The Online Photographer

Open Mike: Lewis Black

First of all, I have no idea which countries these videos are, or are not, viewable from. I apologize if I'm linking to something you can't see. They have not put me in charge yet.

My friend Kim and his wife got to see a live performance by Lewis Black the other night. "Funniest I have ever seen him," said Kim, "and of course he is aligned perfectly with my own political and social feelings." It just occurred to me that there might well be people alive on the planet who don't know Lewis Black—think of a sort of darkly comic Andy Rooney whose steady state is the verge of apoplexy.

If you haven't ever seen him, you're in for a treat. Among many other things, he's an occasional but recurring fake commentator on the fake news "Daily Show." Here's a bio page with a collection of video links.

I especially loved the one about "artisanal" foods (fourth one down).

Lewis Black for President!

Mike

P.S. Regarding last Sunday's "Open Mike," I was very gratified that the NFL very sensibly righted its ship promptly after last Monday Night's debacle. (The Packers and their fans sacrificed of their record for the common good, I guess.) Apparently it wasn't just me—others out there in sports fandom were getting perturbed as well. I am looking forward with deep satisfaction to being outraged by the obvious blindness of the regular, well-trained, more compentent refs later today. Just hopefully not so often.

"Open Mike" is a series of off-topic posts that appear only, but not always, on Sundays.

Original contents copyright 2012 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.
A book of interest today:

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

T Bannor: "My wife and I went to see Lewis Black last month here in Chicago at the City Winery. You could arrive two hours early to have dinner with wine. Evidently, one young lady had a bit too much wine as she started heckling within a minute of Mr. Black coming on stage (she didn't utter a peep for the two opening comedians). Big mistake. We witnessed the mother of all smackdowns."

Random Excellence: Doug Rickard (?)

Doug Rickard, #82.948842, Detroit, MI. 2009. 2010

It occurred to me that I should say a few actual words about A New American Picture, the book that appeared in the footer ad on Friday.

Short take: a custom-made version of this book was published in 2010, to great acclaim, in a severely limited edition by White Press. It sold out in about 1/125th of a second (estimate only). And that was that. Until it wasn't: now, a more commercial edition of the book—but with a more generous selection of pictures—has just been published by Aperture (it hasn't quite made its way to Amazon yet, but soon, no doubt). I'm not in the habit of reviewing books before I've seen them, but this is one you might want to join me in line for.

Doug Rickard had an idea. Just like spiderbots crawl the Internet, Google's camera's are crawling the streets, taking wide-angle pictures every twenty feet. Your ability to pan up and down and from side to side makes for an effective infinity of static views. Pretty much like actually being in the world, with some restrictions imposed. And with other restrictions lifted, it's important to add—you could never get to all the places Google's cameras have unless you want to do nothing else for the rest of your life.

If Google Street View was going everywhere, Rickard must have realized, it was going into places no one ever paid attention to. The Daily Beast called him a "tour guide to a shadowed nation." You might have heard it said that America is in a recession, but I think it's a depression—but it only affects half the country, and nobody cares because it's only the bottom half. ("The Half Depression" is actually a pretty good moniker for the current economy, come to think.)

Well, get on board the Rickard/(Google) virtual tour bus and take a gander. What Rickard has done is to treat Google Street View as a shoot, and edit out a few great shots from the endless half-forgotten, run-down stretches of street you've never visited. Finding tiny flakes of gold amidst endless tons of dross.

Doug Rickard, #40.805716, New York City, NY. 2009. 2011

It worked. Rickard also knew what every picture editor does, which is that if you have enough material to work from you can mine something from it. 5B4's Jeff Ladd says, "I learned photography through an ability to trust in the world and a rather strong distrust of 'ideas,' so clever frameworks rarely excite unless the work from image to image surprises and transcends." That's the cool part, and the reason this deserves our attention—some of the pictures look like Hopper paintings.

Edward Hopper, Nighthawks, 1942, at the AIC

As for the notion that somehow this project is artistically suspect or less than legitimate because Rickard didn't take the pictures, well, I reject that. The pictures were gathered automatically, without the slightest particle of artistic intention or individual input. I'm the first guy to get my back up when somebody steals or appropriates or otherwise exploits actual ideas or work by others, but I don't object to this in the slightest...ethically and artistically, anyway. (IANAL.) I might be prejudiced, because I think in the age of the digital tsunami, one thing Rickard's project does is demonstrate vividly what all photographs, and photographers, and photography need now more than ever: creative, and severe, editing. Saying that Rickard didn't "take the pictures" (well, he didn't) is like saying the baker didn't bake the bread because he didn't mill the flour. In my opinion. I'm happy to look at the work of a picture editor, even if that's all it is, if it results in genuine creative insight.

At the very least, you've got to admit that this gives new meaning to the rubric "random excellence." :-)

A funny thing for me personally is that I had this idea thirty years ago—even wrote it up as a grant request. My idea was simply to outfit a vehicle so I could sit comfortably on top of it in the open air—I envisioned something akin to an open-topped double-decker tour bus, only based on a step van—and hire somebody to drive it around while I took pictures. The Internet wasn't a bump on the world's belly at the time, and yet, lo these many years later, here we are—Doug Rickard, with Google Street View's considerable help, has done up that old slumbering idea better than I or any one photographer ever could have.

Doug Rickard, #83.016417, Detroit, MI. 2009. 2010

The Guardian* quotes the dyspeptic and slightly clammy poet Philip Larkin: "All streets in time are visited."

Mike

*Note the author of that article. That's Geoff Dyer as in Geoff Dyer.

-

Counterpoint
By Kenneth Tanaka

Last weekend at Art Expo, here in Chicago, I visited a gallery representing Doug Rickard's "work." Big prints of small Google street images at big prices.

I agree with Mike that there is some good stuff in that group of images. It's also true that these images are taken from places that are largely abandoned relics of the 20th century, places you might not want to go without a tail-gunner.

But someone did go there, someone driving one of those nutty-looking Google camera cars. The "system" took the pictures. Rickard did not visit any of these places, did not make either of the most seminal decisions of photography: where to place the camera and when to push the button.

Even the title of Rickards's book is fraudulent: A New American Picture Photographs by Doug Rickard. "Photographs by"? Rickard didn't take a single one of the photos.

Of course he's just copying an earlier idea of cashing-in on collecting Google images. It's been done at least once before. This whole fame-and-fortune-thru-appropriation thing is popular in the contemporary art world now, with Richard Prince perhaps the standard bearer for the movement.

I've concluded that a great deal of my own judgement on such cases is based on the style and context of presentation. Rickard, for example, is clearly aiming for fame and fortune rather than simple curated exposition. He's parading this work through major galleries (there's an upcoming showing at Yossi Milo in NY) and the book and prints are heavily worked-over (by yet another anonymous helper) to make them look rather filmish and painterly. This is so obviously a cash chase. But Rickard himself is neither a photographer nor an artist. He's...what...an editor? A sociologist? An entrepreneur?

Now consider a different context of representation of appropriated work. Last year the Art Institute of Chicago presented a collection of anonymous images as a carefully curated body of work titled The Three Graces. The exhibit, and its tiny catalog, were inspired by the revelation that snapshots featuring three women have been extraordinarily common throughout photo history. The images, rather than the curator or the donor of the collection were the stars.

I have to dissent about Doug Rickard. I've browsed the book and seen the prints. Interesting, but the authorship claim feels like a sticky doorknob. Personally I'll not be buying into it.

—Ken Tanaka

-

Original contents copyright 2012 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.
A book of interest today:

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Ed Hawco: "To borrow the phrase from Ctein, that's what I'd call stochastic street photography. (I would also call it brilliant.)"

Richard Sintchak: "Eh, I'm not so sure. I like a few of the photos I see as examples but I've bought way too many photo books loving the front cover image only to find the rest of the photos very boring or blah. Like the comedy movie in which all the best jokes were in the preview clip. Maybe I'll be wrong. I'm reminded of the adage: 'Even a stopped watch is correct twice a day.'"

Stan B.: "Last depression, people agreed we all needed to act and work together, so we got programs like the FSA and its photography division. Today we have a lone voyeur at home on a computer, who is arguably less detached from reality than many of our leaders."

David: "I've got similar plans for my van...it's going to be built. Also, shame on you, Mike, for the 1/125 insert...It's gonna take me a while to recover from that one. This guy's editing work intrigues me and causes me a tiny bit of conflict but I do enjoy the images he culls...."

Dean Forbes: "Shame on Rickard, Aperture and TOP for foisting the book off as original or compelling work. It's copying pure and simple, and a gross example of appropriation of someone else's images for personal gain."

Joe: "If the images are intriguing, if they stop you in your tracks, if they make you laugh or make you pause to study, or to say Wow, or to show others, if they make you think about the world in which they were taken...in short, I say if Rickard has edited a set of photographs into a series that makes me feel as if I'm seeing the world through a unique set of eyes, then I forgive the method and the source and the artist's statement and I call the collection a success."

JL: "Whatever else you might think of this project (I quite like it, but then, I really don't care where an image comes from), I think Mr. Tanaka is parsing the title of Rickard's book in the wrong way. It's not that the photographs are 'by' him; it's that the book is. This is standard practice, and isn't even remotely misleading: Rickard, like Prince, makes it abundantly clear that he didn't push the shutter release button. You can like the work or dislike it, but it's misleading to speak of it as 'fraudulent.'"

Carlos L. Esguerra: "I, too, have an idea. I can save a lot of travel money by not going to those iconic places Ansel Adams visited. Instead I will buy his photo books, photograph the images and publish my own version of the pictures after some cursory Photoshop edits."

JohnMFlores: "Many photographers are caught in a gilded cage, where the fundamentals of the craft (the decisive moment/don't 'spray and pray,' the rule of thirds, the superiority of 'full frame' and the optical viewfinder, etc.) almost guarantees that the resulting photographs will have a whiff of 'I've seen that somewhere before.' Interesting and new things happen when we discard these sacred cows and fully embrace our digital and networked age. Congrats to Rickard for trying something different—that is how photography moves forward."

Partial comment from expiring_frog: "Like you I too feel this work has artistic merit, if only because it raises serious questions about the nature and role of the witness, especially when viewed in the historical context of photography and the modern role of topography/surveillance. There is also a certain romance and dystopic irony in the idea of the little car trundling down lonely streets, meticulously and indiscriminately recording backyard after dreary backyard, and occasionally (as revealed by Rickard/Wolf/Rafman's curation) capturing an aesthetically pleasing picture purely by accident." (Read the rest of expiring_frog's comment in the Comments section. —Ed.)

Ade: "That'll be the Geoff Dyer who wrote an (excellent, IMHO) book on photography despite not being a photographer, or even a professed expert, himself. Which also seemed to annoy a lot of people. Ironic."

Mike adds: A. D. Coleman isn't a photographer either. I don't think Max Kozloff is, but I'm not sure.

Lens Test

SA*

Photo courtesy Sony Electronics

The Sony RX1 lens is sharp in the center but quickly gets soft towards the edges and corners.

Mike

*Satire alert

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Original contents copyright 2012 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.
A book of interest today:

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

John Krill: "I was told RX meant Really eXpensive. Or was that more satire?"

Mike Plews: "It takes balls to put something like that on the web."

Paul Amyes: "I thought it was spherical aberration."

Luke: "Son, you're a troublemaker. Keep it up, and...we'll keep reading. And laughing."

Nikon D800E

Amazon has eleven (11) Nikon D800E's in stock this morning.

Thought somebody might want to know. They've been, er, scarce.

Mike

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Original contents copyright 2012 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.
TOP's book of interest today:

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Lukasz Kubica: "List Price: $3,299.95 Price: $3,299.00 You Save: $0.95 This is surely a deal of the year, LOL."

Mike replies: Right, but if it were equivalent to a popular car in short supply, they'd be asking $500 over list.

Gary: "I see the pairing of post topic with book recommendation could get creative/interesting. No irony intended there...the megapixel champion camera with the very lo-fi A New American Picture?"

Mike replies: Heh. Glad somebody noticed that. I feel like I put little hidden jokes into TOP all the time that nobody seems to notice. For instance, no one seemed to notice that my Latin "FPO" text in the "Changes" post actually means something....

OT: Lovely Typose

My friend-I've-never-met and onetime TOP contributor Paul Butzi and I, purely for amusement and not a bit for spite, often trade examples of typos, misspellings, misspeakings, poor grammar, and general linguistic idiocy encountered on the 'Net. I dasn't give examples from fellow photo sites, lest I offend*, but here's a nice one from Amazon:

My husband bought this [toaster oven] so that we could use it to cook in the summer time so that we didn't have to use the big oven and heat up the house. I do believe it helped us save some money on eclectic bills.

Good one! Personally, though, I think that's a miscoinage: I would nominate "eclectic bills" as a good name for those mysterious little ancillary bills you get after a stay in the hospital. You get a big bill from the surgeon, a bigger bill from the hospital, and then a whole bunch of little piddley bills you couldn't possibly explain or decode if you had to:

Frendokensiologist, consult, 5 min., $82

Little do you know, but what that means is that a friend of your doctor, whose name is Ken, stuck his head into your room and said "How're you feeling?" and then disappeared. His name is Bob, so Ken's bills to Bob's patients are from the Frendobobsiologist.

Those eclectic bills can add up, too.

Mike

*Although I was startled to encounter "framer ate" on a photo site the other day, which I thought was lovely for a typo. (Think about it.)

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Original contents copyright 2012 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.
A book of interest today:

Featured Comments:
(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)

Ben Rosengart: "Luminous Landscape gave us the wonderful phrase 'hare's breath,' which is still capable of sending me into paroxysms of laughter when I picture my wife's reaction: a single tiny pant. 'Framer ate' is of a category which said wife and I term 'superb owls,' after a correction offered by MS Word when she was writing about a sporting event some years ago."

Ri chard Newman: "You're lucky...Frendobobsiologist bills are usually at least $182. Maybe the bill was a typo??"

Mike replies: You laugh, but I was at the ophthalmologist's a few months ago and when I went to pay, they handed me a printed bill for $2,450.00. When I recovered a normal cardiac rhythm, I inquired, and it was, yes, a typo. The bill was $245.00. True story.

Will Whitaker: "While employed for a while at a major bank I had to request an annual report from AT&T. It came direct from their corporate communications department addressed to Mr. William Shitaker. I wanted to write them back with a copy of the address label to tell them they were full of whit, but thought better of it."

Sony Electronics Posts First RX1 Samples

ISO 6400

I guess the title explains all...here they are....

At up to full size.

Sharp bits look good (both of these details are 100% after you click on them)

Lens blur looks good...ƒ/5.6

Damn, damn, damn...gotta lock down the wallet. How did Odysseus do it again? Oh yeah, he lashed himself to the mast. Anybody got a mast?

Mike
(Thanks to David Stewart)

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Original contents copyright 2012 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.
TOP's book of interest today:

Featured Comments from:
(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link at the bottom of this post.)

James Liu: "I'll sell you a mast for $2700.  ;-)"

Andrew R: "Mike, you're a cruel, cruel man. Any comments on the bokeh from the hack who coined the term?"

Mike replies: I didn't actually coin the term; and, looks good so far.

Daniel R. Fealko: "I've only got one word to say to all of this: 'Dang, those are some really nice images!' Okay, maybe more than one word, but I'm impressed. Now off I go to dab the drool from my chin."

Mike Plews: "$2700? For that you get a D600, 35mm ƒ/2, 50mm ƒ/1.8, and a steak dinner in change. Did I miss a memo? Nevertheless the pix are very nice."

Mike replies: The memo said, "You're not supposed to be so sensible about this stuff!"

wchen: "GAS, yes GAS. It costs a lot more cash to fill a tank these days. But it is not a bad thing to have something to feed our eyes; quite an entertainment at least."

Ed: "Eh Mike...I just saw the widow of Steve McQueen on German TV...and guess what she was using...a Nikon F...with a softbutton release...now that is my definition of subzero cool. And her lens was a Nikon series E 36–72mm...does anyone remember that? Remember Mike, in photography it is not that important what is behind the lens, important is what's in front of it  :-)."

Phillip England: "I don't need to spend $2700 to see a bar drinks shelf blurred like that!"

Olympus and Former Executives Plead Guilty

"Former Olympus chairman Tsuyoshi Kikukawa has pleaded guilty to charges of falsifying accounts, covering up losses of $1.7bn (£1.1bn), at the opening of his trial.

"Two other former executives, as well as the camera firm itself, filed a guilty plea in Tokyo District Court.

"They face up to 10 years in prison...."

READ ON at the BBC

Mike

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Original contents copyright 2012 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.
TOP's Book o' the Week this week is:

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Featured Comments:
(To see all the comments, click on the post title and scroll down)

From Kenneth Tanaka: "Meanwhile it looks like Sony will, indeed, become a bit of a white knight investor in Olympus, to the tune of $642 million.

"An aside...throughout much of the 1990s I was involved with an institutional investment management firm that was a true pioneer in leading normally stodgy U.S. companies to invest across broader global asset classes. When prospective clients would wonder why fees were higher for non-U.S. assets, the investment managers would have to explain just how much in-depth research needed to be done to determine the true financial situation of overseas companies—yes, even in developed settings like Japan. Accounting standards vary wildly, often making it nearly impossible to gather enough accurate data to normalize against U.S. standards. Even very large multinationals, such as Olympus, have (ahem) flexible accounting standards that mask their true health. It's not generally as much a criminal evasion (as this case apparently was) as it is differences in culture. Variations often are found among companies in the same country, with explanations sometimes relying on the company's historical standards.

"While it might seem that the Internet has helped to make global finances more transparent, those still in the business suggest that this is not the case at all. This Olympus case would seem to buttress that opinion."

Changes to TOP

As you might have noticed over the past couple of days, I've been fiddling with a few changes to the standard post format. I'd like to add a small advertisement to each post, because we now have almost 28,000 people signed up to get our full feed, and those people don't see any of the regular ads. So I figured I put a small image of an interesting book at the bottom of the "fine print."

I'm not sure how many people who subscribe to the feed actually qualify as "readers." Could be relatively few; I subscribe to feeds I seldom click on. It does make me think I should concentrate on more "grabby" post titles—you know, like "Amanda Bynes Topless!" (I'm kidding. I have no idea who Amanda Bynes is.)

I'm also going to try introducing the "Featured Comments" like this:

Featured Comments:
(To see all the comments, click on the post title and scroll down)

From Astutio: "Abundans cautela non nocet..."

The TypePad interface has been getting progressively more fiddley in terms of building the simple "Featured Comment by..." intro that I've been using since forever. With comment moderation and selection now taking up to six hours of my day, I think a little workflow streamlining might go a long way here.

You can see all the changes in the "Supercool Case" post.

Open question is whether the little book thumbnails are going to annoy anyone...and whether they'll work at all or not. At this point I suspect I'll use the same thumbnail for four days or a week, and then change it to something new. (It's called a "soak.") (You'll know I've fallen asleep at the wheel if you see the same thumbnail persisting for months. Could happen.)

Experimentation and fine-tuning will be ongoing....

Mike, TOP's All-Purpose Editorial Slave (APES)

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Original contents copyright 2012 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.
The following is an advertisement:

Featured Comments:
(To see all the comments, click on the post title and scroll down)

From bill: "Shiver me timbers, an ad. Actually I liked the choices so far, got the Walker Evans and the Jeff Schewe will find a spot when in the budget. All in all you have a 'quiet' blog and I appreciate that."

From MM: "I don't know what the RSS feeds look like, because I read websites the old-fashioned way—online, like my ancestors did...."

Mike replies: Heh.

From Elisabeth: "I don't mind the book thumbnail at all! The revenue-generating features on TOP are always extremely tasteful and never feel the slightest bit coercive to me.

"I echo the comments of others who have suggested a rotating set of five to 10 books. I wouldn't even mind seeing four or five different thumbnails at a time below the post—I get bored easily and always love a selection when browsing/shopping.

"Your book recommendations at TOP are one of my favorite parts of the site; in fact, I wish you had a permanent link to the thumbnails or links for all of the books you've ever recommended—preferably somewhere prominent like the very top of the page. I envision this link as the portal to one of the most interesting and discerning photography bookstores around, and I know I would be clicking on it quite often.

"By the way, I appreciate it when you give feedback on your affiliate sales, as you did with the Walker Evans book. It's a nice feeling to be part of a much larger group that helps to support this wonderful site. My nosy/curious side would even be interested to hear the monthly 'winner' for most expensive or unusual item purchased through your links. :-)"

Mike replies: I'll just address two of your thoughts if I may. The problem with a "master list" of book recommendations is twofold. First, lists of that sort by their very nature presume to completeness, and I'm unfortunately not in a market where a very large selection of the available titles are available for me to see—so I'd overlook a lot. Second, lots of photo books go in and out of print rapidly, and sometimes they go in and out and in and out and...a master list would actually be quite difficult to "groom" (as professional direct-mail marketers say of mailing lists), and it would take a lot of time.

Second thought: I've actually considered occasionally naming some of the things people buy through our links, and it's tempting—the range shows an incredibly diverse array of needs and interests. But I finally decided it would be a potential invasion—well, let's say "intrusion," as it would hardly rise to the level of Normandy or the Soviets in Hungary in 1956—on the buyer's privacy. Even though nobody'd ever be connected to an item by name (I never see who buys anything), they might feel exposed, which might make them uncomfortable. So I decided not to do that, at least not as a regular thing.

From Samuel Dilworth: "Although you've proven yourself capable of many surprising things over the years I've followed you, I believe the quality of your writing remains your unique strength and explains my enduring appreciation of TOP. I'd love to see you write longer pieces more frequently. Why can't you work eighty hours a week to please me?"

Mike replies: My fantasy, in which I indulge from time to time, involves just that. I fantasize raising five or six (or seven or eight) million dollars through arts grants, forming a non-profit corporation to support a completely independent TOP, paying myself an adequate but not excessive salary, and then engaging five or six (or however many we could afford) regular writers/reporters/reviewers (even if part-time) who I could assign to do the really fascinating stories that I never have adequate time to research. Then I'd hire a Managing Editor/assistant/webmaster to handle all the administrative details and the day-to-day chores...and the print sales...and I'd just write. I could then take the time to do "real" essays and articles along with my little toss-off stuff, instead of writing everything on the fly like some kind of photo-techy Hildy Johnson.

Possibly the most significant frustration of TOP is that I don't have time to do enough research. There are great stories that just go by. I know where they are, I know how to report them, I just don't have time to do the reporting and the research. (You know what they say: Oh well.)

And then—this is a small part of the plan but a significant part of the fantasy—we'd use whatever money's left over at the end of every year to subsidize the work of working photographers or the publication of books I think are crying out to be made.

It's all do-able...it's just that first bit that's a little bit of a sticking point. Next lifetime, I promise.  :-D

Sign of Success

Can't say I've seen this before...

Mike

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Original contents copyright 2012 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.
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From Boglev: "Just checked. They're back!"

Mike replies: Sorry, I should have said it's intermittent. I was seeing most pages but got that box when asking for D800 samples, which, after all, must be pretty demanding of bandwidth.

Supercool Case

I totally love this—check out this freestanding print storage and display case. It's shown in a catalog of the Milwaukee Photo Materials Company from roughly a century ago. It has four leaves or boards for print display that turn like the pages of a book, more space for display on the back, and drawers for proofs and loose prints.

Awesome! I'd buy one of these for $45. Kudos to the late Mr. T. R. Bowring of De Pere, Wisconsin.

Okay, I guess $45 was a little bit more back then.

Mike
(Thanks to James Erlandson (a.k.a. Speed))

UPDATE: I did some quick digging about T.R. Bowring. Turns out Thomas R. Bowring was a professional and portrait photographer in De Pere (now a suburb of Green Bay) who lived from 1878 to 1947. His father, Thomas D. Bowring (1844–1897, buried in Woodlawn Cemetery in Brown County) was also a photographer. You can see some of Thomas D.'s work online at the Wisconsin Historical Society, and these two pictures for sale on eBay might be the work of father and son:

The picture on the left, obviously by the Bowring studio, is c. 1890, when Thomas D. would have been 46 and his son Thomas R. 12; assuming the right-hand picture taken twenty years later was also taken by the Bowrings (a fact not in evidence!), then it would have been taken by Thomas R., who was 32 by that time, because his father had passed away. (eBay item number 400304384080.)

And finally, via the De Pere Historical Society Newsletter Vol. 19, is our photographer and cabinet designer himself:

It's pure conjecture on my part, but I'll bet he designed his print display case for his own business, and then took it to market thinking he had a winner on his hands.  —MJ

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"Recommended"

Featured Comments:
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From Ed: "According to the Bureau of Labor and Statistics Inflation Calculator, $45 'roughly a century ago' (1913) is $1047.18 today (2012)."

Mike replies: That still seems a little cheap for that complex and apparently well-built piece of furniture, doesn't it? I don't know, maybe it was made in China.

From wtlloyd: "I'm a cabinetmaker in Southern California. $45 today will buy you one of the large bottom drawer boxes from my suppliers. Not the drawer front or cup pull or slide hardware, just the inner box."

Why ISO Isn't ISO

By Ctein

I know I promised a column this week on Raw files and how they're not quite what you think, but the confusion that has popped up over DxOMark's measurements of ISO has made me realize that I need to explain what ISO is really all about before I can explain this Raw business.

Wobbly
Photographers have the idea that ISO (whether analog or digital) is a fundamental physical measurement, a way of describing the "photon capture efficiency" of a film or sensor. It's not. Ultimately, what it's really about is what exposure will produce the best-looking photograph for a particular subject luminance, according to the collective judgment of viewers. That is a pretty wobbly criterion.

Even in the film days, this was an arbitrary matter. Those of you with long photographic memories will recall that in the 1950s, negative film speeds (then called ASA) suddenly doubled. The films hadn't changed, but film use had.

Black-and-white negative films get grainier and less sharp with increasing exposure. When large format was king that was not very important, and ASA was biased in favor of producing a long range of shadow detail. As the dominant film formats shrunk, grain and sharpness became more pressing issues. The sweet spot for the best looking photograph shifted towards sacrificing some shadow detail in exchange for getting finer grain and more sharpness.

This was essentially a voting process, not an objective determination of physical fact. Some photographers chose to continue to "over"-expose their film by one stop to get the extra shadow range and they were happy to live with a bit less sharpness and more grain. [Present! —Ed.] As always, personal Exposure Indices (E.I.) count for more than manufacturers' rated speeds.

Even film "shadow speed" is arbitrary. It's pegged at an exposure that produces a density 0.1 density unit (d.u.) above film base plus fog for a certain kind of standard development. Why that development? Why 0.1 d.u. vs. 0.2 d.u. or 0.05 d.u.? We're not talking about unchanging physics here, we're talking about photographers' preferences, even with as rigid a medium as film.

Five ways
Digital captures are a lot more flexible. There are two different measurements of ISO in the industry and one of them is objective-physical-based.

1. Sensor ISO is based on the amount of light it takes to saturate the sensor to pure white. This is what DxOMark measures and reports. Sometimes that yields counterintuitive values. Double the collection efficiency of your sensor so it only takes half as much light to saturate the sensor, and you've doubled the ISO. That makes sense.

Suppose, though, you just make larger pixels that can hold more photoelectrons. What happens then? Well, it takes more light to saturate the sensor, so the sensor ISO drops even though the sensor still has the same sensitivity to light.

WTF?

This is one reason why many large format digital backs, with their huge pixels and huge dynamic range (which means a huge exposure range) come in with such low DxOMark ISO values. Their pixels aren't insensitive, but they are designed to be huge light buckets, so it takes a lot of light to fill them.

This measure of ISO, while useful for avoiding clipping and correct for a site that is measuring sensor performance, isn't of prime importance to photographers. It doesn't tell you what exposure will produce the best looking photograph. So, we come to...

2. Camera ISO. There are, god help us, five different industry-standard ways to determine camera ISO. Fortunately, only one applies to any cameras made in the past five years and works for both JPEG and Raw files and sRGB and Adobe color space. It's the one that makes the most intuitive sense to photographers, but it's the least physically-based:

Make a bunch of exposures. Process the Raw files into viewable RGB images and decide which exposure produces the best looking results. Once you know the best exposure for a particular subject luminance, you've got the ISO.

Notice that this doesn't directly connect to what exposure saturates the sensor (sensor ISO). That is just one factor. For example, less exposure (which equates to a higher ISO) leaves you with more highlight headroom before you start getting clipping, but the picture will look noisier. Conversely, more exposure (lower ISO) produces a cleaner photograph but your highlights will block up sooner.

Different camera makers will decide on different camera ISOs for the very same sensor, depending on what they think is the optimum balance for image quality. Almost always, they choose a camera ISO that is somewhat greater than the sensor ISO because blown-out highlights are unpopular.

What we care about
Camera design affects camera ISO, too. The noise in the picture is the result of the entire electronic chain, the amplifiers and all the rest. Different designs produce different amounts of picture noise for the same exposure with the same sensor. That shifts the balance between what's an acceptable level of noise and an acceptable range of highlight detail. Still, the sensor ISO hasn't changed.

And, let's not forget the different camera makers (and cameras) will have different hardware and software to convert the Raw data into viewable RGB photographs. Unlike film ISO, there is no "standard developer" for digital files; each camera maker decides what it considers the best "development."

The bottom line
That's why DxOMark gives you a plot of camera ISO vs. sensor ISO. It doesn't reveal that a camera manufacturer is "fudging" or "lying." It tells you how the two different kinds of ISO, which are legitimately determined in very different ways, compare. That's all. It's not an exposé. It's just technical information. So far as real photography practices go, we care a lot more about camera ISO.

In two weeks I'll tell you how camera ISO ties into Raw and why Raw isn't as fixed into objective physics as you'd think. Next week, though, I've got a more pressing matter to write about. See you then.

Ctein

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Photo Book Bestseller

Walker Evans: American Photographs (75th Anniversary Edition) (U.K. link) is now (in only two months) the all-time #1 bestseller through TOP's links, with 1,007 copies sold through Amazon in the U.S. (869 copies) and the U.K. (138).

Thought you'd want to know.

Mike

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Question from Alan: "Is it possible for you to get sponsored links to The Book Depository? For us antipodeans, the difference that free shipping makes is often substantial. A couple of times I've gone there after following your links to Amazon and found a much better deal. And they're owned by Amazon!"

Mike replies: We are affiliates of The Book Depository, B&H Photo-Video, Amazon.com (U.S.A.), Amazon U.K., Amazon Germany, and Amazon Canada. All the links can be found any time by clicking the "Amazon Links" pane in the right-hand sidebar. And as always, thank you.

Middleman

It just occurred to me this morning that I'm a middle-aged, Midwestern, middle-income, middlebrow moderate.

Stands to reason I'd use a mid-level camera with a mid-sized sensor.

Mike

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Featured Comment by Bill Mitchell: "Still have the whole plate? (I guess that's halfway between 5x7 and 8x10.)"

Mike replies: Yep, right in the middle.

D600 Bythom

If you're one of those whose interest was piqued (n.b., entire Internet: not "peeked" or "peaked"!) by the new D600, you might already know about our friend Thom Hogan's Bythom.com, the most interesting of the Nikon websites (and very good as a general photo-industry site too).

Thom has been keeping up a running commentary about the D600, with the latest updates at the top, called "Everything I Know About the D600 So Far." If you're one of those who are new to the page (and many veteran Nikonians won't be, I realize), I think the best place to dive in is to scroll down to the section titled "D600 Impressions" from Sept. 12th, before reading higher and lower. There, he'll give you a nuanced take on the question "should I get a D600 or a D800?" and cover some interesting subtleties about Nikon's product-introduction strategy, and how it might affect you.

Among many other points. A line I liked was, "But here's the thing: the D600 is a D3x in a D7000 body for about 30% the price." Attractive when you put it that way.

I do have to tweak Thom about one thing. First* he apologizes for helping to introduce the term "end-user" back in the 1980s. And then he says: "The D600 feels more 'casual enthusiast' to me with the D800 being 'dedicated enthusiast.' The D600 shooter is more likely to be the weekend-only, or worse still, vacation-only shooter. The D600 shooter probably isn't trying to get to the highest pinnacle of photography, and is satisfied with 'good images.' The D800 is someone shooting all the time and trying to move to the next level."

"Move to the next level" is another cringeworthy phrase in my book. Darkly, it seems like language co-opted into the corporate product-tier mindset, but even trivially it grates...on my ear, anyway. Photography isn't a video game.

But of course you know what he means. (Thom's always good at making complex considerations clear.) Sounds to me like he likes the D600 but basically thinks you should (ahem) take it to the next level and go ahead and get the D800. (Who wants to be a "vacation-only shooter"? Not even vacation-only shooters, I'm guessing.)

But no need for me to maunder on. I'll assume most people reading this have already clicked over to Thom's article and gotten started reading that.

Mike

*First, that is, if you're reading from the top....

UPDATE: Ming Thein has posted his D600 review, too. (Thanks to Kevin P. for this.)

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Featured Comment by Andrew R: "I love it when my favourite bloggers cross-link!"

Featured Comment by Chad Thompson: "Though photography isn't a video game, cameras are becoming more like game consoles all the time."

Featured Comment by fjf: "Does the D600 offer focus piquing?"

[Mike slaps forehead]

Featured Comment by JohnMFlores: "I've started a spreadsheet of the cost of the D600 plus different lens combinations. This can't end well."

Mike replies: It can for me, if you just remember to buy it through my links! :-)

Featured Comment by Harry Lime: "I just got my D600 a few days ago. Coming from a D700 I can assure everyone that it is not a 'vacation camera' or a flimsy toy. The IQ is truly superb. It offers a noticeable improvement over my D700 in terms of exposure range and noise. The camera is fast in operation and the ergonomics and viewfinder are first rate. I only wish the viewfinder window was round, instead of square. AF is fast and accurate. It's compact and noticeably lighter than the competition.

"Think of it as a digital F100. Build quality is very high. Yes, it's a notch below the D700, but it is far from being a toy camera. It will without a doubt stand up to the rigors of cat photographers and soccers moms the world over. Many professionals shoot with 'consumer grade' bodies and unless you do something truly extreme, they work just fine. This is a very, very good camera and IMO the biggest bang for your buck currently on the market."

OT: Monday Night Melee

Sure, it was exciting. Yes, it was different.

But it sucked.

I seldom quote myself—bloggers can be self-involved enough without going that far—but this is what I said about the replacement refs on Sunday:

Finally, there's the fairness issue. One reason I watch sports is because everybody gets held to the same rules...unlike in life, where unfairness abounds and people get away with all kinds of nastiness and skullduggery. If I start feeling like the outcomes of football games have to take into account all sorts of blown calls and blatant cheating, I'm just not sure how I'm going to feel about that.

Well, be careful what you wish for. Because now I know.

Great game, right? Except for the fact that it was decided on bogus calls. There were mistakes, sure ("It's a touchdown!" "No it isn't!" "It's 3rd and inches on the one-and-a-quarter!" "No it isn't! It's first and goal on the one!" etc.). And the replacement refs tried their best to control the game by flagging everything except illegal contact, which they apparently don't know is a rule. But to flag everything, you've got to be able to tell what's a penalty and which player committed it. If you can't tell the difference, then it doesn't help to try to be strict.

Bah.

Nicely managed ending to that game, wasn't it? This entire season has an asterisk by it already, if you ask me. The results are contaminated. The refereeing isn't just poor, it's atrocious, and the result are out-of-control melees that are a disgrace to the sport. (I looked up the word "melee." It's pronounced "may-lay" and it means "a violent free-for-all." Works here.)

The fake refs are essentially retraining the players—teaching them that they can get away with a lot more cheating, and retraining them to play dirtier and more dangerously. (My prediction: before too many more weeks go by we're going to see a crippled knee or two, and players out for the season—or for life—due to injuries from illegal blocks or tackles. Remember where you read that.) It's getting so bad that it actually occurred to me last night to wonder if the real refs are going to be able to get the players back under control again when they return.

The real pity was that it was a tight and hard-fought and very interesting game for about 45 minutes. Green Bay got its ass completely kicked in the first half but also mostly shut down the Seattle offense, and then McCarthy made radical adjustments at the half and the Packers neutralized the overpowering rush and clawed their way back into it. Too bad so many drives in the fourth quarter were decided by missed calls or wrong calls, because it would have been really interesting to see who would have won the game that had been underway, the game that should have been. We'll never know.

Just a disgraceful game. I looked up the word "travesty," too, and that one means "any grotesque or debased likeness or imitation."

In this case, of pro football. Or should we start putting that word "pro" in quotes?

Mike

UPDATE Thursday a.m.: The lockout has ended, and I can go back to being a football fan again this weekend. Sigh of relief.

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Featured Comment by Craig: "I live in Chicagoland and I am a Bears fan, meaning my two favorite teams are the Bears and whoever is playing the Packers. But...I watched the slow motion over and over again as we all did, and cannot figure out how it was ruled a Seahawks touchdown. Further, it is completely beyond me how the review booth saw it the same way. Some tweeter quoted on ESPN said it was the first time in NFL history a QB threw a game winning interception. That would be PIYP funny, except that the Packers were truly and clearly cheated out of a win."

Mike replies: Rumors: that the review from the booth is what Aaron Rodgers is most furious about (he can't speak freely or he'll be fined), and even Seattle running back Marshawn Lynch thinks Seattle lost the game.

Featured Comment by c.d.embrey: "I stopped caring about the NFL when 'Monday Night Football' hired Dennis Miller as a commentator. This is a good demonstration of the 'Law of Unintended Consequences'—I've never watched another NFL game, including Super Bowls, since. I wonder how many people will stop being fans because of the 'amatuer refs' fiasco? When I stopped jonesing for the NFL, it gave me a lot more time to do something useful with my limited time."

Mike replies: Dennis Miller can do that to you. His great gift—and it's rare—is to be a reactionary idiot while at the same time sounding like he's smart.

More generally, I've always wondered about this sort of thing. American Airlines sponsored the televising of a tennis circuit I really appreciated way back in the '70s, and I flew American whenever I possibly could for years. I also hold grudges. If some company or organization does something really stupid or venal or shoddy, I remember it and act accordingly. There are three or four companies whose products I simply refuse to buy—don't care about the details, I just refuse. And I refused to watch baseball for three or four years after the '94–'95 strike—it just completely disgusted me that a couple of hundred very, very lucky guys who play games for a living couldn't figure out how to divvy up several billion dollars between them. Not that baseball noticed I was gone.

Yet there doesn't even seem to be a term for this phenomenon, and little discussion of it. What's the opposite of "consumer loyalty?"

Featured Comment by speed: "On the bright side...you got a blog post out of it."

DxO Gives OM-D High Marks

By Oren Grad

DxOMark has just posted performance data for the E-M5. On their measures it's a leap beyond any prior Micro 4/3 camera, including the 16MP Panasonic G3. I'm always concerned about the DR score, and in that category the only reason it doesn't match the best APS-C cameras is that it doesn't have the ISO 100 setting that kicks the measured exposure range up beyond 13 stops. But from ISO 200 up, it's neck-and-neck. The story is comparable on the other DxO measures.

An impressive step forward—much kudos to Olympus, especially the product designers and engineers who've kept plugging away despite the nonsense at the corporate level.

Oren

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Featured Comment by MJFerron: "Sold my OMD and took a $150 loss in doing so. Too many dials and buttons. All too close together. Yes it has fine image quality and AF speed but those features were not enough to win me over. A button should say ISO, WB, etc."

Featured Comment by Rick D: "Love this little camera. It's a great complement to my E-series system and extends it in several important ways. Its low-light performance is stellar, in part because of the sensor and in balance, the displays. The IS system seems to be a significant advance. And for legacy lens fans, it's an ideal platform—precise EVF focusing and IBIS make it far better than any E-series DSLR. Being light, compact and weatherproof make it an ideal backpacking companion. Where I'd normally take a compact I can now take the E-M5. In sum: pretty good. Cheers."

Featured Comment by Richard K: "For those who don't like/want/have money for the OM-D, the same sensor is now available the the E-PM2 and E-PL5. If it were available in an E-P3 replacement too, I know what I'd be getting myself for Christmas!"

Vivian Maier at the Chicago History Museum

By Kenneth Tanaka

The legend of Vivian Maier lives and looms even larger this fall!

Earlier this month the Chicago History Museum opened an excellent new exhibition of the late, previously unknown Vivian Maier's work titled "Vivian Maier's Chicago." Unlike an earlier show at the Chicago Cultural Center this is a wonderfully simple yet sophisticated exhibit that manages to capture a previously unshown dimension to her work in a relatively small space.

This exhibition of previously unseen Maier work is very thoughtfully and cleverly presented. The center of the smallish gallery space is occupied by large board-mounted prints suspended by cables. These enormous prints, actually of top quality (although I would have preferred them untoned), form small spaces that visitors can explore freely.

The perimeter walls of the gallery are banded by a continuous strip of enlarged contact sheet-style prints of some of Maier's Rolleiflex 120-size film rolls. We see all 12 6x6 frames of each selected roll, the progressive sequence of how she worked a subject, the stinkers with the gems. This is perhaps the richest possible presentation of Maier’s work for others to study, especially other photographers. I think I could have spent hours in there!

For me, this presentation affirmed that Vivian Maier was every bit as talented, and then some, as the best of the more renowned street photographers of the last century. I don't care if she was an odd duck. (As if Winogrand and Frank weren't? Yah.) And I care much less that the art museum /art criticism world has its collective head so deeply up its collective arse as they so clearly do on Maier's work. She was a great unknown talent and deserves to be shown and shown as intelligently as the Chicago History Museum is now doing.

The exhibit will be up until "Summer 2013." If you have any interest in Vivian Maier’s work, or even in good street photography, find a way to go see this show. Really, just go.

Can't get to Chicago?
Also noteworthy is a new book of Maier's work scheduled to be published by CityFiles Press on October 16th of this year. I have not been able to browse the book yet but from its appearance (in a vitrine in the exhibition) it looks to be a much larger collection (288 pages) of her work than the earlier 136-page book. Hopefully of more mature and refined print quality, too.

It's called Vivian Maier: Out of the Shadows. That link's to Amazon.com (USA); here's the U.K. pre-order link.

Ken

UPDATE from Richard Cahan and Michael Williams, authors of Vivian Maier: Out of the Shadows and curators of "Vivian Maier's Chicago" at the Chicago History Museum: "Thank you all for your enthusiastic comments about the Chicago History Museum show and the book Vivian Maier: Out of the Shadows. We can assure you that the scans supplied for the show were straight grayscale images without any toning. One image, added at the last moment, now appears to contain a slight pinkish tone. We hope to replace that soon. We do not consider Vivian Maier's work to be nostalgic or sentimental. We are glad that so many people are enjoying the show. No plans for a traveling exhibit right now—so come to Chicago in the next nine months or buy the book."

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Open Mike: Refs

I assume there must be some fans of American football out there in the audience. So can somebody please explain to me what's going on with the refs?

Halfway through Week Three, it's looking to me like the NFL is bent on proving that the regular refs are worth their weight in gold. As soon as the Bears seemed to have their game wrapped up, I switched to the 'Skins-Bengals game...and I can hardly remember seeing a game that seemed more out of control.

There was one incident where a Redskins receiver who was double-teamed got blatantly interfered with by both defenders, who had him on the ground by the time the ball arrived—and no call. During the bizarre ending of the game the refs seemingly let the whole Cincinnati team and staff wander out on the field; there were problems with the clock, half-calls, long waits for reviews...a bit of a mess.

Then the network switched to another game, N.O.-K.C., and the same sort of thing seemed to be going on—a long wait to sort out what appeared to be a non-call on the field.

What the heck happened to the regular refs and when are they going to be back?

I obviously haven't been paying enough attention.

Mike

Illustration: Referee Alberton Riveron by Bill Frakes/SI

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Random Excellence: The L.A. Times

Photo by Brian van der Brug / L.A. Times

Here in the U.S. we don't normally think of California as a "flyover state,"* but it was yesterday.

Check out the L.A. Times' wonderful set of documentary pictures of the sentimental and celebratory final flight of the Space Shuttle.

(I found the set taken as a whole to be better than any one picture. My favorite if I had to pick one would be Bob Chamberlin's shot of the Shuttle past the smokestacks of the Queen Mary.)

Mike
(Thanks to John Camp)

*A derogatory term for the interior states used by people on both coasts, meaning that all you ever do is fly over them when going from one coast to the other.

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Featured Comment by Paris: "The 747 carrying the Endeavor made a low pass over the University of Arizona at Tucson, for the benefit of Endeavor commander Mark Kelly and his wife, former Representative Gabrielle Giffords."

The Sleeper of the Show

Here it is, folks—the highest resolution mirrorless camera shown at Photokina this year, bar none.

As I am always sayin', I am just sayin'.

-

UPDATE: We apparently either crashed the linked site, or it expired during the night. Here is the picture I originally linked to the words "the highest resolution mirrorless camera":

It's an Arca-Swiss LulF (I don't know what the first "L" stands for, but "ULF" is a common acronym in the view camera fraternity—it stands for ultra large format). It's an 11x14" view camera that has an accessory 8x10 reducing back. (I love that.)

I'd refer you to the website, but Arca-Swiss, famously, feels no need to conform to newfangled fashions—it's never had a website.

Mike
(Carpal tunnel symptoms acting up today, hence paucity of verbiage)

(...Oh, and thanks to Oren)

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Featured Comment by Johannes: "Mike, you forgot to mention that this camera is full frame too!"

Featured Comment by Don: "Yeah yeah, but if you went digital and did a multiple image stitch you'd easily exceed that resolution for a fraction of the cost. Just sayin'...."

Question from Roger: "Does it use CF cards, SD cards, or both?"

Mike replies: It uses SF cards. (For "sheet film.") And fully mechanical IS.

Will Whitaker replies: "It uses credit cards."

Featured Comment by Karl: "In the never-ending drone about digital convenience, speed, flexibility, portability, stitching and so on, what's lost in the conversation is the unique beauty of a good large format image."

Featured Comment by Alan Winston: "Is that thing as lightweight (for its size) as it looks? That could be what the L stands for."