The Online Photographer

Focusing Follies

By Ctein

In the many online discussions, here and abroad, about Michael Reichmann's letter to Leica, a point oft brought up (or tacitly assumed) is that there is nothing wrong with existing focusing systems and therefore Michael's exhortation to Leica to "think differently" is inherently misguided. I'd like to correct that.

I have no horse in this race. If Leica builds a super-cool camera, that's nice, but I probably won't buy it. I've used about every kind of focusing system at one time or another, and they all seem to work well for me, just with different strengths and weaknesses. One of my favorite cameras for many years was my Canonet G-II QL 17 (I wasn't as fond of Leica rangefinders, but that's purely a case of one shutterbug's ergonomic ceiling being another's floor; it's no criticism of the design. Just didn't work well for me).

First, understand the difference between precision and accuracy. If you have a wooden meter stick marked off in millimeter increments, you can measure things to a precision of about 1/2 mm. Want to bet that that meter stick is actually one meter long? The Leica website talks about the high precision of their rangefinder designs. Their engineers are admirably careful in their use of technical language. They don't talk about how accurate they are. That's because they're not, particularly; I've tested them.

Rangefinder cameras, whether they have interchangeable lenses or not, are heir to all sorts of tolerance problems in the mechanical linkages that degrade the match between indicated focus in the viewfinder and real focus in the film/sensor plane. A very long baseline lets you set the focus back to precisely the same point, time after time, very quickly. It may not be the point you actually want to be focused on.

I have never, ever tested a rangefinder camera, fixed- or interchageable-lens, which was particularly accurate over the entire range of distances. None of them were better than your typical SLR; many of them were substantially worse. This design simply doesn't lend itself well to extreme accuracy, except at fabulous expense, even by Leica standards.

SLRs must be aligned too
So, SLRs are the way to go? Unfortunately, no. In SLRs, there's one big problem: the distance from the lens to the focusing screen/focusing sensor usually isn't exactly the same as the distance to the the film/sensor. Now, there are easy ways to adjust that in an SLR; there are setscrews that determine the mirror rest position. You can bring the focusing plane and the film plane into near perfect alignment. I routinely do that.

Unfortunately, because a flapping mirror is involved, a tuned-up camera will not stay tuned up. One important difference I've found between robustly built cameras and "amateur" cameras is how fast they'll go out of alignment. In some cameras, a heavy day's work is enough to shift the focus measurably.

I have never seen a camera come from the factory in critically sharp alignment for use with a reasonably fast prime lens. Common wisdom is that most fast lenses are not very sharp at maximum aperture in the center of the field (hardly any lenses are uniformly sharp at any aperture over the entire field). That mis-impression comes from the fact that hardly any fast lenses get accurately focused! I've found that tuning up any camera I used will improve wide-open resolution by 50–100%. Right out of the box, cameras can be annoyingly inaccurate.

There's a third problem that all focusing systems face. Most work best at large lens apertures, but any lens that doesn't have perfectly corrected spherical aberration will undergo a focus shift as it's stopped down. Often the shift is so small, in comparison to the increased depth of focus, that it doesn't produce any important loss of sharpness. Sometimes it does.

One crude idea
This is all stuff that Michael knows (and didn't think needed elaboration), which is why he encourged Leica to try thinking outside of that box, figuratively and literally. Could focusing systems be substantially improved with innovative approaches? Unquestionably! Here's a crude idea I came up with after just 10 minutes thought:

Take a traditional coincident-image rangefinder. Add a piezo actuator that can shift the sensor in the z-axis (image stabilization systems use actuators to shift the sensor on pitch and yaw; we're just adding a third axis of control). Add another processor chip that looks only at the pixels in the sensor that match the coincidence window in the rangefinder viewfinder (limiting the data crunching to a small number of pixels means the device can operate in real time). The photographer focuses manually, or so they think. But once the focus gets close, the processor takes over and starts shifting the sensor until it actually is in exact focus. Then it flashes a little signal in the viewfinder to tell the photographer that the subject is in focus. The photographer thinks they're focusing manually, but what they're really doing is the rough focus and then handing it over to an autofocus system. Heck, with improvements in sensor sensitivity and signal processing, you could even have such a system work with the lens stopped down, eliminating spherical aberration focus shift.

Sure, this idea's less than half baked, and I have no doubt that folks can poke major holes in it. But if I can think up something like this so quickly, imagine what proper camera engineers could do putting in some serious work time on the effort. It's a proof of principle.

Your existing focusing systems are lousy. They can be improved.

Ctein

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Featured Comment by Bill Pierce: "It was absolutely routine when I started working to send all new Leicas to Norm Goldberg (Don's father and a brilliant innovator, designer, builder, repairman) to have the rangefinder matched to your lenses. Previously, you had sent all your other bodies and lenses to Norm to have them 'null-nulled,' to have everything 'zeroed' to the extent that instruments could do it. And anytime you could, certainly once a year, equipment went back for a CLA (clean, lubricate and adjust). I certainly wish that Leica would make the necessary tools available to some of the good independent repairman so that this kind of work could be done again with direct communication between the photographer and the repairman."

He Wasn't as Steady as a Tripod

"...Sparked me up, like the thing on the table with the bolts here...TZZZT!"

Now then—I really do mean to take tomorrow off, as I'm supposed to. (As you can probably tell, I get a little obsessive about staying glued to the computer.) But I'd like to leave you with a link to a film that I think might be perfect for your Saturday.

It goes on for about an hour, so you'll have to budget some time. It's about Brian Duffy, one-third of the "black trinity" of British photographers of the 1960s. (The others were David Bailey, best-known of the three because he was the model for the character played by David Hemmings in Michelangelo Antonioni's film "Blow Up" of 1966, and Terrence Donovan, who took his own life in 1996.) Duffy is perhaps best remembered for his mode of departure: he made a pile of all his prints and negatives and put a match to it, and walked away from photography for decades.

Recently, however, now 75 and in failing health, he returned to photography, and had his first show. The BBC did a documentary about it, and it's now online at his website.

I have to mention, I love the Klemperer story. But it's the creative arc that's revealed through the piece that's really arresting.

At any rate, you can watch for yourself. It's pretty terrific, especially if you have an iconoclastic streak. There's no direct link: to get to it, you have to go to the website > exhibits & links > BBC DOCUMENTARY. You can watch it online or download it.

Bob Stevenson told me about this; thanks, Bob.

Mike

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[Hopefully temporary] UPDATE: We appear to have whacked their bandwidth, hardly surprising with an hour-long video on a private website. That turns this post into naught but a tease. Sorry. But do keep this in mind, and check back. It's really worth seeing. —Ed.

UPDATE #2: A week later, Chris Duffy writes to say that we did crash their shared server, but the video is now on Vimeo. So, have another go—it should work now.

UPDATE #3: Sad to say Duffy passed away on May 31st, 2010.

Featured Comment by Andy Forbes: "I have been a fan of Duffy since the '60s. Rather than buy photography mags I used to buy the fashion mags that Duffy, Bailey and Donovan contributed to. The documentary style of fashion shoot they used was fascinating and totally different to the accepted style of fashion shoots at the time. There is a wonderful quote by Duffy from the '60s: 'Before 1960 a fashion photographer was tall, thin and camp. But we three are different: short, fat and heterosexual!'

"I was fortunate to be invited to the private viewing of the Duffy exhibition, which features in the documentary, at the Chris Beetles gallery last October. It was a great night and interesting to see how the players, models and fashion editors had weathered, some not so well as others! Bailey was there for a short while and it is obvious he has great respect for his old friend Duffy. The surviving photographs are wonderful—I went to the exhibition four times to drink it all in. The BBC documentary is a bonus and I recorded it when it was broadcast a couple of weeks ago and have watched it several times since and it shows Duffy is still as rebellious now as he was in the '60s.

"Duffy's son Chris is the man really responsible for all of this and has worked tirelessly over the last couple of years or so to bring Duffy back into the public eye and thank God he has, he really deserves his place in the history of photography and the period. Hopefully there is more to come."

H.C.-B.: The Invisible Man

By Jim Hughes

More than any other practitioner, I think, Henri Cartier-Bresson has defined the art of small-camera photography. Defying categorization (that bane of any true original), H.C.-B., neither photojournalist nor documentarian, seemingly traversed the earth in search of telling human images—decisive moments, he himself called them—that in their inevitable lyricism strike me as unspoken tone poems in black and white. It is too easy to say that he photographed people, often at their most vulnerable, or even that he captured the essence of their lives, both of which were certainly true. He somehow managed to photograph time itself, stopping that great equalizer in its tracks. It is almost as if the instrument of his art—and make no mistake, it is the music of life that he played—existed on another plane entirely.

Yet when I looked upon that instrument, it appeared to be a camera, nothing more. Indeed, the day I first met Cartier-Bresson, he was wearing not the famous black-taped classic Leica I expected to see, but an even more miniaturized version, the then-brand-new Leica CL, a superb design now long-discontinued and highly sought after, that was no bigger and almost as simple as some of today’s ubiquitous point-and-shoots. The International Center of Photography in New York (then located at 94th and Fifth on Museum Mile in what had once been a grand old mansion) was planning an exhibit, and as a photo-magazine editor I had been invited to meet the great man in person. History was everywhere. We gathered in one of the upstairs meeting rooms. Cornell Capa, ICP's founder and Robert's brother, was there. The conversation, conducted at first in a kind of Anglicized French no doubt to accommodate me (Cartier-Bresson made his reluctance to speak English quite obvious), quickly turned to Magnum, an unusual cooperative of independent-minded photographers who never seemed able to agree on much of anything, but who nonetheless managed, individually and as a group, to produce work of unparalleled excellence.

I had expected to encounter the gentle soul of a poet. Instead, the quirky man to whom I was introduced was edgier than I could ever have imagined, possessed of a sharply caustic intellect that, I realize in retrospect, might actually have been calculated to put people off—or perhaps just people like me. He was, I'd been told, an aristocrat. He talked of his growing frustration with (or maybe it was disdain for) photography, and his concomitant need to return to his roots: drawing and painting, the few examples of which I’d seen had left me cold, left me wondering how a great master in one field would fail so completely to recognize his mediocrity in another. But no matter. If Henri Cartier-Bresson chose to be full of himself, I was sure he’d earned the right. Genius is as genius does.

At one point, a young man with a Nikon F appeared at the open door. I paid him little mind; at ICP, one regularly encountered young people carrying cameras, all eagerly shooting each other's nooks and crannies as they earnestly went about learning how to make incisive pictures. But this fellow was different; he seemed barely out of his teens—if indeed he was—and he appeared to be genuinely starstruck. It is not often one gets to meet one's true-life hero in the flesh.

"Monsieur Cartier-Bresson," the young man exclaimed in what sounded like his best prep-school French as he brought his Nikon to his eye, moved in and squeezed off a series of exposures with, I think, a 105mm lens. At the last ka-thunk of the mirror, Cartier-Bresson sprung to his feet, literally sprung as if his wiry body had been coiled tight, just waiting for a reason to release itself.

"You must not photograph me!" he shrieked, his English suddenly crystal-clear. "No one is allowed to photograph me! Everyone must know that..."

A Return to Form for TIME?

I was at the grocery store a couple of days ago and happened to notice the February 1, 2010, cover of TIME, apropos our recent discussions of TIME covers. Seems like a return to classic form to me. Photojournalist Callie Shell is credited right on the cover, which won't be a regular thing. I contacted Callie, who demurred when I asked her how much she was paid—which I respect; none o' my business. But it's original photojournalism, by a TIME contract photographer (and an eloquent, evocative photograph, too, I think. And you know how much I love black-and-white). TIME's current Director of Photography, Kira Pollack, only began in that position a few months ago, in October, 2009. Kira has agreed to do an interview with TOP, if she can find the...er, well, the time.

Mike

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H.C.-B. in Ink

By Joe Cameron

I don’t want to rain on anyone’s parade, but to those bemoaning  the fact that they live too far away to see the traveling Cartier-Bresson show and therefore can’t experience "original prints," I would say that some photographers' images work best, and do best what they are intended to do, on the printed page—not gallery walls. I would include most photojournalists in this category, and Cartier-Bresson is a case in point.

I appreciate seeing original work as much as anyone. One of the seminal experiences of my life was stumbling into a Rothko retrospective at the Tate many years ago. It was late on a rainy London afternoon and the paintings were lit only by somewhat faint skylight. At first I was irritated that the galleries were so dark, but after sitting for many long minutes and acclimating my eyes to the ethereal atmosphere, a vast new world opened that I shall never forget, one that cannot be duplicated in the form of a book.

Brian Forrest, Mark Rothko, Installation View (Pacific Design Center, 2007)

But I also remember hearing the photographer Ralph Gibson suggest once that the deep rich black of printer’s ink came closer to conveying his ideas than the silver of printing paper. He was glad to sell 'original prints' to collectors but he implied that the book pages holding his images were truer to his vision.

Both of these examples, however, are about how important the material which makes up the image is to its impact and communication. To the contrary, it seems to me that Cartier-Bresson’s photographs (and most photographs for that matter) attempt to bypass the vehicle of their conveyance and present the actual physical world intact. And sometimes books can pull this off more effectively than the austere walls of a gallery whose purpose is to emphasize the preciousness of objects.

So take heart—for a small sum of money (the price of a book) you can enjoy the full beauty of Cartier-Bresson’s work, at its best, and in the comfort of your own home.

Joe

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Saving Face?

Photo courtesy Pentax

By Hugh Crawford

I was reading the press release for the Pentax Optio I-10, which says "In addition to popular features such as the innovative Small Face Filter, this upgraded version is programmed to detect not only human faces, but also the faces of dogs and cats [...] These features make it simple and effortless to capture delightful faces of active pets."

My software development experience suggests that after weeks of trying to remove the "accidentally focusing on dogs and cats" bug, engineering and marketing declared it a feature. The feature for automatically posting said pictures of cats to the internet with funny captions should be out by year's end. Meanwhile, my daughter's point-and-shoot camera will be imbued with the "Shroud of Turin feature" whereby it recognizes and tracks the faces it detects on manhole covers, burnt toast, and twenty dollar bills.

Does the Small Face Filter remove unexpected Rod Stewart hair along with red eye?

Hugh

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Hank Carter Coming to America!

Henri Cartier-Bresson (who sometimes Americanized his name to "Hank Carter" when traveling in America or with American friends*) will be the subject of a major show at New York City's Museum of Modern Art this spring.

MoMA, as H.C.-B. fans will recall, was the site of his first major American show, in 1947—originally planned when they thought it was going to be posthumous, as Cartier was believed to have been killed in the war (he was actually a POW). The new show will be the first Cartier-Bresson retrospective in the United States in more than thirty years.

"Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Modern Century" is in New York from April 11th through June 28th, 2010, and will then travel to The Art Institute of Chicago (where I'll be sure to catch it), the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMoMA), and the High Museum of Art, Atlanta. I expect the catalog to be fantastic! (Dare we hope for a new edition of The Decisive Moment, which in 58 years has never been reissued?)

"Hank Carter" in 1972. Photo by Martine Franck.

Mike
(Thanks to Yemado)

*Bill Bresler says it's a nickname given to him by Elliott Erwitt.

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Featured Comment by Jim Metzger: "Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy!"

Featured Comment by Bill Mitchell: "He de greatest! Without question more 'great' images than any other photographer (I would guess Eisenstadt is a distant second). Let us hope that time does not diminish appreciation of his achievement."

Featured Comment by Ken Tanaka: "Indeed, this 'Hank' show is coming here to the Art Institute of Chicago in July. I know the curators here are excited. I'll probably be visiting it at MoMA in advance of its arrival here.

"—Caution: Heresy Follows. Turn Your Children Away!—But while I am eager to see the show, and Peter Galassi's catalog, I can't help feeling like this is well over-trodden ground. Cartier-Bresson's work is delightful and always enjoyable to view. But it's been published and ruminated over so many times. Plus, as it's all rather contrasty small-scale black-and-white work it's been quite well represented in dozens of finely printed books over the past 5+ decades. What undiscovered revelations could possibly remain about this man's photography?

"Doesn't popular photo worship seems just a bit stuck in Rutsville, rather like the film 'Groundhog Day'?

"Museum curators either seem to reach way back for the crowd-pleasing (and attendance-encouraging) classics like this or way out to look-at-me dreck that's at the fringes of the definition of photography (like much of MoMA's recent 'New Photography' exhibition). There's a lot of other wonderful work, past and present, out there. (Tease: With a little luck and a little more funding I hope to be able to reveal a show of just such work at the Art Institute of Chicago in the coming months.)

"Okay, I'm ready to be led to the stake for my barbequeing now. You can let the kids back at the computer."

Mike replies: I can sympathize with this view, Ken—in fact I've been mulling over writing an essay about the ways in which culture is stuck, despite our self-concept of ourselves as a society accelerating at breakneck speed into the future. In many ways I would rather see a Vivian Maier show, although maybe someday I will.

Still, art is new to people who haven't experienced it before, and it has been thirty years since he had a major retrospective here. And it's always good to see original prints. And museums still have Rembrandt and Van Gogh shows, don't they? And Turner and Miro and Franz Kline? Seeing original Rothkos is a religious experience, never mind that it's no longer anything new. I intend to enjoy the H.C.-B. show for what it is. Maybe I'll meet up with you at the Art Institute—look for a guy with a beard wearing a carnation in the lapel of his trenchcoat.

P.S. I just saw "Groundhog Day" for the first time in 2009, and loved it. Old hat to you, no doubt.

The Revenge of the Bean Counters

By Kenneth Jarecke

I can tell you why the "frugal" Time cover written up in the previous post was such a bad harbinger for our industry. The going rate for a Time cover shoot—just the shoot, regardless of whether it was published or not—used to be $4,000 plus expenses. That was the flat fee—for Dirck Halstead, David Byrne, or even Andy Warhol. Of course, that doesn't mean you couldn't get as creative with your expenses as you could with the actual imagery!

Dirck (like myself) was a contract photographer, which means he was obligated to allow the magazine to publish the Lewinsky image (which was made on assignment for the magazine). Still, the $4,000 licensing fee would have applied.

I think the $1,800 fee Mike mentioned comes from some published price guidelines that were for images not specifically made for a cover, but I don't think anyone who knew better ever billed less than the standard $4,000.

All of Time's covers are collected by the Smithsonian. Which makes it a bit of an honor. So I can claim I have several of my photographs in the collection of the Smithsonian Institution.

In the past, the magazine was very protective of its cover images. They often demanded ownership of the copyright, and there was a separate contract for the covers. The last thing they wanted was for anyone else to run the same cover image inside their magazine, let alone on the cover. Which would have precluded the use of not only microstock, but even a wire image that had not been licensed exclusively for cover use.

During the Vietnam War, a UPI image appeared on the cover of both Time and Newsweek in the same week, and both magazines were extremely embarrassed. So, if you were a wire or agency shooter with the only shot of a historic, newsworthy event, you could receive more than the $4,000 for the cover, but technically the magazine would be licensing your complete take for use throughout the magazine that week.

(Obviously, there are rare situations such as the O.J. mugshot where there is no real ownership and both Time and Newsweek end up using the same image.)

Knowing all of this, in addition to knowing the proud history of the magazine, the printing of the April 27th 2009 "New Frugality" cover (and there 's another example which is even worse, a composite of three microstock images of a crying baby getting inoculated) was when the magazine publicly gave up on creating great, original content for its readers. At that point, even a casual viewer could see that the new mantra in newsmagazine publishing was "good enough is good enough."

That's why this was such a big deal. The bean-counters had finally beaten the creatives into submission. Sure, free content on the internet and the economy take a lot of the blame, but really you have to think this "victory" by the business side has to take a lot of the blame for the poor state of magazine publishing today.

I wonder if Steve Jobs can reverse this trend with his new gadget today? Maybe content—content of the highest quality—will matter again.

Ken

Kenneth Jarecke's Portfolio Website

Kenneth Jarecke's Blog

Editor's Note: And by the way, if you have never read Dirck Halstead's "The Monica Lesson," you really should—it's one of the quintessential essays of the digital transition, an essay I am certain will become part of the history of photography. —MJ

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Featured Comment by Jayson Merryfield: "As a bean-counter myself, I object to that line of thought. It is the penny-pinchers who are at the root of this issue (read: management who are more concerned with the bottom line than with artistic or creative standards). A bean-counter will tell you how many beans you have. A penny-pincher decides how many beans are spent."

Featured Comment by Geoff Wittig: "Which came first, the chicken, or the egg? Are magazines and newspapers disappearing like snow on a hot griddle because subscribers and advertisers are for mysterious reasons spending their dollars elsewhere? Or have readers and advertisers left in disgust because (after corporate consolidation saddled publications with colossal debt and absurd profit expectations) magazines and newspapers have so fatally degraded the quality of their product by squeezing every last nickel out of it?"

The Frugal TIME Cover (and Other Indignities)

I'm late on the uptick with this—I completely missed it when it happened, last Spring, and only learned about it yesterday from Stephen Gillette's "Featured Comment" to the iTunes post—but it's too interesting not to mention.

Illustrator Arthur Hochstein's April 27th, 2009, TIME cover

Photographer Robert Lam's microstock picture of a jar half-filled with coins was used for the "illustration" on the cover of TIME magazine for April 27th, 2009.  Here's the original image on iStockphoto. iStockphoto got the photo credit, and Robert evidently didn't even find out about it until July, when he got paid. He mentioned it on Model Mayhem and sparked a multi-page thread. He reports that he got $31.50 for the use of his image on the cover; iStockphoto's page seems to indicate they'd need a payment of at least $125, so presumably the agency got to keep the other $93.50.

The going rate for an editorial TIME cover is reportedly $1,800 plus expenses (for those of you who aren't pros, that's when they hire you and tell you what to shoot, presuming you're able to deliver what they want). For sure they've paid many multiples of that in the past, but doubtless for unique pictures that were highly newsworthy and timely (wonder how much Dirck Halstead got paid for the famous picture of Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky? I'll see if I can find out [UPDATE: See Dirck's Featured Comment below]).

Photographers love to p-ss and moan about microstock, and I sympathize, but look at it the other way around for a sec: what does it take, really, to do a photograph like that jar of coins? Admittedly, $31.50 probably doesn't even pay minimum wage for the time it took to do it, but microstock works (if it works) by making multiple sales. I'm sure 90% of our readers could do that shot. I'm sure dozens of other photographers have done that shot, or something very similar to it. And, really, why should TIME pay any more than it has to? Does Warren Buffet pay any more for toilet paper than anybody else does, just because he can?

From a non-photographer perspective, you've got to admit it's pretty funny that TIME paid $125 for a cover photo to illustrate a story about "The New Frugality"! At the very least, some art director there has a sense of humor.

And if you were in the business of selling microstock, wouldn't you be pleased to sell into such a high-level usage? Why is that any worse than selling into a phone book ad or a church newsletter? The seller sets the price. Getting his price (and such a prestigious clip) wasn't a bad thing for Robert Lam: he said of the sale, "I am happy."

But, looking at it from the other direction, look at the two little inset photos on the TIME cover above. Those two photographers got paid more than the guy who did the big shot.

I can't resist another pretty funny link fished out of the Model Mayhem thread (WARNING: some spicy workplace- and school-unfriendly language in this):

(If you can't see this video, go here.)

When I was at Photo Techniques, the sad fact is that we could have run most of our covers, and most of our portfolios, for free—most photographers would indeed have been more than happy to donate the work just for the publicity. But we paid. My reasoning was, it's a photography magazine, and if a photography magazine won't respect photographers enough to pay them for their work, who will?

And finally, for Lam, there was one last indignity. (As the saying goes, friends don't let friends sell microstock....)

Mike
(Thanks to Stephen Gillette, and Dan Hood and Derick Hingle from Model Mayhem)

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Featured Comment by Steve S.: "Mike, I do a lot of iStockphoto stuff. I make several thousand dollars a year—not enough to live on, but a nice side business and I can use the money right now.... Sometimes I put a lot of effort into a shot and it never pays back, but I also do a lot of work with my scanner. I have a scan of a cocktail napkin that took me maybe two minutes to do and upload to iStockphoto...I think that one shot has earned me about $300. Way more than the time I put into it! I love microstock, it's easy to upload and my images have been earning money for many years...."

Featured Comment by Stefan Zemp: "I would assume that it was a deliberate decision to use a cheap (microstock) photo for that cover—to show the new frugality."

Mike replies: That's what I assumed at first, maybe only because it's just the sort of thing I might do. But as you can read in the next post, Ken Jarecke thinks it's a symptom of a much deeper malaise, and he's in a better position to know.

Featured Comment by Dirck Halstead: "For most of my 29-year contract with Time, which ended in 2000, the going rate for a 'pickup' cover either from an agency or from an assigned take was $1750. However, any 'commissioned' cover from the Art Director was at least $5,000 plus expenses. FYI, the Monica photograph paid $7,500 for the cover. I had shot it while already on assignment for Time."

Ken Jarecke adds: The blog format makes it appear that I'm directly contradicting Dirck in the post that appears above this one. Actually, that post was written before Dirck's "featured comment" appeared here.

For the record, I take Dirck completely at his word. I can very well believe that the cover rate that I and others of my generation received was $1000 less than what they offered the contract photographers of the previous generation.

Random Excellence: Umida Akhmedova

It seems to me that every country in the world only has a few really outstanding photographers identified with it. Frankly, the country of Uzbekistan was not in my consciousness before I saw Umida Akhmedova's pictures of it. The pictures—you can see about 50 of them here—are honest and unflinching, as all good photography must be, but they show a country breathtaking in its beauty as well as a proud people for whom the photographer obviously has much affection.

The impact on me of seeing her pictures is that it makes me wish to visit Uzbekistan or, at least, to learn more about the country and its people.

Mike
(Thanks to Michael Seltzer)

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Featured Comment by Ian Loveday: "Yes, they are great pictures for an outsider to see (when or if I'll get to visit Uzbekistan I have no idea, but they certainly attract me). My point is...natives of a country (or region or city I suppose) can react badly to portrayals by (and to a large extent for) outsiders. I bought a book of photographs of China recently (China: A Visual Adventure, published by Carlton Books). Not a self consciously arty or prestigious book to be sure, but I liked some of the off-beat and non-tourist-cliché images it included, like wannabe punk rockers in Beijing. My Chinese wife was horrified. 'It must have been shot by a westerner,' she said. 'No Chinese photographer would publish pictures like that.'"

Mike adds: And don't forget it took a Swiss to do The Americans.

DSLR Sales Up Slightly...Maybe

Stephen Shankland at cnet.news is reporting that digital camera sales in 2009 totaled 106 million units, down 11.6% overall from 2008, but that DSLR sales increased 2.3% to 10 million units.

Here's an interesting wrinkle, though: Micro 4/3 cameras were counted as DSLRs! Leading to the unanswered question, would DSLR sales still be up if Micro 4/3 cameras had not been included in the category?

The article reports that sales are expected to rebound in 2010, though not to 2008 levels.

Mike
(Thanks to John Hogg)

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An iTunes for Print Media?

You might be only dimly aware of this, or you could easily know far more about it than I know (I haven't followed it closely), but Apple Computer is slated to make a major new product category introduction tomorrow morning in San Francisco. Expected is the "iPad," although that might not be its actual name, a "tablet" computer that would double as a multipurpose electronic reading device.

But there's likely to be more to it than that—possibly a lot more. Essentially, the rumors are that Steve Jobs hopes to do for print distribution what iTunes did for music distribution. Many traditional print media—newspaper and magazines—have been buffeted by "competition" from the web (which in some ways isn't really competition, functionally, since the web is mostly not professional and doesn't amount to a serviceable replacement*—but it is competition in a business sense, as trad media has seen its revenues and circulations shrink). They're likely to be so grateful to anyone attempting to propose and provide a viable business model going forward that they could be choosing to overlook, for now at least, the far-reaching ramifications of sharing or even ceding partial control of their content to a central distributor. There's already been a fair amount of unease over Amazon's attempts to wrest content from book publishers for the Kindle; it's possible that those are just the foothills of the mountainous battles to come over revenue sharing and control of content between Apple and traditional content gateways. (The music industry isn't in a state of unalloyed joy over the rise of the iTunes model.)

In any event, even though it doesn't have to do directly with photography (except that it has implications for newspaper and magazine photojournalism), the announcement tomorrow will probably be interesting, to say the least.

Mike

*And I say that as a web content provider.

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Featured Comment by Stephen Gillette: "Mike, please allow me to disagree with your opinion that the iSlate (I'll use that rumored name for today) has little to do directly with photography.

"The device will surely be much more elegant than any netbook, much more portable than any notebook, with an intuitive touch interface similar to the iPhone. And it should be perfect for viewing photographic content.

"The Amazon Kindle (which has been successful, maybe even wildly so) may be great for reading Harry Potter, but it can't handle Ansel Adams' 400 Photographs or William Eggleston's Guide. The iSlate may do just that.

"Personally, viewing photographic 'content' on an iPhone has never seemed practical, given the 3" screen. That has not stopped developers from offering endless iPhone/iPod Touch apps for photography. It looks very likely that all of these apps will port to the new Apple device.

"The iSlate may offer opportunities for photographers (and videographers) who can offer quality content and exploit the potential for mass distribution. This will require an enthusiastic, forward-looking understanding of where our culture is heading in regards to image making and sharing. I appreciate that some will find this evolution of the medium bewildering or even irritating. However, consider the artist/photographer. Or the photojournalist. Or the commercial photographer. All trends point to continued downward pressure on earnings. Time magazine has famously used iStockphoto to source a cover photo—for $30. The old models of doing business can no longer guarantee an ability to earn a living for hard-working photographers.

"I doubt that the iSlate will do for image-content creators what iTunes has done for musical artists. (And just what iTunes has done for music is still a developing story, with plenty of pros and cons.) But I will be very surprised, if the iSlate catches on like I think it will, if it doesn't open up opportunities for photographers that we can scarcely imagine now.

"One example: an inexpensive (think iTunes' or Kindle pricing) portfolio of images (think: photo book), which can be purchased and downloaded with minimal effort, might entice some to purchase a hard copy (ever easier to produce through a growing list of providers, such as Apple itself or Blurb), signed and with extra images. One tier up, the collector of photographs could order an original print from the photographer, and potentially in a size much larger than the printed book or iSlate iterations of the image. As awareness of the photographer and his/her work increases, the synergy of these multiple avenues of distribution will undoubtedly foster other opportunities, from commissions to exhibitions and collaborations.

"Tomorrow's Apple unveiling may well be the start of the next big thing for photography."

The Plight of Umida Akhmedova

Photo by Umida Akhmedova

Uzbek photographer Umida Akhmedova is awaiting trial and is facing a potential sentence of six months in prison or three years forced labor. At issue is a 2007 work called Men and Women from Dawn to Dusk that contains approximately 100 of her photographs of life and customs in Uzbekistan. A special commission tasked by the government prosecutor has analyzed the photographs and charged Ms. Akhmedova with "defamation and insulting Uzbek traditions."

There are ten of her photographs here. The story is told in the (brief) captions. It's a very quick read; won't take you more than a minute or two.

Let's be clear: this makes the Uzbeks look backward and uncultured, all right, just as they feared. But what makes them look so bad is not the photographs or the photographer (which are really quite nice, and perfectly respectful, at least the ones I've seen). It's the fact that they'd even think of prosecuting anyone for making documentary photographs of her own country.

Mike
(Thanks to Marcin Bieszczanin)

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OT: Live by Favre, Die by Favre

This is really just a private note between neighbors.

We like hating each other's football teams, but Minnesota and Wisconsin have a lot more in common than not. We're both fly-over states. We both get a lot of that slow-release rain five months a year. There's that famous "Minnesota Nice," of course, but people in Wisconsin are a lot the same kind of nice. We like our neighbors. We're like our neighbors.

I'm sure football fans in Minnesota are hurting this morning. Here's the thing. We love the guy too. But the thing that makes him great is the thing that breaks your heart. You live by Favre, you die by Favre. We know.

This isn't hindsight—we've watched him a lot longer than you have, remember? Remember 2007 and Corey Webster? The same drive that makes him the all-time iron man, the drive that gets him back out on the field battered, taped and limping to grind out the tying touchdown, the drive that keeps the records falling, is what sends him over the top. I said it out loud at the beginning of the game: impressive that he's had so few interceptions this year, but if the pressure gets intense, his true nature will turn up again. The same impulsiveness that makes him so exciting leads to the mistake that breaks your heart.

Your neighbors could have told you.

I was rooting for the Vikes all the way. (Never thought I'd say that.) I'm sorry the Vikes lost. (Never thought I'd say that.) And okay, I hope you keep the guy around for season #20. Your Vikings might not come home in February 2011 all bathed in Super Bowl glory either, but when you start feeling better, and look back on your 2009, you'll remember how much fun it was. And you'll realize how rare that kind of ride really is in the game.

It's kinda like life. It doesn't end well. But it's great to soar so high, on the way to that last pass.

Mike, in cheesehead mode

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U.K. Photographers Protest Police Harassment

Photo by Michael Perrin

This past Saturday, reports the BBC, more than 2000 photographers protested the indiscriminate harassment of innocent photographers under Britain's anti-terrorism laws. The protest took place in London's Trafalgar Square. 

Britain's law allows police to stop and search individuals without any indication of wrongdoing. Despite increasing calls for moderation—most recently from the European Court of Human Rights, which ruled that Britain's law is indiscriminate—the law is often used as an excuse to hassle and persecute photographers.

TOP is firmly in sympathy with the demonstrators. The act of photographing is by itself an extremely poor indicator of possible malign intent. There are plenty of ways for actual terrorists to get photographs of potential targets, either by accessing available existing images or by photographing surreptitiously. The act of photographing openly with plainly visible equipment most probably means a person is less likely than the average citizen to be a terrorist, not more. Police persecution of photographers, in our opinion, is just a way for police to appear busy without risk to themselves while actually doing nothing to improve public safety. (Case in point. Seems like somebody sends me a link to a similar video once or twice a week.)

CNN article about the event.

Photo by Flora Savastano

Mike
(Thanks to Steven House, and Rudy)

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Featured Comment by Mark Scheuern: "Security expert Bruce Schneier had an excellent editorial on the topic of photographer-terrorists in The Guardian in 2008."

Mike replies: I agree with you, Mark. That's probably the best commentary on the issue I've read.

Featured Comment by Roger Bradbury: "I was there, and I've probably got a shot of Michael Perrin taking the picture above. It was all good humoured, and after a while I stopped trying to keep out of everyone else's shot. It's just not possible.

"People brought all sorts of cameras. One guy brought a 5x4 camera and I watched him throw in a bit of front tilt to get his shot. He was up above the steps where I stood. Another had a handheld pinhole camera made from a roll film back and lots of black tape and card. A petite woman was carrying a folding Polaroid rangefinder camera with flash bulb gun, and a rollfilm SLR, and a Canon DSLR and a bag for her film and bulbs.

"Everyone was doing their own thing. If we are not careful Britain will become a place where you daren't do that, for fear of bringing yourself to someone's attention.

"Here are just a few other thoughts:

"Robert Roaldi wrote: '...and you have to justify your presence to them....' Quite. This is just one of the ways that 'innocent until proved guilty' is being phased out a bit at a time in the U.K.

"Perhaps the dog's jacket should have read, 'I'm a terrier not a terrorist,' but in Britain now that's close enough for the police to want 'a word.'

"Remember that this event was a mass photo gathering in defence of street photography. It was not a protest, because you need permission from the police to do that."

Photographers Find a Way to Help Haiti

Kudos to photographer Ezra Marcos for organizing a way for photographers to help with the Haitian relief effort. At an event organized by Marcos, Jacksonville, Florida photographers offered to shoot free portraits for anyone who would write a check—of any amount—to a Haitian relief agency. Marcos then put the donor's check into a stamped envelope and handed it back to the person to mail. He says he did it that way because he wanted a way to assure people that he wasn't profiting from the event.

Photographers reportedly spent 15 or 20 minutes with subjects in a variety of settings, and donors were impressed with the amount of care and skill the photographers put into the portraits.

The story is at the Florida Times-Union's Jacksonville.com News website.

Mike
(Thanks to David Graham)

Deals o' the Day

Amazon's one-day "Gold Box Special" this morning is Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 for for $188.99.

It's a bit difficult to figure out how much of a deal this actually is, though. Lightroom 3 is now in public beta, and if the prices for 3 stay the same as they were for 2 then the "savings" are a wash; adding the upgrade price to today's sale price won't save you anything over buying 3 when it ships. If 3 is going to incorporate a price rise, though, then this might be a good deal. In any event it splits up the cost into less painful chunks if money's an issue. Up to you; I'm just passing the news along.

Mike

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The Dark Cloud of Collecting...

By Ctein

There's a nasty little secret that Mike failed to mention in his columns on collecting.

Bob Dales hinted at its existence when he commented, "I have no more wall space but can't help myself" with regards to the recent dye transfer print sale. The secret Mike didn't impart in his collecting columns is that Bob isn't unique, or even uncommon. He represents a universal truth:

Nobody has enough wall space. Anyone who is hemidemisemi-serious about acquiring art ends up owning more work than they can display. It doesn't matter if you're building a structured collection like Mike is trying to do or if you're just accumulating a motley (like me). Either way, I guarantee you'll end up with more art than you have wall space for.

It also doesn't matter how rich you are. This is a situation where your artistic eyes will always be bigger than your habitable stomach (to coin a somewhat disquieting metaphor). More income lets you buy a bigger residence with more wall space. Surprise, surprise, it also lets you buy more art; that trick never works. The problem with art is that there is guaranteed to be more art in the world that you like than you will ever be able to afford. It's an open-ended game. Even for the super-rich, who endow entire museums to hold their collections. That at least solves the problem of how to de-clutter their full-to-the-brim mansions, but with only rare exceptions, most of what's in those museum collections is not on display but in storage at any given moment.

...And the silver lining
This points to the huge silver lining that surrounds the nasty little secret. Museums rotate their collection, changing what's hanging on their walls. You can do the same thing. In fact, you should. Rotation isn't merely a necessity, it's a genuine feature. It will substantially improve the quality of your life.

Regularly changing the art on your walls is a great way to freshen up the environment in which you spend your time and make it feel like something new. Once you've amassed enough of a collection (or motley) to require rotating art to see it all, it's a lot cheaper and easier than new furniture, wallpaper, or paint, but it's just as effective.

When should you rotate your art? When the art you have hanging on your walls becomes invisible to you. When it's part of the decor and you don't even notice it anymore, it's time for change. Keep the handful of pieces that truly inspire you or have such deep significance for you that you can't bear to have them out of sight, even if you're not noticing that they are in sight. All the rest, put them in the closet, pull out a bunch of new pieces, redecorate those walls, and sit back and enjoy the experience.

You will be amazed. You will see the art (heck, the whole room) afresh.

Give it a try if you don't believe me.

You can take this one to the bank.

Ctein

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Featured Comment by Martin Doonan: "Okay, here's a counterpoint for the peripatetic. I move a lot (just completing my seventh move in 13 years) so the walls rotate around the art, figuratively. Same art works helps make it feel like home. Fortunately the new place has a lot of wall space. Maybe the trick would be for me to have a rotating portion and a few selected 'home' pieces."

Leica: Could Be Worse

Without picking on any one individual, I'd like to address a common plaint about prices.

But first, I wonder if I could reproduce, unedited, a short passage from the website of a high-end stereo retailer. To make sure you understand the context, "interconnects" are the pairs of wires than connect one component to another—for example, a preamplifier to a power amplifier. Got that? Here's the quote:

On a 1-meter length, the retail price of ODIN cables are 3 1/2 times that of Valhalla which, while extremely expensive, is exceptionally reasonable considering what just one ODIN interface does for your system and a bargain when you think about the cost of other manufacturers’ top of the line cables which don’t do anything nearly as well. Fortunately, additional meters are priced quite a bit more reasonably.

For example, while a 1-meter of ODIN interconnect is $16,000. each additional meter is only $4,000 more.

So let's just parse that. A meter-long set of wires is said to be "exceptionally reasonable" on a value basis: "...considering what just one....does for your system"; and, although that meter pair is at the same time acknowledged to be "extremely expensive," it's "a bargain when you think about the cost of other manufacturers’ top of the line cables," meaning, the other manufacturers' cables must cost more than $16,000 per meter pair; and finally, you can double the length of your interconnects by buying an extra meter of length for "only" $4,000,* the word "only" implying that the cost is sensible and could have been more.

Insofar as this is a viable product at all, and I assume it actually is, it's plainly an example of a "Veblen good," named for Thorsten Veblen, meaning something for which demand does not decrease as as price increases, turning the normal "law of supply and demand" on its head.

As I've mulled over the worlds of high-end audio and photography, it increasingly seems curious to me that almost all products in high-end audio are Veblen goods, whereas almost none of the products in photography are. Top-end Canons and Nikons, while very expensive for cameras, are really not unreasonably priced given their technology and economics of production. Leica is essentially the only true Veblen good in photography. And compared to single meter pairs of hookup wire that cost $16,000, even an M9 is quite reasonably priced in comparison. After all, an M9 body costs less than the difference between a one-meter and a three-meter pair of Nordost Odin interconnects. Chump change.

In any event, long way to go for a small point: the conventional wisdom about the price of Leica products is, well, wrong. It's a commonplace to hear things like, "Leica needs to lower its prices to make its cameras more accessible to more people." No; no, it doesn't. It's desirable to its customer base in part because it is not accessible to more people. Leica wants it to cost more than most people can afford. It's a status symbol, and status symbols that everyone can afford are no longer status symbols. Just because a number of real photographers select it as their tool of choice for perfectly valid reasons doesn't make that untrue.

A related mistaken belief is that "one of the big camera companies should make an affordable digital rangefinder that takes M-mount lenses."** Actually, they shouldn't. Know why? Because there's no market for that. (Well, there is, but it's a very small one.) Only a few people really want a digital rangefinder. What people want is a Leica. It's not the same thing.

Mike

* To put you in context, the stuff I like best, after years of listening to various kinds of interconnects, costs $31.50 per meter pair. And an extra meter is "only" $7.50 more. (I have no connection to the manufacturer at the link except as a customer.)

**An alternative way of stating the same thing is, "It's time for the digital Zeiss Ikon." I could tell you why that's not going to happen, except I'm not allowed to tell you.

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UPDATE: As if on cue....

Featured Comment by Jim: "Mike wrote: '...it increasingly seems curious to me that almost all products in high-end audio are Veblen goods, whereas almost none of the products in photography are.'

"Actually there is a very simple reason for this...allow me to explain.

"First, some credentials: I work for one of the world's largest music companies, and I have produced or executive-produced more than 40 high-resolution DVD-Audio titles for my company. I have, in the past, worked in the film industry where I was also a post-production supervisor on many titles. I have been able to combine these disparate work experiences to produce Blu-ray HD concert titles for my company as well. So I have a bit of professional experience in this area. (Plus I am a photographer, but it is not my source of income.)

"As you might imagine, my company has the resources and equipment to test all sorts of claims about audio products and processes, which we do on occasion, mostly to settle internal disputes. Also in my company, there are a wide set of opinions about audio, ranging from the educated to the ridiculous.

"The reason that there are so many bogus products in the high-end audio world compared to the digital imaging world is because hearing audio is basically a psychological experience. You can't freeze-frame a piece of audio and examine it. It's ethereal, fleeting, and difficult for most people to judge objectively. Any bias that you have in your mind about an audio product or process gets amplified in your brain when you listen. It causes you to experience stuff you don't really hear.

"However, in the digital imaging realm, the actual image doesn't lie. Artifacts are either there or they're not. Fidelity is either there or it isn't. It is much easier to apply objective criteria to looking at an image than listening to audio.

"So in the digital imaging world you mostly won't find such crap as $500 exotic-wood chickenheaded knobs, or special goo, or $10,000 interconnects, or any other such nonsense. If you can't demonstrate that it has an effect on the image, your product is a sham. And by demonstrate, I mean show me in the actual image. When my friends ask me where they should buy their HDMI cables, I tell them to get the cheap $3 cables on Amazon. Order 3 or 4, and if you have a bad one, you still come out ahead.

"As an example of rampant audio pseudoscience, one myth that we deal with all the time at my company is whether MP3 files are significantly inferior to the original audio. When we remove variables like cheap 5 cent D/A converters, 10 cent headphone amplifiers, and $1.00 earbuds most often found on portable MP3 players from the equation, guess what? For all people tested, MP3 audio files achieve transparency against the original material at around 160kbps. Most so-called audio 'experts' refuse to believe this, but we've demonstrated it over and over again in blind ABX testing.

"I am not saying that the MP3 audio codec is perfect, only that for most applications it damn near is. Although I wouldn't want to use it for a glockenspiel recording :) ."

MR's Open Letter to Leica

Michael Reichmann at The Luminous-Landscape website has published an Open Letter to Leica outlining some of his ideas for the future industrial design of Leica's lead product. At one point he calls himself a "complainer," but of course he isn't that at all—what he's doing is thinking creatively about what a smart future direction for Leica might be, from the standpoint of a photographer who is both very sympathetic to Leica's past and has owned, used, and reviewed many different cameras from the dawn of digital to the present moment.

I love "newthink," and habitually approve. But one thought nagging at me from the back of my mind is that efforts at blank-sheet rethinks of classic German products haven't always gone so well. One example was the front-engined Porsche 928, which basically never sold well enough to justify its design and tooling costs. Even the New Beetle sold beyond all reasonable expectations. At Leica, further examples can be found in the M5, innovative (and actually a very nice camera to use) but rejected by the market in its day, and the DMR, which was  exactly what people said they wanted...except when it came time to buy one. The more conservatively-conceived M8 and M9, by contrast, essentially digital replicas of M film rangefinders, have both been rewarded with healthier sales.

Then again, the S2 is a fresh rethink if ever there was one (in fact, one that puts Nikon and Canon to shame), and might well prove to be a counterexample. Maybe Michael's proposals could be another. But in any event, ultimate viability isn't the immediate point of the article. The point is Michael's analysis, observations, and ideas.

Mike

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Featured Comment by Gordon Lewis: "If the success of the M9 has taught Leica anything it's that radical innovation is not the path to success. The M9 is essentially an M7 that uses a full-frame digital sensor. The only thing 'radical' about the M7 was that it was the first Leica rangefinder to have automatic, aperture-preferred metering—an innovation that appeared on other cameras back in the mid-seventies.

"What I suspect M9 users like so much about it is that it's a high-performing old-school alternative to today's over-engineered, menu-driven, bulky DSLRs. Leica's best bet, assuming they can afford the tooling costs, is to offer a Leica R-series DSLR that has a full-frame sensor and uses Leica's existing line of R-lenses. The very thought of manual-focus lenses with aperture rings and depth-of-field scales, mounted onto camera bodies with usable focusing screens and direct controls instead of deep menus is making me perspire. The only thing keeping me from hyperventilating is the realization of how much such a simple and elegant camera would cost."