The Online Photographer

Not Such a 'Free Country'—For Us

It's a sign of the times and a mark of shame against the character and honor of this country that not just every photographer, but every citizen, needs to read this....

I've come to believe that the only solution to this problem is that there must be penalties put in place for violators—that is, we need laws stating that any law enforcement official, or any person acting in a security-providing role, who illegally interferes with, threatens, impedes, arrests or detains any citizen for photographing legally in public, be punished with something such as suspension for ten days without pay for the first offense, thirty days without pay for the second offense, and firing for the third offense. Something like that.

Photographing in public is legal in a free country and public officials do not have the authority to systematically and persistently deprive citizens of rights clearly granted to them by their Constitution. Obviously, even systematically informing police departments about the rights of citizens to photograph isn't doing the job, even in the relatively rare instances where that's being done. Photographers are becoming an illegally persecuted class of people, for utterly no good reason.

Only if there are consequences for doing it will the persecution of photographers in public subside.

Mike

NOTE: This post is not an open invitation to discuss generally all the shortcomings of law enforcement, government, or the U.S. as an entity. Comments that overstep the boundaries of the present topic by too great a margin won't be posted. Thanks. —Yr. Friendly Ed. Mod.

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Featured Comment by Jeroen Grobben: "At least Washington D.C. Police Chief Cathy Lanier gets it right. fstoppers had this interesting article on their site on July 25 this year. Here's the link. She even went so far as to issue a directive (linked in the article) which instructs her officers on the rights of photographers and the public. Yay for her. Too bad the world is such a crazy place nowadays. Why can't we all just get along?? Yikes...Jeroen, way up north near Ardrossan, Alberta, Canada."

Response by MartinP: "I suppose I am the hundredth person to point it out, but the comment by Jeroen Grobben over a 'photographer friendly' statement by a senior police-officer omits that the statement was made as part of the settlement of a civil-rights lawsuit which was lost by the police department in question. The ACLU supported the case."

'Most Generous Magnum Member Gone'

Martine Franck, Pauline Doohan's and Brian Gallagher's wedding,
Tory Island, County Donegal, Ireland, 1996.

R.I.P. Martine Franck, 1938–2012. She died yesterday, after a protracted illness. A "shy" but accomplished photographer, she joined the Vu Agency in the 1960s, and became a full member of Magnum Photos in 1983. She was Henri Cartier-Bresson's wife and President of the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation.

Martine Franck, U.S. photographer Paul Strand, Orgeval, France, 1972.

There's a thoughtful and informative obituary by Olivier Laurent at the British Journal of Photography website, and several portfolios available to look at at Magnum.

Martine Franck, Shechen Monastery, Bodnath, Nepal, 1996.
(Photos courtesy Magnum.)

The title of this post was a tweet by Magnum photographer John Vink.

Mike
(Thanks to Pete)

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John Claridge and William Gedney

It might be that the world seems to be recently discovering some previously little-known archives of 1960s-era photography because the photographers are now older and making efforts to push their work out into the world; or perhaps it's just that we now have enough perspective on this time period that it is acquiring historical distance sufficient to allow our interest; or it might be simply that I like photography from that time period, and that explains why I'm paying attention to it.

William Gedney, Teenage Boy Rolling a Cigarette, 1964

Two photographers of that period have crossed my wake in recent days. One is William Gedney, who died in 1989 and whose work was the subject of a now-unattainable book that I thought we recommended here on TOP although I can't find any mention of it now. He made two trips to Kentucky spanning only 29 days, in 1964 and 1972, and the work he did there is now part of a comprehensive online archive of his life's work that includes more than 5,000 pictures.

William Gedney, Vivian Cornett Fixing Daughter's Hair, 1964

William Gedney's Kentucky work is the subject of a series of posts by Roger May at Walk Your Camera—an easier way in than diving directly into the unedited archive (although I'm not sure I entirely agree with Roger's picture editing—then again, there's the big Duke University archive if you want to make your own choices). Here are the Walk Your Camera links:

Looking at Appalachia | William Gedney—Part One
Looking at Appalachia | William Gedney—Part Two
Looking at Appalachia | William Gedney—Part Three

-

John Claridge, no title given, 1963

Vanishing London
The East End of London has been much discussed of late because run-down parts of it received a makeover for the Olympics venues. This is not firsthand knowledge on my part, but apparently the term "East End," denoting an area which appears to be more or less in the middle of present-day London, refers to an area just east of the original Medieval walled city. Traditionally it was poor and overcrowded (the Salvation Army was founded there, after an epidemic worsened already bad conditions), and apparently parts of it were improved by being wiped away in favor of temporary sporting facilities.

John Claridge, Accordion player, Spitalfields, 1970

The gentle author of a small blog called Spitalfields Life has been mining the early work of a photographer named John Claridge, who came up from the East End to become successful in advertising. His pictures of the East End were taken between 1959 and 1982, many of them when he was no more than a boy.

Here are the posts:

A Nation of Shopkeepers by John Claridge
John Claridge’s East End
Along the Thames with John Claridge
At the Salvation Army with John Claridge
In a Lonely Place
A Few Diversions by John Claridge
This was my Landscape
John Claridge’s Spent Moments
Signs, Posters, Typography & Graphics
Working People & a Dog
Invasion of the Monoliths
Time Out with John Claridge
Views from a Dinghy by John Claridge
People on the Street & a Cat
In Another World with John Claridge
A Few Pints with John Claridge

Great fun. I've been enjoying making my way through these.

Mike
(Thanks to Howard French and Ian Goodrick)

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Featured Comment by Patrick Medd: "At last, my favourite photographer on my favourite photography website! I've been chasing after John Claridge's work since I first read a magazine feature on him 20 years ago. One of those rare photographers whose monochrome and colour work is equally compelling (to me). Indeed the colour photographs shouldn't work; pictoralist in many ways, heavily filtered, diffused...but he's not afraid to let large parts of his pictures render as pure black, and his use of this aesthetic appears magical to me. Check out his series of portraits taken at 'The French'—a pub in Soho, which are on his website."

Featured Comment by Tim Auger: "The East End has suffered two phases of comprehensive urban planning: one was implemented by the Luftwaffe, and the second by postwar planners and architects building stained-concrete housing fit for the masses, but which they themselves wouldn't be seen dead in (and which the masses don't like much either). It was called 'slum clearance.' And traffic management schemes. A lot of the old stuff's gone. The East End's a lot better than it was 10–20 years ago, but the intimate texture of urban life that you see in these pictures is pretty lacking now. Except in some of the recent concentrations of ethnic minorities maybe, which do have a good atmosphere."

Featured Comment by Cliff: "For more of Gedney see Shorpy." 

Mike replies: Ah, that's where I'd seen his work before. Thanks, Cliff.

Featured Comment by Roger May: "Thanks very much for mentioning/linking to my series on William Gedney. Admittedly, I'm no photo editor. I could've easily posted hundreds of images, but only requested permission to use less than fifty. It's my hope that more folks learn about Gedney's work and share it with others. Again, thank you!"

Mike replies: 'Tis I who should thank you, Roger!

Ramesh Raskar and Femto-Photography

This 11-minute video will start your Thursday off on a good footing by expanding your thinking for today. MIT Professor Ramesh Raskar at the TED Talks. ("Femto-" [symbol f] is a prefix in the metric system denoting a factor of 10^−15 or 0.000000000000001.) I love that it would take a year to record a bullet moving the same distance as the light inside the Coke bottle.

Here's a link to a TED Talks page which might be a better-quality video for you (I had problems embedding that video here). And here's a link to a bio page describing who Ramesh is and what's so interesting about his talk.

Mike
(Thanks to David Dyer-Bennet)

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Featured Comment by rnewman: "WHEEEEE!!! Around 1970 we were doing 100,000 fps for photographing explosions, and that was state of the art. A 1^-2 second exposure used lots of film, especially when you considered the spin-up time before actual exposure. I'd love to get a chance to work with this. Ain't science grand??"

Featured Comment by Ed: "Yeps, computational photography rules...absolutely. By the way, I stopped worrying about megapixels when I made a 2.3 gigapixel picture with a $99 Panosaurus, a $100 kit lens, and $100 worth of software...now that was 5.8x2.9 meters in size at 300 DPI. And I didn't even need femtoseconds to do it (in fact it took me 21 minutes of shooting and two days of processing). And then I found out that I hadn't enough webspace to show it :-)—the JPEG data was 590 MB, my webspace only 500. "

Zooms vs. Primes, Part I

An Idiosyncratic, Unfair and Unscientific Comparison

By Ctein

Having rounded out my Olympus Pen lens kit, I've an excess of choices. I have four primes and two zooms and, as close as often matters, the zooms overlap all the fixed focal length lenses. The zooms themselves overlap at their extremes.

So here's my question: if I'm out photographing in a situation where I could use either a zoom or a prime at the same settings (focal length and aperture) which lens is going to give me the best photograph, technically speaking? E.g., if I have the 14–42mm Olympus kit zoom on the camera and I see a composition which asks for about a 20mm focal length, will I gain anything by switching to the Panasonic 20mm lens?

I don't care about relative size, weight, convenience, maximum aperture, or cost. I just want to know how my lenses perform and which ones I should choose. If that doesn't interest you, skip the rest of this article and come back in two weeks.

Here are the lenses I own:

• 12mm ƒ/2 Olympus M. Zuiko Digital
• 14–42mm ƒ/3.5–5.6 Olympus M. Zuiko Digital (first generation) (NLA)
• 20mm ƒ/1.7 Panasonic Lumix
• 45mm ƒ/1.8 Olympus M. Zuiko Digital
• 45–200mm ƒ/4–5.6 Panasonic Lumix G Vario
• 85mm ƒ/1.4 Rokinon

Simple enough; I'll compare the 12mm to the 14–42mm (lots of the times I don't need the extra coverage of the 12mm), the 14–42 to the 20mm, the 14–42 to the 45mm and the 45–200mm, and the 45–200mm to the 45mm and 85mm.

Then Jeff Goggin, who owns more equipment than is good for me, knowing that I was not totally thrilled with that 12mm, thought maybe I'd be curious to see how it stood up against his wide-angle zooms.

Oh sure, why not. So he sent me:

• 7–14mm ƒ/4 Olympus Zuiko Digital
• 14–35mm ƒ/2 Olympus Zuiko Digital SWD
• 14–50mm ƒ/2.8–3.5 Lumix Leica D Vario Elmarit (NLA)

You can see the assemblage of glass in the accompanying illustration. Suddenly the number of potential comparisons triples, and what was going to be one column is two. Sheesh. Nobody's fault but my own; I could've said no. Well, time to dive in....

Jeff's three zooms are in the back row, left. All the other lenses are mine.

How did the 14–42mm Olympus kit zoom compare to the 12mm Olympus lens? At ƒ/4 they were essentially identical in image quality, the zoom being just a touch less contrasty overall. At ƒ/5.6, the zoom was actually better, being sharper on axis. At ƒ/8 the two lenses looked identical.

How did the 20mm Panasonic fare? At ƒ/4, the 20mm had better image quality in the center of the field but the 14–42 zoom was better at the corners. The prime lens was just a touch more contrasty. At ƒ/5.6, though, the two lenses produced almost identical image quality; if one had reason to stop down to ƒ/8, the zoom was actually better.

Understand that there is much nitpicking going on here. In practical reality, what this tells me is that there's no reason to swap out the zoom for the prime (or vice versa) at these focal lengths.

It was quite a different matter at the long end of the 14–42mm's range. The 14–42mm is mushy and smeary in the corners; even stopping it all away down to ƒ/11, where you'd expect diffraction to completely dominate, doesn't clear that up entirely. That superb 45mm Olympus lens wipes the floor with the zoom. It's better in the center of the field, much better in the corners. More importantly, it has much better microcontrast. Overall contrast isn't a big deal in these days of Photoshop; it doesn't really much matter if one lens is a little more contrasty than another. Microcontrast is another matter entirely; if the lens is muddying up tonal distinctions in fine detail, that's hard to recover.

Comparing the two zooms at their extremes, the 45–200mm Panasonic is a lot better in the corners at the 45mm setting than the 14–42mm Olympus is at 42mm, although the Panasonic has pretty serious light falloff in the corners wide open. Not what you'd usually expect in a telephoto. Still, if it's a choice between those two lenses for overall quality, the Olympus loses. But more importantly, that 45mm Olympus prime lens beats them both, although it's only slightly better than the Panasonic zoom at ƒ/8. (That zoom is really quite good; I've made a number of 17x22" portfolio prints with it over its whole range of focal lengths.)

That only leaves me to compare the 85mm Rokinon with the 45–200mm Panasonic. Lenses optimized for ultrafast apertures are frequently not as good as their brethren at more modest apertures. Well, at ƒ/4 the Rokinon is really good, corner to corner. It's noticeably better than the Panasonic zoom, being crisper and sharper over the entire field. By ƒ/8, the two lenses are equally good—the zoom might even be a smidge better, but I'm hairsplitting. Generally, though, I should switch from the Panasonic to the Rokinon if I don't need the autofocus and aperture.

So, there are the answers for my personal lens set. Some predictable results—did anyone really think the 45mm Olympus wouldn't blow everything else away? Some you wouldn't predict at all if you weren't familiar with the lenses. You'd certainly not guess that Olympus's first-generation 14–42mm kit lens would be as good as the much lauded 20mm Panasonic. Or, conversely, that a very inexpensive ultra-fast telephoto would beat out a much better-than-decent zoom.

Next time I'll toss Jeff's wide-angle zooms into the mix and see what rises to the top. Likely we'll find some surprises there, too.

Ctein

Ctein is anomalously idiosyncratic, unfair and unscientific on Wednesdays here on TOP.

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Featured Comment by Craig: "My big annoyance with dedicated Micro 4/3 lenses in general is that most of them (even the shorter primes) have excessive barrel distortion that has to be fixed up in software. The difference is obvious if you compare a in-camera JPEG to an uncorrected RAW file (using third-party raw processing software that won't automatically apply a lens profile to straighten the image out). Part of the problem is that correcting distortion requires pixel remapping, which by its nature always reduces sharpness in the regions farthest from the center (where the distortion is worst). Unless I missed something, Ctein doesn't tell us in this article whether he is assessing the lenses' performance based on JPEGs, corrected RAW files, or uncorrected RAW files, which makes it difficult to tell whether he's really judging the lenses as such or the image-processing software."

Featured Comment by Manuel: "You have every reason to be unscientific, Ctein. Using a lens can be a very subjective experience. We often get misled by technical specifications and overlook a lens because of e.g. its narrow maximum aperture, but lenses are hard to judge from specs only.

"Let me advocate a lens that everybody else dismisses: the humble Olympus M.Zuiko Digital 17mm ƒ/2.8 Pancake lens. This is the lens that was bundled with my E-P1 (it was one of those once-in-a-lifetime deals) and was my only lens for two months, save for a rather frustrating two-day experience with the original 14–42mm zoom, which I never got to grips with. (That was when I realized I was a prime man.) Sure, the Pancake has horrendous chromatic aberration and fisheye-like levels of barrel distortion—even if it's unnoticeable with JPEGs due to in-camera correction—but, when I look critically at the 30x40 cm prints of photos made with the 17mm and the E-P1, those issues become completely irrelevant. The levels of detail are simply amazing for such a modest lens and, while I wouldn't exactly call it 'sharp,' it is nonetheless extremely accurate.

"Short of having a top quality wide-angle lens, the Pancake is my loyal companion when I do street photography. Very seldom it lets me down. Even now that I have some nice OM lenses in my backpack (don't even get me started with praising them), I keep turning to the Pancake because of its nimbleness and levels of detail. So here it is: there's nothing like actually using a lens to evaluate it. In my view, printings are the ultimate image quality test—and the 17mm passes it with flying colours. We should never overlook a lens just because it has a bad reputation, and neither should we rush in to buy one just because everybody is raving about it."

Calling All Geeks! Part II

The other day I considered five camera brands, one at a time, looking for your recommendations as to which cameras best fit the description "small cameras we love" for a list by that name that will come out in October.

I got some useful suggestions, too—for which, thanks.

Here I'm taking a look at four more cameramakers and asking for your advice. I've appended my thoughts, but bear in mind this is not the list—I'm just sketching my first impressions and asking for your input.

Canon: So far I've got the tiny-sensor pocket S100 and the larger-sensor all-in-one G1X on the list. The antediluvian G12 with its point-and-shoot sensor sits on the fence, a relic of an earlier digital era, a throwback, nice as it is—as does the T4i. To me the G12 seems superseded by the G1X, which has most of the former's virtues but a better, bigger sensor. As for the T4i, well, I actually do kind of love the T4i. Canon has a wonderful history with affordable DSLRs, and the T4i is the inheritor of the original Digital Rebel that set our world on its ear back when we were all younger and very slightly less cranky. The good side of the T4i is that Canon could build a great small DSLR in its sleep...the bad side being that sometimes it seems like that's exactly what it has done; excitement—and hence, the inducement to love—seems a bit thin on the ground. So what do you think—should the G12 and the T4i be in, or out?

Sony: Two must-includes for the list are the hot camera o' the moment, the RX100, and the Siren-singing NEX-7 which is to Yr. Hmbl. Editor as crack is to a crack addict. My feeling is still that the NEX-7 is one of the most desirable cameras currently being made, plus that it's not just small but the perfect size—with a feel in the hand and ergonomics to die for. But aside from those two, are there any more Sonys you'd put on the list? I confess I'm confused by Sony's proliferation of DSLRs, some of which are indeed small. The DSLR lineup seems like the shampoo aisle at the supermarket, where there are just too many choices and the brain-overload just makes me feel anxious.

 

The Canon G1X seems to supecede the G12, having most of that camera's virtues and a bigger, better sensor besides.

Nikon: Friends in the camera retail industry tell me that the Nikon 1 series is hitting its marketing target—prosperous people who are actually capable of detecting the flaws of point-and-shoots but who just aren't serious enough about photography to want to buy/carry an entry-level DSLR. Seems to me the Nikon 1's are the very definition of cameras we enthusiasts do not love, however, and this despite positive reactions from a few adopters. We're spoiled, and it took us a while to get over our dismay that Nikon actually spent a lot of time and money building a nice little product that isn't for us. So in the Nikon brand category for this list I get...nada. Nuthin'. No small camera we love. I must be missing something. Am I? (Maybe we could throw Nikon a bone by naming their top superzoom as our token inclusion for that less-than-loved general category.) Your thoughts?

Pentax: Ahhh, Pentax. I love Pentax, speaking of love. I'm an old Pentax guy, and lately I've been a new Pentax guy, and they advertise with TOP so I gotta love 'em for that, too. And they've been on walkabout in recent years, bought and sold and traded and swapped around the corporate world, finally coming to rest in the loving arms of Ricoh, which our intuition says is a match made in heaven; or could be, anyway. I also really don't mind a camera company whose models don't really coalesce into a coherent lineup: I dislike the current tendency of Japanese companies to make lockstep Stepford-wife product lineups with each standard product category covered by a me-too, keep-up-with-the-Joneses entry doused in the official corporate "design language." Let your products be free! Allow creativity to bloom, to breathe the air! Let each product be itself, and to hell with lineup coherence! At the same time, I'm not sure we quite love either the Pentax Q—a delightful, delicate little toy system aimed directly at the Japanese audience—or the think-outside-the-box K-mount K-01. Although, really, we do love them: we're just not sure we think they're mainstream recommendations for camera buyers. So, to me, the cameras from Pentax that go on our list are the K-30—the list's favorite small DSLR by virtue of, well, its virtues, but also its lenses—and the waterproof shockproof crushproof coldproof dustproof Optio WG-2. Discuss: do you approve?

-

We'll wrap up with the remaining marques next time around. I really am grateful for your advice and suggestions, really.

Mike

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Featured Comment by John L: "Add another vote for the V1. I like it so much because its the first small digital camera I have used that works as well as my first camera, a (marvellous, loved) Yashica FR1. It focuses fast, so you can take the pictures before the moment passes. The EVF works. Having a silent shutter matters. And then there's that FT1 adaptor...so handy.

"Here is an Olympics picture (for those missing their hit). Should have used a faster speed, shouldn't have been hand-holding while sitting down in the stands, but, as others have said, the V1 allowed me to use a 500mm+ equivalent lens all day without getting a sore neck or indebted. (And yes, the control wheel is a pain, but you can just tape it in place....)"

Mike replies: John, I think you used the perfect shutter speed. That bowstring....

Thank You, United Kingdom!

Four years ago, after the Chinese had done such an overwhelmingly impressive job hosting the world at the Beijing Olympics, Boris Johnson's acceptance of the Olympic flag had a frumpy, deprecatory air about it, as if the English weren't even going to bother to try to top the Chinese.

And of course I didn't go in person. But from everything I saw and everything I've read, it sure looks like Great Britain pulled off a simply splendid world party—and did it with enthusiasm, good grace, and appropriately high spirits. The London games had many memorable moments. And it would appear the host city and nation pulled the whole thing off with brio, élan, and nary a (significant) hitch.

Do you all still say "jolly good show" over there—or is that a cliché now? In any event, well done, U.K., well done—thanks for hosting the world. You did a great job.

(And congratulations on your great whacking heap o' gold, too. That was impressive.)

Mike

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Featured Comment by Eric: "A personal story.

"When I moved to London from abroad 18+ years ago I found a country paralysed by strikes and splintered politically well into the process of winding down the Thatcher revolution. The election of Tony Blair in '96 briefly brought hope that that new third way solutions and Cool Britannia were the future. Shortly after we were rocked by the tragic death of Diana, mismangement leading to the Millennium Dome fiasco, followed by a series of shocking rail disasters leading to the deaths of commuters resulting from corporate malfeasance unacceptable in a first world country. Our National Health Service and educational system seemed in disarray. The country struggled with questionable techniques which the Blair gov't used to take us into a not terribly popular war in Iraq followed by another divisive war in Afghanistan.

"We won the bid for the 2012 Olympics with amazed disbelief in July 2007, and not 24 hours later London was rocked by 'home grown' terrorists attacking, injuring and killing our own people. Shortly after the attack, a young Brazilian man was murdered by the police who mistook him for a terrorist, symptomatic of a national suspicion which pitted different ethnic groups against each other. These were divisive times indeed.

"The Blair government became increasingly unpopular. Blair handed the baton of government to Gordon Brown without an election, and Brown, a taciturn and brooding man, well reflected the gloomy national mood. When the world economic crises struck in 2008 the U.K. and especially London were at the centre as we are arguably the largest financial centre on the planet. Our government had to nationalise banks and big payoffs to top bankers became a national scandal exacerbating the class issues which have long existed here.

"A new coalition government implemented an intense austerity budget which among other things led many to question its £9.3 billion ($15 billion) commitment to the Olympics even as much of that money reclaimed derelict polluted land in east London and rebuilt neglected infrastructure. We are a nation of whingers with long memories for slights. Unresolved issues of class, race and ethnicity are national wounds. Last August we were rocked and shamed by riots which partly resulted from failing social attitudes and policies on immigration and multiculturalism but also by the unabashed selfish greed of many of the rioters.

"The national skepticism that we could successfully take on as large a project as the Olympic games was palpable everywhere. We were a rudderless nation which was not comfortable in our own skin. We had clearly bitten off more than we could chew.

"That it rained almost constantly from April through to July this year seemed an ominous omen of just how much would go wrong once the Olympics began. And then at the last moment it because clear that the contractor G4S couldn't live up to their commitments to keep the games secure and were vastly understaffed The deployment of the army and the police and installation of missiles on the roofs of blocks of flats that we watched on the evening news conjured up the image of Britain the police state.

"I think nobody has been more shocked by the success of the games in their totality than we were. For the first time in my 18+ years living in the U.K. (where I'm now a citizen) I've experienced a palpable sense of national pride and identity among all of my countrymen of all colours, class and ethnicity. We, the often querulous peoples of the U.K. were over the last 17 days transmogrified into Team GB.

"Magical!"

How to Love a Camera

All of us crusty old club members natter on around here, but every now and then I think I should write more posts for beginner and intermediate photographers (after all, being a beginner is a great advantage in photography—you have fresh ideas, and you haven't yet learned a) all the things you're supposed to not be able to do, or b) how to play the same tricks over and over. But all that's another post).

So here's my answer to the question "How do you learn to love a camera?" The answer is: Get to grips with it.

There are two main ways you do that. One is by learning it. That means understanding all the controls and settings, and practicing camera-handling. The other is by using it for real work: meaning, spending a lot of time taking a lot of pictures in situations where the camera is not the important thing, the pictures are the important thing.

It's become harder and harder to learn all of a camera's settings. When I was young, I didn't allow other people to use or even touch my camera because I was afraid somebody would twiddle the ASA (ISO) dial and I wouldn't realize it until I'd wasted some film—and missed some pictures. One of the things I liked about the Leica (I used the M6 and the M4) was that there was such a limited number of camera controls. You always knew where you stood with it. Not so these days, of course. Ctein's just gotten a new digital camera, one I know too, and for the past several days we've been having an animated private email exchange about how to set it up; there are many, many muliples of six controls on the thing. I think it's fair to say that we both have a ways to go yet.

Still, you've got to do it. A camera you can't control is one that will frustrate you, and a camera that frustrates you is one you won't love.

Camera handling is a specific set of skills that everyone needs to work on. Work out the way you personally hold the camera and work the controls. You should always hold it the same way in similar situations; your hands should be able to immediately find the controls you need most often. That takes work. I'm a big fan of "dry practice" every single day, because I believe that presenting your mind with problems helps your mind assimilate skills. Studies have proved that when learning languages, one hour a day seven days a week is far more effective than seven hours a day once a week. It's the same with camera handling: ten minutes a night in your living room is more valuable than an hour of practice on a Sunday. In these days when exposures cost nothing, just setting yourself the task of taking a certain number of exposures every day works too, but it only counts if you're doing it mindfully and working to set your camera-handling habits.

The best way to learn to love a camera is to use it for something important to you, and that usually means a project. No thoughts on what the project should be (again, that's a different post), but think flexibly. Mark Power, one of my teachers, made this crucial observation years ago, and I still think he's bang on: he said that he learned to ignore students griping and bellyaching, because they only gripe and bellyache when they're not engaged in their work. So his advice whenever anyone was complaining was to encourage them to work harder.

 

One of the cameras I loved best was a Contax 139Q. It was nothing special, but it was the only camera I had all the way through photography school, so I knew it well and used it constantly. Photo courtesy contax139.info.

So, to sum up:

• To learn to love a camera, get to grips with it.
• The way to do that is to learn it and use it.

Here are a couple of additional tips for getting a camera to love, but these are low-level tips, far below the above two points explained above.

—Try to use only one, or one model (a main camera and a backup). When you have a go-to camera that you use for everything or most things, it becomes a "friend." I realize that a lot of people like to own multiple cameras and amuse themselves by switching around from one to another, and that's fine, but it's by definition dilettantish, and will prevent you from "bonding" with any one trusty tool.

—Try to start out with what you really want and really like. This often means sacrificing when it comes to expense, and spending more than is easy. But it can mean the opposite, too—I've known guys (er, and I am one) who own big fancy hyper-researched rigs yet who, when pressed, will admit that they most love using a more modest but more comfortable camera, or an older fave, rather than their big rigs.

—Accept workarounds. No camera has every little thing you yourself would choose to include or exclude. Every camera has its foibles and shortfalls. Don't moan about this—just learn to work with what you have. Hell, workarounds can even be fun, and were a point of pride with photographers as venerated as Edward Weston and Alfred Stieglitz, both of whom used old cameras that required some accomodation to use. If Stieglitz could use a camera with saggy bellows that had to be held up during exposure with a loop of string, you can learn to deal with a button in the wrong place or the lack of a feature you liked on your previous camera.

—Ignore what other people think of your camera, or think of you for using it. It's not a contest. This is easy to forget online, in the "social" world of comparing toys. But you can do great work with a "good enough" camera.

Mike

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Featured [partial] Comment by Carlo Santin: "I think a lot of people dump a camera before they are truly familiar with it."

Featured Comment by Craig Arnold: "It rather depends on which of two related hobbies/interests/activities one is engaged in at the time: 1. Photography as art, which is all about the images. Your advice pertains mostly to this hobby. And here in fact almost any camera will do, as becomes obvious when one looks at the cameras used by the great historical and modern photographers. 2. Cameras as gadgets; this is about collecting, measuring, analysing, etc. The fact that they can be used to make photographs is an almost irrelevant side effect, as becomes obvious when one looks at the galleries of most camera experts. There's nothing wrong with enjoying both activities of course, and it's easy to become expert in #2, whilst being devilishly hard to be anything more than average at #1."

Featured Comment by Mahn England: "I now have a Sony RX-100 in addition to my DSLR. I have until now been monolingual speaking only Canonese. I have had to learn another tongue. My brain can't cope with this. I now find that I speak a sort of pigeon point and shoot with a DSLR accent. I hope it settles down so that I can start taking photos again."

Random Excellence: Matthew Girard

Matthew Girard of the engineering firm Wiss, Janney, Elstner Associates took this vertiginous fisheye photograph from the top of the Washington monument in Washington, D.C. last fall, as his firm was repairing damage to the monument sustained in an earthquake a year ago.

Tourists can see a similar view from the top of the monument—but without 32-year-old Emma Cardini of WJE's Difficult-Access Team hanging on ropes off the eastern face of the 169-meter-high structure.

A series of pictures taken by WJE workers was recently featured in the Washington Post.

Mike
(Thanks to Ed Kirkpatrick)

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Featured Comment by Roger Bradbury: "I had no idea that the monument was quite so big, or that you could get inside it. I was very surprised to see WJE's Difficult-Access Team in a room, paying lines out of a window."

Mike replies: Roger, each side of the base of the monument is 55 feet (just under 17 meters) wide. The walls are 15 feet thick at the base.

Here's a picture I found online that will give you a good sense of its scale.

Calling All Geeks! Part I

So I'm compiling a list, a Buyer's Guide, for the fall, to be called "Small Cameras We Love." "We" meaning, vaguely, the TOP writers and the TOP community.

My question is, what small cameras do we love? I'd like to consider various cameras brand-by-brand—that is, look at which Fujifilm cameras should be included, then look at which Panasonic cameras should be included, and so on until we get through all the existing cameramakers. In this initial post I've only included five marques or makers, but I'll get to the others eventually too. So even though Canon and Sony, for example, are missing from this list, today, here, they'll be discussed too—but in a future post. So if we could, let's limit the discussion to the five camera companies named in this post, with the understanding that there will be a Part II to this post and the missing companies will be included at that time.

In other words, I'm asking which Fuji, Panasonic, Leica, Olympus and Ricoh cameras you think belong in a list of the best small cameras.

So let's start out with just these five brands:

Fuji: I think all three current hot Fujis—the X10, X100, and X-Pro1—have to be on the list. These are camera-lovers' cameras. Doesn't really seem very arguable to me, but you can argue if you care to.

Panasonic: The new LX7, latest in the evergreen LX[x] series, and the near-and-dear-to-me GX1 definitely belong on the list. Any others? I think the GH2 (2010) is getting just a tad long in the tooth to be cool with the kids, but I could be wrong.

Ricoh GR Digital IV

Leica: Very tough call for me. Leicadom is a world unto itself. The one easy decision is that even Leicaphiles don't particularly love Leica's genuinely small camera (and few like to pay status-symbol prices for the budget option in the range, Let's face it, people who need to do so can do better with two grand). Is the M9 a "small" camera? People do love it, although time is rushing on. This is a buying guide, though, and it seems likely that Leica is gathering itself for a model change—so do I want to tell people to buy a $7,000 camera from 2009 that's probably getting close to being replaced? Next question, dare I indulge my great admiration for the S2 system by stretching the definition of "small" to include it as being small—and exceptionally ergonomic—for medium format? My instinct is that's too far a stretch, but I waffle. Even if you allow for it, I don't see how I discriminate against the 645D once the S2 is allowed a spot. And finally, should the whole list be without a Leica altogether? Seems slightly sacreligious. Discuss....

Olympus: The OM-D is on the list, no question there. Do we love the E-P3? I've got to advocate for the XZ-1, too, even though its moment in the mid-day sun has probably passed.

Ricoh: The GR Digital in the current flavor definitely belongs, because of the emphasis with which it is actually loved—people really do love GRDs. Moving over, here's the controversy: I actually do kinda love the GXR, too, and I think it deserves a place on the list by virtue of the M-module. Plus, doesn't any camera system this quirky deserve to be rewarded?

Again, we'll cover other brands in future posts, for sure. I'm not ignoring them. I just want to cover Fuji, Panny, Leica, Oly and Ricoh today, just to begin with.

And—thanks for your input!

Mike

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Featured Comment by David Mantripp: "Accepting its limitations, in my opinion the GRD4 is one of the best cameras ever made. Unlike the Fuji X series, it has no idiotic handling / usability bugs. The Fujis are all very pretty, and I have a very high regard for Fuji in general, but I don't think any of them are well finished enough to deserve a recommendation. It seems that all too often they make you lose the shot, and this is just bad, or insufficiently funded, design. Ricoh seem to make cameras purely for the pleasure of it. I guess they sell a lot of copiers!

"As for the E-P3, I have a love-hate relationship with it. Even though I have well used to Olympus controls and menus, it still sometimes manages to confuse me. But on a good day, with the 45mm ƒ/1.8 stuck on the front, it doesn't get much better...."

Featured [partial] Comment by Burt: "If you keep X-Pro1 then you have to include the M9, and vice versa."

Mike replies: Although I appreciate the size similarity, I'm not so sure that's fair, because the M9 is the smallest camera with a full-frame sensor. To me, that counts as "smaller" than a similar-sized camera with a smaller sensor...doesn't it?

Featured Comment by Kevin Purcell: "People have favorite types of film but not many favorite sensors. The Sony ICX685CQZ is a bit of classic small sensor, I think. Never heard of it? Nope, most people haven't. But its performance and the numbers of enthusiast cameras it appeared in speak for themselves: Canon S90/S95 and G11/G12, Nikon P7000/P7100, Samsung EX1, Ricoh GRD 3 and GRD 4. I don't think any other single sensor has been used in so many different cameras. What will the next GRD (GRD 5) look like? Will Sony sell its 'type 1.0 inch' RX100 sensor to Ricoh/Pentax in lieu of the (now out of production) Sony ICX685CQZ 1/1.7" CCD? A bigger sensor with a prime lens plus the GRD UI (that seems to have been designed by people who take photographs) in the same sized box would be a winner. Any chance of two models: a wide and an normal GRD5? Ricoh/Pentax may be the group to watch for 'interesting cameras.'"

Featured Comment by Andrew Johnston: "A timely and apposite story. On Saturday I was at a wedding, doing my usual bit as 'unofficial photographer' (i.e. guest with a hobby). I sat down to the wedding breakfast next to a lady who was playing with her Lumix point and shoot and who said admiringly of my GH2 'that's a big camera.' Shades of Crocodile Dundee as I reached under my chair and heaved up my Canon 7D, complete with big lens and flashgun. 'No, that's a big camera!' All things are relative. And my GH2 is cool, even if I did use it mainly for video...."

Open Mike: Stakistics

David Rudisha listening to the Kenyan national anthem at his gold medal ceremony. The names "Rudisha" and "Bolt" belong in the same sentence. (Photo: screen shot from NBC Sports.)

So I've been addicted to the Olympics for the past two weeks. I'm preparing for withdrawal—and even so, I will be unprepared. So I've been watching a lot more telelvision than I usually do. If I had the stomach for this much television as a regular diet, I'd write a media-watch column—there really are some entertaining idiocies that flutter past.

For example, I swear I heard the following on the national news the other day. The story was about the employment report, and the point being made was that businesses were hiring. So they cut to a business owner, who says this: "We've hired six new employees this year. Started out the year with four or five people, and now? Twelve."

Made me laugh. I'm bad at arithmetic, but even I can tell that that is not the guy you want to be going to for your statistics.

(In related innumeracy, the local weatherman was reporting on the rainfall totals, and he pointed to my county, where the map was clearly emblazoned with "0.20," as he intoned, "...and a quarter of an inch in Waukesha." Again, not good at fractions here, but....)

Nice guys finishing first
I've been doing pretty well with the Olympics. Thursday was genuinely thrilling, with the incomparable Usain Bolt adding to his legacy and legend in fine form, and a Masai warrior from Kenya named David Rudisha delivering an accomplishment as stunning as Bolt's in Beijing, setting a world record and getting the gold medal in the gruelling 800 running from the front. Wow. (Most records in that race are set with the help of a "rabbit," a fast runner setting the pace in the first part of the race before fading back.) I've run 800s, way back when, and that is one damn tough race*. They showed a special on him, and he seemed like a nice guy, too. It's the first WR in the 800 at the Olympics since 1976. 

I have to remember that name. David Rudisha. There really is something magnificent about truly great athletic performances—people doing things nobody else can do.

I had a rough time getting into the beach volleyball, but I finally managed. Every time I turn it on, I picture myself trying it for about two minutes, determining quickly  that jumping and running on sand on purpose is stupid, and heading for the beach towel. Turns out it's not a bad game, though, although I'm still not sure why. At least it moves along.

I'm sure I'm not the first person to note that some Olympic events have a decidedly arbitrary feel about them. I mean, throwing a ball on a chain as far as you can might be traditional, somehow (I always picture a guy being released from a chain gang, celebrating), but who's the guy who said, "I know! We can all get on kid's bikes and go like crazy over a bunch of bumps!" It's very entertaining, though. Even though that poor girl who face-planted into the front side of a bump isn't going to know where she is until about next Wednesday.

The guy who decided they should play a variant of soccer in a swimming pool went too far, though. It might be fun to do, but I'm sorry, that's just too dumb to be a sport.

I had in mind coming up with more Olympic events in the same spirit—here's one: climb up and down a telephone pole, then race a hundred yards on a pogo stick. Sound like an Olympic event to you?

Here's the thing—I'd probably watch it.

Mike

P.S. This is the OT column for this week. Come back tomorrow morning (or tonight) for some entertaining camera geekery.

*Seriously, if you are young enough and fit enough that you're sure it won't kill you, go find a quarter-mile track and run around it twice as fast as you can, then tell me if you've ever been able to make yourself feel worse in such a short time.

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Featured Comment by Jim Costello: "I kind of lost interest after the Greco-Roman Synchronized Equestrian Water Polo was over."

Featured Comment by Isaac: "Water polo was, along with wrestling, the most difficult sport I have ever played. It was brutal. Agree that it isn't much fun to watch though. There are professional leagues in Europe."

Featured Comment by David A. Goldfarb: "As far as I'm concerned, nothing beats a good badminton scandal."

Mike replies: Wasn't that great? Two teams both trying their best to lose. They could make that into a whole category if you ask me.

Featured Comment by Kevin Purcell: "The Outside Magazine profile of Rudisha's coach, Brother Colm O'Connell, is online—it's called 'The Irish Priest Who Trains Olympic Gold Medalists.' Isn't that apropos of the previous column about the death of magazine stands and rise of online magazines?"

A Look Back at Photo Magazines

By Ken Tanaka

Mike's article (just below this one) on photography magazines was coincidentally timely for me. Throughout this summer I've been up to my waist in a research project involving photo hobby magazines of the 1950s and 1960s, specifically U.S. Camera magazine. I'm particularly interested in this period for two reasons. First, because it was a relatively prosperous, relatively peaceful, and generally optimistic time in America. Second, because it was also the period just before electronics deeply penetrated cameras. Photography was still a largely mechanical and chemical undertaking that did not demand the prerequisite aptitudes that later eras would require. (That's a significant point, more closely related to my project, which I'll discuss in greater depth in a future article.)

My moldy magazine musings have treated me to many collateral retro delights thus far, some of the best of which I plan to share with fellow TOP readers in the coming weeks. But here are just a few gems to get started.

Let's begin by cutting straight to the chase of photo mags, shall we? If you were following photo mags you know where you usually started your monthly reading, don't you? That's right, you probably started reading a photo mag by perusing the ads in the back. They were troves of tiny-print "deals" on photo hobby treasures (right, from U.S. Camera, August, 1955).

Photography in that period was far more gadget-laced than it is today (if young people can imagine that). In addition to "best prices" on cameras there were mountains of darkroom gadgets all of which promised to help make you a star in your camera club.

The next attraction was the product ads. Magazine ads were the primary ongoing promotional vehicle for camera companies during this period. Television was still new in the 1950s. Kodak ran some television ads, usually near summer and the holiday seasons, in the 1960s. Of course radio was useless for promoting photo products. So we see a variety of large ads for new products each month. This was how folks learned of new products.

Ad designs seemed to be straddling styles much the same way that art of the 1950s and 1960s seemed to straddle the old and new. For example, we see a rather instructional ad for the Rolleicord V (the consumer version of the Rolleiflex) in simple pen-and-ink.

From U.S. Camera magazine, August 1955

Just a few months later, in February, 1956, we see this ad for Nikon’s S-2 rangefinder:

From U.S. Camera magazine, February 1955

Note not only the "modern" design of the ad but also the selection of the photographs that the silhouetted figures are viewing. That image of what appears to be a Mies van der Rohe building really jumps out at me as an icon of "tomorrow." This was a period in which contemporary art was beginning to emerge as a powerful force not just in the art world but also in graphic design. Nikon's clearly trying to make a statement that it's the brand for the future.

Finally we get to the actual editorial content. Yes, there were plenty of "how-to" articles in each issue. But there were also frequent articles dealing with broader and deeper issues of photography in general. U.S. Camera, in particular, often held symposia featuring many of the noted photographers of the day. For example in this same 1955 issue we have such an article titled "Interview with Three Greats" in which Dorothea Lange, Imogen Cunningham an Ansel Adams discuss topics such as "What are the important trends?" and "What did the F/64 group mean?"

From U.S. Camera magazine, August, 1955

The caption reads: "HERE is a picture of the symposium held in Dorothea Lange’s studio for U.S. Camera. The people left to right are Herm Lenz, moderator, Imogen Cunningham, Dorothea Lange and Ansel Adams."

Photography had widely recognized "greats" still living in the 1950s and 1960s and U.S. Camera seemed to exploit them well for such discussions. By contrast, today we really don't have many such figures left. Many of today's best known photographers are principally photographic artists who really have little relationship to photography per se. We do still have treasures such as Bruce Davidson (who recently offered some thoughts about his work on Leica's blog) but they're not being replaced.

One last point worth noting: the camera magazines of the 1950s and 1960s looked terrible compared to today's magazines. The type is rough, the graphic line screens are coarse, the layouts are often nutty and the paper can be frail. Comparing a 1950s photo magazine to, say, an issue of today's British Journal of Photography is a breathtaking object lesson in the progress that printing and repro technologies have made in 60+ years. Really remarkable.

The future of photo magazines
There's little. It's no secret that magazine sales, in general, are in decline, with 2011 newsstand sales reported as being down between 8.9% and 9.2% (depending on the reporter). There's no question that (to cop a line from the film Men in Black) "that ain't gonna grow back." The Web and the growing list of "app" magazines are certainly responsible for part of the decline of photo magazines. The paper publishing medium is relentlessly giving way to the digital medium—which, frankly, is a win-win. With such high-resolution displays flooding the marketplace, and the common availability of relatively cheap broadband data transmission, publishers can produce and distribute a much richer product more quickly than ever. Readers reap great benefits. Advertisers reap great benefits. The planet's environment gets a much-needed break. Printers, paper companies and magazine distributors are the losers. Oh well.

Ken

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Featured Comment by Ed Cornachio: "U.S. Camera? How about Issue #1 when it was spiral bound, and Ed Steichen was one of the editors. (Number 2 was the last to be spiral bound.) I have issues 1 through 15 (missing #4). Interesting stuff."

Featured Comment by Jim Hughes: "Ken: Thanks for giving U.S. Camera its due. As you may know, I started my career in photographic publishing at U.S. Camera Publishing in 1966, when I became editor of its smaller circulation (and by then, more serious) magazine, Camera 35 (my contribution was to try to make it even more serious by putting even greater emphasis on portfolios and photo essays).

"U.S. Camera began as a high-quality spiral-bound Annual in 1935. Photographs were printed well, and large. Tom Maloney, a young advertising man with the vision to put Edward Steichen in charge of choosing pictures, said he lost $5,000 on that first edition. I have copies of the first few Annuals on my library shelves (protected in plastic bags!) and I still regularly study them. In 1938, Tom decided to add a periodical, and started U.S. Camera the magazine as a quarterly in the fall of that year. The 11.5x12-inch publication was priced at 50 cents, and sold out its entire run of 25,000 copies. At the beginning of 1939, with the second issue, the magazine became a bi-monthly. I am fortunate to possess two bound volumes representing the full run of the bi-monthlies, which to my mind represent a high point in photo magazine publishing.

"Indeed, it was the high standards of those early magazines that in great part inspired the objectives I set for myself, years later, as editor of the original Camera Arts magazine, which remains my proudest accomplishment.

"But it is Tom Maloney who remains one of photography's most unsung of heroes. He helped establish Ansel Adams' Yosemite Workshops. He published Ansel's book on the Japanese-American detainment camps, Born Free and Equal. He suggested Edward Weston for a Guggenheim and published his California and the West. He was responsible for Edward Steichen becoming director of the Department of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art. I could go on, but you get the idea....

"And Maloney did all this in his spare time. His primary business was advertising and public relations. Remember Sylvania's 'Blue Dots for Sure Shots'? How about Sherwin-Williams 'We Cover The World'? Those were Tom's campaigns. And it was his advertising work that supported his photographic 'hobby.'"

Newsstand Watch

I really don't know if my area is representative or not, but I've been noticing that several stores that have traditionally included newsstands have recently reduced their sales areas devoted to magazines. My nearby drugstores have cut the overall size of the magazine sales racks in half, more or less.

Tonight I was in a local grocery store that still had a full-sized newsstand, and I noticed something else. I found a wide variety of titles: there was Acoustic Guitar; Mad magazine (I didn't know that one was still around); the ever-popular Canning and Preserving, and two bow-hunting titles (it's Wisconsin, after all, although we're not going to have a lot of crop to can and preserve this year, what with the drought); I think five magazines about something called "Fantasy Football" (I've heard of that, but I don't know what that is), and five more about motorcycles; SewNews; Scrap & Stamp (the initial "S" was covered up by another magazine, so I thought at first glance it was called "Crap & Stamp"); Yoga for Weight Loss; Combat Aircraft magazine; something called Geek (I didn't look to see what that one's about); a magazine called Rat Rod which of course no self-respecting newsstand should lack; and, for inquiring minds, Reality Stars / Where Are They Now? (I wasn't sure if the second line was part of the book's title or if it was the lead blurb. It took me a while to search my brain to see if I knew the name of one reality star—I came up with "Snooky" and "The Situation," although I don't know if I'm right about that or not. Are those reality stars? In any event, I don't care where they are, although I bear them no ill will.)

But not one photography magazine. Not a single one.

I seem to remember when this happened with stereo magazines, which were easy to find on most general newsstands twenty years ago. In that case I think it signalled a pretty distinct decline in the hobby and in the status of those types of products; in this case it might have to do less with the decline of the hobby and more with the rise of the Web.

Of course at full service bookstores (Barnes & Noble seems to be the only one of those left around here) we have a generous range of photo titles.

I've been away from the publishing business for several years now (I think I wrote my last magazine column in 2009—maybe 2008—and it's been since 2001 that I was an editor). It would be interesting to know the circulation figures in the photography category now.

Mike

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Featured Comment by Tony Collins: My favourite (UK) magazine title is Total Carp."

Featured Comment by Michael T.: "LensWork still exists in print, still true to its beginnings (no adverts). It has also an indepth and greatly expanded (over print) web presence. I tip my hat to Brooks Jensen and the rest of LensWork publishing team! They have adapted (and adopted) to the web and technology well!"

Featured Comment by Tom Swoboda: "Between 1971 and 2010 I lived in a small town that had a storefront newsstand down on main street. Every week on my day off I would spend at least an hour there paging through magazines and leaving with two to four of various types. I now live in an even more rural area and don't have a full service newsstand to visit anymore and I have found, like you, the supermarket and drugstore magazines have shrunk in size but I don't browse them. The WWW has pretty much eliminated my reading of newspapers and magazines."

Featured Comment by Mark Lacey: "We still have heaps in Australia, get most of the English and American rags too. In the long run they will be doomed by the net, like most things I'm interested in. Must say I miss your writing in the U.K. Black & White Photography magazine."

Featured Comment by Macrothemovie: "First: at first glance, it looks like a newsstand in Great Britain. Second: photography magazines are very rare, everywhere. You only find them in art galleries and little else. Perhaps you mean what I call 'camera magazines' which, indeed, are usually very popular."

Featured Comment by Geoff Wittig: "Yes indeed, the photography magazine market is cratering. Their advertising base is either disappearing or moving to the web. Cell phone cameras are wiping out the digicam market that dominated the field in recent years. Just look at Popular Photography circa 1990, and today. It had three times as many pages, with far more editorial content as well as ads. It's gradually wasting away. There are a goodly number of gear-head magazines, but they seem to arise and fold almost overnight. American Photo has turned itself into People magazine, photo edition, with a repellent (well, to me at least) emphasis on celebrity/sports/fashion photography. It's twilight for photo magazines."

Featured Comment by Kirk Tuck: "I'm surprised that no one has mentioned PDN (Photo District News). Of all the print stuff out there it's still the one I get every month in paper and my local Barnes & Noble always carries copies as well. It's aimed much more at the industry and to more advanced users. After hearing about the demise of print for the better part of the decade it warms my heart to go into a big bricks and mortar bookstore and still see an enormous wall of magazines. Even happier when the magazines feel thicker than they did a year or two ago...."

Featured Comment by Jan: "Not a comprehensive datapoint, but just came across this post called 'Magazines Suffer a Brutal First Half' after reading yours. Might create a chicken/egg situation. If the newsstand shrinks, so do sales and vice versa."

God Answers Prayers

In an uncharacteristic move, God apparently began actually answering prayers in the U.S.A. sometime on Wednesday evening, until sometime early this morning. Among the extraordinary effects:

• All but 168 purchasers of Lotto tickets for Wednesday's drawing won. Despite widespread initial euphoria, after the usual fees and administrative costs were skimmed off the top each $2 ticket paid $1.38.

• Nationwide, 1,460,385 sick and hospitalized patients miraculously recovered. On the other hand, more than 2 million previously healthy people dropped dead for no outward reason.

• 1,856 fourteen-year-old boys were transported literally into World of Warcraft. Once their parents discovered they were missing, more than 1,600 of them came home again. (The parents of the remainder evidently prayed for something else.)

• More than 2,600,000 young (and some not-so-young) people suddenly got cars. Brand of choice: Corvettes. Those who have religious parents will never get hurt or killed in them.

• Many mortgage and rent payments were miraculously made.

• 12,392 TOP readers suddenly acquired their dream camera outfits, plus various lenses, printers, and accessories. In most cases, their spouses did not notice the acquisitions.

• To spare you the gruesome details, let's just say that the approximately 14-hour period during which God was answering prayers was not a good time to be a boss.

• More than 56,000 men got lucky with women they met in bars late Wednesday evening. However, most of those men disappeared in a poof of smoke as soon as the women woke up sober the next morning.

God suspended the answering of prayers quickly as it became apparent that it is a logical impossibility for every American football team to win its first game. "People like to say 'God knows,'" God told reporters. "But I really don't. Both teams can't win." He added, with a chuckle: "You'd think there would have been fewer of those kinds of prayers to deal with, on account of it's only the preseason. But no."

Mike
(Inspired by Sal Santamaura)

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Featured Comment by Jim Hart: "In Detroit we do not pray to God for a football win. We do, however, pray to Bobby Layne to intercede with God in hopes of someday getting a professional football team."

Mike replies: I thought you guys did pretty well last year...you had our respect.

Featured Comment by Emmanuel Huybrechts: "I love your humor. Not quite as funny as athletes thanking gods but very close."

Featured Comment by Steve: "Unfortunately, very sad post! Your photography related information is excellent on the other hand."

Featured Comment by Dave: "Mike: I was one of the 12,392 on whom God saw fit to bestow their dream camera kit. There was, however, a bit of delay in processing my prayer as the Canon T90 and full set of lenses were prayed for 1986. On a related note, anyone wishing to purchase an unused vintage film camera should contact me via email."

One Left!

My friend Peter Turnley has one spot that opened up late for his upcoming workshop in New York City. May I please just tell you how much I wish I could unchain my ankle from the leg of the desk and spend a few days immersed in actually taking pictures? Alas. I hope someone will please go so I can at least enjoy it vicariously.

Every one of my friends who has taken one of Peter's workshops has thoroughly enjoyed the experience.

Take a look at some pictures and read about the workshop here, or click on the ad at the left.

Mike

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Lord High Executioner

By Ctein

In early July, my friend DDB (David Dyer-Bennet) and I went off to Willow River State Park in Wisconsin to do some more of the infamous stochastic photography that some readers have found so controversial (example below) and to just photograph nature and waterfalls in general.

More "frozen" water. I love this stuff.

A successful and most pleasant outing, as usual, although the day was unpleasantly warm. Consequently, there were many folks playing in the water, a custom I still find a little disquieting, since the rapids and falls on West Coast rivers are typically much more rugged and dangerous. It just seems wrong to be splashing about in white water that way. Indeed, a small number of west-coast visitors die from not realizing how vigorously many of the rivers west of the Great Divide run.

Nonetheless, it does appear to be a Midwest "thing" and when we arrived at Willow River Falls, we discovered it was lousy with bathers and sunbathers.

I use that word by choice.

I don't like people in my nature. I am at my most misanthropic when I am out in the countryside, and I am especially so when I am photographing. Strange people are variously distracting, annoying, and an outright intrusion in my photograph endeavors.

I tried working around it, treating all the brightly and scantily-clad hominids as if they were some slightly mobile variety of wildflower, working them into the compositions. For all I know, I even got good results. Here's an example:

The scene at Willow River Falls on a hot summer day, as I found it.

But honestly, this kind of work is not to my taste. Whether or not other people think it's a nice photograph doesn't really matter. I don't like it. I'm interested in the waterfall, not the human intrusions into it. Too bad I left my magic wand (or, in a pinch, the mass disintegrator ray) at home.

But wait! I've got this nice shiny new copy of Photoshop CS6 that I've been breaking in, with its new and improved content-aware tools. I wonder how hard it would be to render all those pesky hominids into, well, nonpersons?

Whaddaya know! It was much easier than I thought it would be. It took me less than 45 minutes of work mostly with the Spot Healing Brush (and just a bit of cloning) to get to this:

The scene at Willow River Falls on a hot summer day, as I wish I had found it.

For those who would like to pixel-peep and see just what a good job the new tools do, I've posted full resolution versions of the before and after pictures on my website.

Instant pristine wilderness. What's not to love?!

Okay, if you're a documentarian, this is unacceptable. And I am, of a sorts. My stated aesthetic and artistic reputation is that I try to make prints that look like the way I see things (when I can see them, anyway). At the least, that what people are seeing in the prints has a reality in front of the camera. My audience trusts that my photographs aren't the result of special effects. A photograph like this last one, below, of the forest fire smoke, is accepted to be real by folks who know me. They do not think I used a tobacco filter on the camera or gradient filter in Photoshop to get that effect. My reputation lies in rendering it beautifully, not in inventing it.

Smoke creates a lovely kind of golden Renaissance light. What makes this photo work for me (and my audience) is that it's a real thing. If it were the creation of filters (hardware or software), it would be much less interesting and appealing.

Consequently, the Willow River Falls photograph is never going to end up on my public website or as part of my portfolio. It would poison that reputation. But that doesn't mean I can't amuse myself.

Even from the documentary point of view, though, it might be acceptable. If one were interested in portraying what the waterfall looked like, with no particular space-time context, I'd see nothing wrong in using the depopulated photograph. It accurately portrays the falls themselves. Just not their relationship to those pesky people.

Ctein

Columnist Ctein depopulates reality on TOP mostly on Wednesdays.

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Featured Comment by John Holland: "So, Ctein's hero turns out to be Marvin the Martian, the fellow who wanted to disintegrate the Earth because it obstructed his view of Venus. I clicked on each picture above to open them in separate windows, then alt-tabbed between them. Mesmerizing. People...waterfall. People...waterfall. Watching them disappear was more fun than I would have expected, because for one thing, I'm not a misanthrope—at least, I don't think I am. Second, I actually like to have a human or two (but no more) in outdoor pictures to give a sense of scale, especially if the vista is immense. (But no red shirts!) However, this particular herd of hominids was too dense; your instinct to reach for the Illudium P-36 Space Modulator is entirely understandable."

Featured Comment by Jim: "There's still one small fragment of humanity surviving near the top of the waterfall, towards the right, just next to the large boulder. And there's me thinking I don't pixel-peep. Sheeesh."

Featured Comment by Andre: "With regards to Ctein's fire picture, I recently ran across some really stunning photos of tornadoes and other severe storms from a news site link—stunning, that was, until I found a post by one of the photographers showing the original capture and the amount of manipulation that had been done to get the final result. The finished photo made it look like the photographer had captured some spectacular natural light that illuminated the lower part of the storm while the clouds above were ominously dark. The base Raw file showed the exact opposite —the higher clouds were lit up while the lower reaches were dark. At that point I completely lost interest in the photograph.

"Certainly not everyone feels that photographs need to maintain some amount of documentary accuracy—at least one contributor to the Luminous Landscape site has stated that if all his photo does is capture reality then he doesn't see much point in it. But for me, I've found that I expect a fair amount of realism in a photograph. I'll happily accept dramatized-beyond-reality poses/lighting/colors in other media (paintings, drawings, etc.) but have no tolerance for them in photography. Not sure why my mind draws that hard line, but it does.

"I much prefer photographers with Ctein's philosophy—where what you see is pretty darned close to what they experienced."

Featured Comment by Clayton Jones: "I have no hesitation in using the Spot Healing Brush/Clone Tool to remove unwanted objects. I assume as much freedom to do whatever I want as I would if painting a canvas from scratch. Why should painters be the only ones allowed to create compositions the way they want? I don't invent things that don't exist, but I will modify if needed. Just yesterday I removed a small foreground tree that was ruining an otherwise nice composition. I have removed power lines and beer cans, and once I moved a bird in flight to a better location which made the composition more balanced. It's art, not documentation. I like the falls picture, by the way (without the people). Very nice."

Featured Comment by Rodger Kingston: "For me the people in the original photograph are what keep it from being just another boring nature calendar photo. Usually I find that nature itself trumps photographic representations of it. (I'm an equal opportunity nature photography bigot: more often than not I have the same feeling about Ansel Adams' images, including most of the current Adams exhibition of photographs of water at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Mass.)"

The Anonymous Ur-Wegman

A site called Cosas Cool found these amongst the vast L.o.C. archives. Antecedents of the great dress-up-the-dog photographers of today, no doubt...someone should write a thesis.

Mike
(Thanks to Tom Kwas)

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Random Excellence: Hannah Stonehouse Hudson

Photo by Hannah Stonehouse Hudson

After I dissed Wegman's doggies the other day I felt like my dog lover's cred was in jeopardy. My neighbor Karen (we actually talk over the fence in the backyard, and yeah, it's a picket fence) suggested I take a look at this shot from Facebook that went viral.

It shows John Unger with Schoep, his 19-year-old Shepherd mix (in case you're not a dog person and don't know, that's extremely old for a dog, especially a bigger one). On her Facebook page, Hannah writes, "Shep falls asleep every night when he is carried into the lake. The buoyancy of the water soothes his arthritic bones. Lake Superior is very warm right now, so the temp of the water is perfect."

Unger credits Schoep with helping him through hard times in his life.

The article at the Duluth News Tribune says, "the photo of Unger and Schoep is the second photo taken by Hudson to cause a sensation since she started her business in 2005. The first was of a bear crossing the ice on the lake in front of the Madeline Island ferry. 'I tend to be in amazing spots at the oddest times,' she said. 'It's Lake Superior, and weird stuff happens.'"

On Facebook, the photo's gotten more than 200,000 "Likes" and in excess of 23,000 comments.

Mike

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Featured Comment by Tavia: "I would have done anything I could to help my little Inga feel better. God Bless this man and his dog."

Country Music

And now for your delectation and delight, a country music song.

I am not your perfect host here. I admit to about equal-sized blind spots toward rap on the one hand and contemporary country music on the other. I do like some old-timey country, people like Roy Acuff and Jimmie Rodgers and Jimmy Martin and Mother Maybelle Carter and Bill Monroe and Patsy Cline. But contemporary country strikes me as mainstream pop-rock with a big sign on the door saying WHITE PEOPLE ONLY. I understand that a big part of living music is to define and delimit social groups, but as I've been listening to African-American acts since I discovered a Motown station on the radio in fourth grade, suppressing racial diversity among the musicians I listen to has never been a big concern.

(It has gotten me into trouble a few times. Back when I was in high school I remember walking into an all-black bar on North Avenue with a few friends, rationalizing that it was a liberal era, and we were all citizens, and if black people had a right to go anywhere they wanted to in public then we did too. I swear, before the bravest of my friends reached the end of bar nearest the door, the loud hubbub subsided to a hush, the music got turned off, and a deep, booming voice from somewhere back in the dark reaches of the bar said, "Boy, you got till I count to ten to get your white ass outta here." The last thing I personally heard was "Three....")

Thus I find myself in no position to judge whether this is a good country music song or not. Maybe some contemporary country aficionados will be so good as to step in and school us. I had never heard of the singer before John sent me this link.

I do fancy I can interpret lyric poetry at least competently, and it seems like the video producer's got the song a little wrong—it's not about colorizing old black-and-white photographs (or the music video itself); rather, the line "you shoulda seen it in color" is another way of saying "imagine what it was like in real life."

But, like I say, I don't know the codes.

Mike
(Thanks to John Camp)

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Featured Comment by JW: "Jamey Johnson's double album The Guitar Song is a remarkable country album which bears more resemblance to the good old days of Waylon, Willie, and Cash than any of the new 'country' out there. Truly one of the great acts out there, and from what I have heard, he puts on a superb live show. I was born about 15 years too late to see Waylon live in his prime, but I have seen Willie three times and hope to see Jamey soon. Can't stand the crap that passes as country these days, but there is some hope out there!"

Featured Comment by Henk Coetzee: "Your description of walking into the 'wrong' bar took me back to my student days. My ideas, ideals and activities during the dark days of the '80s in South Africa took me into what were at the time townships and homelands. My friends and I listened to a lot of music which certainly wasn't country. A few like black punk, township jive and even some jazz are good, if quite disparate examples. A lot of the great South African musicians like Abdullah Ibrahim, Hugh Masekela and Miriam Makeba were living in exile at the time. Imagine our surprise arriving in Gazankulu, a 'homeland' in the north-eastern part of South Africa and finding that country music was really big here. It's still surprisingly popular in Swaziland."

Mike replies: Stan B. sent me an astonishing set of links the other day that relates to that: Seems there was a folk singer-songwriter in Detroit who put out a couple of albums in the 1970s, one called "Cold Fact." They sank like stones in the U.S., so he quit music and became a day laborer for 30 years. Unbeknownst to him, his albums became legendary in South Africa, anthems of the anti-apartheid movement. (Maybe you've heard of him, Henk—Sixto Rodriguez.) But in South Africa it was accepted as fact that he was dead. 

Two South African journalists realized there were many conflicting stories about how he died, so they decided to find out the the truth:

After years of searching, the two journalists finally got in touch with the producer of Cold Fact.

"They call him and they are full of questions," says Bendjelloul. "They ask, 'How was the album made? And the most important thing: How did he die?' And he says, 'No, I saw Rodriguez this morning. He is living down the street!'"

There's a movie about it that's just out in the U.K. called Searching for Sugarman that I gotta see, somehow. Here's the trailer.

Featured Comment by gene lowinger: "I played fiddle with Bill Monroe in the '60s and have been playing bluegrass music for more than 50 years. Country music as you define it (Acuff, Rogers, Carter family, etc....) died when the big studios built new sound stages in Nashville back in the '60s. Since then the music that comes out of Nashville is just trashy songs about male hunks making up to sassy girls. That's what the folks who listen want to fantasize about themselves."

Deal o' the Day

Amazon's deal of the day today is this pocketable Panasonic Lumix TS20 "TOUGH" digicam that's waterproof, shock-proof, dust-proof and freeze-proof, for only $99. Perfect for late-summer days at the beach?

Today only (as long as supplies last), and (sorry) USA only too.

Mike

UPDATE 3:00 p.m. Tuesday: The deal is over. The sale cameras are gone, and the price is back up to the regular $139. B&H's price is a little better than that.

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