we shall see what we can see.

At least it will make those particular objects less latent and more real, "warts and all."

Mike
(Thanks to psu)

Original contents copyright 2012 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.
A book of interest today:

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I Had Better 'Fess Up

Illustration courtesy camerasize.com

About that crack I made about selling all my cameras: I'd better 'splain.

It's very tempting to keep this quiet, but, to paraphrase David Vestal, I'm "in the disclosure business," so I might as well take a deep breath and blurt it out. The truth is: my old colleague Harold Merklinger has been writing about the state of the art in digital B&W (Harold, former Chief Scientist of the Canadian Defence Research Establishment Atlantic, who retired as that agency's Director-General, wrote one of the original articles about bokeh that I published in Photo Techniques in 1997) and he feels that the D800E is a breakthrough for digital B&W. I've been relentlessly researching everything I can about the D800E's B&W capability online, and I think I've quickly arrived at the point where I just need to try it for myself in order to find out more.

When I published the "poll question" the other day, I got lots of  relatively legalistic responses to what I thought was a very straightforward question. Few people intuited that it simply described an issue I happen to be wrestling with myself! The Nikon D800E is very much not my kind of camera—not what I want to shoot with, not what I want to carry, not what I want to pay for. But on the other hand, while I've seen some decent digital B&W here and there (often, curiously, from the original Canon 5D), I've never been happy with what I've been able to produce myself. And what else am I going to spend my money on? Unless you count coffee, I have no other vices. (Well, maybe a touch of gluttony, according to the needle on the bathroom scale. Burp.)

It seems fair to conclude from the evidence that I'm the victim of some persistent delusions when it comes to my own photography. For instance, every time I buy a new camera, I truly believe that I'm going to use it for the rest of my life and will never have to re-sell it. This flies in the face of all of a huge body of evidence to the contrary (somewhere in Vegas, Josh Hawkins is ROTFLHAO—Josh is a photojournalist who used to be the manager of Oak Park Camera, around the corner and down the street from my loft condo in Illinois). Another of these persistent delusions is the idea that I'm going to return to my first love, B&W film photography. Any day now. As Bill Cosby (as Noah) would say, riiiight. I've sunk a fair amount of money and effort into that phantasm: I've bought too many film cameras, and even built a darkroom, which, with everything else that's going on in my life, gets used only sparingly, despite my excitement about it when I built it and despite my fond intentions. More's the pity; but it's like walking when you own a car—you do it a few times when the weather's nice, but mostly you're in a hurry and you just want to get the errands done.

I've been very excited so far by what I've seen of the D800E's B&W output. Unlike most D800/E shooters, I wouldn't buy a D800 for resolution; 16 megapixels in Micro 4/3 is already plenty of resolution for me. But something about Nikon's new sensor really seems to do B&W in a way that I imagine (or that I fantasize, as Scott Adams would say) could satisfy my standards.

I don't know that it can; note that most film photography doesn't meet my standards, and film is much more gifted with monochrome than digital. You can only learn so much online, from others. Photography is a "see for yourself" pursuit, and I accept that there are just some things you need to try for yourself, so that you can "demystify" them for yourself on your own terms. (My friend Oren Grad was the one who turned on that particular lightbulb for me.) That's really why I'm not sorry for having bought the Chamonix: I felt I needed to try it for myself. That justifies it in my mind.

I really don't know that I'll do this. I had zero interest in the D800 until I saw what it can do. Really, the D800E is not my cup of tea as a camera at all. Consider that the three digital cameras I like best on the market right now are the OM-D, the NEX-7, and the Fuji X-Pro1, not necessarily in that order—and I imagine I'll like the NEX-6 and the Fuji E-X1 just as well—and, despite having never seen one, I love the Panasonic GX1, since it's the successor to my GF1, which is the camera I've used by far the most since 2009. (In the last three years I've probably used the GF1 more than all other cameras, film and digital both, combined.)

My brother Scott, a wise and thoughtful guy, once observed that I'm far better at giving other people advice than I am at figuring out what to do for myself. He was talking about stereo equipment, but I think the same thing holds true for photographic equipment as well. It's possible that I simply lack the crucial ingredient of objectivity when it comes to myself.

Someone in the comments to the previous post made the snarky, verging-on-nasty comment, "I give him six months before he's on to the next shiny object." That does bring up what's always been a significant complication for me, which is that I move on to the next shiny object for a living. Or as part of my living. To do a better job as the majordomo of TOP, I should really use far more digital cameras than I do, not fewer, and I should probably stop dithering around with film cameras altogether. I'm sure MR at L-L or any of the guys at, say, Imaging-Resource have hands-on experience with far more cameras than I do. The obligation to stay current with many different camera models is not conducive to settling down with the one thing that's best for your work and ignoring everything else. That's a luxury many amateurs take for granted that I haven't had for many years now. I've been reviewing cameras professionally since 1988, and this is a perpetual conflict. Really, I ought to be more like Ken Rockwell, and I know it.

Perhaps that gives better context to the "poll question" from the other day: to get the results you want, would you use a camera you don't like? The D800E is not my style, and I haven't owned Nikons since Reagan was President. But to do really nice B&W...that particular seductive siren is screaming in my ears.

That snarky commenter should come back in six months. Maybe he'll find he can buy a D800E cheap. That's okay, I guess. I suspect I'll have learned something in the interim. 

And if I struggle with a D800E for a while, you'll probably get a few entertaining posts out of it to boot, don't you think?

Mike

ADDENDUM: But on the other hand...(read mouseover text):

Hat tip again to the very useful Camera Size.

Original contents copyright 2012 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.
A product of interest today:

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Featured Comments from:

Josh Hawkins (partial comment): "Mike, I'm still amazed you have owned a camera, the same camera, for six months straight, at least once. The times are a changin'. (In all the years I dealt cameras to Mike I don't think I ever saw him own a camera for more than 6 weeks.)"

Mike replies: C'mon, Josh, it wasn't that bad. You knew me in my OM-4T period, and I used that camera exclusively for four and a half years, admittedly a modern record. And I used Nick's M4 for a whole year, maybe even 14 months, albeit with two different 50mm lenses. Granted, I didn't keep that Leitz Focomat IIc enlarger more than a few weeks, although that was entirely because I didn't like the results I got, not due to fickleness. Those Konicas didn't last long, and I was conflicted about the R4...and about the CLE, and...okay, I'd better shut up now.

Nicolas Woollaston: "Could it be that the kind of people who take the trouble buy and carry D800s are also the kind of people who take the trouble to own and use the very best B&W conversion software and take the trouble to really learn how to use all that technology and are the kind of people who don't stop striving until they are achieving the very best of results? Maybe some of that other stuff is actually more important than the initial image capture device. Hey, maybe even a Leica M Monochrom would be just about as good ;-)"

Mike replies: Many people have made one of two points: 1) that technique might be as important as the camera or more so, and 2) your point, which is that I might be being misled by the fact that the people who own D800E's are people whose technique is very good, and that's what I'm responding to. Both are excellent points. Both might be true. But I also think both just support what I said when I said "I've arrived at the point where I just need to try it for myself in order to find out more."

dogman: "Years ago, I bought a new XXX camera when they were first released and I hated it almost immediately. It did not feel right to me at all. Compared to other model cameras of the same brand, it felt like a toy. It was also unreliable. When it worked, I got results as good as what I was getting from the other models of that brand that I already owned. One infuriating day, following an assignment in which the XXX malfunctioned for the umpteenth time, I walked to an unoccupied area of the street and smashed that damn camera to pieces. It was an act most people would later regret. Instead I felt nothing but relief to be rid of it and I've never had any regrets.

"Since then, I've been a little more reserved when I came across a camera that I didn't like to use and/or one that just wouldn't work properly. I've sold them. Mike, your situation appears to be unique because, in your view, there is only the one camera available that will give you the results you want. But it also appears you really don't particularly like this camera to begin with. Sounds like a marriage forged in Hell. Requires more thought. Don't be impulsive."

MHMG: "Mike, I've now owned my D800E for just about 3 months. Here's my take. 1) I hate this camera. 2) I love this camera. 3) I really hate this camera. 4) I really love this camera. 5) I really hate to say it but I love this camera! Get the idea?...'cause that's what you're in for if you buy one!

"P.S. It eats good lenses for lunch. It demands exceptional glass and very careful technique, and when you finally nail a great image technically and artistically with the D800E, then you'll be wanting a 44" printer!"

Steven House: "I'm tempted by a D800 or E as well. I'm using a D700 at the mo' and I'm happy with that, but I'm already looking forward to your wranglings. That's what the site is about I thought. I don't come here for incessant camera reviews I come here for an insight into photography. Changing cameras once in a while is part of that. Whether as a result of changing technology or changing focus [sic] is neither here nor there."

mcomfort: "I think the secret sauce is pretty simple; Incredible resolution + incredible DR = fantastic B&W potential. The textures, detail, and the ability to push and pull those tones like Atlantic City taffy is a real treat. I've been shooting more B&W with my D800 than all my previous cameras combined."

This is Not a Post

 

By Marcel Duchamp

This looks like a post, but it isn't a post. It's a comment. I just get to tack my comment to the bully pulpit, is all, perch it on top of the pile where it can be seen, since I own the blog. As Michael Reichmann once said, it's good to be king.

I was involved in a semi-serious incident at school in seventh grade. It had to do with art class. From an early age, I drew pictures; it was my claim to fame when I was a kid. "Mike's an artist." Because every kid who draws pictures impressively is an artist. (Appropriately, we're easy on kids that way.)

For a while in seventh grade we had a substitute art teacher. I loved my regular art teacher and was very loyal to him, and didn't give the poor sub much of a chance (sorry, subs everywhere. You know how it is). So anyway, I'd been working on a certain drawing for several weeks. The temporary teacher, who probably just wanted to be liked, was making her rounds of the class. She came around to my table and started gabbing at me. (Don't need any comments, thanks; keep it moving. I just thought that, didn't say it.) Then, to my horror, she actually took my drawing board and drew on my drawing to illustrate her point. I told her calmly that if she ever drew on my work again, I'd tear up the picture. She told me not to be insolent. Then I fastidiously erased every trace of what she'd done and got back to work.

A day or two later, she came around and did it again, more extensively this time.

I'm afraid I made a bit of a scene. I tore the drawing off the drawing board, ripped it up in front of her, and stomped out of the room. I went right to the headmaster's office and explained to the vice principal that I wasn't going back to art class until the regular teacher returned. And I meant it, brother. They could call my parents, they could suspend me, they could flunk me, they could expel me, but I wasn't going back. (It's right there in the description of my basic personality type—see paragraph six at this link.)

Fortunately, it never came to a head; they let me skip a few art classes, and then the regular teacher returned.

Here's why I tore up the drawing: it was mine. Not hers. Mine. Art belongs to its creator. Even if not legally, as property, then ethically and morally and spiritually. Other people have to respect that. So I thought in seventh grade, at least.

Another story: when movement conservatives were embarked on a PR campaign to try to convince the public that Ronald Reagan had been a more popular President than he was, there was an initiative for a while to add his head to Mount Rushmore. I was appalled by that—well, on more levels than one, to be truthful, but basically—essentially—I was astonished and amazed that no one considered or even mentioned the Borglums. Two sculptors, father and son, spent their lives on that one work of art. And the suggestion was that "we" should come along years later and deface it (pun intended) by adding another head? I don't care whose head—that would have been artistic vandalism of the first order, a defilement. Maybe not quite as evil as the Taliban bombing the Buddhas of Bamiyan or as blatant as Laszlo Toth's fifteen hammer blows on the Virgin Mary's nose, but distinctly and definitely a crime of the same order.

So I was really surprised that this hardly came up in all the discussion about Sanna Dullaway's colorizations. Some of those pictures are historical documents, some of them are photojournalism, but several of them are either art or function as art. What about respecting the people who made them?

Try this as an exercise: imagine your very best picture—something you're really proud of and think you got just right. Now imagine someone else coming along, taking your file, and completely changing it in some fundamental way, and then spreading that version around with your name on it.

Maybe you wouldn't mind. I sure as hell would.

In 1919, in one of his famous Dada gestures, Marcel Duchamp penciled a mustache on a print of Leonardo's Mona Lisa and called it "hot pants," which was risqué at the time. But that was a transformative act, a political statement; he was implying—enacting—the need for rebellion against received cultural authority. And of course Sanna Dullahan didn't deface any originals. I presume she just took JPEGs of the pictures and went to work with her virtual Marshall Oil set.

No harm done. Except to good taste, and that's not rare. People do jokey, knee-jerk things to representations of art all the time. It's disrespectful, but not serious...equivalent, maybe, to urinating in public or farting at a formal dinner. I think the only difference here is the rather startling notion that these particular photographs needed to be improved, and that adding colors is the obvious way to do it. Why don't they take that damned guitar player of Picasso's and add some colors other than blue? What, was he short on other tubes of paint that day? We should fix that.

There, that's better. Stupid Picasso.

My own reaction is that it's essentially and deliberately disrespectful of the artists...the photographers. And even if any of them would have made their pictures in color if they could have, it's still disrespectful—because of course an artist is conscious of his or her medium and takes it into account when making all the many decisions that need to be made in the process of creation. Maybe one or the other of those photographers would have worked in color. But they didn't, and no one knows how they would have done their pictures differently if they'd been taking color into account.

It's disappointing to me that so few people rose to the defense of the artists' intentions, and their spiritual and ethical "ownership" of their work. If someone peed all over your work, I'd come to the defense of you.

It does, however, regrettably, dovetail right into a longstanding and persistent attitude toward photographers. Ignoramuses have always considered photographs to be "appropriatable," if that's a word. As if photographers are just "camera operators" possessed of approximately the same level of intellectual acuity and intentionality as organ grinders' monkeys. Have at it, all you casual defacers and defilers, all you helpful teachers—you certainly won't be the first, and you certainly won't be the last.

A final story. A friend of mine, who was completely committed to color photography long before color photography was cool, and who happens to be a glowering, taciturn fellow who suffers fools exceedingly poorly, used to absolutely despise the phrase "original in color." As you know, back when monochrome reproduction was much cheaper and more widespread than color reproduction, many publications of almost every type—even art-critical texts, sometimes—would run reproductions of color pictures in black and white and excuse themselves with that phrase. "What the hell are they talking about?" my friend would growl. "It's not even close to being the same picture."

Well, the shoe's really on the other foot now. I suspect that a hundred years from now, they'll consider the recent seismic shift from black and white to color in lenticular imagery to be at least as significant as the digital transition it paralleled. Those execrable but harmless colorizations just need to excuse themselves unilaterally with a peremptory stock phrase, the verbal equivalent of a contemptuous shrug: "Original in Black and White."

Mike

P.S. No political comments please. Yes, I'm aware that I "opened the door," but see paragraph 1. Sorry.

ADDENDUM: Readers with long memories will recall that I was sorely tempted to do the opposite of a Dullaway to John Moore's famous picture. I did think it worked better in B&W, although I deferred (a trifle reluctantly) to the photographer's judgement. ...Naturally: de-colorizing someone else's work is no better than re-colorizing it.

ADDENDUM #2: Thanks to the many commenters who posted such excellent comments. Many of them are long and naturally I couldn't "feature" more than a few, but many of them were feature-able and many more were thoughtful, enlightening, entertaining, or some combination of all three. Thanks for that.

Original contents copyright 2012 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.
A book of interest today:

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Featured Comments from:

Robert P: "Duchamp wrote 'L.H.O.O.Q.' on his Mona Lisa which in french sounds like "Elle a chaud au cul" which effectively means that she is horny. ("She has a hot ass"—hot as in temperature, not hot as in sexy). It is a pretty vulgar expression. Vivent les femmes chaudes!"

D.C. Wells: "As a guitarist who rips off others' licks whenever I can, occasionally adding a little of myself in the process, I find nothing ethically objectionable about the young Swede's colorizations of the B&Ws. But that analogy is weak, because she and Time were honest (unlike me) in showing the original photographs and crediting the original photographer. The result was simply an exercise in reimagining the past in a different visual voice. Perhaps my sense of right and wrong when it comes to visual art is skewed, but it's a grand tradition in music. (Perhaps you'll remember the Toys' 'A Lover's Concerto' based on J.S. Bach's Minuet in G, except that it might well have been someone else's music in Bach's notebook. It's one of hundreds such borrowings, almost all probably better.)

"To propose another musical analogy, your and Ctein's objections remind me of those raised in the late '60s to Dylan or anyone else playing folk songs with electric guitars, whether their own compositions or others'. Purists persist, though. I recently overheard someone complaining about hearing Jimi Hendrix and Black Sabbath tunes played on a classical guitar. I am not sure whether the classical guitar or the rock music was seen as the victim.

"I might or might not like the results, but I can't seem to muster anything but genuine fascination over her straightforward and all-hands-above-the-table creative effort. In fact, teachers do things like this with hypotheticals all the time—'Imagine if Bach hadn't started composing before the modern piano was invented' or 'Imagine if Hamlet had been the son of a Chinese warlord' or 'What would Homer think about Joyce?' Ms. Dullaway's reworkings have cause me to think about the people and times and technologies portrayed in the photos in ways I might never have otherwise. Young Anne Frank was a real person, 'in color' when she was alive. Why is it a sacrilege to portray her as she might have been when alive? Is it that we are less interested in Anne as a person than as a symbol? Would a modern movie of her life and death have to be in B&W? I don't find the B&W version of her any more genuine as a portrayal of her personhood.

"I think you are saying that photographs and other two-dimensional arts deserve more protection than other art forms from unlicensed imagination, reworking, modernization, etc. even where the original art and artists are fully credited. If so, I don't yet understand why."

John Camp [not responding to D.C. Wells' comment, although his comment came in directly after D.C.'s —Ed.]: "I'm always amazed at the number of people who take these issues seriously (as I do) and at the number of intelligent, but differing, opinions.

"One critical aspect of these things is 'permission.' It's not like covering a song—try covering a song without the permission of the composer, and you will find yourself in court. If you get permission, then he's essentially approving your alterations (if any). So that's all right, then. Messing with somebody else's art isn't so all right. When Richard Prince appropriates something, he's not stealing art—he's stealing an advertisement, and changing it, if only notionally. I have a lot more trouble with the woman who rephotogaphs art photographs and presents them as her own...though that ain't going anywhere.

"About Mike's example of the teacher's interference—I've taken a lot of drawing classes, and have had teachers draw on my drawings, and it never bothered me, because I didn't consider my drawings to be art—they were were exercises. And if the teacher says, 'No, the back lie of the head goes like this,' and draws it in, and you instantly see where you were wrong, that's a valuable thing. (And I've given them permission to do that.) Mike apparently didn't consider the work he was doing to be an exercise, even though he was in class and supposedly learning, but to actually be art. That's a big difference, and should be acknowledged.

"If you asked 1,000 art historians who was the most influential and greatest artist of the 20th century, I suspect that something less than one percent would mention Duchamp. In fact, I think that claim in occasionally made just to irritate people. The three artists who most influenced the 20th century were probably Cezanne, van Gogh and Gauguin, from which derived the 20th century's cubism and modernism; expressionism, especially among the German-speakers; and synthetic color, from which we got the fauves and Matisse and everything that came out of that. Duchamp helped create (or at least took credit for) an attitude (rather than art) which mostly didn't lead to anything except possibly long discussions in sophomore dormitories, followed by the consumption of large numbers of Ding-Dongs and Hostess Snoballs. I thoroughly approve of that, because everybody's got to start somewhere."

Steve Barnett:

Good artists borrow, great artists steal.
                                             —Pablo Picasso[*].

"The context of the Duchamp Mona Lisa is that he was borrowing objects and artistic concepts and amalgamating them into something else. The fact that he didn't go through Da Vinci's entire back catalogue, or labour the point, is testament that his work was ongoing, moving on, working through ideas. The difference between that and the hand coloured 'Abe Lincoln' series are that those are laboured, they are intellectually one dimensional, they are one idea. Rather like a child who learns a trick and repeats time after time...'look what I can do.' Duchamp moved on, and artists like Warhol and Pollack moved on, they explored their idea's through variations, milked them, and when they had wrung them out they 'saw' something else.

"Now, seeing one Abe Lincoln in colour can be transformative. It pulls you up and makes you think. Just as the digitally coloured films of the trench fighting in WWI now being broadcast on history channels do. The colour puts the people into the present—the dead and dying are not old memories but now real. But that subverts history. Those dead and dying are memories, just as Abe Lincoln is a memory; he was real then, but not now.

"And this is something only photography can achieve, to confuse 'then' as if it was 'now.' The photograph I took ten mintues ago was 'then,' the moment stayed recorded, but the tree moved in the wind a bit since. So stealing other peoples' old photographs to hand colour is photographic kitsch; it is mangling history or 'the spirit of the time' and making it cute for a modern audience. Just the way any other practitioner of kitsch works, transforming higher principles of design or art into thinner and less challenging shadows of the original."

[*That quote originated with Philip Massinger, in an essay about T.S. Eliot, but the idea stands. —Ed.]

Roger Bradbury: "I'm being a bit slow in the thinking today. Of course! This is not a post, neither is it a pipe."

Mike replies: Glad a few people picked up on that. It's too obtuse, I grant that.

Image Virtues

Robert Capa, Landing of the American troops on Omaha Beach, Normandy, France, June 6th, 1944. A photograph with no image quality.

It was telling that with Saturday's poll, a number of people chose to assume that I was talking about conventional "image quality." I wasn't. I was talking about "the results you want." That could be anything.

I don't care about "image quality," anyway. I care more about image properties.

What does that mean?

When it comes to photographs, a "property" is what I call "quality" without the value judgment attached. And with a much broader range of possibilities.

Grainlessness might be an aspect of image quality. To me it's just a property—as is extreme graininess. Or anything in between. Accurate color might be another aspect of conventional "image quality." That's a property too—as is deliberately or adventitiously inaccurate color. And so on.

People suffer from very oppressive ideas about which properties of images are "good." Certain properties are said to be "good" and their absence "bad." I choose not to submit to that oppression. Shake loose your shackles, your bonds and fetters! Free yourself!

Ahem.

But really, photographers talking about "image quality" are like pious people talking about moral virtue. Certain image qualities have to be "good." Lack of those "good" qualities is a shortcoming...a failure...a sin. "Bad."

Sharpness is the most highly prized, the most widely accepted, image virtue. But who says an image has to be sharp? Some are, some aren't. Some sharp images look like crap and some sharp images look great. Unsharp images, ditto—sometimes that can look good, sometimes not. It depends.

Sharpness is a property that suits some pictures and not others. Some photographers treat it like a virtue, as if possessing more of it confers ever more glory and honor upon them.

They're wrong about that. What, you can't imagine a thoroughly bad photograph that's extremely sharp? Never seen one? I've seen thousands. Hundreds of thousands. Millions, even.

Consider that during the time of the pictorialist movement—and among the amateurs that kept its values alive in its aftermath—the same assumption held sway, except in the reverse. Image unsharpness was the virtue, the accepted convention.

I used to see a fair number of pictures that were ruined because they weren't sharp enough. Those days are mostly gone. Even modest cameras and lenses can take pictures that are plenty sharp these days.

Granted, it's somewhat more difficult to make a photograph work when it suffers from unvirtuous properties—you have to be sensitive to the effect those properties have, the way they function visually, and how well they suit a particular picture and its message, instead of being just plain clueless about all those things. And in order to achieve the virtuous properties, your equipment, materials, and techniques need to be capable of it. There is a certain—slight—honor in that, I suppose.

But in general we should stop being such image virtue bigots, and stop seeing "image quality" as this great big value judgement looming above everything. We're not talking about morality here. We're just talking about the properties of photographs. No property automatically makes a photograph better. No property automatically disqualifies a photograph from being good. Being bigoted just closes us off to a greater range of possibility in our own work, and to a greater and more subtle range of possibility in the accomplishments of others.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2012 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.
A book of interest today:

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Mike Plews: "Talking about properties vs. qualities got me thinking about a Ralph Steiner quote that popped up in a photo magazine back in the early 1980s. I can't remember it exactily. It was part of a series of critiques of reader photographs and it essentially said thay you need to photograph things you actually care about. Copying other peoples' stuff or worrying too much about who likes your work gets in the way.

"Anyway I couldn't find the quote iteslf but did run across this which is just about as good:

If I were to teach, I wouldn't teach a course in photography. I'd teach a course called 'What Matters.'

—Ralph Steiner

"So I suppose you could consider 'it matters' as a quality worth striving for as you take pictures."

Mike replies: I went to a lecture by Ralph at Dartmouth at which he said the same thing, so I approached him in the hallway afterward and told him that when he taught that course, I wanted to take it. He said he was never actually going to teach the course, but if I'd buy him lunch he'd give me the syllabus. I treated him to a nice lunch and although he really didn't touch on the contents of the mythical course, he treated me to a long, lively, challenging and very interesting conversation.

A fascinating guy and a natural teacher.

Bill Pierce responds: "Hooray for Ralph Steiner, the most generous of men who probably set a record for helping other photographers."

Jim Hughes responds: "I think the Photo Critique Mike P. is referring to appeared in the April, 1983, edition of the original Camera Arts. We had asked a panel consisting of Ralph Steiner, Cole Weston and George Tice to comment on prints submitted by seven readers. Ralph said about one image:

I think one thing a supposed critic should know is when to stop looking for ways to improve [the photograph being studied], and just say he is lying flat on the floor with amazement and admiration. This mixture of nature and the work of man is not my kind of subject, nor would I hang your print on my wall, but that in no way stands against what you wanted to do—you made the photograph for yourself, not for me.

"I hope this is the Steiner quote Mike Plews had in mind. If not, my apologies—but I was happy for the opportunity to go back and read Ralph's words again!"

Graham Dew: "Couldn't agree more. It's our job as photographers to know which quality is appropriate for the job. To illustrate your point, how about this fantastic unsharp picture by Josef Koudelka:

Mike replies: I do have to point out that many of Koudelka's prints have an almost supernatural sense of subjective sharpness, though.

Whatever Is Best

In the "What MY Photography Costs ME (By Mike)" post the other day, I concluded that whatever "is best for your work is best for you."

But really, even that is a bit moralistic. Work—pictures—is just what's most important to me.

It doesn't have to be for everyone. However anyone wants to have fun with photography is fine so long as they're not hurting anybody. 

People do a whole lot of things within photography. Some people collect equipment, old or new. Some people like to chat (or argue) on forums. Some people are into surfing Flickr. Some people like to hire and photograph nude models. Some people like to have a function—a job to do, a role—at family gatherings and sporting and school events. Some people like an excuse to go hiking. Some people like to collect old postcards. Some people like to test lenses. Some are into toy cameras, or night photography, or photograms. And so on. Me, I like to write about it. There's a minority interest.

And I take pictures when I can. Like most of us.

Circa 1907 bedroom, Michigan

Most of us like to do some subset of all the fun things you can do in, and with, photography. So who's to say what's right and wrong?

Suit yourself, and don't judge others.

I try to encourage people to be clear about their desires, intentions, and goals, and not feel guilty or insecure or ashamed of whatever it is they enjoy. Who says it's not valid to master the arcana of antique Exaktas, or test RAW converters, or photograph churches? Who else knows better what gives you pleasure within the hobby?

I'm interested in people who are interested in their work, and I enjoy helping enable those people if I can. And I'm always hoping to help someone else to share some part of the great pleasure I myself get from photographs. But it's okay with me if someone else cares about something else.

•   •   •

A little story. Years ago, I taught a Photo 101/102/103 sequence at a community college. I loved it. I had people of all ages in my class, from many walks of life, both sexes, etc. One was a youngish lawyer (older than me at the time), always snappily dressed, skeptical, acerbic, whose hand would shoot up to challenge me about the details whenever I made a technical or factual claim. (I ended up persuading him that I knew my sh*t, which was cool.) He was clearly interested in mastering the mechanics and techniques of photography, as it existed then, in such a way that his mechanics and techniques and equipment would be the best.

And then there was an elderly, white-haired lady who one week actually (cliché incoming!) brought in home-baked cookies for the whole class. She was just the nicest lady—she fairly beamed grandmotherly approval at me from her seat no matter what I was saying. Even though, by her own admission, she understood about one-twelfth of everything I said. Her ambition? To learn how to work the controls on her camera so that she could take pictures of her grandchildren.

Finally, there was a young guy who was all washed-out colors—pale, washed-out skin, hair, eyes, clothing, affect. He was in his early to mid twenties but clearly a teenager in mind and heart, and committed to that. When I laughed at his Butthole Surfers T-shirt (I'd never heard of the band before), he gave me an intense, half-vacant stare: "Why are you laughing? It's their name, man," he said, as if that solved everything. Photographic ambition: totally opaque. None discernible. Worked just hard enough to earn a pale, washed-out C.

Lesson the teacher learned from the class: everyone's different. Deal with the person who's in front of you and meet them wherever they are.

•     •     •

However anyone wants to have fun with photography, power to 'em. Be clear, and go forth, and be as happy with what you're doing as you can be.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2012 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.
A book of interest today:

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Featured Comments from:

darr: "What's the story behind Bedroom c. 1907?"

Mike replies: The proximate explanation is that I was getting tired of posts without pictures, and I couldn't clear a photo of the Butthole Surfers. Otherwise it has no purpose in the post except to add a touch of color.

There is one little story I can tell about that room, though. See that light fixture on the ceiling? The construction of the house was begun in 1907 and finished in 1912, and the area it's in was much more rural and remote back then than it is now. (The lumber for the house was dragged across the lake by horse-drawn sledge during the winter, and building commenced in the spring.) The lighting was installed in about 1915. It was not the first, but one of the first houses in the area to have electricity.

My grandmother told me that when she was young (she would have been 14 in 1915), the local children would come over to see that light. It wasn't that they had never seen electric lights before—some of them had—but none of them had ever seen an electric light with the switch on the wall, way over by the door—pushbuttons, that operate with firm resistance and a crisp snap. That's what was wondrous to them. She said little kids came from all around to venture timidly into the house via the back door, then stand there taking turns switching that light off and on over and over again.

Recalls Clarke's Third Law: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

Categorization

In a comment to the "Push the Button" post, Robert Roaldi (who has contributed a great deal to this site with his comments over time, as have a number of others) wrote:

As someone else wrote above, just say what it is. One picture may be the result of one person's actions. Another photo may be something else. Isn't that all you need to know? The rest of the debate seems to be about categorization.

That's kinda what I was sayin'. But it deserves further underlining: I don't really care about categories except insofar as they matter to me. It doesn't matter to me if some collector pays a zillion dollars for a picture at an auction; I'll still try to judge the picture as a picture, and like it or not based on my own response. Same with pictures in museums: I might be convinced by them, but not on account of their sanctification by the great fortified castle of the institution (in fact I'm more often annoyed by the converse, when museums waste my time showing me with exquisitely lucid presentation an empty conceit that isn't even good to look at).

It has always been my faith (I mean "faith" here) that an occasional amateur in some nondescript corner of the world, completely unheralded, completely unknown, can take a photograph that is greater as a photograph than, say, the art-world unobtanium of Stieglitz's "The Steerage." It might not be as great a talisman or totem of agreed-upon art-historical numinosity, but that doesn't happen to be what nourishes my soul.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2012 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.
A book of interest today:

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Jim Hughes: "My favorite W. Eugene Smith quote: 'Hardening of the categories causes art disease.' I found it scribbled, clearly in Gene's hand, on a 3x5 notecard among his mammoth trove of papers at the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson in the early 1980s while researching my biography of Smith, W. Eugene Smith: Shadow and Substance."

Middleman

It just occurred to me this morning that I'm a middle-aged, Midwestern, middle-income, middlebrow moderate.

Stands to reason I'd use a mid-level camera with a mid-sized sensor.

Mike

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Original contents copyright 2012 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

Featured Comment by Bill Mitchell: "Still have the whole plate? (I guess that's halfway between 5x7 and 8x10.)"

Mike replies: Yep, right in the middle.