The Online Photographer

The Great White Squirrel

My normal reading diet consists almost exclusively of nonfiction (most recently Lance Armstrong's War, because I've been on a cycling kick), but every year I try to read one great classic of literature. In recent years I've read things like David Copperfield, Native Son, Treasure Island, and In Cold Blood. I have Proust and The Grapes of Wrath on the shelf, waiting. Last year I tried to read Moby-Dick for about the third time in my life. Alas, Ishmael and I don't get along; I realized the other day my ambition had been inadvertently harpooned—I set the book aside one day and just never took it up again. The fate of all too many books. Fiction, to echo what Richard Hugo said of flying, is unnatural.

Ironically, I lapped up the two current non-fiction books about the historical incident, Thomas Farel Heffernan's Stove by a Whale: Owen Chase and the Essex and Nathaniel Philbrick's In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex, as well as the first-person account of the Essex that Melville was familiar with, Owen Chase's The Wreck of the Whaleship Essex (The Essex, if you don't know the story, was the only real whaling ship ever attacked and sunk by a mad whale. The meaning of the story has changed somewhat nowadays; in light of the remorseless factory ships and the sad tragedy of overfishing, some of us find ourselves inclined to root for the whale). 

Melville.

But I know the story, of course. The brooding, Old Testament prophet of a whaling captain, Ahab, obsessed with the albino whale who took his leg, intent upon revenge at any cost.

"Vengeance on a dumb brute!" cried Starbuck, "that simply smote thee from blindest instinct! Madness! To be enraged with a dumb thing, Captain Ahab, seems blasphemous."

"Hark ye yet again—the little lower layer. All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event—in the living act, the undoubted deed—there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there’s naught beyond. But ’tis enough. He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I’d strike the sun if it insulted me."

Which brings me to the albino squirrel.

Months ago, in June I think it was, I caught sight of a white squirrel in the alley adjacent to ours. I turned up the alley in the car, gave chase, and just glimpsed his tail as he disappeared behind a fence. I meant to walk up there later with a camera, and see if I could get a shot of him to post on the blog. But of course I forgot about it.

The days of the summer passed by. Had it really been a white squirrel? It might have been an apparition. Or a cat.

Then, months later, pottering about the neighborhood on my new bike, which I love, and have named Gruesome—no, not Pequod—I saw the white squirrel again—unmistakeably, this time, from my perch high atop my two-wheeled crow's nest. He was gamboling happily by the side of the road, in plain view, some two blocks from where I'd originally espied him. Again, poor wretch that I was, I had no camera with me. I swear to God this was the reason I subsequently bought the handlebar bag for the bike which I wrote about in this watery vastness not long ago—so I could take the camera on the bike. The white squirrel was the reason. I'm not saying I've been obsessed, at least not Ahab-level obsessed, but I had in mind that one day I was going to encounter the elusive white squirrel again. I intended to be ready. Well, sort of ready, given that I don't have a zoom or a tele. As I've reported, I went on several rides with the GF1 nestled in the bag's well-padded hold.

It's an internet truism that "the best camera is the one you have with you," but it's a lesson I don't think I'll ever entirely learn. Last weekend we were enjoying what around here is called "Indian Summer," a brief warm respite at the end of the autumn—summer's last gasp before the frigid nor'westers arrive. On one of those balmy days I interrupted my work at the computer to drive Zander to band practice at a friend's house. The friend lives near the dog park, and Lulu, who knows exactly where she is whenever she gets within a mile of the park, made such a fuss that I gave in to her pathetic whimpers and whining and we made an unplanned stop. I've taken too many pictures at the dog park, so it's normally no hardship to be there without a camera, but wouldn't you know it—being that it was probably one of the last warm weekend days of the year, our local dog owners were out in force that day. The one time I didn't have the camera with me, and there were more people and dogs at the park than I'd ever encountered, and not by any small margin. There must have been 150 dogs meandering happily around, if not 200, and half again as many owners.

A lovely sight, if you love dogs. I would have liked to have a picture or two to remember it by. So on the way home, I was once again castigating myself for not bringing the camera, because the fact is that you just never know when you're going to want it, when—you guessed it: there he was, unexpectedly, in the grassy strip beside the busy road—the white squirrel! Where was my weapon? I could have turned the corner, departed the ship—er, the car—stalked him, maybe gotten lucky. But no camera. I felt the mute admonishments of all you TOP readers at the back of my mind. Lesson learned that day, yet again—once, and then again, an exclamation point added, like the stinging of the lash-end.

Here, then, was this grey-headed, ungodly old man, chasing with curses a Job’s whale round the world, at the head of a crew, too, chiefly made up of mongrel renegades, and castaways, and cannibals—morally enfeebled also, by the incompetence of mere unaided virtue or right-mindedness in Starbuck, the invulnerable jollity of indifference and recklessness in Stubb, and the pervading mediocrity in Flask. Such a crew, so officered, seemed specially picked and packed by some infernal fatality to help him to his monomaniac revenge.

So anyway, the other day I sent the Panasonic GF1 back to its owner. As if on schedule*, a boxlike brown truck hove into view on the swell of our hill, and a box fetched up on the lee side of the porch—a Sony A850 to test, courtesy of B&H Photo.

Alas! The A850, beauteous though it undoubtedly is, will not fit in the handlebar bag. 

I took Gruesome on several long rides during our warm spell. Because the Sony is too big for the bag, no camera, again, on these rides. On one occasion, I beat to the top of a long hill, and turned into a cemetery there. At the back edge of the cemetery I was surprised by an unexpected view. The grateful dead have a spectacular vista, from their hilltop, of the industrial side of town. The light was delicate and lovely; I regretted, again, that I didn't have a camera with me. And of course, all this while, I continually had it in the back of my mind—since I don't have a camera with me, I'll probably see the white squirrel—.

But I didn't.

Yesterday, I did something else that I too often do—another lesson that I never learn. I drove back to the cemetery, in the car this time, with the camera. I had it in mind to re-create my first encounter with that fine view, and make a panorama with the Sony. This never works; no matter how similar the conditions seem, the light is never the same. I took a few pictures, here and there, a headstone, a statue, a bush. Nothing much.

And then, as I was walking back to the car, I froze—there he was! Me with a camera in my very hand, and the Great White Squirrel was not twenty yards away, frolicking among the tombstones! I had him!

"Oh, lonely death on lonely life! Oh, now I feel my topmost greatness lies in my topmost grief. Ho, ho! from all your furthest bounds, pour ye now in, ye bold billows of my whole foregone life, and top this one piled comber of my death! Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale; to the last I grapple with thee; from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee. Sink all coffins and all hearses to one common pool! and since neither can be mine, let me then tow to pieces, while still chasing thee, though tied to thee, thou damned whale! Thus, I give up the spear!"

I stalked steadily toward him, and he took refuge in a bush. Which might afford some protection for him from me, but not from the camera. Alas, he seemed to realize this as suddenly as I did, because the infernal little bugger leapt for the ground and made a run for the tallest nearby tree!

I made a quick snapshot**, and then he was up it. 

He's canny, the White Squirrel. He never showed me more than the edge of his head, as he watched patiently from behind the body of the tree. He seemed to know I was after him, and he had a much better reason to be patient than I did. And of course I only have a 50mm lens for the Sony. I waited a while, wandered off, returned. No wildlife photographer I, this was the best I could get, because it was the most he showed of himself, the whole time:

But it was him, all right! A detail:

Down to his beady red albino eye.

He really is a cute little bugger. You're just going to have to take my word for it.

But don't think it's done between us yet. I still have a date with the Great White Squirrel. I'll get a halfway decent picture of him one day, or my name's not Ahab—er, Mike.

Mike

*Well, all right, actually it was scheduled.

**The word "snapshot" was first applied to photographs by Sir John Herschel, the Victorian polymath who discovered the image-fixing properties to hypo. It originally meant a shot by a hunter who, surprised by a sudden encounter with game, quickly snapped shut his broken shotgun and fired without taking careful aim.

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Mastery in Digital Photography

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I mastered Photoshop...

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

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

And on it goes.

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

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

A little gain, a little give.

Mike

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Settling Down (Redux)

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

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

A few random thoughts, in no particular order:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mike

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

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Why They Invented Cameras

Photo by D. Shumake

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

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

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

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

Mike
(Thanks to Jim)

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Bright Spots

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

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

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

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

Mike

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

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

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

A Leica Won't Improve Your Photography

By John Camp

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Does 'Expensive' Mean?

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

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

Resistance is Futile

Scan courtesy of The Wheeldon Family

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

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

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

Mike
(Thanks to Oren)

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Recommendations: Looking for the Group

By David Bennett

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

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

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

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

Google depends on it; Amazon thrives on it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

David

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

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Ratings: Bah, Humbug

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mike

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Doctor My Eyes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mike

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This I Like

I just realized something. I was poking around on the Rangefinder forum and I came across a member who had a link, in his signature macro, that said "My ten favorites." I clicked on it.

I think I've done that before. Lots of times. I might even do it habitually.

If you think about it, one thing that's more important to photography now than ever before is editing. Kodak used to estimate that between four and six billion pictures a year were taken worldwide. That must have been in the '80s sometime. Recently, Photobucket alone passed seven and a half billion pictures online. Given the literally hundreds of photo-sharing sites on the web, it seems a fair bet that more than a billion photos probably now get uploaded every month. It's even possible that the number is much more than that. If you then postulate that only a small fraction of the photos taken get posted, then the numbers of pictures being made today might well be ten times what it was back when Kodak was able to count. Maybe more.

No one person can see more that a tiny, tiny fraction of all of them. So editing—self-editing as well as editing filters applied by publications and picture editors in any of a variety of situations—is even more important now than it was in the past.

And it was certainly important in the past. If a National Geographic story had an average of 16 photographs, and the feature photographer shot 650 rolls of film in order to get that story (those numbers are also from a decade or two ago), it's easy to understand how much the editing process was crucial to the result.

It's true that it's helpful to have other people edit our work. But it should be acknowledged that this is hard work, something that only a few (good!) friends will do for you—and that only a few good friends should have to do for you. Voluntarily. The desire to have help is not an excuse to inflict unedited masses of work on casual, innocent viewers.

As a viewer of photographs by unknown photographers online, I certainly don't want to have to wade through unedited work. The stronger the existing edit, the more I'm interested; I don't have time for anything else. At the very least, the photographer should make selections. People who shoot fifty frames of the same subject and post all fifty don't deserve an audience for their work, past whoever they might be specifically providing the pictures for. Showing me fifty unedited pictures says "I don't know what I like. Maybe there's a good one in here somewhere. You decide." No: you decide. It's your work. Take a stand.

But when people say, "Here are my ten favorite pictures of my own work," on the other hand, I'm predisposed to take a look. It interests me to know what they like of their own work. Because, let's face it, however much we might like to believe that all the creativity in photography is in shooting, a good part of the actual creativity of photography also resides in the selection of what pictures to show: it's the confident assertion, "this I like."

Mike

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New Canon

Featured Comment by Sam Tinson: "Good point Mike. I used to work as a picture editor at a photo-news agency and nothing makes a worse impression than a photographer submitting a huge edit. It shows a lack of confidence and takes up valuable time. On the other hand, I don't go with the habit of including your 'best shot' as a sign-off on emails etc.—unless it is a very, very strong image, it can encourage snap judgment, which is not always in the photographer's best interest...."

Featured (partial) Comment by Benjamin Derge: "Here's another thought: If we can't tell the good from the bad after the picture is taken, how can we ever expect to do it before the picture is taken?"

Shunners of Sunlight

I got some good chuckles this morning over an article called "Tears in the Stop Bath" over at Idiotic Hat:

...People who have come to photography since the advent of digital imaging have little idea of the realities of doing your own developing and printing in the days of 'wet chemistry,' and they have no idea how lucky they are, especially if their taste runs to colour. Don't believe the retrospective myth-making: The darkroom was a place of evil and loneliness, where darkness, dangerous chemicals and an almost comic lack of control over the uniformity of the end product combined to restrict art photography to a monastic set of pale-skinned creatures with black fingernails, or people rich enough to employ these shunners of sunlight.

Of course, there was a certain satisfaction to be had in learning to produce a good enough print, but producing excellent prints really only appeals to the kind of person who might enjoy the challenge of making their own furniture. It's a hard, painstaking craft, that takes years to learn....

I love that "almost comic lack of control over the uniformity of the end product." I also liked the analogy to furniture-making. I'd never thought of John Sexton as Norm Abram before. I sometimes watch a television show called "The New Yankee Workshop," in which a phlegmatic New Englander by the name of Norm Abram wanders around in a gleaming, well-lit, obsessively organized workshop equipped with about $480,000 worth of esoteric power woodworking equipment. He says things like this: "And now we're going to make the anterior verplex hamhock joint. This can be a little tricky—" (note that when Norm says something can be "a little tricky," he means that it's going to require full-scale black magic on the part of ordinary mortals born of women) "—but it helps if you have a handy little piece of equipment called a Remosaic Inside-Out Perglulator. It's a little expensive, and it pretty much only does verplex hamhock joints, but it's a lot better than trying to scratch the joint out of the wood with your fingernails...." We then hear the sound of a high-speed motor and an exquisitely sharpened blade munching away at hard maple, and voilà. I picture guys all over America descending into dank, smelly basements where there was six inches of standing water the previous spring. The basement is littered with heaps of old paint cans and oil-soaked rags, lit by a single hanging light bulb six meters away. They stand there quietly for a moment, staring at an antediluvian dirt-encrusted cast-iron table saw now being used as a storage table for boxes of items last used when Richard Nixon was president, thinking, "Now, where am I going to put a Remosaic Inside-Out Perglulator?"

Even back in the days when silver prints were common, good ones weren't. On the other hand, my aunt's house is full of gorgeous furniture she built herself.

Mike

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Featured Comment by JK @ Studio Hatyai: "A good laugh, but not knowing better at the time (and perhaps through 20cc or so of rose-colored filter now), I thoroughly enjoyed almost every hour I spent in the darkroom. Especially safelight-less, pitch-black color darkrooms. They often induced a kind of meditative state that nothing in my life since has ever replaced."

Mike adds: Don't get me wrong, I love watching NYW. But definitely only as an observer....

Featured Comment by John Sartin: "I just have to comment on this one. I spent 30+ years working as a designer /craftsman working in wood. Norm actually visited my shop once while filming a segment of "This Old House" in Tucson. There are many similarities between photography and woodwork that I find amazing. There is the hand/low tech vs. machine/high tech, there is the pro vs. amateur, there are also the common difficulties of trying to make or craft something useful/attractive and worthwhile. The business aspects are similar as well. Changing markets, low budgets, ridiculous deadlines.

"I quit being a woodworker to become a photographer for many reasons. I was tired of the isolation and infrequent interactions with people. My body was also rebelling against the years of heavy lifting, repetitive motion stress, chemical exposure and breathing sawdust. I will also admit to feeling a bit jaded in my attitude with amateur woodworkers coming into the shop seeking camaraderie yet being totally unaware that the similarities of what we were doing ended when you have to factor in budgets and deadlines.

"Now I have a small general photography business and work with people often and occasionally wish for isolation. I am shooting and processing film and becoming interested in alt process work and am concerned/cautious about the health considerations. I am keenly aware of the fact that there are many amateur photographers with creative and technical skills far superior to mine that will never have to consider budgets or deadlines.

"Nirvana is always over the next hill but photography is a cool thing to practice on the way. I really don't miss the woodshop."

DP2 ≠ DMD

I just wanted to mention in passing that I might still buy a DP2, despite Ken's review. No, I guess it's not the DMD, and that's too bad—but then, nothing else is, either; the DMD appears to be beyond the range of the technically feasible for the world's otherwise demonstrably competent cameramakers, for what reasons I know not.

One of my favorite cameras, one that I used only for a year or so in about 1986 or '87, was an Exakta 66 Model II. It had a fascinating backstory, but it was a real clunker—no light meter, a wildly inaccurate finder, and film advance as touchy as a sadistic dictator with a migraine. It could really barely perform basic camera functions adequately. But it had one of the best lenses I've ever used, and the results I got with it were just outstanding. I have some framed in my house to this day. Of all the cameras and lenses that have passed through my hands over the years, that's one I wish I'd kept.

The thing that appeals to me about the DP2 despite the proliferating accounts of its various and sundry shortcomings is that it seems to get two things very right—the lens, and the related perplex of image quality. It seems to me that over the years, a great many photographers have put up with all manner of inconvenience to get the results they crave. If you've ever lugged around an 8x10 on a tripod, even briefly, I'm sure you know what I mean. So which would you rather have: a beautifully built, ergonomically perfect camera that gives you so-so image quality at best, or a hunk of antediluvian junk held together with baling wire and chewing gum that yields image quality that's really outstanding? Given that choice—putting it that way—in my view it's not even a question; the conclusion's foregone.

The DP2 seems to do some things wrong, but the really important things right. As I read more and more about it, and see more results from it, the more the feeling sneaks up on me that I could do good things with it.

Maybe not, but I might want to see for myself. I could chalk it up to a learning experience. That's how I justify most everything I want to do, even when doing it doesn't make perfect sense.

Mike

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Colorless Green Photographs

By John Bates

Noam Chomsky has infamously stated, "There is no such thing as the probability of a sentence." For that, he is roundly mocked by computational linguists everywhere, whose statistical models have delivered tremendous development in the practical analysis of spoken and written speech.

His argument, though, is worth considering, and it is much more subtle than it sounds. "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously" is only the starting point of his critique: a sentence that is syntactically correct, and which can be assigned a (low) probability under statistical models, but which is semantically meaningless. (Of course, by virtue of its becoming a standard example in linguistics, it has become both more probable and more meaningful, although not in a way that is easily amenable to standard analysis.) Some computational linguists will argue that because that string of words is clearly possible, it is open to consideration, and that various approaches will weed out semantically meaningless cruft, much as the human mind, fundamentally a statistical engine, will puzzle over and then discard nonsense.

Chomsky's argument goes beyond the mere syntactic/semantic split, though. Computational linguists generally start with a set of utterances, text, or whole corpora, examining word and feature frequencies. By using these starting points, they build after-the-fact models of language. They can map those models to search for or summarize both syntactic and semantic features, e.g. named entity recognition, topic selection, or bias detection. They regard words and combinations of words as mere (ha!) random events, sequences of which can be assigned specific meanings. Chomsky dismisses that randomness. In his view, words have meaning. Words and sentences are created by people.

That's not to say that Noam Chomsky is some kind of starry-eyed mystic claiming special status for the human soul. Instead, his point (or rather, my interpretation of his point) is that words are objects of communication between two deliberative entities, and that the meaning of a sentence is therefore only interpretable taken in that context. As I write this sentence, it is the product of the sum total of all of my experiences and decisions up to this point, as well as the physical apparatus that I am using to deliver it. As you read it, I am making physical changes in your brain. Right now! You can't stop me! Ha!

Statistical models tend to strip away this context. His point might be better taken as something closer to: you can't predict what I'm going to say next, and I can't predict how you'll interpret what I say. Except, of course, for the context that we share. If I stand on the corner and talk about the coming apocalypse, you can probably guess quite a bit about me and my current mental state. If I babble instead about colorless green ideas, you're bound to be lost, and I cease to be communicating. Regardless, the likelihood of the words that I use has little bearing on the act of communication.

As someone who dabbles in both computational linguistics and statistical processes, I can take issue with this argument. I can point to numerous techniques that incorporate broader contexts into analyses. I can illustrate problem after problem that has fallen to our tools, and I cannot disparage anybody for attempting new challenges. But ACQUINE clearly demonstrates the shortcomings articulated by Chomsky. Photography, like writing, is fundamentally an act of communication, requiring the full context of a human's knowledge to go beyond the shallowest parse.

The frame is a perfect example. Subconsciously, we clearly do prefer images with boundaries. Consciously, or possibly semantically, we are able to eliminate them from our consideration of an image, or to view them as an extraneous feature. ACQUINE's developers must have forgotten about that, probably because they are so easily elided from our perception. But on the social networks, people posting simple snapshots rarely frame, while people who are trying to be "artists" do. Artists post in black-and-white (why? context, again...) but parents dump their flash memory cards to the web.

Obviously (at least, to me) the ACQUINE developers are not idiots. They know all this better than I do. They are attempting a grand thing: analyzing the affective perception of visual content. And there are some pretty cool refinements that are clearly possible: for example, clustering the responses of the raters can lead to social filtering, so that all of us who are Callahan fans can be distinguished from the infrared HDR cat lovers.

But "collective intelligence" and social filtering is at best a highly refined popularity contest, and fails at the one task that is most interesting: finding and evaluating truly original content. For, if it is original, it is, by definition, low probability, and also incomparable. How can you rate that which has never before been seen, if you can't understand it?

John

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Featured Comment by Seinberg: "Johns Hopkins had natural language processing (i.e. computational linguistics) talks every Tuesday this past semester. I attended many of them, as someone whose research is not in natural language processing but who takes a serious interest in it and have dabbled with it in the past. The first guest lecturer was Martin Kay, one of the fathers of computational linguistics. Someone asked him point-blank whether the standard approach taken today by the Big Names like Google and the professors at the most celebrated computational linguistics university on the planet (Hopkins) is enough to eventually pass the Turing Test. The standard approach is statistical analysis. His response was immediate and he said, 'No. I think it will be a new method not in use today.'

He did eventually back-track a bit and admit that statistical analysis is helpful for several very specifics processes. For instance, part of speech tagging, for which statistical analysis is 97 or 98% accurate given a good training corpus (far better than the majority of humans do).

Where statistical analysis falls down, however, tends to be precisely where Chomsky seems to be going with Green Photographs: understanding context. Reference resolution is still a wide open problem. If several people are discussed in previous sentences, resolving pronouns like 'he,' 'she,' 'it,' etc. are very difficult. In parsing the semantic content of sentences, these pronouns should be linked to the entities to which they refer. Humans do this automatically, but current computational methods do it poorly. Statistical analysis does this very very poorly, particularly with complicated language. The current best we can do (more or less) is 'sentiment extraction,' where analysis tries to extract small parts of the meaning to get the general idea of what people are saying e.g. in blogs. For instance, 'does this blogger support Obama or McCain?' But that's easy.

"Then there's the problem of the pink elephant in the room. Imagine the date is September 12th in 2001. Everyone who talks to each other says things like, 'How could it have happened?' 'Isn't it terrible?' 'How are you and your family?' Every person in the US—and probably most in the world—knew precisely what had happened. But a statistical parser would be at a complete loss, because it wouldn't have any context in which to understand the Pink Elephant of 9/11 that was in the air.

"So statistical analysis needs to be augmented (or: should be used to augment) some other method, and that other method needs to include knowledge in its analysis. Then, of course, statistics might be used to determine with 95% probability that on 9/12 the Pink Elephant is the events collectively known as 9/11 (or 'the terrorist attacks' or whatever).

"One final link. A professor at my university is trying to incorporate knowledge into natural language processing, although perhaps to his detriment: he uses very little statistical processing, claiming the whole venture is for the birds."

Mike comments: Where I come down on ACQUINE is that it wouldn't work even if it worked.

One thing I've been threatening to do for a while now is to take a single photograph and map different "modes of approach" to it—that is, specify some of the various ways (formalistic, coloristic, epistemological, factual, connotational, emotional, etc., etc.) different viewers might choose to think about it, giving concrete examples of each mode of approach so people might actually understand what the heck I was talking about. I might still do it, too...another of those "one day" projects. At the very least I think it might help illuminate why there can't be a single standard for aesthetics, even if we don't define aesthetics as personal to begin with—which, incidentally, I do.

Featured Comment by Paul Pomeroy: "In Claude Shannon's seminal 1948 paper, 'A Mathematical Theory of Communication,' he says up front that, 'The fundamental problem of communication is that of reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point. Frequently the messages have meaning; that is they refer to or are correlated according to some system with certain physical or conceptual entities. These semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering problem.'

I think most people overlook the full significance of what he was saying. In part, he was saying that 'information' doesn't exist in the middle. What goes across the wire is without meaning and 'meaningless information' is an oxymoron. Information, true to its -ation suffix, is a process. It's not a noun, it's a happening and for people it happens mostly under the level of consciousness.

"The history of computational intelligence is riddled with examples of seemingly brilliant people who have made the mistake of thinking the meaning was in the message. This has lead to all sorts of naive optimism and costly errors. As an example of the later, consider the 1999 Mars probe that crashed because one device was 'sending information' using imperial units (pounds) to a device that was 'receiving information' in metric units.

"My favorite example of naive optimism involves an Artificial Intelligence project funded by the military. The goal was a machine that could look at a photograph (or real-time image) and locate any hidden enemy tanks. This was to be done using neural networks which were 'trained' by showing them thousands of actual photographs some including tanks that were hidden (some not very well, others so well that experts couldn't find them) and others with no tanks at all.

"After a surprisingly short training period the neural networks suddenly started getting really good at indicating which photos had the hidden tanks. In fact, they were perfect. So the military started trying them out in real life situations and...wait for it...they were completely useless (actually worse than purely random guessing).

"It took quite awhile to finally figure out what had happened. It turns out that the original set of photos had been taken over a two day period. They first photographed locations without any tanks and then they brought in the tanks, hid them and took another set of photographs. No one took notice of the fact that on the second day the sky was overcast while it had been sunny during the first shoot. No one, that is, except for the trained neural network. So, for about a million dollars the military got a device that could tell them whether or not a photo was taken on a sunny day.

"There hasn't really been a whole lot of advances since then. And maybe I'm mistaken, but it seems to me that finding aesthetic quality in a photograph is a bit tougher. Unless, of course, it turns out that aesthetics is just a fancy word for tanks on an overcast day."

A Wise, Iconoclastic Voice

It is a fine day in May, and the trees are leafing out, showing the bright tender green I associate with newness, and the sun is shining, and the news from Costa Rica is that Bill Jay has died in his sleep.

It is thus my reluctant duty this fine morning to write an obituary for Bill, a task for which I feel wholly inadequate as well as wholly unprepared. I knew his work well and he himself in passing. Bill only recently moved to Costa Rica; I last talked to him just before he left the United States. After a long and active teaching career at Arizona, he planned a long and relaxing retirement, which hardly got its legs underneath it before it ended. I think he was still shy of seventy years old, and I am old enough myself now to consider that a young age at which to bring things to a close.

Bill Jay was not a major photographer, although I think he was a very, very good one (I like portraits, and especially portraits of photographers, and I like black-and-white, especially 35mm black-and-white. We might be talking about a good match here—although I really do think he is—was—a gifted portraitist). Bill was also perhaps not a great critic or a major theorist of photography, although he was one of the best to read, and even though he co-wrote (with his great good friend David Hurn, of Magnum) one of the very best books of photo-instruction ever written. He was not the most important magazine editor of the past half century, although he was very good at that, too—and by now you've got the pattern.

Most current photographers and photo-enthusiasts know him from his "Endnotes" column in Lenswork magazine. Photographers of my generation know him better as the author of a series of wide-ranging essays nominally about photography, collected in several Nazraeli Press books, the most famous of which is Occam's Razor: An Outside-In View of Contemporary Photography, which is currently, but no doubt not permanently, out of print.

Mary Virginia Swanson, who knew him much better, has written a much better obituary, with a far more complete selection of links. Brooks Jensen has posted a portrait of him at Lenswork.com.

Bill Brandt by Bill Jay

I marked hearing the news by listening to Ivan Moravec's recording of Beethoven's 14th piano sonata, which I've heard too often and reserve for special occasions now, while rereading, for about the sixth time, "The Family of Man," just to hear Bill's wise, iconoclastic voice. But of course as I paged toward it, what I couldn't help catching was a line he quoted approvingly in the essay prior: "There is something bloody fishy about human existence."

Bill Jay was a lifelong enthusiast and supporter of photographers. He was photography's best fan. He was one of those who paid attention, who understood and appreciated how people used cameras to express themselves. He saw the linkages between the best work by good people and the fullness and richness and paradox of this fishy existence.

Bill was born in Britain. He died in Costa Rica. He was a citizen of the art of photography. He gave us a lot. He's left too soon, on a day in Spring.

Mike

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Everything Is Amazing, Nobody Is Happy

I've watched this three times, and it makes me laugh each time. It's not about cameras explicitly, but just think about cameras while you watch it.

I mean, people were still using chamberpots and traveling by covered wagon when they first worked out how to do photography, and not a whole lot changed for a hundred and fifty years. Just refinements, basically. I'm not even old, and I remember when they first made 800-speed film that was good enough to use. When I was young they were arguing passionately about whether tying the exposure controls directly to the light meter was a good thing or not. Ten or twelve years ago, the first digital cameras I used had like 200,000 pixels and the image quality looked like one of those 1950s televisions that were as big as a washing machine and had a screen about eight inches across.

Today, everything is amazing, and nobody's happy.

Here's another point, which I'll also make using a non-photography-related link. In the comments to yesterday's post, Craig Arnold said, only partly tongue-in-cheek,

You wild and crazy man. You have forgotten that we are talking about two different pursuits!

1. Taking pictures. All of your choices are equally good. A good picture-taker adapts fairly quickly to the equipment and gets on with it.

2. Collecting cameras. Now here of course they are not all equally good. Every tiny feature counts. This is the hobby discussed on forums. It's also very easy to be good at this hobby, all you need is money, a strong opinion and a thick skin. For people in this camp your cop-out is inexcusable, almost incomprehensible.

Take a look at this page. (I hope we don't crash his server.) Skip to the section about two-fifths of the way down called "Grounded Grid Cap Test" (it's linked at the top, where it says "Go to a mini cap test below") and see if you can figure out just from the pictures what's going on. Just scroll down; you'll get it. Do you see? He's wiring a series of different caps into a hand-built preamplifier to see how they sound. I swear I laughed out loud (really, "LOL") when I got to those two "Gigantic Russian alu/teflon foil caps" strapped to sticks and suspended from the edges of the chassis.

Now, if this were somehow part of your job, and your boss was making you do this, wouldn't you just want to shoot yourself? He's obviously doing this because, for him, it qualifies as fun. Geekout, esoteric fun of the kind that many of us might recognize in spirit. It makes me think of the time I made hundreds of 8x10 fiber prints when I was testing a handful of different lenses for bokeh properties. I would have gotten the same information from RC prints. But I made, washed, and dried like 200 fiber prints in the course of my tests. Why? Because I was being a nut, that's why. Having fun.

(At that link, I also love the two little three-line paragraphs at the end. If that doesn't sum up geekout hobbies in a hundred words or less, I don't know what does.)

So anyway, long way to go for a small point: however photography is fun for you, it's okay with me. It's not hurting anybody (well, at least not if you manage to stay civil about it—when people start slinging insults and shouting enraged things about each other's mothers because they can't agree whether a rear wheel is a good or a bad thing, I start to take a dim view, I admit). So if you want to learn every last trifling feature of a bunch of cameras you don't own, who am I to tell you it's wrong? Knock yourself out, my brother. Fun is fun. There are lots of ways we find it.

Mike

P.S. I found the Louis CK clip at Eolake's blog. His (Louis CK's) other stuff is very blue, so be warned.

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Featured Comment by Jay Moynihan: "Excellent. Have you seen this?"

Mike replies: That is hilarious. Not sure who would appreciate that more, people who fly a lot or people who read Kafka.

Featured Comment by Paul De Zan: "There's absolutely nothing wrong with camera collecting/measurabation as a hobby; what's galling is that the majority of practitioners think they are 'into photography' when they are into nothing of the kind. The obsessive study of camera equipment is the very best way I know to completely avoid committing acts of photography."

Featured Comment by Maarten B.: "Are you telling us you're a geek, Mike?!?!"

Mike replies: Not just a geek, a blogging geek.

Featured Comment by Mark Scheuern: "Love the video.

"I recently was in the market for a portable GPS receiver I can move between our cars and spent some time researching them on the internet. Mixed in with the good advice was much whining about what struck me as trivial things, like how well the text-to-speech algorithms can pronounce street names with foreign or obscure spellings.

"I mean, here's the tiny gadget that can simultaneously lock onto four Department of Defense satellites in space, and, based on the timing of the signals (corrected for both special and general relativistic effects) and by calculating where they intersect, can pinpoint your position within a few feet, give you spoken street directions, and tell you where the nearest Barnes and Noble is. All for $200. And people are complaining because it takes a minute to find the satellites. Also, predictably, there was much Garmin vs. TomTom vitriol.

"I have a background in physics and I think knowing a bit about how things work actually makes them seem more special."

Featured Comment by Marcin Wajda: "I think it was Terry Pratchett who said that humans have a special anti-amazement filter built in. Otherwise we would spend entire days walking around with our mouths open wondering at how can we survive basking in the light of what is technically speaking a permanent nuclear explosion...."

Cranky Old Man

I've had my problems lately. For one thing, I cannot seem to take a decent picture. Do you ever go through those dry spells? Sometimes I've felt I could take good shots in my sleep—or at least every time I pick up a camera. Not recently. My best shots lately are only competent, and sometimes not even that. I've been flailing around like a tyro. I have to do something...get out more, work harder. Something.

I'm also dealing with some annoying glimmers of "old man problems." I'm 52, which is not old, although it is undeniably middle-aged. Those of you who are 40 or older but not yet 45 can take heart—a few years ago, the DSM IV, the Diagnostic Statistical Manual of the psychiatric profession, revised middle age upwards, defining it as 45–65 instead of 40–60 as it had been defined previously. Seems people are living longer, and are remaining healthier and more active longer, so they extended young adulthood. If you're 44, you are—officially!—not middle aged yet.

I, on the other hand, take naps. Young adults don't take naps.

A number of years ago, my brother complained about a dog that raised its leg on a fire hydrant. "That's such a cliché," he said (still makes me laugh). Similarly, my nascent old-man problems are annoying clichés too (because, after all, I know some genuinely old men who are pretty young at heart, and in mind). For one, I'm becoming a bit of a pack-rat. Where'd that come from? I responded to the encroaching clutter in my house by buying a book about dealing with clutter. I read it enthusiastically, and learned a lot about clutter and what to do about it. So now I know. I just haven't done anything about it, is all. That book is still around here somewhere. Probably buried under some stacks of papers.

I'm also telling my son the same stories over and over. That's more annoying to him than it is to me, but it's annoying enough to me. When I was younger I told myself I wasn't going to do that. But I do it anyway.

And I've gotten cheap, too. Has anyone bought a Kindle 2 yet? If so, do you like it? Was it worth what it cost? I really want one, but I can't seem to pull the trigger on actually spending the money.

It would probably help with the clutter, a lot of which is books.

I think it's an old man thing: a tendency towards miserliness starting to manifest, like a case of hives.

A more serious consequence of my nascent miserliness is that I really want a Sony A900, but I can't seem to bring myself to actually buy the thing. I have the money, and photography is my "thing," after all, and I could probably make the camera pay for itself in a year or two. What I'm saying is, it doesn't even need rationalizing. But I can't seem to pull the trigger on the purchase.

It's very annoying to me that Sony has ported so many lenses over from the old Minolta versions, but not the one I want most; I tell myself that that's why I'm not plunking down for the A900. Yeah, that's it.

But I suspect it's really because I'm too cheap to spend $3k and watch it slowly (or not so slowly) dissipate down to nothing. I should just buy the damn thing. In this case, miserliness is counter-productive.

It's bad enough having finished my curmudgeon training several years ago, and being a full-fledged one of those. It's worse watching yourself become a cliché, right before your own eyes.

Okay, time for my nap.

Mike

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UPDATE: Thanks for all the great comments. I feel much better now.