Pixels

• I can't say this yet without violating The Pinker Rule*, but I got this book the other day and I think I love it. (U.K. link.)

• I did not laugh at this video like the rest of the world is doing. I cringed. In total sympathy. I thought, poor guy. And I thought: yep, something like that could've happened to me....

No photographer can laugh when both the guy's cameras got dunked.

• Idea for a new law: Term limits for late-night comedians. It's gotten difficult to explain to 17-year-olds that yes, David Letterman and Jay Leno were actually funny once. And inventive. Edgy, even. Craig Ferguson is the only one who does an actual "monologue" any more.

Noticed how the word "edgy" no longer is?

• The strange Finnish light, high up on the slope of the world, must be having an effect on Saikat Biswas' brain. His strange and lovely Holga D dream....

• Photographer's life in graph form.

• And speaking of words, we're sick of passionate. Passionate has become the perfect corporate anodyne term. Mid-level office workers are required to be passionate about the company's mission. Passionate has nothing to do with passion any more.

• Another "lurid dream," this one from Canon.

• Say what? From an online article about LeBron James:

Oh, well, at least they didn't say "flashbulbs" like magazine and newspaper writers have been doing for decades.

• Latest perfectly good word ruined by pop culture: minions. They're cute, though.

Mike
(Thanks to Steven Ralser, Jay Smith, Adam Isler, and Tyler Monson)

*The Pinker Rule states that you are not allowed to recommend a book until you've finished reading it.

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Original contents copyright 2010 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

Note time stamp. This this getting to be a pattern?

Featured Comment by David L.: "Add 'epic' to the list of words overused, meaningless, and often applied to things that aren't. If you haven't heard it often, it is because you are over 30 or haven't been around surfers/snowboarders lately. Lucky you.... A few days ago I went for a full-day bike trip with some friends. I described it as a 'near-century' whereas one ride buddy dubbed it 'totally epic.' Ugh."

Featured Comment by Arthur: "That graph doesn't have nearly enough dips."

Featured Comment by Carl Blesch: "I'm passionate about avoiding corporate-speak. I knew it was time to leave my last job when my boss tore apart some talking points I wrote and told me instead to write, 'we have a laser-like focus on our market.' Spare me, please!"

Featured Comment by Brad: "As a guy who used to do wedding photography for [you call that] a living, I also found nothing amusing in the video. What did strike me, however, was that the photographer fired off 21 exposures in about five seconds before taking his bath. Twenty-one practically identical iterations of the same 'moment.'

"It's a different world. I used to expose about 80 frames of VPS 120 to cover a complete wedding, drop the film off at the lab on the way home, pick it up on Monday, stuff a proof book, and deliver it to the client the same day. Total post-production time: 30 minutes. Some would argue that he gets to choose among 21 iterations to get the best facial expression, etc., but we accomplished the same thing by planning, anticipation, and timing. I hear of guys who shoot literally thousands of images per wedding. I shudder at the thought of the post-production overhead."

Featured Comment by Hugh Look: "1) The new Gerry Badger book is very good: I'm reading slowly as I want it to last; 2) You are right about 'passionate'; this is what finally killed it for me:

 

Featured Comment by Patrick Snook: "Oh, I don't know, I could get quite passionate about a vending machine. Some of them are quite fetching in a frock. Or a company mission—never heard of the mission position? Very sexy! Try Googling 'our passion, not just our' and weep. I'm away now to see if I can stir the passion to go to the supermarket. Maybe I'll try the organic supermarket. Perhaps find an organic supplement to put wood in my pencil*. Organic...don't get me started on that one!

*(N.b., not lead in my pencil. My son's school principal always asks the kids at the beginning of the school year to bring 'lead-free' pencils. Sigh.)"

Featured Comment to end all featured comments by MBS: "Glad someone is finally blowing the whistle on this disruptive situation: the thinning of meaning in the American Way of Life. Once words like 'passion' were dynamic, robust, value-laden expressions that could be leveraged in conversation for a number of special effects. These smart, scalable bits of linguistic synergy might be re-purposed to raise the tenor of the discussion to new, ground-breaking heights, or spin it into a next-gen, cutting-edge, market bleeding, enterprise class, cross-platform rap of cataclysmic, sticky, pure paradigm-shifting and -shimmering soup. I'm talking the secret sauce, here, man; the organic mindshare, the perfect storm of mental sign and signification! A win-win if I ever I saw one. Thank you for bringing this up. You're the man, the avatar.  Words cannot express (not anymore, anyway)….  I only wish I cold adequately respond, but I just don't have the bandwidth."

Comments

[Mark]

The wedding photographer was asking for it. Time to chimp but not to look behind him once! Good of the video guy to look out for him too, hah.

[MJFerron]

Becoming a skilled comedian must be one of the toughest achievements in the entertainment industry. Few make me laugh. Rodney Dangerfield had to be may all time favorite.

Just seeing the nervous, spastic, bug eyed Rodney come out on stage had me prepped to chuckle. The king is dead but not forgotten.

[Jeff]

Your comment about passion is amazing.

[Geoff Wittig]

Dang it, Mike....
I keep promising myself to stop buying more books until I've read (most of) the ones already accumulating all over my house like a heavy snowfall. And yet...

Amazon's 'one-click ordering': crack cocaine for the bibliophile.

[David Bostedo]

Mike - Could you explain what's wrong with saying "flashing cell phone cameras"? Many cell phones have built in flashes.

[Alan Klughammer]

What is this obsession with "do all" cameras (Canon's lurid dream) and/or cell phone cameras?
I wonder if they (and Canon of all people) would know a great image if it came and slapped them in the face?
We photographers are much to blame though. We constantly try and buy new equipment in the hopes it will "fix" all our problems.
All I want is a simple, manual, interchangeable lens camera that makes a good espresso....

[Will Frostmill]

re: Holga . D

Saikat Biswas has a blog entry on the Holga . D, here.

I find the concept charming, but his execution absolutely brilliant! What great design chops that fellow has. I hope he goes far.

[Paul]

If the Holga D isn´t a joke, it´s really simplicity at it´s best! It would be very nice if some Japanese manufacturer could make a normal full frame camera without all the Holga "defects" based on this design. I certainly don´t need much else to enjoy photography.
Paul

[David Dyer-Bennet]

And I notice the first person helping the photographer OUT of the fountain grabbed the camera first -- maybe another photographer, then?

The memory cards will probably be fine, with the existing photos on them. But I hope he has a THIRD body and some lenses around!

[Blake]

The wedding video link locked up my computer

[Aaron Scott]

I may have misunderstood you, but when the journalists said "flashing cell phone cameras" they weren't saying that people were using their cell phones to take pictures, but rather that they were using the flashes on their cell phones. It's a pretty common feature with smart phones these days. Still not bulbs, though - they're LEDs.

[B]

My cameraphone has a flash, and it's four years old. Maybe that's been lost to cameraphone evolution, since four years ago might as well be the mesozoic.

[Jim Witkowski]

I was laughing about the cell phone flash thing untill the person in the next cube showed me his.

[antonis]

"the highfaultin video demo"

was that an intended pun? I wonder.
And shudder at the idea of the future-cam

[Michael Steinbach]

RE: The poor photographer. Mike I think you missed the joke... he was shooting Canon!

[Randy Cole]

The video of the hapless wedding photographer is another one of those clips in which surprise generates a laugh, followed by a guilty sympathy. My sympathy goes out to this poor guy and every other photographer and participant caught up these spectacles of nuptial excess.

Nevertheless, as a photographer one is responsible not only for the contents of every frame but also for maintaining awareness of his/her surroundings. I'm thankful it wasn't a rooftop wedding.

[Jan]

Mike, any chance you could tell us some more about the Badger book? It looks quite interesting!

[Mike Johnston]

Jan,
I will write a full review of it, but I really need to finish reading it first. Given everything on my plate at the moment, that is unlikely to happen with extreme speed, but it will happen.

Mike

[Jeremy Pardoe]

Add 'Awesome' to the list.

[Doug Howk]

That misuse of word "passion" really hit home. In my previous employment a VP went around to every employee under him asking what they were passionate about. I told him my wife/family and photography (I'm in computer software dev). Not too long thereafter when the company was acquired and ensuing layoffs, I was included by the VP in those layoffs. Does management really expect passion from their employees when treated so cavalierly.

[Kent]

Sorry to be an insensitive buffoon, but I thought the wedding photographer video was hilarious!

The upside: he probably won't make that mistake again. We all learn and grow in pretty much the same way, and for me the "yup, saw that coming" aspect was part of the fun. Been there, done that ... if not in precisely the same way.

[hugh crawford]

"passion" the sufferings of a martyr.

Terrific is one of my favorite words, as it is synonymous with both awesome and awful.

[Mike Plews]

It's been weeks since anyone said convergence, synergy or paradigm shift in my presence. I haven't been told to think out of the box yet this year.
I might say that I am cautiously optimistic but only time will tell. I might say that but then I hope one of you would hunt me down and slap some sense into me.

[Isaac Crawford]

My least favorite/most mangled word that I see in the papers is "vow." If I see one more mention of a politician "vowing" to end whatever gripe they have I think I'll puke. With all the vowing going around, I imagine the house and the senate sounding like a Shakespearian play...

[Maggie Osterberg]

Seymour Valentine, I do not think that word means what you think it means.

[Doug Newman]

The lack of a rear LCD on the Digital Holga concept reminds me of really early digital cameras like this:
http://www.nikonweb.com/dcs420/

[Ian Loveday]

"Passionate"? "Epic"? what about "Awesome"? or has that passed into mainstream acceptance now? and just to rub it in, usually a mere "awesome" is not enough, it has to be "Totally awesome". I told someone recently the word originated from people referring to Awesome Welles, the great movie director. I think they believed me. Very sad.

[Christopher Lane]

During the day I work for a HUGE global corporation. I hate, hate corporate-speak. It is truly diluting the English language. I never use it if I can avoid it. Fortunately, "passionate" hasn't come our way yet. My daughter is passionate about acting. I am passionate about photography (and my wife -- Hi Hon). I will never, not ever, be passionate about my job. Many other positive terms describe that, but passion is not one of them.

[Doug Klassen]

I thought the behavior of the photographer in the video was unprofessional before he fell in the fountain. Walking backwards half way down the isle with the camera flashing in the couple's face was rude. He apparently had no confidence in his ability to get the right images at the right moments without inserting himself prominently into the event.

[Martin Doonan]

Commenting on multi-link posts like this is tricky...(carefully avoiding the over-used word nightmare). here goes:

Late night comedians have a law: the law of declining wit, evidenced by being given a late night talk show.

Wedding photo forgets 60s of location shooting. Whatever happened to planning an activity?

Canon's dream: so much wrong there I hardly know where to begin. Do these guys ever use a camera? As for the whole video-stills convergence, I think the new micro-4/3 video camera will blow that one to smithereens.

Annoyingly misused technical words: mainframe. Doesn't anyone in movies use computers?

Word of the day: I learnt the words "musteline" and "mustelid" yesterday. They'll come in handy.

[Mani Sitaraman]

Dear TOP,

Reflecting on my reaction to the wedding photographer, I realize that what made me cringe was the sight of the camera gear getting dunked, not the spectacle of the photographer taking what could well have been a nasty backwards fall.

Does this make me a pathetic inhuman gear-head?

[Bill Rogers]

Actually, that DID happen to me. I was shooting at night at the WWII Memorial in Washington, DC. Looking through the viewfinder, I walked straight into one of the fountain pools, fell, got soaked, and dunked my D70. Not one of my prouder moments. (The camera worked fine after drying out ...)

[Bill Rogers]

And what the heck ... add "anodyne" to the list!

[Leigh Higginson]

Imagne my disappointment when I realised that the Holga was only a concept and not real, I was credit card in hand searching for the contact details. Then I saw the graph,(um? I've stopped using the tripod and HDR)Oh well I'd better get practising then!
Leigh

[Bryce Lee in Burlington, Ontario Canada]

"It's gotten difficult to explain to 17-year-olds that yes, David Letterman and Jay Leno were actually funny once. And inventive. "

Mike, the 17 year old is yours, and
I sympathize with him and you.

Television used to be entertaining,
now it is simply another intrusion
upon our lives.

Guess it is easier to turn off the
receiver than
for us to get turned on.

[Iñaki]

Latest perfectly normal word distorted and overused by suits and stockholders: innovation.

[Karl]

That digital Holga? I would gladly pay for something like that. The design and build seem a very un-holgaesque top notch. I would use my Holga 120 and 135BC nonstop if they had just one more control - adjustable shutter speed. They would easily be my one camera, one lens setup.

[Dennis Ng]

One of the reason I start my film photography about 6 years ago (again) is holga. It attracts because its honesty. The package comes with a black tape to minimise (or select) light leak.

This is NOT a holga D. No light leak and the color is not satured enough (default C41 to E6 or vice visa) etc. mode.

It looks more like a real Lecia to me, except for the lens may not be as good. The Epson RD1 is similar (if one simply close the back) and further simplify the design, it will becomes this "Holga D". I think it is the real R2D2.

[Ken White]

I'd be very surprised if something very like the Canon 2030 prototype is not on some current five year plan. Maybe the technology (and size) would have to be slightly scaled back but the concept is just a minor extension of current consumer products.

Given the accelerating pace of change in technical consumer goods I'd say the Canon concept will be outmoded long before 2030. Think miniature wearable optical gear before 2030. What you see is what you photograph without the black box, big glass or distinction between still and video.

[hugo solo]

I cryng all night.

[photogdave]

I think we have to add 'journey' to the list. If you ever have the misfortune of having to endure a reality show where contestants are voted off and viewers are shown their 'journey' during the show, you'll know what I mean. If you played it like a drinking game you would be dead of alcohol poisoning within one episode!
PS: I don't encourage participation in drinking games. Especially ones based on reality shows.

[Doug Newman]

Patrick, someone ought to tell your son's principal that all pencils are lead-free. I am not aware of actual lead ever having been used in pencils ... pencil "lead" has been made from graphite for centuries.

I wouldn't be surprised if someone is taking advantage of this and advertising their pencils as "lead-free," though.

http://xkcd.com/641/ (be sure to read the alt-text for maximum funniness)

[robert e]

I'm not sure the word "edgy" was ever much more than marketing-speak. In my experience it usually signified something that had the appearance or trappings of dark, risky or even dangerous thinking, but delivered something that was largely trivialized or sanitized for mainstream audiences looking for entertainment with a bit of titillation rather than challenge.

I don't mean to suggest that "edgy" doesn't describe the Letterman show, or that "edgy" wasn't enormously fun and entertaining. I'm just sayin'.

I agree that the word seems to have lost its usefulness. That's probably the fate of marketing words, and I'd intended to say that this goes to show that the word was more about image than substance, but I got to thinking about timing, and then wondering whether 9/11 and its aftermath damped American audiences' taste for such things, along with the need for words to promote them.

[Doug Newman]

And I just saw a well-timed banner ad for a place calling itself the "most passionate" online photography store. According to its web site, it's also the "funnest." (It's from Hong Kong, where "funnest" might be standard English for all I know.)

[Andy Kowalczyk]

Should the wedding couple be blessed with children, maybe they will hire him to cover the baptism?

[Mike Johnston]

Doug and others,
Last night I turned on the television and happened to see a feature about "giggle auditions." People were going into a studio and giggling, trying to get their giggle chosen for an ad campaign.

Cut to the director, who was saying, in perfect earnest, words to the effect of, "The most important thing about your giggle is that it should be AUTHENTIC. I keep telling people, what we are looking for if you want your giggle to be used in a national advertising campaign is AUTHENTICITY."

Surreal.

I had to wonder if he actually understands what the word "authentic" means.

Mike

[Mike]

Why did the wedding photographer need to take so many pictures! Sorry about his cameras, but the frame rate was ridiculous. Is that what wedding photography has come to?

On the passion front, I was once told a story about a man who sold his advertsiing business when a young lady explaned that 'now is a very exciting time to be in frozen chips...'

Mike

[Malcolm E. Leader]

The worst, by far, in my opinion, is the use of ANY adjective with the word "unique". Unique cannot be modified BY definition so "really unique", "quite unique", and "____ unique are all incorrect. Of course, they could be repeatedly redundant...

[Rob Atkins]

I'd like to add a grip about two words: portrait and landscape. Whatever happened to horizontal and vertical? Art Kane made horizontal portraits and Ansel Adams certainly made a few vertical landscapes, after all.

Sad how Art Kane work isn't seen much any more. sadder still how his life ended.

Just some late night thoughts...

[Paul]

I, too, am looking forward to the Gerry Badger book. He (Badger) is one of my favorite writers on photography. He seems to find just the right mix between hard facts and poetry.

[Robert Roaldi]

I wrote this bit about corporate passion a few years ago: http://roberts-rants.blogspot.com/2005/05/ordering-pizza.html

[Al Patterson]

Too bad. I used to be a "Tech Services Minion" in one job, now I'll have to take that off my resume.

And, it would take YEARS to damage "minion" as bad as "extreme" has been. Extreme has been so overused I just roll my eyes and shake my head when I see it in an ad. And then I walk away and buy another product.

[Ludovic]

I must admit the "HDR hole" in the photographer's life as a graph made me giggle. Lots.

[MBS]

Ludovic...

http://www.viruscomix.com/page523.html

I think that's the "HDR hole" near the top right, by the sign that says, "NO! IT'S STOPPED MAKING SENSE!"