The Online Photographer

Canon 5D Mark III is Great for Low Light, Not So Great for DR

DxOMark has just published its results for the new Canon EOS 5D Mark III. It obtained Canon's best-ever DxOMark Overall Score for full-frame digital cameras.

With a DxOMark Score of 81 points, it's in 10th place overall (for all cameras) in the DxOMark rankings, barely edging out the 1Ds Mark III (80 points) and improving on its predecessor by two points. More importantly: the 5D Mark III provides very good performance in low light, putting it in 5th place overall for this category. Canon had announced that its sensor would show improved sensitivity thanks to a new gapless micro lens array that would capture more light, and, at nearly one-half stop better than the 5D Mark II, the new camera's performance justifies that claim.

The 5D Mark III sensor's dynamic range, similar to that of the 1Ds Mark III, is in 49th place for this category. What this means, says DxO, is that the manufacturer has made very little progress in DR since the appearance of the 1Ds Mark III and the 1D Mark IV, the best-rated Canon cameras in this category.

Mike
(Adapted from the press release)

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Random Excellence: Eddy Pula the Famous

Eddy Pula, Drunk Girls

For most of the past five years Eddy Pula has dressed up as one famous photographer or another to cover the Boston Marathon. This year—for the hottest of all 116—he went as Bruce Gilden. That's him as Weegee at the right. ("We all have to get used to wearing different hats," he says.)

The picture above isn't from the Marathon of course—I found it on his blog. Where I also ran across this:

The last post was the most popular ever and for a while I was obsessively checking the viewer count. I would yell out to Rosie, my sister and chief editor, 'We hit the big FIVE NINE!!!' to which she would reply 'Cat videos get 10 times that in a minute, loser' which is true of course, but its cool to think of 59 people reading the bullshit I scribble down.

To me his work seems promising but not fully formed; it seems like he needs to stay himself and keep doing the same thing but just get better. Wonder if he will? "Drunk Girls" is a nice shot but not quite a great shot, somehow. Those faces are sculptural though.

Speaking of which, does anyone remember a guy who published all the pictures on a single proof sheet—also medium format black and white—and we all thought it was great? I wonder what happened to him.

And speaking of Weegee, I've been reading this little book and really enjoying it. Makes me wonder if the other volumes in the series are as good. I can't recommend it yet because of the Pinker Rule, but I'll let you know once I'm done.

DD-B is right; when do people find time to watch TV?

Mike

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Your Pulitzer Prize for Fiction

Are you a fiction reader?

As you've no doubt heard, the Pulitzer Prize for fiction wasn't awarded this year, because apparently either the three nominees all sucked, or the jurors emerged from their deliberations with giant "L"s imprinted in red on their foreheads (I mean, really. If you're going to judge a contest, get with the program, people).

So I thought we should award our own: TOP is hereby accepting nominations for best fiction book of the year.

Like the Pulitzer, the book should be "distinguished fiction by an American author, preferably dealing with American life," and it must have been published in the U.S. in 2011.

Serious answers only please! Please qualify yourself as a nominator, on your honor: you must have read the book you nominate*, and you should be a person who reads...what would you say, 20 or more novels a year?** Fifteen? I guess you can decide for yourself if you're a "serious reader" or not.

I can't participate, because I read mainly nonfiction. So it's all you, TOP reader readers.

Mike

P.S. John Camp's vote counts double.

*The whole thing, through to the end.

**That's less than two books a month, which seems a reasonable cutoff to me. Serious readers read at least that much, right?

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Featured Comment by John Camp: "I'm a really bad person to ask about this, because I'm not much of a believer (any more) in 'serious' American fiction. Mostly because it doesn't seem very serious to me. I tried to read Swamplandia! and gave up. I didn't try to read David Foster Wallace's book for two reasons: 1) He has three names, and I don't read people who have three names (or much look at paintings or photographs by people who have three names); and 2), I read that it was about a guy who had a boring life. Why should I read about a guy who has a boring life? If you read a book like The Gulag Archipelago, you realize that vast stretches of time in the gulag were boring. Solzhenitsyn left those parts out. So: there are very large numbers of novels out there that deal with things like the gulag, colonialism, war, financial disaster, etc. They are important books. But, they are either 1) not American, or 2) thrillers. In fact, I propose a 'gulag' test: on a scale of one to ten, how does your 'serious' novel compare to The Gulag Archipelago, with one being 'it's a joke' and ten being, 'very comparable in importance.' I would suggest that no American novel in the past twenty-five years would score more than a 3....

"If you really wanted to know a lot about important issues in the U.S., you might want to read (God forgive me for saying this) Tom Clancy, John Grisham, Michael Connolly, Stephen King and so on. That's where serious issues are semi-engaged in fiction. "Serious" books tend to examine why college professors have affairs with students, and should they really? Or how do people get through their boring lives? But who cares? If your life is boring, join the Army and become a helicopter pilot. Stop whining about it.

"So, if there's little serious fiction anymore, where did it go? Two places. Non-fiction is one. I mostly read nonfiction, although I do read fifty or so novels every year, and I will say that it's one reason that I keep coming back to TOP—I probably buy and read ten or twelve non-fiction books a year from recommendations here, because somebody like Mike or Ken or David said something that piqued my interest, about photography or art, about the way the mind works, about economics or politics or society. 'Serious' fiction doesn't deal with that any more—most serious fiction is either fantasy/allegory, or is so psychological that no conclusions can be drawn about anything larger than the book's main character.

"The other place serious fiction has gone is the movies. If you both read and go to movies, I'll bet you can think of a dozen movies in the last few years that moved you, and may have changed the way you think about life; and not nearly so many novels, if you can think of any at all.

"So, I agree with the Pulitzer board. Most 'serious' fiction sucks; give the prize to Clancy.

"As a final thought, I leave you with this list:

A Visit From the Goon Squad;
Tinkers;
Olive Kitteridge;
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao;
The Road;
March;
Gilead;
The Known World;
Middlesex;
Empire Falls.

"Those are the last ten winners for the Pulitzer in fiction. Which one changed your life? How many have you even heard of, other than The Road? And just between you and me, The Road was a SF thriller (much of which could have been lifted from Stephen King) disguised as 'serious' literature. (Though I admit it was beautifully written.)"

Mike replies: Interesting tidbit about The Gulag Archipelago: in the U.S., about 2.2 million copies of Volume 1 were sold. Sales of Volume 2 were about 500,000, and of Volume 3, about 100,000.

Featured Comment by Steve Rosenblum: "The Tiger's Wife by Téa Obreht. And I have to disagree with John Camp. A number of the books on his list of Pulitzer Prize winners of the last 10 years were really wonderful reads. Last year's A Visit from the Goon Squad changed my view of novels and how they should be written."

Featured Comment by Chris Crawford: "I've read all three volumes of The Gulag Archipelago. I don't think it;s a fair comparison here, because it is nonfiction. Perhaps One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich would be a better Solzhenitsyn work to use, as it's a fictionalized account of life in a Soviet labor camp. It also includes all the mundane, boring stuff that the prisoners experienced. In fact, Solzhenitsyn said that the book was meant to be a typical boring day. It didn't include anyone being executed or tortured, there were no prisoner revolts, no extraordinary things at all happened. Typical day, that's all."

End Game

By Ctein

Mike and I have been discussing plans for one last dye transfer sale on TOP next year (we're not ready yet to divulge the details), which required me to go through my supply of dye transfer paper and inventory it. This is a remarkably tedious, repetitive process of closely examining each large sheet of paper by both reflected and transmitted light to catch any surface flaws or inclusions. Kodak's quality control was not the best in the waning days of dye transfer, so such precautions are necessary; half or more of the sheets in a box turn out to be unsellable.

When all was said and done, I discovered that my supplies of good paper were rather smaller than I had thought. By the end of next year and quite possibly sooner, I will have used up all my good dye transfer paper. Well, good riddance, I say. I've been bored with doing dye transfers some time now. I keep doing it because it's a profitable part of my business, but I won't cry at all at being forced out of it from lack of supplies.

This slightly surprising result had two immediate consequences. The first is that I stopped offering commercial dye transfer printing services the day after I finished my inventory. I can't afford to devote paper to new clients at the expense of existing obligations or making and selling prints of my own work.

I believe that leaves exactly one purveyor of dye transfer printing services in North America: Jim Browning in New Hampshire.

The second repercussion is more interesting to me. Psychologically, I'm now in the end game when it comes to my darkroom. I've been talking and mentally planning for a while about closing it down, by the end of next year at the latest. But the details of those plans were indefinite, and that made it feel a bit less real. Now I have a well-defined endpoint that will come with the exhaustion of limited supplies, even if I don't know the precise date of closure.

Ctein's not-long-for-this-world darkroom, in its day.

This has made it very real for me. When I recently went into the darkroom to make some dye transfer prints, I no longer found myself reflexively thinking about what maintenance, upkeep, and improvements I wanted to be doing, but about what will last for the next 12 to 20 months. If it's good for that long, and it hasn't been driving me totally crazy so far, then it's ignorable. That's a distinct change in my head.

In truth, it's a much more profound change then me "officially" giving up film for digital photography. Photography is photography, so far as I'm concerned; there is no significant difference for me between making a film photograph or a digital one. I honestly don't care about the medium, just the message.

But a darkroom? That has a substantial, tangible physical presence. For as long as I've had my own place to live, I have always had a permanent darkroom space, starting with my first apartment in 1972. By the end of next year, for the first time in 40 years, that will not be true. Do I mind? Not in the least! Finances permitting (fingers hugely crossed, here, hoping for a good sale), Paula and I will be able to take the garage space that currently includes or caters to my darkroom and build a couple of more rooms into this house. It would be nice to have a real guest room among other things. And an actual printing studio that can handle my humongous digital printer and its supplies and output in a convenient way.

Will I miss the darkroom, even one bit? Not once, not for a moment. But, man, it's sure a huge change.

Ctein

Longtime columnist Ctein sheds light into the darkness every Wednesday on TOP.

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Featured Comment by Geoff Wittig: "As someone who never made a darkroom print and who loves my large format inkjet, it still saddens me just a bit to see a truly expert darkroom printer hanging up his spurs. Watching the Luminous Landscape videos of Ctein making a dye transfer print, or Clyde Butcher making a huge black & white darkroom print, reassured me that there was still a living tradition stretching back to Edward Weston's contact prints and Paul Outerbridge's carbro color prints. It's becoming a more tenuous connection with every passing year. By the end of the decade, darkroom printing is likely to be as arcane and deliberately retro as self-coated glass plate capture."

Featured Comment by Walter Glover: "Been there and done that six years ago Ctein...and now find I have lived to regret it. Think long and hard before you reduce your darkroom option to zero. Old habits die hard and the darkroom was always more than just a production facility; it was a haven for a very special kind of contemplation, even therapy. I miss mine and am forever trying to come up with ways to even set-up to contact print some 8x10s."

Featured Comment by Jeff: "I found that selling off and donating my last darkroom four years ago was a liberating, and motivating, experience. After four darkrooms in four houses over 24 years, and after only using film, I finally decided to go all-digital prior to another house move. Only by getting rid of it all could I be all-in. Two people were perhaps happier than I: my home design friend, whom I've known for 25 years, finally able to not sacrifice her aesthetic choices due to my darkroom requirements (but still my stereo speakers and equipment); and a longtime friend and photo bud whom I gifted a nice Leica Focomat enlarger (in exchange for some much needed guidance in the digital realm). No regrets."

Featured Comment by MM: "I did the film-and-darkroom thing for 25 years. Then I stayed out of my darkroom for a few years in the mid-2000s when I was only shooting digital.

"Then about four years ago, after shooting and printing another pile of digital photographs that the client regarded as technically perfect but felt clinically bland to me, I made a realization that seems obvious in retrospect but was a huge leap at the time: darkroom printing, like shooting film, 'means' something completely different in an age when there's digital than it meant when film and darkroom was the only way to make photographs.

"I say this observation is 'obvious in retrospect' because I've since realized that there are countless analogous activities that took on new meaning in the face of new technologies: playing acoustic instruments after synthesizers were invented; driving a stick shift after automatics were invented; gardening after grocery stores were invented; walking after bicycles and cars were invented; woodworking after Ikea was invented; sending snail-mail cards after e-mail was invented; sailing after powerboats were invented; making paintings  after photography was invented....

"In all of these cases having a new, more efficient way of doing a task didn't satisfactorily replace the old way for everybody. Instead, the new way gave the old way a different meaning to those who still chose to do it the old way for the inherent satisfaction of the activity, even as they knew that their final product wasn't necessarily going to be 'better' as judged by whatever metric. (My large inkjet prints are usually far superior—and far, far easier to make—than my darkroom prints are. So?)

"Needless to say, and I've said it here before, I'm happily shooting both film and digital now (the former for personal satisfaction, the latter for my profession)—I try to keep a 50/50 balance—and I'm happily printing with inkjet and with my reborn darkroom.

"I'm not saying Ctein ever would or should consider anything similar; he knows himself and it's very clear he's done with film and darkroom. In part this could be because unlike a hobbyist he may associate the darkroom more with professional work than with low-stress personal enjoyment. And anyone who gets no more feeling of accomplishment from nailing a difficult shot with film than with digital should definitely shoot digital (it's the same principle as gardening, walking, sailing, painting, driving a stick shift, and playing acoustic instruments: if the process doesn't matter to you, do whatever gives you the best results).

"But it could also be because Ctein was born too early. In my observation, 1957 or 1958 is about the cutoff point for long-time photographers who are willing to return to analog photography. It seems that people born before then usually say, 'Did that for too long, will never do it again,' while those born after that date seem much more open to giving film and/or darkroom a(nother) go."

Richard Zakia

Dick Zakia in the summer of 2011. Photo by Willie Osterman.

I was just reached with the news that Richard Zakia has died, last March 12th.

Richard (born Rashid Elisha) Zakia was one of the great photography teachers of his era in the United States. A member of the stellar 1956 graduating class at the Rochester Institute of Technology that included Carl Chiarenza, Peter Bunnell, Bruce Davidson, Ken Josephson, Pete Turner and Jerry Uelsmann—and that numbered Minor White and Beaumont Newhall among its teachers—he did a stint at Eastman Kodak as an engineer out of school, and then returned to RIT, where he taught for 34 years, eventually serving as the chair of the Fine Art Photography Department and Graduate Program in Imaging Arts.

He was the author or co-author of 13 books, and edited, with his colleague Leslie Stroebel, the mammoth third edition of The Focal Enclyclopedia of Photography. His most interesting book to me is Perception and Imaging, a fascinating and learned tome on how we see, how the camera sees, and where the twain meet. His most recent book, with co-author Glenn Rand, is Teaching Photography: Tools for the Imaging Educator, published in 2006.

Our condolences to Dick Zakia's family, his friends, and his many students.

Mike
(Thanks to Barry Myers)

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Featured Comment by Slobodan Blagojevich: "I second your choice of Perception and Imaging...it has been the most influential book in my photographic library. I used to study perception in business school (as in: in marketing, perception is reality), but in photography, Zakia's book was an eye-opener. I often use the concept of optical illusions (mentioned in the book) to introduce the concept of cognitive biases in decision making: we are by now, being familiar with certain well-known optical illusions, quite ready to accept that our brain can play tricks on us, but we are somehow still very reluctant to accept—or, even worse, to consider—that our brain can play tricks on us using cognitive biases."

Harold Feinstein Book Will Be a Reality

You might remember that back in October 2011 we called attention to a Kickstarter campaign to help Harold Feinstein publish his first monograph of his decades of work. Well, the Kickstarter campaign was a success, and Panopticon Gallery in Boston has announced that the project will come to fruition: Harold's A Retrospective will be published by Nazraeli Press in the fall. Thought you'd want to know. Panopticon will stage a concurrent exhibit beginning on September 14th.

And today is Harold's 81st birthday.

Also, if you haven't visited the page recently, you'll note that Carl's Kickstarter campaign has been a big success as well, with eight days to go.

Mike

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All the Photographs from the 19th Century

In this still-interesting 1000memories post, the astonishing assertion is made that today, humanity takes as many photographs every two minutes as were made in the entire 19th century.

Even if the datum is off by half or double (1 minutes, four minutes), or more, it's still a really amazing notion.

Mike
(Thanks to Stan)

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Open Mike: The Sinking of the S. S. Titanic

I am not very interested in fiction or its liberties. I would rather get as near to truth as I can.

In fictional accounts of the sinking of the Titanic, which happened 100 years ago today, liberties are often taken: maelstroms of nature and human panic are imagined and inserted, and were from the first.

The reality may have been much more eerie and haunting. The best eyewitness account was provided by Lawrence Beesley, in his book The Loss of the S. S. Titanic. What follows is an excerpt from the book that recounts the sinking of the ship—in silence, on gentle ocean swells with no waves.

The book is in the public domain. Hope you enjoy reading this.

Mike

 

The Loss of the S. S. Titanic

by Lawrence Beesley

Excerpt from Chapter IV, "The Sinking of the Titanic,
Seen from a Lifeboat."

...We had no eyes for anything but the ship we had just left. As the oarsmen pulled slowly away we all turned and took a long look at the mighty vessel towering high above our midget boat, and I know it must have been the most extraordinary sight I shall ever be called upon to witness; I realize now how totally inadequate language is to convey to some other person who was not there any real impression of what we saw.

But the task must be attempted: the whole picture is so intensely dramatic that, while it is not possible to place on paper for eyes to see the actual likeness of the ship as she lay there, some sketch of the scene will be possible. First of all, the climatic conditions were extraordinary...

Doisneau is 100

Google is celebrating the centennial of the great French photographer Robert Doisneau's birth today—have a look at its home page.

Doisneau died on April Fool's day 1994.

It's funny, but I've never owned a good book of Doisneau photographs. Of course, like most people, I probably have a book's worth in my mind.

Mike

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Quote o' the Day

"I have always been more interested in persons than in people."

—Lewis Hine

It took me a minute to parse his distinction. Of course, once you get it, you realize that photography itself is more interested in persons than in people, too. You can't meaningfully photograph a big political movement, but you can photograph one brave guy standing in the way of a tank; you can't photograph bad economic conditions, but you can photograph one worried woman with three dirty children in a pea-picker's camp. And so forth.

Mike

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Featured Comment by Hugh Look: "Reminds me of Jonathan Swift, who wrote (in a letter to Pope):

I have ever hated all nations, professions, and communities, and all my love is toward individuals...principally I hate and detest that animal called man, although I heartily love John, Peter, Thomas, and so forth. This is the system upon which I have governed myself many years....

Shorpy and Addie

Well, damn, I deserve what I get for mentioning taxes in a lead-in. Let's pretend I didn't do that, okay? It makes me feel kind of useless to spend my time not publishing comments.

More on topic, Jim Nash mentioned that there are some large JPEGs of Lewis Hine pictures at shorpy.com, as indeed there are. Including many which I've never seen before, which is exciting for me.

Those of you who don't visit Shorpy, or have never heard of it, might not know that the site itself is named after the subject of a Lewis Hine photograph:

December 1910. Shorpy Higginbotham, a 'greaser' on the tipple at Bessie Mine, of the Sloss-Sheffield Steel and Iron Co. in Alabama. Said he was 14 years old, but it is doubtful. Carries two heavy pails of grease, and is often in danger of being run over by the coal cars.
(Photograph and caption by Lewis Wickes Hine.)

Shorpy Higginbotham died in a mining accident, aged 31.

Poking around the Hine photographs on Shorpy, I was interested to see how the site's community dives into researching the pictures and their elements. Consider this one—the commenters have figured out the real name and age of the "newsie," the location of the store, and even the fact that the toilet paper in the window was made by the Waldorf Company, whose employee education program was the ancestor of the still-thriving Waldorf Schools.

That led me naturally enough to the site of Joe Manning, "author, historian and geneologist," whose site I have actually surfed past before, looking for pictures, without realizing its full import. Joe's "Lewis Hine Project" involves tracking down what happened to the subjects of some of Hine's pictures.

February 1910. Addie Card,12 years old, anemic little spinner in North Pownal Cotton Mill, Vermont. Girls in mill say she is ten years. She admitted to me she was twelve; that she started during school vacation and would 'stay.' (Photograph and caption by Lewis Wickes Hine.)

One of Lewis Hine's most famous child-laborer photographs is of Addie Card, an "anemic little spinner" in a Vermont cotton mill. A book author, Elizabeth Winthrop, wrote a novel inspired by the photograph, imagining the life of the girl in the picture, who she named "Grace." But she became curious about the identity of the real person in the photograph, and asked Joe Manning to help her find out more about her.

Joe Manning's account of several months of detective work starts here.

It's not a fast read, but his search certainly succeeded—he was able to track Addie Card through marriages, divorce, a lost child, and all the way to her headstone (she died in 1993). He met a number of her descendants and uncovered several later pictures of her, and one possible earlier one, including a picture of her as an old woman.

Based on Joe's researches, Elizabeth Winthrop wrote a short article for Smithsonian magazine about Addie, which can be found here.

And to think, there are probably similar stories waiting to be uncovered about so many of the pictures on Shorpy...if you've never visited, don't do it when you're in a hurry.

Mike

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Labor

Those of you with regular salaried jobs, with benefits, working for big employers, should be feeling grateful right about now. You can be thankful you don't have to pay self-employment tax. And I pay every morsel of my own benefits with after-tax cash, too. I am my own welfare state. Guess that's why I work nights and weekends.

And speaking of labor, I've always liked Lewis Hine, the pre-eminent photographer of the workingman. Not necessarily because of a visceral attraction to his photographs; to me they're more meaningful than they are aesthetically pleasing (although some of them are that). Hine himself, who remains opaque to me except through the window of his work, was a bootstrapper, self-made, an upright man with a heightened sense of ethics as well as empathy, a man on a mission whose mission actually succeeded. (Of course now our capitalists have simply moved our bad labor practices to other countries, but never mind.) He virtually invented social documentary photography, or at least helped greatly to define it. It's not easy to be clear about what you're doing when no one's ever done it before.

Hineograph by Lewis Hine

At his most grandiloquent he called his photographs "Hineographs." Self-promotion, it must be admitted, was not his genius.

You'd say he was an American success story, except he was more or less the opposite: a self-made, hard-working, moral, inventive, creative, caring person who contributed immeasurably to society...but ended up forlorn and forgotten, begging for work. Nobody cared about him or supported his work in the later part of his life (Stryker turned him down for the FSA, in which he was desperate to be included), finally losing his house and being forced to apply for welfare in his old age (yeah, I know. Quiet, please). Even his archive went nomad, given the Dear John by MoMA before finding refuge at George Eastman House after a waystop at the Photo League.

It's a bit dangerous to recommend a BBC video to a worldwide audience, because sometimes they're not viewable everywhere. But here goes. Worked for me, in quiet backwater Wisconsin USA. Tasty, if you're able to see it.

Regarding that new book by GEH's Alison Nordström they talk about, it puts me in an increasingly familiar quandary: I'd love to have it, but I can't have everything, and I already have several books about Hine, including Passionate Journey which has already gotten rather pricey. But can I afford not to have the new one? It includes an entire facsimile of the justly famous Men at Work—which however you can buy in an inexpensive reprint. What to do, what to do. One thing's for sure...he who hesitates is lost, or, rather, he who hesitates will pay through the nose later. Note those prices for Passionate Journey.

At least I could write it off my taxes.

Mike
(Thanks to Christian Kurmann)

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Featured Comment by Paul Butzi: "Hine is of my photographic heroes, if only because he uttered the words 'If I could say it in words, I wouldn't need a camera'—eerily similar to Robert Frost's response when asked to explain a poem: 'You want me to say it worse?'

"It seems to me that Hine is to social documentary photography what Louis Armstrong is to jazz trumpet—if you're go to work in that field, you first discover that the very first thing you need to do is learn how to do everything they did. The second thing you discover is that they covered an awful lot of ground, so just catching up to them is not so easy as you might expect. Most social documentary photographers today fall far short of Hine's aspiration: 'There are two things I wanted to do. I wanted to show the things that needed to be corrected. I wanted to show the things that needed to be appreciated.' His ability to do both at once has not often been matched. Salgado comes to mind, and then I start to have to work to come up with names."

OT: From VHS to Virtual (Partly)

By Ctein

Digitizing the entertainment media in my house hasn't just been about audio CDs and vinyl records, as I've written about previously (here and here). Paula and I also had a couple of bookcases holding several hundred VHS tapes. A motley to be sure, including VHS, S-VHS, commercially purchased movies and TV series, and over-the-air recordings, the tapes running anywhere from two to eight hours, recorded over 25 years.

Remarkably, all were entirely viewable. But, with VHS machines becoming increasingly difficult to find and increasingly unreliable, there was pretty clearly a "sell by date" on the assemblage of entertainment, even if we didn't know just what that date was. Besides, I really wanted that bookshelf space back.

What was conceptually simple was not physically so. It was physically easy to move my turntable and preamp into the office where the computers work in order to digitize my vinyl. Not so for a VHS machine and a TV monitor. I didn't relish the idea of stringing several dozen feet of cable through the house, signal quality issues aside. Moving one of the computers into the living room where the TV lived was inconvenient and impractical. Finally, digitizing the VHS tapes was going to be a much bigger drain on my computer resources; the data bandwidth demands were substantially higher and I had several times as many hours of tape as of vinyl.

The solution I hit upon was to transfer everything to DVD first. We already owned a DVD recorder. I could plug the S-VHS output of the VCR directly into the input of the DVD recorder and turn all those tapes into platters. Them, I could digitize at my leisure on the computer using tools like Handbrake, and I'd even have the backup archive I wanted on those DVDs.

The really smart thing I did was to buy a factory-refurbished JVC HM-DH40000U D-VHS machine to play the tapes on. D-VHS was a fabulous technology; it's a shame it came along too late. Any tape, no matter what sort, looks immensely better played back on a D-VHS machine; ahh, the wonders of digital signal processing.

It was really simple. Pop a VHS tape into the JVC. Pop a blank DVD into the recorder and set the recording length to match whatever the length of the tape was (the bandwidth on a DVD is so much higher that there was negligible loss doing this). Press "play" and "record" and leave it be. Spot check the DVD to make sure it really recorded (always did). Repeat until done. Because of the miracles of D-VHS signal processing, these "second-generation" recordings looked just as good or better than the original tapes played on an ordinary S-VHS machine.

The two machines ran the better part of 24 hours a day. In a few months I had almost all the tapes converted to DVDs. Except, I'd hit a big pothole called "Macrovision." A few studios copy-protected their videotapes. My DVD recorder had copy-protection detection built into it and behaved accordingly. It was a very small fraction of the total number of tapes, maybe 30, just enough to be annoying, but enough that I didn't really feel like going out and buying new DVDs of all of them.

This one had me stalled for a good nine months. I inquired about the well-known digitizers like Dazzler and Toast, but they all seemed to be designed to detect Macrovision. Then Fry's had a sale on this.

With rebate, it was $14.95. So I figured what the hell, give it a try. Maybe I could figure out a way to hack around the Macrovision protection. Well, it turns out I didn't have to; this device was so primitive and the capture software so crude that it didn't even see the Macrovision signal!

So, an afternoon spent lugging the iMac into the living room, getting it set up, fiddling interminably with the settings in the ultra-primitive video capture software until the capture look decent, and finally I managed to transcribe a videotape.

Then it hit me. There was a much simpler and more elegant solution. I couldn't believe I hadn't thought of it months earlier.

I launched my torrent client software, Vuze, and had it run some searches. Sure enough, 26 of the 30 uncooperative videotapes were freely available in pirated form as torrents! I cranked up my download rate to a megabyte per second, my upload rate down to under 1 kB per second (I'll happily take advantage of pirates; I'm sure not going to support them), and told Vuze to make it so. A week and many gigabytes later, I had digitized copies of almost all of my uncopyable tapes.

No doubt some of you are getting ready to launch fiery missives castigating me for blatant piracy. Too bad, but I don't see it that way. I own the videotapes. I just want to be able to continue watching them. I understand and appreciate the studios wishing to prevent pirating of the content; piracy is a serious problem and I am not on the side of the pirates. I very much doubt that the studios' intention was to make it impossible for me to watch, in the future, the movies I had purchased; I doubt that even entered their thoughts. (If it did, screw 'em.) It was an unintended consequence, and I feel entirely justified in circumventing it.

As for the tapes themselves? Well, no legal or ethical questions here about reselling them. Nobody wants VHS tapes! I just recycled the media.

Ctein

Ctein's media adventures and sundry flirtations with pirates are published on TOP on Wednesdays.

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Featured Comment by Ken Tanaka: "As a devoted classic film collector for (gasp) over 30 years, I feel your pain. I started in the Sony Beta era and have schlepped through each medium, yes, including LaserDisc.

"More to the recent point several years ago I, too, found myself with a couple of dozen films on VHS tape but not available on DVD. (I really do have a strong bias toward purchasing commercial films rather than trying to copy them. Better quality and the expense is negligible compared to the enjoyment of seeing good quality.) I purchased two Panasonic DMR-EZ47V dual VHS/DVD recorders to smooth the transfer to DVD. Best decision I ever made.

"But, no, there are indeed some films that are simply copy protected. In facing this hurdle I have been fortunate in two ways:

1. At my age I am no longer subject to the obsessions of my youth. I can take two giant steps back and ask myself just how important this is. Answer: Not very. I can always watch the film from the VHS side of those Panny units.
2. Enter Netflix and Amazon. There are quite a few films in Netflix streaming catalog that are not available on DVD at all. Voila! A new technology saves part of the day.

"Moral of the story: Don't drive yourself nuts."

Blog Note

Looks like TOP's going to be closed for a couple of days while the proprietor takes care of...shhh...the T-word. We will stoke up again on Wednesday morning. Sorry for the interruption in services and we hope it won't provoke any symptoms.

—Mike, Ace Accountant and Comptroller-in-Chief-

Open Mike: Nostalgia

A junk-drawer of various thoughts and updates on some non-photographic topics:

Coffee: My earlier grumpy moaning about my deficient sense of smell turns out to have been...well, wrong. As I've done more and more coffee roasting, I've gradually gotten better at it. The tipping point came when I realized I was roasting everything too dark. That's the legacy of $tarbucks, whose One Big Trick is to roast all its coffees too dark. The byword among home roasters is, the lighter the roast, the more you taste the bean, and the darker the roast, the more you taste the roast. Getting the balance of the two that you prefer is the trick. Starbucks roasts everything dark. With its whole bean coffees, you often see an oily sheen over the whole bean, which results in a lot of roast taste and less of the distinctive flavor of any particular bean. This is what home roasters would consider a French to espresso roast, and accounts for the "burnt" overtones many people complain about with Starbucks coffees. Over-roasting also tends to mask the inherent quality of the bean—which I'm sure has nothing at all to do with why Starbucks does it.

As I'm sure you've noticed (it's a frequent lesson you learn from everything from Photography to Angry Birds), the more you do something, the better you get at it. And sometimes your expertise just evolves, slowly but surely, like the minute hand of an analog clock moves. I haven't changed any of the big things I'm doing or the basic ways I'm doing them, but the coffee I'm making now is just...sorry, overused American word...awesome. It's so good I can hardly believe it sometimes. I look forward to getting up in the morning.

Incidentally, not that I'm down on Starbucks (I'm really not, it's just that I have no further use or need for them), but here's a fun factoid you might not know: the vast majority of the drinks consumed from Starbucks have more sugar in them than the equivalent amount of ice cream. America's Starbucks fetish is really just an extension of our collective sugar craving.

Music: This is fun, and will interest anyone who likes jazz or who likes guitar: There's a brand new Wes Montgomery album out. It's called Echoes of Indiana Avenue, and it consists of long-lost, recently rediscovered tapes made in his native Indianapolis in 1957 and 1958. Here's an info page about it—"how these long lost tapes from the early stage of Montgomery's solo career finally emerged after being on the shelf for more than 50 years is a tale of intrigue that will enthrall collectors and aficionados."

Fun stuff, but the deathless Full House is still the record to have if you have only one Wes Montgomery album.

Golf: I don't play much golf, and I think now that my brief fling with it was largely useful because it has made watching golf so much more fun and satisfying (because, let's face it, most of us best like those sports that we've participated in ourselves and can identify with firsthand). The final round of the Masters is today, and it promises to be dramatic: the leaderboard is crowded, and Mickelson is on a mission. He's playing like—well, a master. It will be deeply disappointing if he can't find his mojo this afternoon.

The Masters is a ceremonially dignified event, but, as John Camp noted, it's also recalcitrantly racist and sexist. Clifford Roberts, who ran the tournament with an iron hand for decades, once said something to the effect that as long as he has anything to say about it all the golfers will be white and all the caddies will be black. As an article in the Times points out, the incursion of whites into the caddying ranks is not entirely a sign of progress for all black people: it has come about as caddying has become more prestigious and lucrative. The article's author talked to some actual black caddies who wouldn't mind having those gigs now.

As for the golfers all being white, still mostly true. The major exception hasn't got it going this week, and isn't a factor. Too bad for the television ratings. But even Tiger is in the post-Tiger era now, it seems.

Nostalgia ain't what it used to be: I do sometimes get nostalgic for the world of the 1950s—I like the photography and the cameras and the jazz—but that world (the world the Masters has been trying to hang on to) really was sexist and racist, and every now and then it's good to take a reality check on that. I asked my mother a number of years ago if she misses those days, and she said, "Oh no. Things are much better now. Women weren't allowed to do anything then."

Take a look at this random find:

Holy crap! I find this shocking, and I don't shock very easily. This was business as usual? Things really have changed. An ad like that would probably trigger boycotts now.

(I found that on Retronaut, after looking at a feature about vintage celebrities using vintage cameras.)

Politics: The election passed through Wisconsin with merciful speed, so I've tentatively decided it's safe to turn my phone back on. (I'll probably have to turn it off again as June draws near, though.) Regarding the outcome, this clip is pretty funny. Nothing like a barnyard metaphor as an occasional relief for all the politigeek/wonk terminology we have to wade through. (The clip violates our no-politics rule, but only for 19 seconds.)

Anniversaries: I've always been ambivalent about anniversaries. They do make sense as occasions to look back, I know, but at the same time they're just arbitrary. Poor Zander didn't even get to celebrate some of his birthdays, because I have a hard time thinking birthdays are special at all. (When you have just one parent, you get that person's quirks and peccadiloes inflicted on you unmoderated.)

But recently I've been reading a little bit about 1912, an even hundred years ago. It was the year the Titanic sank, the year the Qing Dynasty ended and the Republic of China began, the year Japan gave Washington its cherry trees. Explorer Robert Falcon Scott died near the South Pole, and vitamins were discovered. It was also, curiously, the year that all three of the greatest trio in the history of American golf were born: Ben Hogan, Sam Snead, and Byron Nelson.

Sam Snead

Ben Hogan and Byron Nelson, seen here in 1942, were both caddies
as boys at the same Texas club.

I'm reading a good book about the three of them right now, or at least I was before the sale week commenced. I hope to get back to it soon. It's called American Triumvirate, and it's a quick-moving, easy read so far.

Unrelated to that, another cluster of anniversaries that I shouldn't care about but kinda do: 1962 was the year that the MGB, Lotus Elan, and Shelby Cobra all came on to the scene, fifty years ago. (Also the Ferrari GTO, but who cares about Ferraris?)

Everyman's sportscar: the MGB, which debuted in 1962 (not sure which year this one is, though).

The MGB, fifty? Although the last ones didn't roll off the line until 1980, which might be why it seems a bit more recent. It had a long run.

Mike

(P.S. Anybody have a better picture of a bonafide '62 MGB?)

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Featured Comment by cfw: "A biggie in my book—April 20th,2012, the 100 year anniversary of the opening of Fenway Park!"

Featured Comment by B Grace: "The 'B' shown is actually rather recent in terms of MGB history. It has three windshield wipers, safety octagon knock-offs, and the revised post-British Leyland corporate grill surround. If it's in original spec condition it's a 1972 to 1973 model. The early 1974 pre-crash bumper 'B' was practically the same albeit with rubber strips on the Sabrina bumper guards."

Featured Comment by Diane Fields: "Yes, that wasn't '62 MGB. I had one of the first in Pittsburgh area, a white with black interior. And I added blue racing stripes. I traded in my fairly new black with red interior A—mostly to get wind up windows (lol) to counter Pittsburgh winters. And being a quite young professional woman in '62 sucked. Thanks for that ad which made me realize how much better (though not geat) it is now."

Featured Comment by Mike Plews: "1962? That was the year my father had a heart attack and died. He was 61 and I was 12. I inherited his old Argus C3 and I decided to learn how to use it as nobody else in the family had a clue. Pop was a career Army Warrant Officer but loved to take pictures. I remember family slide show nights looking at his Kodachromes from Korea in the living room. Not long after he passed I got into the darkroom and when my first print came up in the tray it completely blew me away. The experience left me so blissed out I got dizzy and fifty years later it still does from time to time."

A Digital Photographer's Ode to Slide Film

Mahesh Venkitachalam's "What Slide Film Taught Me" on tat tvam asi.

Mike

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Featured Comment by Tom Kwas: "...Actually many things to love in this article, and I certainly feel a companionship with the idea that going from film to digital is going from discipline to confusion. As a professional, it was certainly easier and cheaper, at least from an equipment investment standpoint, to shoot and 'nail' color transparency than is is to shoot digital. And there was more 'joy' in seeing the result. What I realized from going to digital is it wasn't just getting a beautiful or impactful image that made it for me, it was getting that and viewing it on transparency or in a full-scale black and white print. Viewing it on a computer screen? Not so much....

"And therein lies the 'rub.' If Mahesh is not a professional photographer, or using his work in some sort of media capacity for his employment, why change at all? If he is shooting for his own joy, there will be someplace, at least for the rest of the time they make transparency film, that will do pro processing for him.

"I only got involved in digital years ago at the behest of my clients and because I wanted to keep shooting professionally, if I hadn't been a pro photographer, believe me, I would have never stopped shooting transparency, and in fact, I still shoot it today on certain projects that I deem 'legacy' projects: where it would be important to have the physical film in perpetuity.

"One only wonders how many pro photographers fell off the edge of employment during the film/digital change-over. How many were at an age where they just figured it wasn't worth the trouble, or expenses, to end up with that image on a computer screen. How many ended up looking for that Home Depot retirement job in their mid-late fifties rather than go back to a far steeper—and moving—learning curve, and start over again, like they did in their late teens/early twenties.

"Even for me, I'm one interesting job offer away from never taking a professional photo again; mostly because with the change-over from film to digital, it just isn't fun anymore. Everything I interact with other photographers about now has nothing to do with looking at someones photos and oohing and ahhing about composition or 'decisive moment,' and everything to do with digital equipment speak and trying to fix some sort of digital-related problem.

"It reminds me of an art director I knew once back in the late '80s early '90s. She told me that one day she showed up at work, and there was a computer on her desk, and the production department was gone. From that day forward, she spent her time learning and relearning design programs and the constant change in the design programs; and never again went to a paper warehouse to dig through old stock to find the perfect surface to print on, and look through old books and magazines at a library to try and find beautiful but forgotten type-styles. She was now never again paid for her taste, inquisitiveness, or enthusiasm. She was paid to do 10% of what she used to do and 90% of what the production department used to do."

Mike replies: My son's grandfather, and old studio partner—and onetime teacher—quit photography when digital came along. He is badly dyslexic and has a real feel (almost a genius) for physical and mechanical things, but couldn't cope with computers. He used to have a good business as a professional in Washington, D.C.

As far as "why change at all?", I've given this matter a great deal of thought and I think the reason most people don't shoot film any more is: we don't have to. That sounds very simplistic but that's what it comes down to for me. On the other hand, like Mahesh, I'm very glad I had to shoot film for a couple of decades first. (I do wish I'd been more focused about it, but that's just me—that is, it's characterological.)

Featured Comment by David Bostedo: "If it weren't for digital coming along, I'm pretty sure I'd have never gotten into photography. Not being able to play with exposure settings and see instant results would have killed it for me. So it's likely that for every photographer that laments the loss of film, there's a whole new generation of photographers who are only doing it because digital exists. I do wonder if shooting film would help me become better in some way...but it just seems so painfully slow and error prone."

Mike replies: I'm sure a lot of photographers agree with that.

Featured Comment by Steve Jones: "I pretty much avoided photography for nearly four decades, partially because the process, particularly the thought of the seemingly arcane darkroom, appeared intimidating. Digital changed that, and as a learning tool, its cost effective and forgiving character (with a histogram to boot!) was certainly beneficial.

"However, less then three years in, I switched to film, and this also proved instructive, albeit in a different way. I'm glad digital was around to draw me into photography, helping me get a grip on the fundamentals, but moving over to film helped bolster the visualization process; it slowed me down. I believe I would have acquired such skill through digital, but film, by its restrictive nature, expedited the process. Anyway, I enjoy shooting film more so than digital, and I have no plans to return to digital cameras...although I still use digital scanners."

Featured Comment by Mahesh Venkitachalam: "Thank you all, for the kind comments. Unfortunately, shooting film is no longer an option for me, since I live in India and I don't see any local labs that sell or process slide film. The costs are also exorbitant."

The Ultimate Photographer's Jacket

Made me laugh—Hugh Look found this fabulous jacket on eBay. Perfect for the digital black-and-white photographer who has everything.

Mike

(P.S. Hugh says the jacket really is as pictured, it's not a spoof; he didn't Photoshop the picture.)

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End of Sale Update

I'm happy to report the sale went very well—Peter sold just under 500 prints.

Everybody who ordered should have gotten a longish email back from me with payment instructions that included my mailing address. If you didn't get that, please be sure to contact me (there's an "Email me" link in the right-hand sidebar).

Please allow six to eight weeks for delivery, depending on where in the world you are. I'll post periodic updates here to let you know how things are going.

As I mentioned, our next sale will be something completely different, in the immortal words of Monty Python. Then I'll be getting to work in earnest on the TOP Reader Print Offer for this summer.

Thanks very much to one and all for making this sale a success—and special thanks to Peter for his tireless work, his friendship and his unflaggingly professional attitude.

Mike

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Random Excellence: Bobby Neel Adams

I'm fascinated with photographs that show the way things change over time. Bobby Neel Adams creates what he called "AgeMaps":

Bobby [the artist] at age 36 and 6

...which combine pictures of the same person at different ages; and, in a series he calls "FamilyTree," he combines pictures of different family members into one:

Wendy (age 60) and daughter Liza (age 23)

A portfolio is online at The Forward Thinking Museum.

Mike

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Last Day!

Just a reminder that our current sale of Paris pictures by Peter Turnley printed by Voja Mitrovic is about to end. We'll take orders up until 6 p.m. U.S. Central Time tonight (Friday). I think that's midnight Fri.-Sat. GST, if I'm reading the tables right. [UPDATE: Sale is now over.]

We really don't take late orders, so please don't assume we will—in fact, I'll be sending the orders to Paris right at six o'clock tonight so Voja can get to work bright and early on Saturday morning in the darkroom.

Voja

Voja's going to be working really hard for us these next couple of weeks, and I'd like to extend a special thanks to him, along with my admiration.

As a side note, I really want to thank everybody for all the nice comments. A special shout out to The Wright Language School in the Chugoku mountain range in western Japan, servicing Tsuyama, a rural city of about 110,000 people. Andrew Nichols writes, "This will be the fourth print from your offers I'm looking forward to displaying here at our language school. Gordon's, Charlie's, and Ken's works greet me and our students every day, relaxing and inspiring us, and the chance to hang one of Peter's photos printed by Voja will add to our mini-collection greatly."

Things like that are just nice to hear.

Mike

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