The Online Photographer

LIFE.com Launches

Photo by John Florea

LIFE.com launches today. From the press release: "More than 7 million photos from the Life and Getty Images photo collections are now available to consumers in the largest online photography site. The curated site features both rarely seen and iconic photos from the 1850s through today. More than 3,000 new photos from Getty Images award-winning photographers will be added to the site daily. Users will be able to rate, email, share, purchase, license photos and explore their world through the world’s greatest images in this user-friendly web site."

Mike

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Taking Names

Stephen Gandy at CameraQuest is accepting refundable deposits for those who want a Bessa III 667 from his first shipment, due in June. Announced price: $2250.

Anybody know the last time a new 6x7 or larger folder was introduced?

Mike
(Thanks to Charles Mason)

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Featured Comment by Harry Lime: "Very nice, but at $2250 very expensive. I suppose its relative compactness is a big selling point but for that money or a lot less you could buy...

• A mint Hasselbad with filmback and 2.8/80
• A Bronica 645RF with several lenses
• A Mamiya 7 II with lenses.
• A mint Rolleiflex or several Rolleicord with a full overhaul.
• A mint Plaubel Makina 67 2.8/80mm or 4/65

All of these options are equally portable and provide competitive or better performance. I was very interested in this camera, until I saw the price. Does it really cost Fuji/Voigtlander more money to make one of these than it does Nikon to make a D300? Do I really have to get a job with AIG to be able to afford one of these?"

Featured Comment by Tim Bradshaw: "I disagree that this is an incredibly expensive camera. I think, rather, it's probably about what you'd expect to pay for such a thing.

"Rather, I think that we've all become spoiled by how amazingly cheap things, if made in sufficient quantity, have become. It is astonishing that you can buy a DSLR for well under $1000, and even more so that you can get a perfectly decent laptop for much less than that. There's a lot of technology in these things, and a lot of design goes into them. I don't completely understand what makes them so cheap, but I'm guessing that manufacture in large numbers is important.

"If they made this thing for almost nothing it still would not sell in large numbers, because just not that many people are interested in medium-format, however cheap the camera. The only difference if they did that is that they would not be able to cover their design costs, and would lose money on it.

"I'm a (bad) guitar player, and since I'm kind of bored doing what I do most of the time, I've wondered about making guitar amps. I got as far as trying to work out costs, and it's basically depressing. If I actually wanted to eat, I'd have to charge well over £1000 for an amp (okay, quite a nice amp), and perhaps nearer £2000. The amp I use, which is a pretty nice but not 'boutique' model, was £500, and you can get fairly minimal amps for around £100 now. And these are valve (tube) amps. Someone setting up in the business, unless they had really significant funding to cover the start-up costs, would simply have to go for the high-value small-production-run market. And the valve guitar amp market is a lot bigger than the medium-format market, where the start-up costs probably dominate the recurring costs for any plausible sales volume.

"I'd encourage anyone who doesn't believe this to pick something of interest to you that you might be interested in making and do the costings properly, remembering what your time needs to be billed at if you would like to eat. It's a salutary experience.

"So, no, this isn't expensive: everything else is cheap."

Featured Comment by Craig Arnold: "Despite the price I find I cannot imagine not having one. Oh dear, looks like my 5DMkII is going to have to wait."

No Burning Bush

David Hobby has come clean and admitted that he's never used a burning bush as a light source—or, more precisely, there's no kosher speedlight standard involved in being a Strobist.

(Amateurs are often surprised by how limited the technical knowledge of some famous and successful photographers can be sometimes. It's not that they don't know technique—far from it. They learn what they need to know to do their own work, and they know their own technique backwards and forwards, inside and out. But they feel no compulsion to learn other photographers' techniques. Garry Winogrand probably never used a 300mm lens in his life; Ansel Adams was said by his friends to have had no color sense, based on the clashing clothing he'd wear to parties; and most of Richard Avedon's iconic portraits weren't made with studio lighting at all—they were made with white background paper set up outdoors in open shade (see Laura Wilson's Avedon at Work for chapter and verse). I wouldn't be surprised if John Sexton has never shot a halfway serious digital image, but he can talk about every last subtle nuance of the technique of developing sheet film in JOBO Expert drums. I once worked for a top D.C. studio pro who had more money invested in studio lighting than most people have in their homes, but who didn't own, and didn't know how to use, the kind of flash you clip on to the hot shoe of a hand camera.)

Anyway, David has just published Part I of an article about monolights. Take a walk around the monobloc with him. And not to worry—as he explains, no immutable laws of Strobism are being broken.

Mike

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Featured Comment by Jim Richardson: "By extension, most really successful photographers use a rather limited palette of compositional motifs as well. Taken together these 'limitations' have another name: style. Much of what we call photographic style comes from the very creative application of just a handful of techniques and motifs. Finding that subset that works for you is never easy, so developing a style is never so easy as just being technically lazy. Perhaps it is just that photographers with a strong style have decided (long ago) which stuff to throw away."

Featured Comment by Gordon Lewis: "To put Jim Richardson's comment another way, the photographer who attempts to know everything there is to know about all aspects of photographic technique becomes the 'jack of all trades, master of none.' The more narrow and deep your technical focus (so to speak) the more likely you are to approach or even attain mastery of it."

Featured Comment by Tod Papageorge: "While your general point is well-taken, the fact is that, when he made his living doing commercial work, Garry Winogrand carried around a Nikon with a 300mm lens in his car to take pictures of those sunsets he considered possible (LP) record covers. There's a Beethoven's Ninth somewhere so illustrated."

Helen Levitt 1913-2009

Ach, Helen Levitt is dead. I seldom cry when people I didn't know personally pass away; this is one exception.

Mike

Impress Watch This

The ever-elusive Pentax medium-format digital has surfaced again, this time on the Japanese site Impress Watch. I see my fate in this camera, to an extent. I picture myself looking like Imogen Cunningham's father at ninety, feeble and nearing my end. And they'll say to me, "You've had a good life, Mike—well, at least after you became an internet tycoon in 2013. Anything you regret?" And I'll splutter "But...but..." and then whisper my last words into the ear of my faithful great-grandson. And then I shall expire.

The others will turn to my grandson, wondering what my parting words of wisdom could have been. The lad will shake his head sadly. "He said it was such a shame that he had to go just now, just before the new Pentax medium-format digital camera comes out...."

Such is life.

Imogen Cunningham, My Father at Ninety, 1936

Mike

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ADDENDUM: Speaking of Imogen Cunningham and heroic California landscapes, another book of (mostly) large-format photography I like is Rondal Partridge's Quizzical Eye, which I notice you can still get as well. It's a softcover exhibition catalogue from a 2006 show called "From the Byways to the Highways: Rondal Partridge Photographs California 1936–1969." The pictures are quirky, almost impish in their inquisitive good humor and playfulness; I particularly like the early photographs of Ansel Adams and Dorothea Lange at work, although he has a roving and wide-ranging eye and mind. (I first became aware of Rondal Partridge through a fairly bizarre portrait of a shorn and severe-looking Lange dressed in an almost outlandish white dress with poofy shoulders and 19th-century skirts, seated in front of a window...I still wonder what the occasion was, whether she was dressed in period costume for a play or to adorn an historical reënactment or something? The picture is in the book.) For a long time I thought Rondal was Dorothea's son, but that's wrong; he's Imogen's son (and thus the grandson of the white-bearded fellow above). A long-lived crew, that bunch: Imogen died at 93 and Rondal must be nearly that age now.

Rondal Partridge, Pave It and Paint It Green, Yosemite National Park, mid-1960s

Expect irony as much as beauty from Rondal Partridge. His famous photograph of Yosemite's Half Dome is a pointed but very funny commentary on his mentor (and his mother's friend) Ansel Adams's work.

The Season of Light

I miss the darkroom. More specifically, I miss the darkroom in wintertime (it snowed here yesterday and last night, enough to cover everything, and the house today is filled with the white reflected light of snow, a wintery look...).

I miss the darkroom in winter because wintertime used to be the season when I'd spend the most time in it. I did photograph in the winter, when I was younger, but never very much, because I tend to photograph wherever I am, whatever I happen to be doing, and in the wintertime I don't like being outside for very long. Plus, the days are short and often gray. Light is...scarce. Not always poor. Scarce.

So winter was darkroom season. I suppose only one in ten photographers actually liked the darkroom, but I was one. It was a sanctuary, a nice place to be (even if some of my darkrooms were pretty dreadful little holes when you turned the white lights on!) and I enjoyed the process, the work, the amber glow and the comforting low burble of running water. If I had ever established any sort of career as a photographer—if I'd been able to sell prints, for instance, more than every now and then—I'd still be doing darkroom work.

A not-so-gentle reminder: if winter is a good season for indoor work, for being indoors out of the light, then spring is the opposite. Spring is for shooting. In most of the Northern Hemisphere, which I inhabit and I suppose a lot of you do too, spring is the best time of the year for shooting. Some photographers (poor souls) never learn the essential trick of photography, which is that photographs are about light—not about their subject, not about your equipment, not about colors or "sharpness" or proving you've been to the Statue of Liberty or Disneyland or what Uncle Fred looked like. Well, all of that, too. But mainly light. Light is the essential ingredient of a photograph. It can ennoble virtually any subject. More than that, it creates subjects. It structures the things we see. A photograph that doesn't depend on the light it was taken in has a lot of extra work to do to amount to anything.

And summer light is often as bad as winter light. Monotonous, overbearing, unmodulated—white skies and humid haze and smog on the horizon. Things aren't clear in the summertime. Or often aren't. In the summertime you have to resort to the old photographer's trick of using the angled light of dusk or dawn to help your photographs along.

Spring is the time for photographing. The wind blows, the weather changes, the clouds move; the air's often cold enough to be clear. Look especially for the edges of storms, as one departs or another looms; look for blankets of clouds high enough for the sun to get in under at the end of a day. Even the land changes fast in spring. Don't like the way a place looks today, come back tomorrow, or next week. Spring is the season of light. Get out in it. Use your eyes. Bring your camera along.

High style landscapes
If you still love the darkroom you might be interested in this: I heard from John Sexton recently, and he's still teaching his popular master-class workshops on printing called "The Expressive Black and White Print." John is a direct link to Ansel Adams: he learned his craft in Adams's Yosemite Workshops and from studying the prints of Ansel, Edward Weston, and Wynn Bullock; later, he was Ansel's last assistant. That's John in the illustrations of The New Ansel Adams Photography Series, The Camera, The Negative, and The Print, a trilogy of books any black-and-white film photographer (well, perhaps any film photographer, period) ought to own. He is of course a master craftsman in his own right, in the West Coast tradition, with four beautiful books to his credit. There are printers in the world who are "as good," but there are none better. John's workshops are as close as you can get today to the high style Zone System landscapists and the tradition they worked in, going back to to the heroic days of early California and the West.

 

John Sexton, Tree Fern

Of course, the workshops that are coming up soon (April, May of this year) are already full, as they always are. But John tells me there are places left in the ones scheduled for next fall and spring in Carmel Valley. Now would be the time to plan that, if you want a place. The fall workshops are for November 3–8 and 17–22, and the spring ones take place at about this time next year, March 9–14 and 23–28, 2010. The cost is $900, and it takes a $150 deposit to reserve a place, $100 of which is non-refundable. Here's the link to the brochure and the application.

Oh, and I note with pleasure that at John's Ventana Editions book page, Ray McSavaney's book Explorations is still available—signed, no less!—for a mere $60. (That's better than paying twice or three times that for a used copy from the usual sources.) The text of Ray's book is...well, not bad, exactly, but wooden, declarative, quotidian...earthbound, and I don't mean that in a good nature-y way. But the pictures soar. Pictorially, it's one of those transcendent books, in which every page offers a reward and, often as not, a thrill. Yes, an actual thrill. I love this book. Sorry if I'm gushing, but this is perhaps my #1 all-time favorite book of black-and-white large format nature photography (well, nature plus), or, at least, right up there with five or six now-unobtainable books in my library that I won't name for fear of frustrating you. If you like large-format black and white, don't miss Explorations. I had thought it was gone. It's not going to get any easier to find.

But back to springtime: now is the time of year to stop nattering over cameras, stop sitting around indoors, stop looking at...screens. (I know.) Pick a camera and get outdoors to watch the light. This is the shooting season. The season of light.

Mike
(Photo © 2009 John Sexton, all rights reserved)

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Democratic Vistas: Vernacular Photography and the Common Man

Democratic Vista, New England, 1870s. Albumen Print

By Rodger Kingston

When I first taught photo history in the mid-1970s, Beaumont Newhall’s The History of Photography was the final authority on the subject. Whatever he discussed was accepted as a part of photographic history, and whatever he left out was simply not considered. That entire categories of photography were overlooked—snapshots and family photographs as well as most commercial, advertising, scientific, medical, and forensic photography, for example—was not deemed remarkable. This was no accident; Newhall’s vision was to make photography acceptable to the art world, to present photographs as art to an audience—and primarily a museum audience—that was not inclined to think of it that way. That his history emphasizes those photographic genres that support the argument for photography as art, and plays down or ignores those that don’t, should therefore surprise no one.

And Newhall succeeded far beyond anyone’s expectations. There were other photo histories—most notably Helmut Gernsheim’s—but it was primarily Newhall who dictated the shape and content of photographic history over the next fifty years and more. By progressing through the technical evolution of the medium by means of photography’s Grand Masters, he presented a self-contained universe that answered most of the questions that it raised.

Chinese Women in a Cangue, c. 1880. Albumen Print

I began collecting photographs in the mid 1970s to show to my students, as well as for my own pleasure; I couldn’t afford prints by most of the "name" photographers (even though they were inexpensive by today’s standards). So, having little money, I had to learn to rely on my instincts, by developing a discerning eye, by searching out remarkable images that no one else wanted or even saw as worth having. That was the greatest challenge, and increasingly the greatest pleasure. It was very exciting: slightly subversive, but extremely liberating. I looked for striking images by unknown photographers as alternatives to prints by the masters...

Random Excellence: Alex S. MacLean

Alex S. MacLean, Parking Lot Markings Overlap Basketball Courts, Waltham, Massachusetts

I've you've ever looked with fascination out the window of an airplane coming in low, you'll be fascinated by the beauty, horror, and vast sweep of Alex McLean's aerial views.

I thought this one was apropos as a nod to the ongoing Road to the Final Four*, but it's not any better than most of his other pictures. His whole site is worth an extended viewing. I loved it.

His latest book is Over: The American Landscape at the Tipping Point.

Mike

*An argument against efficiency: you could make basketball much more efficient by giving each team 90 points to start with and then limiting games to 5 minutes. I've always thought basketball could be greatly improved by playing separate 15-minute periods, best three out of five wins. Then, blowouts would only go on for 45 minutes, close games would get an automatic "overtime," and you'd have up to five exciting endings per game instead of just one.

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The AIPAD Show 2009

Regular readers will probably already know that the AIPAD Show (AIPAD is the Association of International Photography Art Dealers—say "AY-pad") is going on in New York City this weekend, at the Park Avenue Armory.

The AIPAD Show is the "other" North American trade show for photography. Enthusiasts, pros and equipment geeks are all over the VISCOMM Show at the Javits Center, which is the trade show for gear 'n' "stuff," but relatively few know about the AIPAD Show, which is the trade show for pictures.

Imagine a hundred or so photography galleries from all around the world renting booths in the same exhibition hall and bringing all their best, most salable stuff, both historical and contemporary, to display and sell, and you've about got the gestalt. But not before adding seminars, talks by famous photographers (Bruce Davidson, whose books we were discussing recently, is one of the presenters this year), and "exhibitions within the exhibition," including one this year that features treasures from the George Eastman House collection. It's a trade show, and dealers, collectors, and museums (well, curators) are quietly conducting business in the background, but there's a huge cornucopia of original work on display for the casual browser as well. (The cover of the illustrated catalog from the 2009 show is shown at right.)

Naturally the risk is that most of the work you'll see is work that is proven to be salable, so it's more of a "greatest hits" parade and not the best place to get a handle on recent, new, and innovative work, but the sheer volume of work on display means you get to see a little bit of everything.

For instance this year Charles Schwartz Ltd. is offering a rare silver-gelatin print of W. Eugene Smith's famous "In the Garden," which will certainly be priced well into six figures.

 

W. Eugene Smith, In the Garden

This is also the weekend for my annual vow to attend the AIPAD Show the next year, which I never do. (This year I even have airline miles that are about to expire, and I am kicking myself, hard, for not putting those two things together. Ow.) But I hereby dutifully so vow. Set up that football, Lucy, I'm a-comin'.

The DLK Collection blog is there and doing a booth review, spilling the beans on prices, too, which is interesting. Here's the link to Part 1, but be sure to check for updates. Here's the New York Times review.

Mike
(Thanks to John Camp)

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ADDENDUM: The proper title of the Smith picture is "The Walk to Paradise Garden," as Scott Kirkpatrick has pointed out in the comments.

Featured Comment by Michael W: "Even better coverage by James Danziger who also has a booth at the show."

Danziger Projects booth, The AIPAD Show, NYC, 2009

[Blog Notes].01

Today is pretty much a housekeeping day, I guess.

In response to reader suggestions, I've redirected the domains so that both

"/theonlinephotographer.com"

      and

"/www.theonlinephotographer.com"

will both go directly to the blog page—that is, this page—without stopping over at the "about us" or Welcome page. It may take a while (a day or two) for these changes to fully propagate. Also, I managed to get domain masking turned off (I'm really not very swift about this stuff) so that the real URLs will appear in your address bar and you'll be able to bookmark and copy and paste actual URLs for pages and posts. Again, it might take a little while for these changes to be fully active.

And I'm trying to hire a real graphic designer to re-do the header bar. Not much movement there yet. (Too small a job?) Stay tuned.

You probably noticed that "Categories" have shown up in the right-hand column, to make it easier to find older posts. The problem is that not very many posts are tagged with categories yet. For various reasons it's not easy to tag large numbers of older posts quickly, so it will take a while before the categories are useful; but from now on I'll at least be putting category tags on all the new posts.

Also, by popular demand, the lynx is back. She's the tab for our not-very-expansive links page. I'd promise to work on that page, too, but, as I always say, I have a lot of things to promise to work on.

Mike

UPDATE: I've received many kind offers of help with graphic design, which puts me in a position of having an embarrassment of riches on that score. Sincere thanks to everyone who offered or is thinking of offering—the offers are extremely kind—but please note that help is no longer needed.

OT: Auto Ezz-thetics

Izzat purdy, or what? It's the ever-upcoming Tesla all-electric sedan. (And you thought you had to wait a long time for digital cameras to make it to market.) It will have a range of 225 miles and a pricetag around $60k. American made. Available only to Hollywood movie stars.

Okay, kidding about that last.

The picture is by Digg co-founder Kevin Rose, from Jalopnik.

Speaking of pretty cars, the Volkwagen CC is an unusually beautiful automotive design for a current car. It plays no tricks, doesn't resort to gee-whiz gimmicks or trendy excrescences or swoopy boy-racer faux-Jessica-Rabbit curvaceousness, but the thing just doesn't have a bad angle: it looks classic and sleek from every quarter. Car design for grown-ups. See it in person: it's a pleasant change of pace in a time when many new cars flirt with either design incompetence or downright bug-ugliness.

Of course, they make up for the illustrious aesthetic design by calling it a "four-door coupe," which is dazzlingly dimwitted. Brilliantly birdbrained. Smartly sappy! Somebody stop me. (A coupé is normally considered to be a two-door car, although there have been other exceptions.)

And speaking of ugly, what were the people at Mazda thinking? They had to be drunk on rice wine in the boardrooms of Hiroshima when they approved this front end. I remember reading many years ago—it might have been the great automotive writer Ralph Stein who said it—that every car designer needs to be aware that the front of a car resembles a face, but every car designer also needs to be aware that the front of a car shouldn't look too much like a face. I'm betting this thing gets a new front end as a 2010 1/2 model.

Does the new Mazda 3 remind you of anything?

Cool that they know that
Also from Jalopnik: the 2010 Toyota Prius gets 26.2 miles per gallon...at 102 miles per hour.

Mike

P.S. "Ezz-thetics," of course, is from this.

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Blog Notes

Lost comments
Apparently, two or three days ago, I must have mistakenly deleted a small batch of comments, probably no more than six or eight. If you wrote a comment recently that wasn't posted, it was most likely not "disallowed," but merely lost. Guess I must have hit the wrong button by mistake. Sorry about that.

Subscribers
I'm pleased to report that the "subscription drive" the other day went splendidly well. No fewer than 121 people ("True Fans" of TOP, according to Ctein's lingo) signed on to make "voluntary recurring contributions." Here's the breakdown:

8 people chose the $0.25 per month option ($6 every two years)
36 people chose the $1 per month option ($6 every six months)
50 people chose the $2 per month option ($6 every quarter)
27 people chose the $6 per month option.

Averaged over two years, that's $300 per month, minus PayPal fees of about $25, for a net of about $275 per month of income that I can more or less depend on as a regular thing. I don't think that quite qualifies me as an internet tycoon (still workin' on that), but it'll cover some groceries—so thanks very much to everybody who signed on! A Mike stimulus plan, indeed. I confess I didn't expect so much participation, so I'm feeling complimented. Thanks.

You'll notice I've posted a new link to the Subscribe page at the upper right. If you haven't done so already, I hope you'll consider subscribing, especially if you're someone who reads via our full feeds and seldom visits the actual website.

A fair number of people experienced problems with PayPal, for which I'm sorry. Er, very sorry, for obvious reasons! When a payment service actively discourages motivated buyers, that is not good service. I've been looking into a way to implement recurring payments by credit card without using PayPal, but not making very much progress yet (most of the available options are for far more elaborate operations). I'll keep you posted.

New Amazon portal
There's also a new Amazon portal at the upper right, including quick links. And thanks again to everybody who makes Amazon purchases through our links—that really helps out too.

Categories
I'm also beginning to implement categories for posts, to help you locate older posts. It will take a while to get this fully implemented, but I'll be working on it. I'm also thinking of putting together a page of favorite posts. That might take a while too.

Movies
The "off-topic" post the other day asking for movie recommendations elicited more comments than any other post in TOP's 3-year-plus history. Whew. I used the suggestions to amass a list of about 13 movie scripts to read. I'm toying with the idea of writing a screenplay, because I have too few things to occupy my time that are highly unlikely to result in income. I'm being sarcastic. It's just one of the things on the bucket list, is all.

I also put together a short list of movies I want to watch based on the recommendations. I've added those to my Netflix queue. Thanks to everybody who passed along favorites.

Mike

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Random Snap

Panasonic G1, G Vario 14–45mm lens at 14mm, 1/400 sec. ƒ/9 ISO 250

I have to admit I kinda like pictures with the photographer's shadow in 'em. I like "mistakes." Dogs are good, too.

Mike

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Featured Comment by Len Salem:

Featured Comment by Gary Smith: "I normally try to avoid taking shots like this. However, just occasionally, not only can they work, you pretty much can't avoid them! :-)"

AIG and US Airways Seek to Cover Up Flight 1549 Recovery Photos

Photos: Stephen Mallon

Stephen Mallon might be sitting on some of the most newsworthy pictures never seen.

Stephen, a New York City industrial photographer, was hired by Weeks Marine, the maritime crane company involved in the recovery of US Airways Flight 1549 from the Hudson River, to document the recovery process.

Those who have seen the pictures say he did a wonderful job. He was given unlimited access on the water, to the plane's interior, virtually anywhere he wanted to go. He had the full cooperation and blessing of his immediate client, Weeks Marine; of the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB); and of USAirways. He never signed a Work for Hire agreement, and his client had no problem with him publishing the work non-commerically—like, on his website, where he posted them. The best shots from the more than 5,000 captures he made amounted to "an incredible, beautiful document of the recovery," according to Pulitzer-Prizewinning photo editor Stella Kramer, who saw them. (The two pictures posted here were published elsewhere while they were still available from Stephen.)

That's when the funny business started. Stephen put the pictures up on his website, where they were viewable for about a week. Then he got a correction from the NTSB: no, he could not "go live" with the pictures. So he took them down.

Two weeks later, the NTSB released them, so all but a couple went up again. Then a couple more had to come down. And so on. Then he got a letter from J. Supor & Son, a land-based crane company, saying they were asserting their rights to be considered his client, based on their ownership of Weeks Marine, which, you recall, had hired Stephen in the first place.

Then he got a letter from a law firm, not sent directly but passed to him by insurance giant AIG—yup, that AIG—asserting that Stephen has no rights to his pictures, and that the pictures absolutely can't be released to anyone, ever—not even news outlets for news purposes. AIG (through its lawyers) apparently seeks total suppression of the work, indefinitely.

Based on...what rights, explicitly? Stephen isn't sure. Like any photographer, Stephen owns the rights to his pictures, except those rights he signed away in his contract with Weeks. AIG is US Airways' insurer. Ultimately, they'll be paying for the salvage operation and for a new airplane. But they weren't Stephen's client.

The ASMP is urging him to proceed with caution, for which I emphatically don't blame him—a sole proprietor photographer has a hard enough row to hoe as it is, without a giant multinational corporation trying with all their might to make his life miserable.

And based on...what motivation, exactly? Why is AIG seeking to suppress the photos of the recovery? It's not like they can cover up the fact that the plane ended up in the Hudson River. No one's disputing that. It's been reported all over the world. And why would US Airways participate in a cover-up? If ever there was one, the Hudson River crash was an example of an airline doing everything right! Not a single life was lost; the pilot and crew performed bravely and brilliantly, and are national heroes as a result—they got a standing O from the U.S. Congress, for Pete's sake. It's hard to imagine a better outcome for a dire emergency situation that results in a crash landing. If you had to be in a plane crash, wouldn't you want it to be a US Airways flight with the intrepid Sully Sullenberger at the controls? So why the cover up?

Stephen can't figure it out. And he has the photos...not just the ones that were posted on his site, but, of course, all his shooting from the scene. And he can't see anything incriminating about the pictures. You and I, of course, can't see for ourselves.

The national news media has yet to pick this story up. I just called up Stephen at his New York studio. He's got the scoop. NBC, CBS, ABC, PBS, NYT, etc.—your move.

So, can you help? Stephen thinks maybe you can. He's asking members of the public to write or call AIG and US Airways to help put public pressure on them to allow him to release his photos to public view.

While we're at it, let's ask them what they think they're hiding! I for one am curious to know that.

(Also, if you're a lawyer, what's your take on this? Obviously Stephen can't use his clients' pictures for commercial purposes, but what about their newsworthiness? Does Free Speech trump AIG's rights to suppress the work? I don't know, I'm just asking.)

Mike
(Thanks to KC Chelette and Stephen Mallon)

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Featured Comment by Carl Weese: "Are they covering something up, or acting on their Masters of the Universe reflex? The rule that says they can crush the little guy if they feel like it—for whatever reason, or no good reason at all—because he can't afford to protect his legal rights against them.

"I'm not a lawyer but have done commercial/industrial photography since 1972, and negotiated a lot of assignment agreements/contracts. A client paying a photographer for an assignment acquires only such rights as the photographer assigns to them, in detail, in writing, in a formal document. All other rights remain with the photographer ('creator' in copyright language.) It's not unusual to restrict other distribution (often for a limited period of time) but there's no such restriction automatically granted—it has to be spelled out in writing. It's not unusual to try to get total control of the pictures by demanding 'work for hire,' but the photographer would have to agree to it in writing. [Note: Stephen did not sign a work-for-hire agreement.  —Ed.] A client can't legally assert 'work for hire' rights after the fact. So the documents that he did sign are terribly important here.

JC: "If you hire somebody to shoot something, wouldn't the photos belong to you, just as if you hired a carpenter to build a fence for you?"

Carl Weese: "No, copyright automatically belongs to the creator, even if he/she is working for pay. The reasoning (supported by copyright law) is because photos have no intrinsic commercial value: the value depends on use. If I'm assigned to do an environmental portrait for a small circulation magazine it might pay a few hundred dollars. The same assignment for a corporate annual report would pay several times as much (it's a more valuable usage of the work) and the same for a full page ad in a national magazine would be worth several times more. If assigned to shoot for the annual report, my contract would restrict the client from using the work in ads without additional payment for the more valuable use. So the client always wants to get the broadest possible rights for the least money, and the photographer wants to grant the opposite. But the client can only acquire rights through written contract: 'we paid for it' doesn't mean anything without a contractually determined 'it.' "

Featured Comment by Toe Tag: "Unless he assigned the rights to his pictures to the crane company (which you say he didn't), AIG has no business telling him what he can or can't do. If they paid for the hull loss, they bought the wreckage, not pictures of its recovery. (In fact, if the Airbus was leased from ILFC—another AIG subsidiary—it looks like AIG paid for it twice.) Practically speaking, though, if AIG is paying the crane company for the recovery, and he wants work in the future from that client, he might want to go slowly (like ASMP recommends) until everybody calms down.

"People do silly things when litigation is involved; I recall that a couple of passengers have already filed suit against US Air and Airbus, though what effect pictures of the recovery of the wreckage would have on that case is beyond me, and I do a lot of that stuff."

Featured Comment by Dave Wilson: "Interesting—contracts are sacrosanct when they involve AIG employees and large bonuses but can be trampled over with ease when they involve someone else and when AIG is not a party to the contract? I'm not a lawyer but this sounds distinctly like a double standard to me.

"I'm glad I got to see Stephen's gallery when he posted them just after the event. The photos are superb."

How Do You Feel About Video in DSLRs?

Time for one of our periodic reader polls.

Online Surveys & Market Research

(Be sure to comment on TOP by using the link below; the comment link in the poll box is to leave a comment at Vizu.)

Mike

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Note: I haven't posted any "featured" comments here, not wishing to influence anyone's answer to the poll. But there are a number of excellent comments, which are well worth reading. Also interesting: the divergence of opinion in the comments, with good arguments on both sides of the issue.  —MJ

Canon Announces New Rebel

Canon has announced the newest in its long line of hugely successful Rebel DSLRs, the Rebel T1i (EOS 500D in the rest of the world). The big news this time is that the camera will record 12 minute clips of full HD video (or, alternately, 18 minutes of 720p HD video or 24 minutes of SD video). As a still photography site, we officially don't care about that...but you might.

As a still camera, the new T1i is likely to be every bit as good as every previous top Rebel—starting with the very first, which was a very good picture-maker despite its then-groundbreaking low price. This one offers a 15.1-MP sensor virtually guaranteed to have excellent high-ISO performance, live view in both still and video mode, and the same 3-inch-wide, 920,000-dot viewing screen as the one found in the EOS 5D Mark II. It will shoot nine raw images at 3.4 fps, and uses Canon's DIGIC4 imaging processor with 14-bit analog-to-digital conversion. Unfortunately, it still has a smallish pentamirror finder, albeit with good eye relief for eyeglass wearers. (The finder compares favorably to other cameras in the Rebel's class; it's just that that's not saying much.) Also unfortunately, still no body-integral IS. And no weatherproofing. It does have sensor cleaning. The T1i is nigh on perfect in size and weight for comfortable handling and carrying as long as you don't saddle it with too chunky a lens.Also announced is a nifty new coat-pocket flash unit made specifically for the new Rebel, the Speedlite 270EX, which features bounce up to 90° and runs off two AA batteries.

Speedlite 270EX side views; on right, with head extended for 90° bounce

List price for the new camera is $800 for the body only or $900 with a kit lens. Ships in early May.

Mike

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The Kingston Collection

Here's a word to the wise for all you photo collectors and would-be photo collectors out there. I had a nice long talk with a TOP reader named Rodger Kingston recently. Rodger's a fine photographer in his own right, and he's had a long, multi-part, multi-path career in photography. In the 1970s, he owned a photography gallery that specialized in 19th-century prints. He wasn't able to afford for himself much of the better work he handled, but he did start collecting the "little things" that came into his hands—the odds and ends that didn't have a ready market and seemed to him to need a home.

Well, lo and behold, several decades later, his by-now extensive collection of between-the-cracks stuff constitutes a major collection. What he once called "junk" is now called "vernacular photography," and the collection as a whole recently appraised for—hold on to your hat—$4.3 million! What started out as a labor of love and enthusiasm turned into a pretty nice retirement plan. (Note: if you're young now, someday you'll be hearing the same thing about collections of prints from the early digital era—now, that would be—even prints not by "name" photographers. Mark my words.)

Shows what you can end up with when you just start collecting what you like, and what you can.

The Kingston Collection is the subject of a new and particularly delightful little book called In the Vernacular: Photography of the Everyday published by Boston University Art Gallery. It's a modestly-sized paperback and not thick, but it's a little treasure-box of photographic riches, giving a good idea of the sweep and variety of the collection as a whole. I haven't read the extensive selection of essays yet, but I'm looking forward to that. The pictures are wonderful—everything from Tom Kelley's Marilyn Monroe pinup in a pirated calendar, to automobile ads, to forensic photographs, to cyanotypes, to photo-booth strips, to stereographs, to lenticular postcards (you know, that magically transform when you change your viewing angle). I have only one complaint, and that is that there isn't enough. I could have looked at three or four times as many. (There are 70 0bjects shown in the book, 175 in the exhibition, and 4,000 in the collection.)

In the Vernacular also has the distinction of being one of the very last—if not the last—book printed at the fabled Stinehour Press in Lunenburg, Vermont, source of so many fine American photo books over the years.

This isn't a major book, but it's a particularly enjoyable minor one. I can't see how it would be out of place in anyone's library, and it surely provides more enjoyment per ounce (and per dollar—only fifteen bucks!) than many weightier tomes.

Gets a strong recommendation from me. I like this kind of thing. I've been through it several times now and I know I'll be back again.

Mike

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Featured Comment by Stacey McCarroll Cutshaw: "Thank you for the nice piece on Rodger's collection and the 'In the Vernacular' project. Just wanted to let folks know that the book is also available via the Boston University Art Gallery website, and this might solve the problem for your reader in Canada."

(Note: Stacey was Curator and Director of the Boston University Art Gallery until 2007. She co-curated the "In the Vernacular: Everyday Photographs from the Collection of Rodger Kingston" show with Ross Barrett. —Ed.)

Curtain Falls on 67II and 645NII

A quiet little notice on the Pentax Japan website spells the end of the line for the venerable 67II and the only slightly less venerable Pentax 645NII. The two medium-format film cameras were discontinued in the rest of the world some time ago, but had continued to be available in Japan. Evidently the cryptic notice says that 250 more of the former and 450 more of the latter will be made before it's curtains, and that 645 lenses will continue in production—evidently to keep the door open for a medium-format digital camera.

The Pentax 6x7, often referred to as "a 35mm SLR on steroids," was first introduced forty years ago, in 1969.

Mike
(Thanks to Oren)

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Featured Comment by Ctein: "I've been using a Pentax 67 since almost day one—I bought the fifth one imported into the US, plus the 105mm and  300mm lenses, back when I was a college student. Cashed in my life savings to do it; in constant dollars the biggest photographic purchase I've ever made. That was my complete kit for about a dozen years.

"Back when I decided to get the Pentax, it, the Hasselblad, and the Rollei SL 66 were all just about the same price (over the decades, until the model II was introduced, the Pentax equipment increased in price much more slowly than other medium format lines, which is why it became such a bargain). It was features that sold me on the Pentax, and, no, it was not an easy decision to make.

"Mirror slap was a problem that was overrated and misunderstood. The mirror mechanism was actually rather well designed to minimize recoil, which on a mirror that size was probably an absolute necessity. But, still, when I tested other medium format cameras I never found the Pentax to be particularly worse than Hasselblads or Rolleis.

"I got the camera to use for both landscape and photojournalism work, so I was regularly fighting available darkness. With practice I could get acceptably sharp photographs with the 105mm lens at 1/30th of a second, handheld, about half the time. I could routinely do decent work at 1/60 of a second. I could get tack-sharp photographs at 1/125 of a second without even thinking about it.

"But...and this is a significant but...there was some sort of mechanical resonance around 1/15th of a second, which made mirror vibration a huge problem at that particular shutter speed, even on a moderately large tripod. You practically had to lock the thing down to a cement block to stabilize it. There was substantially less problem at 1/8 second, and little or none below that.

"I think it's that resonance, plus the fact that it was a very loud camera, which gave rise to the belief that mirror slap was more of a problem in this camera than other 6x6 or 6x7 SLRs."

Scott Streble's Free Portrait Day

Scott Streble's "free portrait day" in Minneapolis went well, he tells us, drawing people "who work (or used to work) in a big range of arenas...I.T., nonprofit, consulting, sales, advertising, entertainment, finance...." He says he met "a range of people in practically every category except one...race. The notice for this opportunity was placed in a wide-range of resources and I am at a loss to explain this." (What several of our commenters mentioned might be true, i.e., that using pictures for job-networking purposes allows prospective employers to be quietly racist, and black professionals might not be eager to give them that opportunity. Maybe they're just more cynical about the possibility then white job-searchers are. Or, maybe it was a coincidence.)

Scott also says his subjects were surprisingly upbeat, leading him to speculate that the job-searchers who are depressed about their situation simply stayed home. He says some of them even had suggestions as to how he (Scott) could get more work!

In any event, kudos to Scott for making the effort to give back to his community in the way he can.

Mike

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Buried on the Bottom in TOP

One of the problems with TOP's format is that excellent comments that come in late are often missed by most readers, even if I post them as "Featured Comments." For instance, check out Maxim Muir's new Featured Comment on the post "Vintage Prints" from last Thursday.

Maxim was a formidable darkroom expert who was the real authority behind author Steve Anchell's best-selling The Darkroom Cookbook. Maxim provided many of the formulae and vetted much of the material; he ought to have been credited as "technical editor" of that book, if not co-author, but I don't think he was. At least not in the first edition.

Mike