The Online Photographer

Book Report

I told you I'd report back once Paul Trevor's book Like You've Never Been Away got here. It arrived very quickly from Bluecoat Press, Liverpool. (As I mentioned before, the way to get it is to go to the book's Amazon U.K. page, click on "3 new for £9.99," then select "Add to Basket" for the Bluecoat Press option. Ignore the bit on the Amazon page about the book being temporarily out of stock.)

The news is both good and bad. To begin with, the reproduction quality is quite fine—extremely fine for a £10 book. The hardest thing to get right in black-and-white—not just in reproduction, but in originals, too—is tonality, and the tonal properties of these pictures are rich and evocative for the most part, looking like real photographs, with their own tonal style, the middle values lowered on the scale like Rodinal used to do with shouldered films.

Considering that it's modestly-sized and only a paperback, the book is well-crafted and put together with skill and care, with sewn signatures and using good materials.

Unfortunately, however, most of the pictures are horizontals, and all the horizontal pictures are run double-truck, spread over two pages...uniformly, without regard for the content of each picture.

Some of the pictures are ruined by the gutter (a poor little fellow in a family portrait on p. 43 virtually disappears), and some more are only hurt by it. Fortunately, many of the pictures are "field-centered," with the loci of visual interest placed here and there in the visual field, rather than "object-centered," so the gutter doesn't ruin very many pictures. This picture, an example of the former, is okay...

(Granted it doesn't look great here—sorry about the poor quickie snaps—but it's a lot less offensive when you're holding the real book in your hand. You do get the sense that you can see the picture adequately.)

But this one is definitely ruined...

The relatively few vertical pictures, however, each reproduced cleanly one picture to a page, make it obvious how the book ought to have been printed—as a square, with the verticals and horizontals run same-size, one to a page. The overpowering temptation that book designers feel to sacrifice the visual integrity of photographs for the sake of size apparently becomes irresistible to them in the case of small books—they simply believe size is more important. They're wrong—visual integrity is more important, at least when the photographs are the point of the book and the photos aren't being used as mere page decor. The smaller (one page) verticals in this book are not perhaps ideally sized, but are large enough.

The intrusive gutter is only intolerable in a few of the pictures. Balance the problem against the fact that the book is very inexpensive, and that it's the only way to get the work if you can't get to Liverpool to see the show. On balance the work is still good to have. Still recommended, with the asterisk.

'From Craft to Art'
In this context I should bring up another beautiful little book that has fallen within my sphere recently, Robert Doisneau: From Craft to Art. This is a gorgeously made little volume, with very attractive embossed pale green paper covered boards (hardcover, that is) and complementary mustard-colored endpapers, and what I would call a mature design: elegant, skillful, but not extrovert. (Note that it may have several different covers: the one illustrated on the Amazon page is not the one I bought locally and that is shown here.) The book is well supported with text, mainly an extensively revised and translated c. 1980 long essay by Jean-François Chevrier (although modified for this book, it retains the tense of the original, written when Doisneau, who died in 1994, was still alive). I'm tempted to call it mainly a reader's book—it even has a bound-in placemaker ribbon; the plates don't start until page 81.

The reason I mention it, and at the risk of seeming like someone who will complain no matter what, is that this is one of the few books I've encountered recently where the reproductions really are too small. Again, we're talking about degrees here: most of the pictures convey adequately. The reproduction quality, typical of Steidl's black-and-white, is capable but not delectable (Steidl's books tend to have well-supported blacks—I mean blacks that are black enough—but that lack tonal separation in the shadows). Although the book design is exemplary, the largest of the pictures is only about 5 x 5", and many are smaller. As with the Trevor book, this affects different pictures in different ways. Many look fine; but some have too much detail to be seen comfortably at such small sizes—centers of visual interest to which the eye is led by the compositions just don't reward close looking; the details don't have space to breathe.

As with the Trevor book, I still recommend this—especially if you feel you'd like to read about Doisneau. It's an elegant little example of the bookmaker's art. (Here's the U.K. link and one for The Book Depository.) Asterisked, as with the above.

 

Steve McCurry masterwork
Finally, just a simple heads-up for the well-heeled: Phaidon's deluxe, slipcased, limited-edition McCurry retrospective, Steve McCurry: The Iconic Photographs, has just been published (last June 13th), at a list price of $400. Each oversized book—and I mean oversized; at 500x375mm (19.75x14.75 in.) and 320 pages, your coffee table had better have sturdy legs—is signed, and comes with an original photograph which is also signed by the photographer. There are 3,300 copies overall, 1,100 of those for the U.S.

Each book comes with a signed Lambda print of Flowerseller, Dal Lake, Srinagar, Kashmir, 1996

For those to whom the nearly $250 Amazon wants for this tome is a wee tad too dear, my old fave Looking East: Portraits by Steve McCurry is still in print for a more palatable $31 (and a bargain at that price, given its stellar printing quality). In fact I think I'll go console myself about not being able to afford the big book by pulling Looking East down off the shelf.

Here's the U.K. link (for the Iconic book, I mean), and here's one for The Book Depository.

Mike

Send this post to a friend

Please help support TOP by patronizing our sponsors B&H Photo and Amazon

Note: Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. More...
Original contents copyright 2011 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

Featured Comment by Andre: "+1 for Looking East: Portraits by Steve McCurry I've had a copy for a while now and I've considered buying a second just to cut the binding and frame some of the photos. I hope that's not too sacrilegious for the book lovers out there."

Mike replies: I've done that three or four times. In each case I've used "hurt" or incomplete copies of the books in question, or books with library markings, and I basically started from the other direction: it was inspired by first finding myself confronted with the hurt book and thinking about what I could do to salvage something of it without having to just throw it away. So maybe look for a cheap used copy that's somehow hurt or that has a binding in poor condition? For instance, Midtown Scholar Bookstore lists a copy on Amazon for $12.95 described this way: "GOOD—This is a hurt hardcover book with some tearing, scuffing, bumping, creasing and a torn dust jacket. Still, it is fully usable and the flaws are only cosmetic." Hard to tell from that if the pages are perfect, but you could call and ask.

I agree that the pages of Looking East are worthy of framing, more so than most posters.

Featured Comment by Paul Trevor: "Hi Mike, your criticism of my book is fair. There are some points I'd like to offer in defence of the publisher.

1. It was published primarily as the catalog for the show, so most people would already have seen the photographs.
2. Like wine, the book can only improve with time, as the pages gradually flatten!
3. The binding is excellent. This means the flattening process can be sped up without fear of destroying the spine by pressing down the center of open spreads or by bending the two halves of the book backwards. This has worked well with my copy.

"But I'll definitely pass on Stan B's comment about how books with a 'soft' spine can improve the viewing experience."

'Doing a Good Job'

Lots of people probably won't read the previous post. People like "right-sized" posts and don't tend to read the long ones. (Same with comments.)

I woke up this morning meaning to add a very short coda to yesterday's post, before I get started watching the golf, to the effect that good habits just aren't that hard to get into. Think through the issues of permanence and the "store 'n' ignore" principle from the start, and it's just not that much extra work.

And then here's what I found in my morning's email, from old e-friend Paul Butzi out on the West Coast:

The discussion you're having (leading?) about archiving/preservation/conservation is an interesting one, and of course it's gotten to the point (as it must always) where someone is asking, not unreasonably, why bother?

Arguments can be made both ways.  Future historical value—sure, maybe. Preserving a legacy, maybe. Ego, maybe. The vast majority of photographs made are worthless, surely.

But what I've noticed is that putting in a sensible amount of effort to order and preserve my photographs is part of what I think of as "doing a good job." And, in the end, photography as a pastime is more enjoyable and more rewarding to me when I have the sense that I'm doing the best job I can at it. If I'm going to do a crappy job, why bother? Doing a crappy job is no fun at all.

And thus, my argument for why it's important to take modest measures to order your work sensibly and make it possible it will survive into the future: it's more fun that way.

Doing it right as you go along really doesn't cost much at all in the way of extra time, effort, or expense.

Even if you haven't done anything about preservation in the past, maybe think about starting now and doing a better job from here on out.

Mike
(Thanks to Paul for his permission to publish his email)

Send this post to a friend

Please help support TOP by patronizing our sponsors B&H Photo and Amazon

Note: Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. More...
Original contents copyright 2011 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

More on Image Permanence

Richard Newman asks: "Mike, the discussions by Ctein, you, and others, of how long photographs will last, leads me to ask a few questions. There seems to be an assumption that all photographs should be saved forever, no matter what. So I ask: How long is 'forever'? Why all photographs? Will many of these trillions (or more) images be of any value to anyone? In some distant future, will anyone care?" [See the Comments section of the previous post to read Richard's entire comment.]

Mike replies: Obviously what matters most is that our archives remain accessible to us for as long as we might need them. For example, when I started thinking of having this spring's print sale myself, a picture that popped into my mind is a "lakescape" I took in the '80s on 4x5 color film. The work I did in color 4x5 was by far the most popular with other people of all of the photography I've done in my life; it accounted for most of my early sales (as well as most of my early compliments). But I can't find that negative. It's likely that it's in a box in the basement, and might well have been damaged by the humidity and mildew even if I am eventually able to find it. This is a basic failure of preservation.

Another case using myself as an example is that one of my more interesting pictures was taken on a job in the early '90s. It was "work for hire" and I never owned or possessed the negative. I think it's 75% likely that the archives of that employer from that time no longer exist, and that that negative is now gone. So what I'm left with is one small drugstore print that we used as proofs on that job, and one "fine print" on fiber-base paper that I made from the negative at work. Now that I'm thinking of putting together a book of my 60 or so best 35mm pictures—of which that picture would surely be one—you can imagine how important it is to me that the single print I possess was well made on durable materials.

The best case: set-and-forget
Most of everything will be lost over time, no matter what we do. What we're advocating for are a) materials that don't automatically self-destruct, so that the small percentage of them that happen adventitiously to survive can indeed survive; and b) that people think outside of their own immediate individual interests when it comes to the evidence of the things they've witnessed during their time on Earth. It's true that this is no more likely to be of interest to everybody in the future than our work right now is of interest to everybody; but it might be important to somebody, and it might even be important to history, society, or culture.

One problem is that "now" has no idea what "posterity" might value. Ctein used the example of childhood pictures of people who grew up to be President. If your grandson is a future world leader, you can imagine that your pictures of your children will be of great interest to historians—interest that you cannot right now possibly predict.

Eight Ways To Preserve Your Pictures

A lot of the encomia to digital that I've been reading for the past decade smack slightly but distinctly of rationalization. Most such apologias aren't a balanced view. There's no problem with that, necessarily—we're making a case for what we like and what we do, and that's only natural—but the fact has to be acknowledged that for the moment, people are perceived as having "taken sides"—even those few who are, in fact, objective.

The discussion around here recently about "image permanence" (it can no longer be called print permanence, since so few people are printmakers these days) seems to me to have those same undertones.

The reactionary views, the ones that go too far the other way, aren't balanced either.

In any event, I know I've written about this before, but I feel like thinking it through again. So here's my current list of the best ways to preserve your pictures.

1. Be famous. Far and away the best strategy for image preservation, although it can be tough to implement. If you can get yourself on all the lists of "the 100 most important photographers" and secure all the trappings of proper regard by the proper people, from gallery shows to commercial coffee-table books to selling your prints on a regular, ongoing basis for the prices most people pay for a car or even a house, you won't have to worry about preservation. Other people will take care of it for you.

I seem to recall that a pair of artists called the Starn twins even deliberately used non-archival materials (like cellophane tape) in their artworks, and said, in interviews, that they didn't worry about it because it wasn't their problem, it was the problem of art conservators of the future. What I'm saying is that if you can insure, by your fame and renown and the value of everything you touch, that your work will automatically come under the care of art conservators in the future, then you'll have solved the image permanence problem. Or most of it.

2. Make the work good. If you can't be famous, at least be good. I'm going to go on thinking that good work stands a better chance of survival than bad work. If I'm wrong about that, I don't want to know.

3. Make the work valuable. It should be self-evident why this can help.

4. Disseminate your work. In the digital realm this is called "redundancy." It means making lots of copies and spreading them around to different places. This removes the danger of single objects being destroyed by accident or caprice, and increases the likelihood of survivors. One good way to do this is make and sell many prints, or publish your pictures in a book that sells tens of thousands of copies.

I think it's fair to say that Gordon Lewis's picture "Precipitation" will still have people looking at it a century from now—we sold 77 original prints in our Print Offer for the picture, and the picture was published in George Barr's book Why Photographs Work. That's aside from whatever efforts Gordon's made to preserve the picture in his own private sphere. I suppose there's a chance that all the copies of the print and all the copies of the book might find oblivion, but this picture has a pretty darn good shot at survival.

5. Redact the work. What this means is to put your work into finished, viewable form that fully embodies your intentionality—or that looks exactly the way you want it to look, to put it in plainer English. Finishing your work and making it fully presentable allows to work to defend itself, you might say. It allows it to make its own case. Work that other people know how to value stands a better chance of lasting; lots of important artifacts are lost or destroyed because people just don't realize what they are, or what their significance is.

6. Craft objects. I mean "craft" as a verb and "objects" meaning tangible art-product. I've made this case before—finely-made things tend to project their own virtue and suggest, even to the uninitiated, their worth. They're likely to be accorded respect and to avoid the contempt that causes other worthless things to be destroyed.

One old tradition that's gone mostly out of fashion is the portfolio—here I don't mean a single presentation of work collected together to be used as a sales tool or to show off what you can do; I mean creating a set of boxed pictures in an edition, for sale, like Ansel Adams did regularly throughout his life. Every so often he'd create, what, a dozen fine prints, mat them, and put them in a beautiful box with an embossed title. He'd make a certain number of them and sell them. Chances are most of them are still intact—and all of them that are intact are currently highly valued. You can see the pictures he chose in his book The Portfolios of Ansel Adams, which simply reproduces the pictures included in each of his portfolios.

7. Don't burden the curators. I mean amateur curators—custodians—too, not just the professionals who will handle only a minuscule fraction of our work. I'll start off by suggesting that the two baseline requirements are that the pictures be viewable and stable (i.e., "store once" or "save once") without extraordinary measures. The more work that has to be done to keep your work viewable and stable, the less likely it will be to survive. By "viewable," all I mean is that someone coming across it will know what it is. If a stranger could find it and think, "Oh, look at this old photograph," then it's viewable. If, on the other hand, a stranger comes across an unlabeled, outmoded media disk or tape for which peripherals are no longer made or supported, then the work is not viewable and consequently at risk if it's out in the world.

In this context I wonder about the wisdom of the current fad for big prints. Yes, that makes them more valuable now, but at the lower levels of photographic practice that I inhabit, bigness is not a preservative—the opposite seems to be more the case. Give someone a big print and it's less likely to be framed, more difficult to store, and of course big prints are harder to handle and hence easier to damage.

"Permanence" in materials and processes—the topic of conversation almost exclusively when image permanence is discussed among photographers—is really little more than a subhead of this category—item 7-1. The less a future curator has to do to ensure the viewability and stability of an image—the easier it is for him or her to "store'n'ignore" the piece—the better. Nineteen-fifties color prints like illustration 1 from Ctein's column last Wednesday are possibly the worst, because they require expert attention and hundreds of dollars in expense just to become viewable—I'm sure it didn't escape you that that's all his restoration did; he didn't stabilize the original artifact so it couldn't deteriorate further than it already has. That would be an additional burden for true conservation.

8. Don't make your archive too big. The bigger the archive, the less likely it is to survive. Big archives require more of everything—more space, more attention, more conservation, more curation (to get what's worthwhile or useful out of them). Obviously, as working photographers, we need to have all our shooting accessible to us, so our archives tend to be big and inclusive, and this suggestion fights against that natural requirement of the working artist. I think I've suggested elsewhere, though, that a very good strategy to see your work through the next generation or two is to put all of your best stuff in one small box and label it "My Best Photographs." It would be hard-hearted heir who would toss that out. But leave a roomful of crap and chances are it will all go to the dumpster—because no one can do the hard work of separating the few good things from the mass of worthless things. You didn't do it, how could they be expected to?

Crazy, man
So now we come down to my opinion, and that's all it is. But here goes. I think anyone who tries to make the case that digital images are more durable than analog ones is just plain crazy. I've been looking at old photographs for thirty years, and in my mind the contest isn't even close, unless you're talking about the periodic "disaster materials" like iron salt prints from WWII or color prints from the period Ctein was talking about. Just my belief, doesn't have to be yours. Maybe I'll make that case someday, but not now.

If you want the artifacts you make to last physically, that's pretty easy, if you assume the object will be given basic care and can stay out of the way of disasters: Shoot 4x5 to 8x10 black-and-white film. Most sheet film is on a polyester base, which is extremely stable, and developed-out, metalized silver (the dark parts of a negative) is also very stable. Assuming "ordinary" care and protection, that negative will last a thousand years without the requirement for further effort. It can even survive the smoke from a fire (which destroys a lot more than fire does, typically—that includes lives, too; more people die of smoke inhalation than burns in fires) and temporary immersion in water, as long as it's "rescued" afterwards.

Of course it's not entirely viewable without being accompanied by a positive, but at least it's identifiable as what it is (assuming people recognize it) without further technology being deployed.

Here's another strategy. Get a few simple archival boxes like this 8x10 Century Box. Make loose 8x10" prints—on archivally processed fiber-base paper if you're printing analog, or an approved pigment inkset / paper combination if you're printing digitally. Identify the pictures by writing in pencil on the back. Add a sheet on top with sufficient information to inform a stranger about the significance of the contents of the box. The boxes hold fifty to a hundred prints (depending on the thickness of your paper) and fit neatly on almost any bookshelf. Work-in-progress is very easy to accommodate in this format—just add or remove prints from the box as your ideas about the sets change.

I'm not suggesting you store all your work this way—just the best of it. How many boxes will hold the pictures of yours you think people in the future will want to have? One, six, two dozen? Even two dozen would be just a short shelf of neat boxes storable in any bookcase. Few people would toss such a small, neat, well-organized archive...

...Especially if you're famous and good. That part's up to you.

Mike

Send this post to a friend

Please help support TOP by patronizing our sponsors B&H Photo and Amazon

Note: Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. More...
Original contents copyright 2011 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

A Print Offer with a Twist

With some trepidation (I'm a curious case...I'm quite self-centered, but not egotistical at all—so much so that the empty space where my ego should be can be a problem for me at times), I've decided to have a "minor" print sale of a picture by a photographer who definitely isn't collectible...(long pause)...me.

It will be for a signed print of "Color Picture" made by Digital Silver Imaging (DSI) in Boston. So it's a digital picture printed on traditional black-and-white silver gelatin fiber-base paper.

I have to admit this is not something I would probably normally do. If you've been reading TOP for a while, it's probably pretty clear to you that I don't use this site to glorify or publicize my own work, or try to make myself seem like an important photographer when I'm not. But then again...I figure if I can sell 18 prints, I can cover the cost of Lulu's operation (she's still recuperating, if you're curious—bored and mournful from being kept cooped up all the time), and if I can sell 36 of them, I can cover that and the cost of the next operation too, the one she's going to need on her right hind leg at some point in the future. As a bonus, another six prints after that will cover the cost of the ventilation system for the darkroom. (Maybe I shouldn't mention that, lest it be a disincentive for those who are hostile to darkrooms. Oh, well.)

For those of you who followed the arguments a few weeks ago about limited editions (here and here), I've devised another little twist to this sale, to follow the layers already discussed. I'll tell you about that when the sale is announced.

By the way, despite the long period of silence recently when it comes to Print Offers, I've been very busy with it behind the scenes. I cast about twenty lines in the water, got six (maybe seven) bites, and hooked (hmm, this metaphor is working less well the further it goes along, isn't it?) two beauties, at least tentatively. The trouble is, neither party was free to do it this Spring. We will have some great ones coming up, though.

Mike

Send this post to a friend

Please help support TOP by patronizing our sponsors B&H Photo and Amazon

Note: Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. More...
Original contents copyright 2011 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

The End of Leitz

Does anybody know of a site or page on the web that recounts in detail the ownership changes of Leica since the Leitz family sold the company in 1986? I haven't dug very deep yet, but I'm not having a lot of luck coming up with the information. I thought it was commonplace and would be easy to find, but I'm not coming up with much....

I've just gotten curious as to why no one these days ever talks about the Leitz family or its influence on the marque. I'm also a bit curious as to why they would sell the company just then, only a few years after the popular and strong-selling M6 came out.

Anyway, if the Cloud-Mind could be of any help here, the Fog-Mind (moi) would be grateful.

Mike

Send this post to a friend

Please help support TOP by patronizing our sponsors B&H Photo and Amazon

Note: Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. More...
Original contents copyright 2011 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

Featured Comment by Michael: "You missed your chance to have a post called 'Leitz Out'...sorry, couldn't resist."

Ephemera

By Ctein

Over the past several weeks, many readers have raised concerns about the permanence of photographs, whether film or digital. Truly, they have every reason to be concerned. It's a problem that has bothered me ever since Henry Wilhelm opened my eyes to this in the mid-1970s (we have been lifelong friends, since).

In practice, photography has not proven to be a very durable set of media. The examples people trot forth of photographs that have survived a century are almost never in their original condition; they are merely recognizable images. Worse, that enduring photographic record of the 20th century, while a far more extensive documenting of humanity than has ever existed before, is but a small fraction of all the photographs made and now lost.

We have the mistaken impression that photography is durable because what has endured is so extensive and we remember victories, not losses. Almost axiomatically, there is little way to remember the losses. It's a kind of cultural posttraumatic amnesia; the photographs that disappear from view mostly get forgotten.

This, of course, is what concerns us all. Photographs are our memories! Unfortunately, we are badly brain-damaged, and while we may be dimly aware of it there is very little we can do about it.

Oh sure, almost all those old photographs (if they physically exist, and most of them don't) can be restored. That is, in part, my business. It's expensive. For what I charge to restore a mere dozen or so individual photographs, you could have all the data recovered from the most decrepit and ancient hard drive. That's an important point: theory says you can preserve old photographs against deterioration and restore them when they do deteriorate. Theory also says you can recover digital data from almost any medium at any time. All it requires is a sufficient application of expertise and money. Especially money.

Nice theory. In practice, how often does that happen? Very rarely. The theoretical permanence of well-processed black-and-white photographs and prints or of well-processed Kodachrome film is as irrelevant to the collective discussion as assuming that everyone will follow proper archiving practices, backups, and storage-medium/format updates for their digital photographs. Those media don't constitute the vast majority of photographs and most of the photographs made in those theoretically-durable media were not well-stored and preserved. If your stuff still looks good, I am happy for you; just realize that you are one of the lucky few.

In the real world, no modern photographic medium, analog or digital, has shown itself to be durable. It only lasts when ordinary people take measures that are, well, extraordinary.

I have been pondering whether the situation is now better or worse than it used to be, and I don't have a clear-cut answer. Mostly that is from a lack of historical perspective; we are simply too newly into the digital age to know what the future will bring.

1. On the left, an all-too-typical color photograph from 1950. It's essentially blank to the naked eye. As the right figure shows, it's possible to recover the image to a satisfactory degree, but hundreds of dollars of work went into achieving this. What percentage of old photos will ever get this treatment?

In the case of film photography, the record is all too clear. Most photographs, slides, negatives, and prints, from 1946 through 1960 are already deteriorated to the point where they are essentially unviewable (illustration 1). Most of them are recoverable but never will be recovered. Not enough money, not enough time, not enough skilled restorers on the planet.

2. By the early-mid '60s, prints were a lot more durable than in the '50s, but that's damning with faint praise. This degree of restoration only costs in the double-digits, but that's still more than most photos will ever receive.

The photographs from 1960 to about 1980 are on the same path (illustration 2). On average they are in better shape because materials improved and less time has passed. On average they are in worse shape because of the increasing shift to chromogenic materials which, back then, lacked in permanance (although God knows they were much better than their 1950s predecessors). Give it another 20 years and most of that cultural record will be gone. I'm not talking about the really important events that were documented up one side and down the other; I'm talking about the mass cultural record that those of us alive at the time made for our own pleasure and to preserve our own memories.

A third of a century of photography is already mostly lost. Very little of it will survive intact another 25 years.

Things got a lot better starting in the early 1980s. E6, C41, late EP2, and RA4 film and paper processes all led to increasingly permanent materials. By the end of the Film Era, chromogenic prints had better display permanence than even dye transfer as well as an entirely acceptable dark-keeping lifetime. Late-generation E6 slides are, in practice, as permanent or more so than K12 Kodachromes were. These photographs will continue to deteriorate, but nowhere as rapidly.

Even black-and-white, on average, has become more permanent, primarily because the vast majority of earlier stuff was really badly processed. I get to see the evidence for that regularly; it is not a pretty sight. Black-and-white RC papers, for example, may not be as durable as fiber-based papers when given ideal processing, but I assure you that a far smaller fraction of fiber-based prints ever received anything close to ideal processing. That theory-vs.-practice thing again.

That is an extremely abbreviated history of analog photographic permanance. So abbreviated, in fact, that it includes numerous minor inaccuracies. The overall picture, though, reads truly enough; view it in broad strokes.

So what about digital photography? The initial period is going to be rocky. Hell, it already has been rocky. I'm going to guess that the majority of photographs from the first decade of the Digital Era will be lost (for some definition of "first decade:" your dating system may differ from mine). Again, I'm talking real practice, not theory. With digital, it's even more about practices than inherent characteristics of the media. Said practices were very, very sloppy.

I suspect that is changing rapidly. Your average camera-wielders are getting much better about preserving their photographs, much more quickly than I expected. The reason, I think, is because the everyday records and data of one's life are going increasingly electronic.

My housemate, Paula, and I were surprised this last year when the IRS told us they would no longer be sending us paper tax forms to fill out; we would have to download them from online. Hardly a burden; we still file on paper, so that's what we did. What really startled us was to learn how much of a minority we are in; only about 5% of all tax returns are filed on paper these days. We had no idea.

That's the way the average citizen's world is very rapidly moving, and in that world there are strong forces at work to improve overall digital durability in practice as well as theory. In the dark, on the hard drive, all bits look the same. Doesn't matter if it's someone's photographs, their music, video, or movie collection, their electronic books, their bank statements and check stubs, or their tax returns. As a pleasant, inevitable side effect one's personal photographs will get preserved and maintained along with all the rest of one's electronic life.

Analog photography lost more than a third of the century. I'll be very surprised if digital photography loses even a quarter. Maybe not even much more than another few years beyond the already-past decade.

I hate it when any photographs are lost. But I've come to sincerely believe that we are better off now than we used to be in the Analog Era. I've seen how badly that worked out.

Ctein

Ctein, the author of Digital Restoration from Start to Finish, writes a regular weekly column (not always on restoration issues—sometimes, it's parrots) for The Online Photographer that is published on Wednesdays.

Send this post to a friend

Please help support TOP by patronizing our sponsors B&H Photo and Amazon

Note: Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. More...
Original contents copyright 2011 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

Featured Comment by Jim: "It always comes down to money! But, why should we preserve them? I read recently that there are 43 billion photos now uploaded to Facebook, another five billion to flickr. And, I would guess, perhaps trillions living on hard drives around the world. I'm not convinced it's a good thing they survive.

"I burned tens of thousands of negatives and prints from 50 years of my photography (I'm a photojournalist) heavily documenting my area a few years ago because I couldn't give them away to historical societies, etc. Sent out dozens of letters, made numerous phone calls. Too expensive and space-intensive to store and conserve them, they all said. Too expensive to scan and convert them all to digital, they all said.

"For most of my photography career I worried about archiving prints and negatives, and then digital files. But I don't concern myself with it anymore. Most of these trillions of images being constantly recorded these days will never be looked at again anyway.

"Perhaps they should be as impermanent as our own memories, which gracefully degrade as we age and then disappear when we die."

Mike replies: That's a painful story, Jim. I almost hate to say this, but it's at least possible that you destroyed your work during its stay in the "Trough of No Value." That doesn't mean it might not have been valuable to future generations or historians, just that it wasn't valuable to them yet.

A Most Beautiful Little Lens

Lovers of the iconic and legendary "fast 50" will no doubt be delighted that the Micro 4/3 system continues to bear fruit in providing options, with the new Leica 25mm DG Summilux ASPH lens for Micro 4/3 just announced.

When I was a kid, the "fast 50" prime lens was the premium standard in every line. I tried 'em all during my "lens fanatic" days. Everyone had a good one—Nikon, Canon, Minolta, Miranda, Konica, and so on—and my favorite, the Pentax. About the only one that wasn't so good was the old 1961(?) Summilux-M, which was...decent, I guess (no hate towards users), but disappointing compared to the famous Summicrons that made Leica's fame. And also compared to Leica's highly characterful but aberration-laden earlier faster 50s like the wacky but delightful Summarit ƒ/1.5 that Johnny Deadman used to such great effect. So, in the later days of Leitz* and the early days of Leica, most M shooters ignored the 50mm Summilux in favor of the one-stop-slower 'Cron (or, in far fewer cases, the over-the-top Noctilux). Leica later made up for this with the 55mm-filter thread Summilux-R, which I very much liked and which, if I remember correctly, was the optical expert Harold Merklinger's favorite lens at the time. 

Before the current 50mm Summilux-M ASPH (which I have written about extensively elsewhere) was introduced, Leica had actually been investigating the feasibility of a new no-holds-barred Summicron, but concluded that it would have to sell for so much that the cost wouldn't support the now modest ƒ/2 specification. So it decided to create an ƒ/1.4 version instead; this was the first great fast 50 for the M system—astonishingly well perfected. If a trifle clinical—gone was the "pleasing roundness" of image that Leica used to defend as being more satisfying to the eye than on the test bench.

It's amazing to consider how few cameramakers have provided a digital-specific "fast 50" equivalent. It wasn't until the 35mms for APS-C gained fashionability relatively recently—the Sony SAM and then the Nikon DX. Of course these are not premium lenses. Not that that really matters much these days, with lens manufacture essentially a solved problem.

Leica/Panasonic brought out a lovely 25mm ƒ/1.4 for the 4/3rds system (discontinued), a lens that is both characterful and excellent. It was also expensive and huge, and in these days when zooms have taken over like the rats in Hamlin, it found limited, if approving, favor.

Thank god that hasn't stopped Panasonic from creating this, the Micro 4/3 equivalent of that beautiful throwback. This Chinese website shows pictures of the lens and sample images; note especially pictures 5–8, which show the "right size" of the new lens compared to its 4/3 system counterpart. Perfect.

And the block diagram and MTF charts for this new lens reveal that it's definitely a premium lens. It's far from a classic Planar design, but nine elements with two aspheric elements and one "ultra" high refractive index element indicate an effort that was not cost-constrained to any significant degree. This will be an expensive lens when it gets here, but that will be okay with those who love fine lenses. (If that MTF chart fails to impress at first glance, note that the topmost line set is for 20 lp/mm, not 10 or 5 as on most MTF charts.)

That Chinese photographer knows how to put a fast prime through its paces to reveal its character. The bokeh—important, of course, for a lens of this specification—has all of the classic character (coherent but characterful, not fuzzy-smooth) that the best fast 50s provide. I would have no concerns about purchase on that score, except that I would want to look at the bokeh in the corners.

This new lens will doubtless not find vast popularity—primes are now the province of purists—but on the occasions you do see one in the future, you will have found a photographer who is in the know when it comes to fine optics.

Bravo, is my comment.

Here's the press release.

Mike

*The founding family of Leitz sold Leica in 1986. The underwhelming 50mm Summilux-M hunkered in the lineup unloved all the way until the early 2000s, outsold by the Summicron 10 to 1 by some reports. 

Send this post to a friend

Please help support TOP by patronizing our sponsors B&H Photo and Amazon

Note: Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. More...
Original contents copyright 2011 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

Featured Comment by andy: "It should not escape the casual reader of this fine blog that now we, the superannuated former users of prime lens on rangefinders and oddball SLR bodies (think OM, Pentax) have a wealth of choices in the Micro 4/3 system in the classic lengths: 14/2.5 (28mm), 17/2.8 (35-ish mm), 20/1.7 (40mm), and the new 25/1.4 (50mm). Oly is soon to announce a 12/2 (24mm). I have the first three of these, and they are tiny, sharp, and eminently useable. And did I mention they were small? Best of all, they are not crazy-priced.

"If what you want—and it's a niche—is a fast, small kit for street and travel photography, and can't afford, or don't want to be a Leica-weenie, it's the best system around right now, IMHO."

Featured Comment by Steve G, Mendocino: "I'll be sticking to my 20mm ƒ/1.7, thanks. Love that little guy, which I use on an EP-1 with a Voigtlander 40mm viewfinder. I did purchase the Leica/Panasonic 45mm, and found it to be unimpressive—especially for the price—and wound up trading it back."

Featured Comment by Robin Dreyer: "As a user of the Nikon 35 DX I can say that there's nothing in the pictures to suggest that it's not a premium lens. I know it's really not, but it doesn't give you much reason to care. And when I take off my heavy work lens and put on the 35 and just take some pictures, it's like taking off my boots and putting on flip-flops."

Panasonic GF Series to Continue to Get Smaller

SA*

In an interview with the Japanese magazine Fashion Camera
(方法カメラ) yesterday, a spokesman for the Panasonic Corporation revealed the company's ultimate aspirations for its GF mirrorless camera: to make it as small as a contact lens.

"Engineers need goals," said Toshiro "Elmer" Kikuchiyo. "People really liked the size of the GF1, so we made it smaller. That made our customers 23% happier, so, when our engineers came to us looking sort of aimless and lost, our management direction was clear."

Elmer said he expects the current direction to continue. In Japan, one iteration or generation of a concept is enough to establish a tradition. At the current rate, the Panasonic GF camera will be essentially too small to see easily by 2023, at approximately the GF18.

"We envision it being too small to find when you drop it on the floor," said Elmer, smiling, "like a contact lens. This will make our customers 819% more happy."

As the camera gets smaller, its instruction book will get larger.

Asked if perhaps the ever-diminishing size might not have consequences in terms of photographic competence and capability, Elmer replied that only one of their designers, who he identified as Hideo, is a photographer. Hideo originally thought that the best direction might be to start with the excellent base of the GF1 and add photographic capability. Panasonic opted for the opposite approach. "First, in the GF1, we eliminated the superfluous viewfinder," said Elmer. "Now we've eliminated the hot shoe. Some of our more visionary designers are already proposing to eliminate the LCD viewing screen next. And why not? You can't see it outside anyway." He added that Hideo is a good employee and keeps quiet.

If he ever does say anything, Hideo will be assigned to figuring out how to make ink cartridges for inkjet printers hold less ink.

Mike

*Satire Alert. This post in no way reflects the views, beliefs, or intentions of Panasonic Corp. or any of its employees named Hideo.

Send this post to a friend

Please help support TOP by patronizing our sponsors B&H Photo and Amazon

Note: Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. More...
Original contents copyright 2011 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

Featured Comment by Edward Taylor: "Then there is this—quoted from Engaget: 'We know some of you have been a little disappointed in Panasonic's GF line of Micro Four Thirds cams as they've shed advanced features and become more "consumer friendly"—terrifying words for any serious user to hear. But, we've got some good news, at some point in the future the GF line will split with a more professionally-minded model sold alongside the more simplistic GF3. That's straight from the mouth of Ichiro Kitao, the head of Panasonic's camera division, who spoke to PhotoRadar about the company's plans. When the GF1 will finally get a spiritual successor isn't exactly clear, but we're glad to hear the pocketable Micro Four Thirds series will finally get another serious shooter.'"

Mike replies: Will this happen before or after the pro-level Olympus Micro 4/3 body arrives? Sorry, I'm being cynical again. Can't help it sometimes, though.

Featured Comment by Jim McDermott: "Stop knocking Panasonic and Sony. We all realize the benefits of the truly pocketable camera, or as Mike calls it, the DMD. That magical moment arrives, you plunge your hand into your pocket, whip out the DMD, pause only to blow off the tissue fluff, take a second look, blow off that last, stubborn bit of fluff, switch on the camera, deftly descend through three menus on the touch screen, set the action program, touch back to shoot mode, raise the camera at arm's length to peer into the rear screen (your only option), whack celebrity in face accidentally as you do so, get knocked to the ground by said celebrity's boyfriend, land heavily on DMD, make mental note as you lose consciousness to bring along Gandolfi next time."

Update: Paul Trevor and Don Hunstein

Don Hunstein by Robert Phillips

First, Don: You'll remember when I did the brief post about Dylan's 70th birthday I added a P.S. that said, "Extra credit: Name that photographer." The photographer who took the cover of "The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan" was Don Hunstein. I tried to reach Don by email without success, but it turns out TOP reader Robert Phillips took a couple of "phone pics" of Don at a small opening of a show of Don's work at the Rock Archive gallery in London a couple of years ago. Don—who from all reports is a very nice fellow—is smiling in one, but Robert says he likes this shot better, so here it is. Thanks to Robert for his permission to show these.

And, strangely enough, and purely by coincidence, this isn't the first time Don Hunstein's work has appeared on TOP. He also took this album cover, featured in a post here last November.

An alternate from the shoot. Robert thinks the actual cover was shot on 6x6.

And by the way, "The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan" is a fine album. I'm not sure I've ever heard it before as a whole—it came out before my time—and although I've heard many of the songs before, it's been a long time for a lot of them. It was nice experience getting acquainted.

•     •     •

Next, Paul: I was gratified to learn after the fact that Paul Trevor, whose delightful work from Liverpool we linked to last week, is already a fan of TOP. We've had a nice exchange of emails, and Paul has agreed in principle to participate in a Print Sale here on TOP next year—details as yet undecided, of course (so please don't ask—I'd tell you if I knew, but I don't).

He also gave me a few additional links which you might find interesting. Most importantly, there is a book of some of the Liverpool pictures. Called (like the show) Like You've Never Been Away, it's published by Colin Wilkinson's Bluecoat Press, which specializes in books of local-to-Liverpool interest. If you'd like to track one down, you have to use Amazon U.K. Go to this link first. Ignore the part about it being temporarily out of stock—Amazon doesn't stock it at all—and click on the link just below that, where it says "[x] new from £9.99," and then choose the one from the Bluecoat Press, which will allow you to get it directly from the publisher.

I ordered two copies, in case I want to give one as a gift. I'll report back to you once I receive it. The low price doesn't auger too well for reproduction quality, but we'll see.

Additionally, The Telegraph is showing a selection of the work on the web, and the BBC made a seven-minute video about his efforts to track down people in the photos.

Fun stuff. I can't wait to see some prints and work with Paul to pick two or three for a print offer.

Mike

Send this post to a friend

Please help support TOP by patronizing our sponsors B&H Photo and Amazon

Note: Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. More...
Original contents copyright 2011 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

Congratulations to the Graduates!

Yr. Hmbl. Ed.'s niece Christy. Employers, take note!

I have to admit I'm not big on ceremonies. They mostly bore me, and I must not be very susceptible to the sense of sanctification they bring to life's mileposts for many.

Yesterday, however, my son Zander graduated from high school. Not with particular distinction, I have to admit—he's not naturally a scholar, even though he's bright, even wise, in many ways.

Still, the event was emotional for me. As regular readers might already know, eighteen and a half years ago I brought Zander home for the first time when he was a mere five days old. A tiny, scrunch-faced, wizened little neonate who slept most of the time and cried a lot the rest of the time. Six days earlier, I'd had no idea I was about to become a father—no inkling at all that his mother was pregnant. I learned I'd be getting custody at midnight the night before, and I'd had exactly nine hours—from midnight to nine o'clock in the morning, specifically—to prepare for his arrival. I brought him home in a carseat that I had begged off an Emergency Room nurse at four in the morning, and the supplies I'd hurriedly purchased the night before were sitting in two grocery sacks in the middle of the living room floor. I had never fed a baby, never burped a baby—never even really held a baby longer than a few seconds—and I had never changed a diaper.

All that changed pretty quick. It has been an adventure, brother.

And I remember thinking, in those difficult early days, that if I could just get him safely to his high school graduation, I would have done about the best I could. He'd be a legal adult; I would have done most of what I could do for him by then. He'd be launched—maybe not ideally, but adequately. (When you're a single father, "good enough" is about as good as you can do.) I turned 35 a few weeks after he was born, and I remember thinking, way back then, that I just needed to make it to 54. If I can last till he graduates, then he'll be all right.

Well, we made it, yesterday, Zander and I. And he is all right. He's a great guy—sensible, interesting, quick-witted, and a guy who knows his mind.

So anyway, here's a toast to all the graduates of the spring of 2011—high school (including my nephew, Zander's cousin, David, who is a scholar—he'll be attending the University of Texas at Dallas on a full scholarship), college (including David's big sister Christy, who graduated from Grinnell, which she thoroughly loved, a couple of weeks ago), and graduate school.

So why doesn't this post have an "OT" (off topic) in the title? Well, it's not entirely off topic. You see, the speaker at Christy's graduation, out in Iowa (I didn't attend—long drive from here, plus, see above re ceremonies) was none other than Henry Wilhelm of Wilhelm Imaging Research! Turns out Henry is Grinnell Class of '68.

Charlie, my brother, who took both these photos, said he didn't catch Henry looking up at the audience even once.

Oh, and by the way, there was one fascinating little tidbit in the program—seems Henry was a photographer for the '66 Grinnell Yearbook, "which," the program cryptically relates, "was banned by the college and not published till 1986." You don't have to have your reporter's instincts honed to a razor's edge to guess that there must be a story in there somewhere....

Mike
(Thanks to Charlie)

Send this post to a friend

Please help support TOP by patronizing our sponsors B&H Photo and Amazon

Note: Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. More...
Original contents copyright 2011 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

Featured Comment by Timmy: "As read on many online posts on the topic, "The college president at the time, Glenn Leggett, had banned the 1966 yearbook co-edited by Wilhelm because of allegedly libelous photos that today barely seem scandalous. (There was a close-up of a student's hand, for instance, that held a smoldering joint.)" Here's the likely first source.

Mike replies: Good article, Timmy, thanks. I especially like the line, "He does for color images what fuel economy stickers do for automobiles or nutrition labels do for food products."

Featured Comment by Bron Janulis: "Mike, Congratulations to you, Zander and your family! I have some empathy for the sudden arrival of a small child, and considering your circumstances, well, good on you Mike, good on you!"

Mike replies: Bron, yes, you do know. You and your wife are an inspiration too.

Featured Comment by Karl Knize: "I have great empathy for your adventure, Mike, and know how difficult it's been. Your journey and mine have been different, but with some commonality. Sixteen years ago I was married and childless, happily living and working in a little storefront condo that my wife and I had begged, borrowed and stolen to get, when her sister finally careened over the edge from alcohol. We had a choice to make: let her kids go into the Missouri DCFS system, or step up.

"So one day I was childless and the next day I had three, ages five, eight, and 11. My first trip to Costco was a real eye-opener—as was leaving the condo the next week and renting a house. But I got lucky, worked hard, shot way, way more product than I ever intended, and made it to 1995, 10 years, when my wheels came off. The issues under the surface, the chilhood abuse that overtook my sister-in-law had caught up with my wife, and, as with my sister-in-law, the alcohol had taken over. About six months before my wife passed from cirrhosis we got a call from DCFS again, and took in the last of my sister-in-law's children, a baby at the time of the first rescue. And we had had two of our own along the way....

"Now, the oldest works as an administrative assistant to the library commissioner here in Chicago and graduated from DePaul. Also, she was recently the (successful) campaign manager for an alderman. The next oldest,who always struggled in school works in a program at the main library; the next manages a coffee shop and teaches art and dance; the next, the last arrival,works at DQ; and my 13 and 15 year olds, still at home, are A/B students,with my freshman son attending the No. 1 school in the state, North Side Prep.

"Life can certainly throw you some curve balls, can't it? But with me, beyond the crushing pain of losing my wife, watching her fade away, the role I've played and the responsibility have given my life substance that I never imagined. I'm not the photographer I set out to be, and never will get to that place, but I think that the role I've played, as you have, makes being a famous or even well known photographer seem kind of irrelevant.You stepped up to the bar, however imperfectly, and did the hard duty that really counts for something in the end.

"I didn't intend to recount all of this. But I suppose I did because I could see some of your journey in my own.

"Good job."

Mike replies: And to you, Karl, and to you...that is quite an amazing story! And an amazing journey you've been on.

Tsk, Tsk—Bad, Very Bad!

SA*

A Guest Post by L. T. Gray

I'm afraid our friend Lloyd Chambers has stepped in it. Stepped square in fresh poop with a great big squishing sound. He's written a commentary about the Leica M9 that's not totally over the moon about that august device (which Mike actually quite likes, we hasten to add—even though he can't figure out how to get the Tri-X in).

I can't find the post Mike wrote on the Leica User Group (LUG) many years ago now called "The Leica Rules" or something like that, but I do remember one of the cardinal rules, which is that you're not allowed to criticize current Leica products. Only once they've been replaced can you talk frankly about the flaws of the earlier versions. Until it is replaced by Leica, every current Leica product is by definition unimproveable. That's a fact of life—a Universal Truth. Axiomatic.

For instance, if you'll remember, Mike wrote a review of the Leica M8 (in separate "Pro" and "Con" sections) that now looks quite sane and balanced. But it wasn't at the time, because, when he wrote it, the M8 was still a current product. Big mistake. Leica fans let him know in no uncertain terms what an irredeemable shit he is. And they were right to do so.

He should have learned his lesson long ago, when he wrote a review of the 35mm Summicron (4th version, now called the "Pre-ASPH") that was only mostly glowing. He said the lens had excessive vignetting with thin-emulsioned B&W films such as 100 Delta. He duly got raked over the coals by aficionados for daring to say such a thing. Later, when Leica introduced the 35mm Summicron ASPH, it mentioned that one of the improvements is that it vignettes much less than its predecessor version. You see, only then did the earlier lens start to vignette; before that, it never did.

Lloyd, your review might look perfectly reasonable...someday. Once the M10 has come out. Until then, though...well, your timing is very poor, and you've done a bad thing. Very bad. Go sit in the corner and think about what you've done until you're ready to play by the rules again.

L. T.

(Important Note: I had nothing to do with writing this post. Don't blame me. I am not the author. L. T. Gray is a former columnist for the now defunct English Darkroom User magazine. —Mike)

*Satire Alert.

Send this post to a friend—but please, not if your friend is a Leica user!

Please help support TOP by patronizing our sponsors B&H Photo and Amazon

Note: Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. More...
Original contents copyright 2011 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

Featured Comment by Ed Buziak, Founding Editor (ret.) of Darkroom User magazine: "El Tigre, huh? My lips are sealed!"

Featured Comment by Erlik: "I saw Lloyd's rant. I don't mean it pejoratively, but it is a rant. I had two questions.

"One: if you can find so many things wrong with the camera, what have you been doing with it for two years?

"Two: the camera is too expensive? Wasn't it too expensive when you bought it?

"Besides, for all his expertise and experience, I wonder whether he thought everything through. I'm not talking about the reactions. Couldn't care less. But we all know that Leica is a boutique manufacturer. He must have known that.

"So where does he think that Leica is going to find manufacturing resources for increased numbers of cameras and lenses should they lower the prices? And why does he think that Leica wants to raise the numbers of its cameras and consequently lower its prestige and margins?"

Open Mike: Artistic Freedom, Artistic License

Okay, just a passing aesthetic/artistic question for you film buffs out there. (I've been trying to watch more movies this year.)

Everybody probably knows what "film noir" is. It was originally a French term for a genre of gritty, naturalistic, character-driven black-and-white American movies of the pre-television '40s and '50s that often showed lives that were dark and amoral, dangerous, and often doomed. Sometimes the plot lines could be overheated, as they often were in the potboiler detective fiction that in part inspired them, and many were what were then called "B" movies—low budget. The better ones had psychological tension as well as melodramatic suspense. My favorite is The Asphalt Jungle, a superb heist film full of sexual tension—a very young Marilyn Monroe plays a memorable bit part—that was set and shot almost completely at night.

The '40s and '50s were also the era of the censors. But the censors (the so-called Production Code enforced after 1933 was surprisingly comprehensive—at 3700 words, it was only 700 words shorter than the U.S. Constitution!) didn't only delete parts of films—they also added them. For instance, there's a short segment in Gun Crazy (a.k.a. Deadly is the Female), a 1950 precursor of Bonnie and Clyde in which the protagonist uncharacteristically expresses his regret over his life of crime. It doesn't fit the plot, and it doesn't even fit the look of the rest of the movie. Some critics have suggested the scene was added at the insistance of the Hays Office as a moral lesson for the audience.

No spoilers here
Anyway, in 1944, Fritz Lang—the great German director of such masterpieces as M and Metropolis—made one of his 21 Hollywood movies, a tale of temptation and downfall called The Woman in the Window. The film has a "surprise twist" ending, which apparently delighted large swaths of the unwashed hoi polloi at the time, but which has dismayed critics and savants ever since. It's apparently widely believed by film noir buffs, albeit not with absolute certainty, that the surprise ending, which actually adds comedic touches to an otherwise grim and fatalistic film, was inserted at the insistence of the censors, or at least added to mollify them.

Fritz Lang

But here's the thing. The ending that the director himself supposedly preferred—a dark closeup of Edward G. Robinson's face as the phone rings and his eyes close—is completely contained in the present movie. The cutesy parts are added on after that.

So my question is, in this age of computer video wizardry, what's to stop some guerrilla fan from creating a version of the movie with the director's preferred ending, simply by eliminating the rest? Fade to black and roll the credits. If you believe the existing ending was created for or by the censors, an "activist" version like that would essentially be a bootleg "director's cut," long after the fact (Fritz Lang died in 1976).

Is that ethical? I can see arguments either way. Movies, of course, have returned to so-called "Pre-Code" standards—moralistic censorship has been reduced to a series of advisory ratings that restrict theater access by minors. So why not give Fritz the grim, noir ending his film deserves? On the other hand, he did add the "official" ending, so you could also argue that tampering with an artist's finished work violates it—all sorts of forces influence the content and appearance of movies, and seldom does a director get to have it exactly the way he wants it.

I don't know a lot about movies, so I'm curious as to what more devoted film fans might think of something like this. Who knows, maybe it's even been done.

Mike

"Open Mike" is a series of off-topic posts that appears here on Sundays. This time, Mike refrains from writing about the noble Shackleford's thrilling start to the Belmont, and his heartbreaking fade before the wire.

Send this post to a friend

Please help support TOP by patronizing our sponsors B&H Photo and Amazon

Note: Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. More...
Original contents copyright 2011 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

Featured Comment by B.J.: "This sort of thing went on all the time. One only has to look at the career of Orson Welles for examples. Arguably the greatest film of the 'noir' genre is Welles' 1958 film Touch of Evil. The film is famous for, among other things, the opening single shot which runs about three minutes. The studio took the film away from Welles, re-edited it and added additional footage shot by someone else. Welles wrote a memo of approximately 60 pages suggesting changes and cuts that would restore the film to his original vision. Not surprisingly, he was ignored. The memo still exists, but Welles original cut does not. The film was re-released in the '70s in a new version, but this was just a longer version or the original release. In the late '90s the film was released again in a re-edited version that follows as closely as possible the changes suggested in Welles' memo. But since Welles' original version does not exist, even this is only an approximation, however close, of Welles original vision. Interestingly, some of the changes had to do with the soundtrack. Remember that Welles came to the movies from radio."

Featured Comment by David: "If the movies are still in copyright, then you are breaking the law if you modify them and distribute them (creating a derivative work). Religious oriented groups have tried this with services that remove 'objectionable' material for their customers. They have all been shut down by the studios. If you want to do it to your own copy, no one can stop you, it's when you pass it along to others that you get into trouble. It's really no different than modifying someone else's still picture and distributing it."

Featured Comment by Paul Byrnes: "God what a can of worms, Mike. It's an intriguing idea, and mash-ups are everywhere now so someone will do it, but I tend to think you can't monkey with history. It's like a Time Machine thing: go back and meet your parents, Marty McFly-style, and you might not be born at all. Studios did lots of shitty things to great film-makers, but where do we start? John Ford used to shoot his films so they could only be cut one way; Clint Eastwood does much the same thing, but directors who revisit sometimes stuff their own films up—like Coppola when he did Apocalypse Now Redux. No discernible improvement, some arguable disservice.

"I think we should preserve and protect—that's all—but even that is controversial. Does preservation allow you to make Dolby tracks of movies that were in stereo or mono? It does if you want to make a buck. Even reputable restorations are doing that. What about tweaking the colours? I work with an archive as well as writing constantly about old movies (and new) and sometimes the tech guys just have to guess, especially when trying to recreate tints on silent films. Do you think it was pink or puce? I guess I'm arguing that less is more in terms of dealing with the past. You can watch the Fritz Lang and imagine the ending, both ways, if you want. Just because some ass once had the authority to change it doesn't give another ass the right to change it again now."

Vexed by fb+f

There are some issues that cause in photography enthusiasts what in the past I've called "angst." That's just the German word for "fear," and it has different connotations in English than it does in German, as far as I can tell. (Ich spreche nicht Deutsches.) A better word for what I mean would be "fretting." A definition of "fret" in that sense is, "To cause to be uneasy; vexed."

I started representing Camera & Darkroom magazine online (on CompuServe) in 1991 and became chief editor of Darkroom & Creative Camera Techniques, a newsstand magazine and quasi-technical-journal, in 1994. I wrote more than 100 columns that appeared on The Luminous Landscape, Photo.net, and Steve's Digicams, and was a columnist for Black & White Photography magazine in England for a handful of years, and I've been running this site since 2005. Believe me, I've encountered just about every form of photographic fretting there is.

All in our heads
Any field, but especially enthusiast hobbies, have esoteric aspects a) which seem like revelations when you first hear about them, b) which seem really important when you plunge into a spate of intensive research about them, but that c) you will be able to restore to their actual level of relative importance the tenth time you encounter them, and d) you recognize as a consistent pattern the 20th time you come across someone raising the alarums about them. Finally, e) you will get thoroughly sick of talking about them by the 50th time they come up...and, in this hobby at least, f) graybeard veterans* have heard them a hundred times—if not five hundred.

I'm not good at putting together comprehensive lists—how do you know you're not forgetting one?—but let's just say that if a bunch of veteran photo writers got together and started brainstorming, we'd come up with a pretty good list of the things that photographers like to fret about. (I even have my pet peeves among them, for instance, how people are so obsessed with sharpness but seldom pay enough attention to tonality.)

A fair amount of this is psychological. There are some things that people just do or don't like as abstract ideas. A simple example: people just don't like flaws and imperfections in the glass of their lenses. Tiny flakes of blacking resting on an interior element, minute scratches, air bubbles in the glass (in older lenses), areas where the coating has flaked or rubbed off—any of these things will reduce the value of a lens considerably. More to the point, they bother people far out of proportion to their actual effect**.

Cosmic rays
So anyway, on to the topic at hand. On Wednesday, a reader named William responded to Ctein's column about hoarding film by saying, "I can't get excited about...film preservation as a viable long-term plan. Why? four words: Cosmic rays fog film." He then cited a passage from a Kodak white paper about the effects of background radiation on motion picture stock. Good research, and a perfectly valid topic to bring up under the circumstances.

Ctein then answered this concern, saying, among other things, "I am well aware of this. Kodak standards for this, though, are extremely tight, far tighter than typical photographers need to worry about. [...] Moderate-speed B&W still films do not become unusable, not even after decades."

Asked and answered? Not hardly. Since then I've gotten half a dozen sardonic, scornful comments about how Ctein thinks he's such a know-it-all because he thinks he knows better than Kodak does, etc., etc.

So here, for the edification of those still following along, is the long version. Or the somewhat longer version.

There are some films that are known to be excessively affected by radiation; most notably, Kodak P3200 (which probably would have been as ISO 1000 film if it had ever been certified with an ISO rating, which it never was). Kodak lore at the time was that the only place new stock could be stored prior to shipment was in an abandoned salt mine, although I've never been able to confirm if they literally did that. With moderate-speed (ISO 100–400), conventional-emulsion black-and-white films, the very low doses of radiation emanating from the earth and from space—collectively known as background radiation—will not affect the usefulness of the film. On the other hand, it can have an effect on photographic paper, which doesn't last nearly as well in storage.

Why? Well, all you have to do is think about what's going on. Even fresh, promptly-processed film has some density in the "clear" areas—that is, unexposed areas of developed film. That density is known as "fb+f," which means film base plus fog. Why isn't that density significant? Because the clear areas of the film correspond to the dark areas of the print, and the contrast of the print can be adjusted in the printing process to account for slightly more fb+f density—just like it can be adjusted to account for the fb+f of fresh film. As for the highlights, the highlights in a B&W negative aren't "delicate"—they correspond to the dark areas of the negative, which have received so much exposure to visible-spectrum light that a tiny bit of added density from background radiation probably isn't even detectable—the same constant amount of added density capable of doubling the fb+f only adds a tiny percentage of exposure to the dense highlights.

A few cosmic rays just moves the whole characteristic curve up a tad, is all. It's inconsequential because you can adjust for it when you print the negative. It takes a lot of fogging to ruin a negative, far more than background radiation can provide with normal films—even over decades. And if your film does show excessive fb+f as it ages, just add a little more restrainer to the developer as the years pass, and that will control it. (You would be running new tests on your stockpile of film every five or ten years, of course.)

But now think about what's going on with black-and-white photo paper. What areas does a slight amount of fog affect? That's right—the paper base, a.k.a. "paper white"—the highlights. As soon as fog breaks the exposure threshold (paper needs a certain minimum exposure before it will begin to register as density), additional fog registers as a graying of the whiteness of the paper. As it happens, so-called "chemical fog"—the changes that take place within the paper itself as it ages—are more significant than background radiation fog, but in any event, paper can't accept much fog of any kind before it becomes degraded or even useless, for the simple reason that grayed-out highlights seldom look very pleasing. So paper doesn't store for long periods nearly as well as film does, even frozen. Your assuredly-safe zone is about two years, and your limit is going to be about five to ten years, maybe a little more if you're lucky (or if you don't mind a little tone in your highlights). This will vary depending on specific paper brands and types and with each specific storage situation, but it accords pretty well with actual accounts I've heard of or read about by or about photographers who have stocked up on a favorite paper when it was discontinued.

So now, armed with the above information plus your own Holmsian powers of deduction, you can figure out why Kodak has such high standards for the allowable fb+f of motion picture stock. What's a "print" of a film movie? How is it viewed? Which end of the viewable spectrum of tonality/density does fog affect?

Exactly. Kodak is right, but Ctein is also right—you don't have to worry about background radiation as a cause of degradation of moderate-speed, conventional-emulsion B&W (negative) films intended for pictorial use, even when you stash 30 years' worth in a freezer. The film can easily withstand the slight increase in fb+f caused by cosmic rays without becoming even slightly less useful.

Mike

(P.S. You're welcome, 11 people out there who have actually decided to stockpile film!)

*Note that Ctein and I both do have actual gray in our actual beards.

**Now that everybody's shooting digital, it's really easy to do the Don Nelson experiment. With your standard utility lens on your camera—normal zoom, whatever—focus your camera on some reasonably detailed subject that's neither particularly near nor particularly far; take a picture. Now tear a small corner off of the adhesive portion of a Post-It Note—maybe half the size of a pea. Stick in on the end of your lens. Now take the same picture again. Compare the two. Surprised? At least now you have a baseline for guessing how much effect that tiny scratch has—the one you can only see when the angle of the light is just so and that's so small you can barely see it without a loupe (and that caused your buyer on Ebay to return the lens to you when you tried to sell it...and the reason you tried to sell it was because that damned scratch just bugged you so much).

Send this post to a friend

Please help support TOP by patronizing our sponsors B&H Photo and Amazon

Note: Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. More...
Original contents copyright 2011 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

Featured Comment by Geoff Wittig: "Living in the Rochester, N.Y., area for many years and knowing many people who have worked in local undergound salt mines, I can confirm that Kodak P3200 was indeed stored there prior to sale. However, marketing hype surely played a large role. The mines routinely rented played-out areas for industrial storage because they provide an extremely consistent environment, requiring zero energy input to maintain 50°F forever. I suspect, though, that naturally-occuring radioactivity in the surrounding rock formations cancels out the reduction in cosmic ray exposure."

Featured Comment by Rico Ramirez: "I went to San Francisco this April and I used black-and-white film over there. Going back I requested the TSA to hand-inspect my film. My camera bag went through the X-ray conveyor for carry-on items. I thought I emptied all the cameras of film but my Hexar AF had a roll of Ilford Delta 3200 in it that was exposed to the X-ray machine. I developed the roll when I arrived home in San Diego and the film came out fine. It wasn't fogged."

Mike replies: I actually had a section in this post about airport X-rays, but cut it because I'm not competent to compare relative doses. (Well, not without doing more research than I want to do.) Generally speaking, though, airport X-ray inspection devices vary in their intensity by a fairly large factor—something like 30X if memory serves, depending on how modern the equipment is, whether you're traveling internationally, the relative wealth of the country you're in, etc.—and, like most radiation damage, the effects are cumulative. So running your film through once didn't hurt it, but running it through 50 times probably would. Now what we need is someone who can compare the rate of background radiation to the rate of airport X-ray radiation....

Featured Comment by John Camp: "There are many different kinds of people plying the waters (and developers) of photography, but because the Internet is what it is—a medium that appeals especially to technically oriented people—you see a lot of people who are more interested in the processes and mechanics of photography than in the images themselves.

"Maybe that's natural, because the physics and chemistry of photography can be endlessly interesting to people who are so oriented.

"As someone who is 'result' oriented, they often leave me bemused and sometimes astonished. I don't think I've ever been drawn to a photograph because of its sharpness, but other people obviously are—how often (on other forums, like Digital Photography Review or Luminous Landscape) have you seen side-by-side photos of a gorgeous model in a low-cut gown, or no gown at all, but the commentary is on the difference in separation of the eyelashes? Or the fact that Image A has more color artifacts showing around the fourth eyelash from the left, and therefore, that camera simply isn't usable for serious work? Maybe this is why geeks don't get laid...they're counting eyelashes.

"I can think of no famous art photograph—NO FAMOUS ART PHOTOGRAPH—in which ultimate sharpness is critical. Photographs need to be 'sharp enough,' and no more. (I can think of a few in which blur is critical, or at least helpful, like Caponigro's 'Running White Deer.') But you can repeat that endlessly—NO FAMOUS ART PHOTOGRAPH DEPENDS ON ULTIMATE SHARPNESS—and be endlessly ignored.

"It also seems to me that these technically oriented people take technically oriented photographs, most often, landscapes, which function as tests of the things they're interested in—sharpness, resolution, and other qualities that are essentially technical aspects of the camera-lens-sensor unit. You rarely see them writing about composition, values (tonal qualities), color, etc., which are aspects of the brain unit. And they are rarely street shooters, because it's very difficult to get test-like photos in real street shooting. What they really like is to get down in a slot canyon with a heavy tripod and a 60-MP medium format digital back, so that nothing moves, and then see how many striations they can separate out in the sandstone.

"So, it's fairly fruitless to talk about the fact that a small scratch on your lens is essentially meaningless ('The lens is unusable, unusable, I tell you!') or that a few cosmic rays won't make much difference in film. Their goal is perfection in the system, not in the image. They may well realize that can never get there (they're usually pretty smart folks) but that's the goal anyway. They are all about technical issues, and not really about art.

"I often think that they're a little wistful about the fact that they're not artists, so they attempt to reach art through more and more technical perfection. In the meantime, teenagers like the Turnley Bros. are out banging around the neighborhood with whatever camera and lens they can get their hands on...and making art."

More Books of Interest

First things first: very eagerly awaited in some circles is Alain Briot's newest, Marketing Fine Art Photography. A seasoned author (and an advertiser here) with several popular how-to books under his belt, Alain also very much knows whereof he speaks when it comes to, well, marketing fine art photography—he's one of the few photographers in the country who makes most of his living through the sale of prints (there aren't as many like that as you might guess: in the late '80s, I recall, one expert pegged the number of such photographers at six). According to the publisher: "After a series of trials and errors, Briot devised a marketing system that allowed him to get out of debt, pay for a state-of-the-art studio, and purchase his first home, all from the sale of his photography."

Amazon's first shipment is almost sold out already. You can also buy the book directly from Alain, but he's traveling at the moment so there might be a delay, I don't know.

Leica books
Happily, my all-time favorite Leica book is freshly back in print yet again, even better than before. Günter Osterloh was for many years Product Manager at E. Leitz Wetzlar and Leica Camera AG, and the Director (from 1993 to 2002) of The Leica Academy. The newest edition of his Leica M: Advanced Photo School is the second Lark (Pixiq) edition (firsts were selling for $70–$125 until a few weeks ago), but there were earlier iterations that I watched go in and out of print over the years—the first one in English, from Hove, came out in the summer of '87. (In general it spends more time out of print than in. I lost my only earlier copy in the '90s when it went the way of most loaned books, refusing to find its way home again.)

I fully expected the new edition to have a section awkwardly tacked on to the end about the digital M's, but happily it doesn't—it's content to remain the best book on film Leicas (and everything related—for instance, 69 pages answering the question "How well do Leica lenses perform?"), rather than try to be something it's not. For those who are into the M9, there's David Taylor's Leica M9 (The Expanded Guide) (also hot off the presses—published a week ago), and 2009's Leica M Digital Photography: M8/8.2/M9 by the friendly Brian Bower, whose earlier Leica books have been enormously popular. (Brian is one of the few photographers I know of who has a real feel for the 21mm focal length and really handles it well. I always enjoy deconstructing his WA pictures in his Leica books to see how he sees.)

Günter Osterloh lives and breathes photography and Leica equally, and his book is the one with the most useful information for practicing photographers, as opposed to pure collectors. I just find this book more companionable than most such. It's good to read along, spending time in the company of such an amiable and erudite tourguide. It's nice to have this again, and a new copy to boot, and for such a reasonable price. It joins my core library of film photography books, and will be equally appealing to those interested in the Leica marque in general.

Plentiful illustrations, too—and a sewn binding, so it won't suffer the fate of my '90s copy, the "perfect" binding* of which shed pages like a Siberian Husky in summer sheds hair!

UPDATE: I'm just not "up" on Leica offerings enough to know exactly where this book "cuts off" in terms of being up-to-date with current Leica products, but do bear in mind this is a second edition of a newer reprint of a 1987 book—it doesn't have some of the latest products, aside from the fact that it doesn't cover digital cameras. It doesn't function as a catalog, in any event.

Books by TOP readers
I can't begin to mention every book that's sent to me, but two recent ones by TOP readers are Remote Exposure: A Guide to Hiking and Climbing Photography by Alexandre Buisse, and Path of Beauty: Photographic Adventures in the Grand Canyon by Chris Brown. I am an armchair reader of mountaineering books such as Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster and Touching the Void: The True Story of One Man's Miraculous Survival (both terrific, by the way), so I paged through Alexandre's book with the same sort of detached fascination with which I read about improbable people clinging to improbable verticalities—but just because it has no potential practical value to me doesn't mean it might not for you! The pictures sure are stunning...doubly so for me, with my fear of all but literary heights. And as for Chris, some of his pleasurable Grand Canyon pictures can be seen here.

And for the record, I'm impressed with all our readers who manage to publish or self-publish a book—if nothing else, I respect the amount of work and dedication I know it takes.

DAM it
Finally, a title that is also possibly apropos to our film/digital discussions of recent days—a small but meaty little volume entitled Photographer's Guide to the Digital Lifecycle. Author Ben Greisler sums up his approach to digital asset management thusly: "After a lifetime of photographic experience collided with my current experience as an IT professional, I saw a need for mixing the two disciplines in a way that took the needs of the creative professional and combined them with solid IT best practices. My goal for this book is to show you how to do this without being overwhelmed by the process." This book is also new to the world, as of last month. Unfortunately I can't tell you how it compares to the better-established alternative, Peter Krough's The DAM Book: Digital Asset Management for Photographers, the second edition of which just turned two, because I don't know that one. But the present title is a thorough but digestible primer on the subject by a guy who knows what he's talking about.

I know I must be forgetting a couple, but those will have to wait for next time, I guess.

Some hopefully helpful links:

Amazon U.K.
Amazon Germany
Amazon Canada
The Book Depository

Mike

*A "perfect" binding—the word perfect should always be placed in sardonic quotation marks—refers to a stack of loose pages with adhesive slathered hopefully along one edge to create the alleged binding. The worse and more porous the paper, and the stiffer, more inflexible, and more unyielding the carapace of glue, the better this "works." It is possibly the least perfect kind of binding there is—hence the name.

Send this post to a friend

Please help support TOP by patronizing our sponsors B&H Photo and Amazon

Note: Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. More...
Original contents copyright 2011 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

Video: Paul Trevor

Photo by Paul Trevor

Here's a nice video by the English photographer Paul Trevor about some old work of his that's just been coming into its own within the past couple of years.

It's also quite pertinent to the discussion(s) in these 'ere precincts recently. A short digression about something that made me chuckle the other day: half tongue-in-cheek, I had sung the praises of Tri-X 400 in a joking comment. I then got an email from a reader who rather anxiously wondered why I liked Tri-X 400 and whether HP5 Plus was as good—what were the properties of Tri-X 400, he asked, that made it special? I'm sure he was asking about aesthetic properties, but many of the reasons I liked Tri-X 400 were purely practical: it withstands long latency periods (the time between exposure and development) gracefully; it doesn't deteriorate easily when stored temporarily in high heat, for instance inside a car or a trunk in mid-summer; it's got good low contrast, and high "latitude" or forgivingness for sub-optimal exposures; it prints fine even with higher levels of fb+f; etc.

Similarly, people always talk about the old "film vs. digital" question like it's all about aesthetic properties and workflow (and now materials availability, as we were discussing yesterday). But I'm lazy, and somewhat disorganized. Re that, listen to what Paul Trevor says in the video starting about 30 seconds in.

Purely by coincidence, almost the same thing happened to me not four days ago. I happened to find an old binder on the floor. Covered with dust, tucked away and hidden by a couple of stack of old CDs, forgotten, it happened to have in it my very first self-developed photographic efforts—photographs I made as a teenager 40 years ago. I was delighted to discover it again—I couldn't have found it on purpose if my life depended on it (at least not quickly). I always have to shake my head when people claim our digital work is permanent. There isn't one in 100 of us whose digital files will be recoverable 40 years from now—and I'm not talking about theoretically, I'm talking about actually. As in, someone will be able to find them, open them, and share the pictures or make new prints. Especially if the archives were not "curated" along the way, or if the curation gets interrupted by the inconvenient intrusion of our own demise (I don't mean to be macabre or morose, but let's be honest, that trend does look robust). The "store once" property of B&W film negatives is one of film's greatest advantages, if you ask me (or, I'm sure, Paul). Forget them, and they wait for you. Come back to them, and it's like you've never been away.

I really like Paul Trevor's work, but then, it's the sort of thing I'm a sucker for, like some people just love Westerns, or pickup trucks, or German beer, or Herman Brood and his Wild Romance at high volumes, or whatever. I love naturalistic B&W 35mm slice-of-life pictures with that offhand compositional dynamism that Paul seemed to get so skillfully back in Liverpool in the '70s. Just a sucker for it. It's "home" for me photographically, so I assume I'm less than objective about it. You'll have to decide for yourself what you think about the work.

That'll be a lot easier if you're within traveling distance of the Walker Art Center in Liverpool. The show (it's called "Like You've Never Been Away") is up until September 25th. (The pictures are nominally "available" on flickr, but only as snapshots from the discolored contact sheets, a way of seeing them you might want to actively avoid.) I have to confess the idea of flying to England just to see the show flitted across my brain. Not normally the sort of thing I do, or can afford to do. Then again, one only lives once....

Mike
(Thanks to Stephen Rees)

ADDENDUM: So this doesn't seem one-sided (many readers have trouble accepting that I'm film/digital agnostic—or, perhaps, that anyone should be), I might add that many of the reasons I like digital are completely practical too—for instance, I don't have to stand at the kitchen sink for an hour every other night performing a tedious rote chore, and I can shoot at 3200 without the fatalistic conviction that I'm completely wasting my energy. Etc.)

Send this post to a friend

Please help support TOP by patronizing our sponsors B&H Photo and Amazon

Note: Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. More...
Original contents copyright 2011 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

Securing Your Film Photography Future

By Ctein

Last week there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth amongst the film fans in our group over the future loss of their favored media. If what you're concerned with is B&W film photography, then I'm here to make you happy. This is really easily addressed (color's much harder).

I'm serious.

I'm not just talking through my hat—I've used the following strategies with success at various times over the past 40 years, beginning when Kodak made the original Pan-X 120 go away circa 1973.

Buy a small deep freeze. Buy a 20-or-whatever-year supply of your preferred B&W film. Stick it in the freezer. Pull out rolls as you need them. I can guarantee they'll stay good for decades. You've spent, probably, a few thousand bucks (depends, of course, on your burn rate) to guarantee your future in film.

Commercial B&W developers and fixers may disappear, but they're very easy to compound—the raw chemicals are cheap, and they will be readily available for a long time. If you fear they won't be, buy a large sealed tub of each chemical—keep them sealed against air, moisture and light and they will also last many decades. B&W film processing is easy to do, too. Any photographer can learn it.

Darkroom print papers could become a problem, unless you stock up on your favorite. That's not a new problem; it's been vexing B&W printers since Edward Weston's prime. You can either live with possibly losing your favorite paper, as folks have for 70 years, or stock up and freeze it, just like your film. Your choice.

Darkroom equipment lasts the better part of forever, unless you're careless. Cameras? Not so much. Afraid your camera body will die on you before you're done with the film phase of your life? Then buy two (or three if you're really paranoid). These days, used, very-good-condition camera gear can be bought for an average of 10–20 cents on the dollar, compared to mid-'90s prices. If that's too rich for your blood, well, then photography's altogether too rich a hobby/career for you. Find something else. I mean it. The bargains are amazing; you can't hope for better. It's the perfect time to buy film equipment. Compared to the bad old days, your redundant gear is still quite the bargain.

Keep one body in reserve. Pull it out every few months, cycle the shutter speeds and other controls, send it to your favorite repair guy for a clean and checkup every few years (and, yes, such folks will be around a very long time, although their services may not come cheaply). If/when you break the first one, switch to the second...and the first one will be a ready supply of parts that will keep the second one in repair.

Can I promise that this will make you safe for decades? Nah, life doesn't come with guarantees. Odds are better than 90% though.

This works. It's not expensive. Over the long run, it will even save you money. The majority of your expenses are upfront, but they're not impossibly large, and, forever after, your running costs will be very modest.

Color's another story
Sorry. I've no easy answer for color. The hangup is the processing. If commercial processing goes away, most photographers will be out of luck—color film processing is a demanding thing, requiring accuracy and precision beyond most photographers' abilities. Color developers can be tricky to compound and some of the component chemicals are obscure and may become very difficult to obtain. You can probably drag out your color photography life for five years if commercial processing becomes unavailable, but I'd not count on more than that.

Any chance for Kodachrome or dye transfer ever coming back, as one reader asked? As close to 0% as you can calculate, for a bunch of very good reasons. For a start, running a K-14 line requires two masters-degree-or-better chemists, and the chemistry is not stable. If you wondered why Dale Labs didn't just decide to run one batch of K-14 a year, it's because they figured that most of you would balk at paying $100+ a roll for processing, which is what it would take.

But, as regards B&W? Easy! Stock up and stop worrying. You'll be a lot happier in both the short and long run.

Ctein

Ctein's regular weekly column appears on TOP on Wednesdays.

Send this post to a friend

Please help support TOP by patronizing our sponsors B&H Photo and Amazon

Note: Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. More...
Original contents copyright 2011 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

Featured Comment by David Dyer-Bennet: "In case anybody is worried about power failures on their freezer full of film—film is much easier to store safely than food is.

"Food reacts badly to being frozen and thawed multiple times (it tends to mess up the texture, which is important), and can become unsafe with relatively short times (hours) spent at room temperature.

"Film, in contrast, is rated to last years at room temperature. If you lose power long enough that your freezer gets all the way to room temperature (which would be quite a while, if you don't open the lid), all that happens is that the film starts aging at a 'normal' rate. (If you're in some hideous climate like, um, mine, where it got to 103°F yesterday, letting the film get all the way up to 103° would not be good; but a closed freezer in the basement will take a very long time without power to get up to 103°; in fact a basement won't get up to the full outside temperature ever—the ground is a huge heat-sink. Of course, lots of hot places routinely build without basements.)

"You do need to be careful about condensation when refrigerating film. What you want to avoid is having warm, most air come in contact with the cold film; water will condense out, soak into the gelatine, stick the layers to each other, and ruin it. (120 film generally comes with each roll in a sealed wrapper already; plastic 35mm film cans are adequately air-tight for this, so you can toss those in an ordinary bag and take them out freely, but let them come up to room temperature before breaking the air seal. If you have film that doesn't have its own seal, a zip-loc freezer bag is perfect.)"

Some Friends (and the Dude)

Mythologizing Oren
Speaking of mythologizing Sanskrit, it turns out I have indeed been guilty of mythologizing Oren-san the master of Photographica, Inscrutable Wise One of LF and Historical Camera Lore. It turns out he does not have nine advanced degrees; he only has nine degrees total, and fully four of them are undergraduate degrees, and all of those are from MIT, and how hard could that be? Secondly, it turns out he did not teach himself Japanese so he could read Japanese camera magazines, as I have been known to claim; rather, he learned Japanese to read said magazines by auditing Japanese language courses at Harvard, although he did audit the first-, second-, and third-year courses concurrently. Next, it does not take him twenty minutes to describe exactly what it is he does for a living. This weekend he did it in under ten (basically, he's a high-level science and technology policy expert for the government, if that radical simplification does not do too much damage to the subtlety of the facts). The Oren-mobile is not a '46 Studebaker; it is an unrestored '64 Plymouth Belvedere. Finally, he does not own 400 cameras, and I have been in error when I have stated that one entire room of the Oren Grad Residential Large-Format Museum and View Camera Graveyard is inaccessible because it is occupied by his collection of mammoth 19th-century stand cameras; actually his suburban Connecticut house, ordinary-looking on the outside, only contains some 150 cameras, including 64 view cameras, and two studios and one darkroom, not three and two as I might have let slip in the past.

My apologies for my obdurate and incorrigible* exaggerating. Guilty.

[UPDATE: For the record, in case it's not obvious, none of the above is true. I'm just pulling my friend Oren's leg. More background: Oren is the guy who, seven years ago, sent me an email saying that he'd been reading a number of blogs every day and that he thought I should start one. I replied, "What in the world is a 'blog'?" And here we are. —Mike]

-

Pam Risdon and some Dude

Pam and friend
Secondly, it might not be obvious to casual readers, but some items on Ye Blog are intended for some subset of the audience, and not the whole parish; so, for the three dozen or fewer readers for whom this will have meaning, I cannot resist posting the above picture of my very good old friend (can I say "old"?) and fellow former Corc Photo-Dawg (Corcoran School Photo '85) Pam Risdon, shown with some Dude. She doesn't look pleased at all to be hobnobbing with famous actors, does she? (I told her she should Photoshop in the bowling alley from The Big Lebowski in the background.)

Pam (we knew her as Pam West in those days) and her husband Cable are both successful commercial, event, and fine-art photographers in the Washington, D.C.-Maryland-Virginia area, proving, as I try to do every everlovin' day, that there is life in the art after art school.

Mike

*and ongoing

Send this post to a friend

Please help support TOP by patronizing our sponsors B&H Photo and Amazon

Note: Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. More...
Original contents copyright 2011 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

Featured Comment by JK: "I've ridden in the Oren-mobile and it's at least as cool as the Dude's wheels!"

Mike replies: I really do think we need to get him a Plymouth Belvedere, anyway.

'67 Plymouth Belvedere laying rubber. Photographer unknown.

Blog Notes

If anyone is curious, TOP has now published 3,950 posts since 2005 (this is the 3,950th), and tomorrow we will pass 78,000 comments.

Mike the Ed., still chained to the leg of the desk

Book of the Week: 'The Practice of Contemplative Photography'

"Technique is important only insofar as you must master it in order to communicate what you see... In any case, people think far too much about techniques and not enough about seeing."

—Henri Cartier-Bresson

The Practice of Contemplative Photography
by Andy Karr and Michael Wood
Shambhala Publications, 2011

Reviewed by Ken Tanaka

The model of most photography self-improvement books hasn’t substantially changed for nearly 40 years. They typically feature early chapters on basic photography principles (aperture, shutter speed, ISO, holding the camera still, etc.) followed by a series of chapters dispensing prescriptive, technique-oriented—and sometimes howlingly hackneyed—advice on how to take "good" pictures. The material tends to be oriented toward guiding the reader to make pictures that resemble the generally accepted aesthetic medians for the subject genres (i.e. landscape, babies, parties, etc.).

That’s fine. But such books offer little or no guidance to readers who want to explore the broader and far more rewarding challenge of seeing with a keener, more creative, and more personally incisive eye.

The Practice of Contemplative Photography pursues a very different path. Its authors, Andy Karr and Michael Wood, draw upon their mutual interest in Buddhist teachings to present an approach to photography that's exclusively oriented to "clear seeing," an important tenet in Buddhism. The concept of clear seeing can be described, at least in this context, as eliminating distractions and confusion to align your eye with your mind and emotions.

But wait! Lest you become turned-off at the impression that this is "What Would Buddha Shoot?", hang in there! Aside from brief background remarks in the preamble and epilogue, the subject of Buddhism is nowhere to be found. Karr and Wood devote nearly all of the material toward imparting a practical understanding of the three stages of their contemplative photographic practice philosophy: Flash of Perception, Visual Discernment, and Forming the Equivalent. The general idea is to learn to turn off the many obstructions to visual clarity that we all have. Obstructions such as cultural biases, adherence to clichés, and the desire to create slick images that will impress people. Such obstructions become filters that distort you perception and blind you to possibilities that don’t fit your preconceptions.

To that end many of the book's chapters are designed to guide the reader toward self-discovery of the technique's methods. The authors provide a brief description of a topic and then offer an exercise to channel the reader's exploration. A collection of images follow each chapter's exercise to illustrate the objective. This is a simple, but powerful, structure for leading readers through conceptual material that can really only be discovered rather than taught.

It's worth noting that the book would be worth its very modest price just as a photo book. Over half of its pages feature images, many of which represent some of the best of the genre that I've seen. (And most were created by the authors.) In fact I believe that the images and chapter titles alone provide quite a substantial portion of the book's instruction.

It's also noteworthy that discussion of basic camera technique is mercifully minimized to just a few pages in two chapters which deal with "Forming the Equivalents," the point in the process at which a camera is employed to record what you are experiencing. This is genuinely a book about seeing, in which the camera is a necessary but generic instrument much as a pencil would be in a book on writing.

Realistically, the techniques of contemplative photography outlined here by Karr and Woods will not stick to every reader. But I am confident speculating that the vast majority of readers who spend dedicated time with the book and some of its exercises will be rewarded, at a minimum, by being able to see many more possibilities with their photography. That's a goal that's certainly worth many times the book's price, wouldn’t you say?

Ken

Amazon U.S. link

Amazon U.K. link

Book Depository link

Send this post to a friend

Please help support TOP by patronizing our sponsors B&H Photo and Amazon

Note: Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. More...
Original contents copyright 2011 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

Featured Comment by JohnW: "I'm delighted to see this approach to photography is finally trickling into the mainstream. I had the pleasure of experiencing the first three courses in the series several years ago and my photography has never looked back. To say it changed my photography would be equivalent to saying water is wet.

"I ordered a copy of the book but have not received it yet so the following comment may be covered in the text.

"One of the major stumbling blocks I've seen in many photographers is the fear of being 'themself' photographically. The underlying belief seems to be that their images must conform to some established ideal—generally that of the 'great masters' or the perceived masters of whatever group, club etc. they may belong to. The approach in this book bypasses all that and gets to the basic essence of art—recognizing, owning and expressing your vision.

"What more could an artist ask for?"