The Online Photographer

Followup: Paul Byrnes on Truth at the Movies

An Australian TOP reader, Paul Byrnes, wrote a brief and somewhat belated comment to Sunday's "Open Mike" post about truthfulness in movies, mentioning an article he wrote not long ago for The Sydney Morning Herald on the same topic. Since his article is much better than mine, I thought it deserved a link of its own. Paul finds the right tone, breezy and somewhere between bemused and cynical, with less hand-wringing about a misinformed public and greater understanding of the insection between art and truth in movies.

A sample:

It is too early to know whether Lincoln will be accused of accuracy, but there are encouraging signs. [Screenwriter] Kushner, quoted in Smithsonian magazine, said: ''The rule was that we wouldn't alter anything in a meaningful way from what happened.'' Most films never even attempt that. Australian audiences will soon see The Impossible (opening January 24) with Naomi Watts and Ewan McGregor playing an English family separated from each other by the Asian tsunami. It is based on a true story, but the original family was Spanish, which illustrates one of the key points about the relationship between the film business and any true story: anything factual that gets in the way of a film's marketability is no longer true. Making the couple Spanish would have severely reduced the film's reach.

As you can see, there are several nice turns just in that short paragraph, especially "Anything factual that gets in the way of a film's marketability is no longer true." Heh!

Paul's opening lines are wonderful: "Hollywood loves a true story. A cynic might say it gives them something to lie about...."

Zing.

He gets a lot right, I think. Anyway, I admire good writing, and seek it out, and prize it where I find it. If the issues interest you, Paul's short article is worthy of your time.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2013 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:

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Featured Comments from:

Clay Olmstead: "I heard this story one time; I don't remember the details, but it went something like this: When Michelangelo carved the statue of Giuliano de' Medici for his tomb, someone pointed out that the deceased's neck was not as long as Michelangelo had carved it; to which Michelangelo replied, 'It is now.'"

Rod S.: "Paul, I enjoyed your article both times—in the printed SMH and again here. Thanks, and keep up the good work. I also thought your review of Lincoln was spot-on.

"Mike, I like accuracy—or at least realism—in films, too. What's so wrong with the truth? Does it reveal that filmmakers and audiences have difficulty telling and accepting the truth? As in 'Don't let the truth get in the way of a good story.' Does science get a bad rap for the same reason? I enjoyed Lincoln last weekend because it highlighted Lincoln's urge to end slavery despite the immediate difficulties and personal costs, and the political conundrum created by the Civil War coming to an end. Perhaps it wasn't the entire truth. But it certainly seems a part of the whole that is worth holding up and celebrating. And the film also gave me a taste of the events surrounding a famous period of U.S. history, which, as a busy working Australian, I am unlikely to spend a lot of time delving into through books. Hopefully I wasn't deceived."

The World's Largest Lens Test Chart

...Is the world, turns out.

Many of us have seen the familiar tri-bar patterns on lens test charts, like the ones based on the 1951 USAF Resolving Power Test Target you once could buy out of the back of Modern Photography magazine to tape to the wall and perform a series of fun but semi-useless tests of your lenses' sharpness. (Your photo buddy, Poindexter, was always quick to point out that he used newspaper instead, because Poindexter never "wasted money.")

GoogleEarth image of an expanded tri-bar array at Fort Huachuca, Arizona.

Well, it turns out there are huge tri-bar patterns painted on patches of tarmac and scattered hither and yon about the country. Many are in the Mojave desert, and are believed to have been used to calibrate the lenses of spy cameras aboard things like the SR-71 Blackbird and the U-2 spyplanes in the 1950s and '60s.

You have to have a geek streak to find the post about it at the Center for Land Use Interpretation website interesting, but I did, and you might.

Die Welt ist merkwürdig.

Mike
(Thanks to Matthew Blair)

Original contents copyright 2013 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:

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Featured Comments from:

Gordon: "Are there also hidden but giant brick walls for them to do distortion tests on as well?"

Mike replies: There's the great wall of China, but it always shows mustache distortion.

Open Mike: Real Stories

I was spouting off yesterday, and told a friend that I think The Wire: The Complete Series is the Great American Novel, come round at last.

He replied, "So, you highly recommend The Wire?" The problem is, he's a retired Chief of Police. I do highly recommend The Wire (even though I'm only midway through Season 4). But do I highly recommend it to a former policeman? I wouldn't recommend a medical show to a doctor. It seems like great fiction to me—in fact it might be the greatest work of art I know of in the entire moving picture medium, movies or TV. But then, I don't know the reality.

It's a thorny issue. Regardless of what you think about her politics (or her publication), you ought to read Maureen Dowd in the New York Times today.

She rather gently goes after "filmmakers who make up facts in stories about real people to add 'drama,' rather than just writing the real facts better."

I've always hated most "true story" movies for this reason. I don't trust 'em. There's a good reason for that: they're not trustworthy, generally. It's not just Hollywood mannerism, the oppressiveness of convention, the tyranny of special effects: the more you know about a subject, the less a movie version will suffice. What's tragic is that the corollary is also true: the less you know about a subject, the more likely you are to accept the debased, tarted-up movie versions as accurate.

Bad data always corrupts. "Historical movies that aren't" do more harm than anybody knows. Most people—me probably included, although I'm more wary than most—know a whole lot about everything that just plain isn't true, thanks to the incredibly low standards of factual accuracy we've come to accept as normal in movies.

No average American knows one damn true thing about the American Wild West, for one thing. At this point it's pure mythos, pure lore, and digging down to the truth would require a far more extensive archaeology than all but a tiny handful of dedicated scholars could ever give it.

I'm not above it. (Neither are you.) I admit, I accept movies from Bonnie and Clyde to The King's Speech as being "accurate enough." I suspend critical skepticism and go with the stories. I don't know any better.

One of the surprises of parenthood for me is that my son isn't a reader. He had some perceptual difficulties early in his education and his elementary school teachers adjusted too little, too late. By the time he hit high school, he was reading well above grade level, but the damage was done: he'd been forced to read aloud to the class when he couldn't, and suffered the slings and arrows of juvenile teasing because of it. He now says he "hates reading." I've tried to explain to him that books are how human pass along knowledge, and he retorted, "why read a book when I can get the same story in two hours?"

That is, from a movie. Movies aren't supposed to be for learning about life, history, culture, facts, truth. Except, that's what people do.

It's always amazed me that we, as humans, as a culture, will literally spend hundreds of millions of dollars spinning pure fantasies as entertainment, but documentary programs are generally limited to a few props and an actor or two. I'd like it better if it were the opposite. We have this wonderful new medium—less than a hundred years old—and we routinely squander it on tripe, rather than using to inform people about the real world and what we actually do know about history, as a people, as a culture. (I've seen some very good movies, don't get me wrong.)

I'm not against works of imagination, and those who like blue creatures can go watch them. (My son likes zombie movies. I enjoyed Shaun of the Dead, which he made me watch. I did not mistake it for truth-telling.) But the pendulum has swung way too far. A series like The Wire, which deliberately rejects the heavily formulaic high mannerism of its genre and attempts real novelistic truth-telling on an almost Dostoevskian scale, goes very much against the current grain.

An even newer medium, animation, is being similarly wasted. I'd love to see a beautifully animated King Lear, or the real story of the 300—it's dramatic enough. But we get talking cars, talking fish, the usual. Some of them even have the depth of a '60s Bugs Bunny cartoon. (I've seen some very good animated films, don't get me wrong.)

The whole point of fiction is that it allows us to get closer to truths that can't be told any other way. Fantasy can be entertaining, but the greatest fiction of all usually has elusive reality underneath it. Movies or TV that purport to tell reality shouldn't take liberties. Not without protest and censure.

We can't always tell the truth when we claim to. But we should at least try.

Mike

"Open Mike" is a series of casual off-topic essays that sometimes appears on TOP on Sundays.

For further reading

ADDENDUM: More reading. Another article along similar lines, by Barry Lando—it's called "Zero Dark Thirty: Hijacking History." A quote:

That point was driven home by a study done in 2009 by Andrew Butler, now at Duke, but then at the Department of Psychology of the Washington University of Saint Louis.

His researchers gave a group of about fifty students an accurate written account of an historical event to read. They also showed them an excerpt from a feature film about that same event, an excerpt that wrongly and blatantly contradicted the central fact of the printed text.

When they were later tested, 50% of the students recalled the misinformation portrayed in the film as being correct.

(Thanks to Carl for this.)

CORRECTION: A bad example was removed from this post because it was wrong.

Original contents copyright 2013 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.

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frank: "For what it's worth, I can confidently say that what is depicted in The Wire is not HBO hyperbole. I worked in those neighborhoods back in the early '90s and saw firsthand the mayhem, trauma, despair, alienation, brutalization and hopelessness embedded in those neighborhoods. And of course none of that has substantively changed, at least as reported to me by colleague familiar with those neighborhoods.

"The homicide rates are 'waxed figures,' fluctuating as a function of political pressure. The powers who are politically in place look to 'feel good legislation' whose purpose is to convince the community that 'we are taking seriously these problems,' yet, of course, nothing changes. The real jobs are illegal, drug-trade related, as is the acquisition of the weapons needed to keep the various trade factions in positions of power and segmented into their respective 'turf.' Good luck on the efficacy of legislation relative to eliminating this source of homicide. And no self-respecting 15-year-old is gonna give up $100 a trip muling in favor of a minimum-wage job at Mickey Dee's. Ain't gonna happen.

"I'm about to begin watching the entire series again, just so I can see how far it is we haven't come."

Rob: "My daughter-in-law has a Ph.D. in sociology and teaches at the university level. She loves The Wire on many levels, but especially for how it portrays the drug culture and its many social and political ramifications. She has also told me that there is a course at Harvard dedicated to exploring The Wire. So I don't know if the program is good enough for a police chief, but it certainly is good enough for scholars in the fields of sociology and criminology.

"By the way, as great as The Wire may be, nothing can match Breaking Bad."

Mike replies: I would take that course. Seriously.

Will: "When I was working in the video section of one of the country's biggest independent record stores, we had a saying: 'There are two kinds of people in the world; people who think that The Wire is the best show in the history of television, and people who have never seen The Wire.'

"I've watched it four times, and am due for a fifth. I have so much to share, but I can limit it to these two fun facts: 1.) The character of 'The Deacon' (who first appears to advise Bunny in the Hamsterdam storyline) is played by the real-life inspiration for Avon Barksdale. 2.) Writer Richard Price joined the show in season three, and wrote a tiny role for his daughter into a season three episode. She reappears in equally small roles in two more Price-written episodes, one each in season 4 and 5. She may have 60 seconds total screen time on the show, but her story is a complete one, with a beginning, middle, and end, and is as poignant as many on the show.

"When I worked at that record store, we had many, many celebrity customers. The only one that actually made me nervously starstruck, though, was Andre Royo, the actor who plays Bubbles."

Rare Nikon Lens Deals

Just one example: the AF VR Zoom-Nikkor 80–400mm—$350 off.
There are more lenses in the sale—18 in all.

Nikon is having an unusual sale on some of its very best lenses. I gather Nikon only very seldomly offers significant discounts on its premium lenses—especially its best fast primes—when they're not bundled in a package. I gather this is the first such sale in a number of years.

Here are all the sales pages. The unusual one is the first:

Nikon lenses

Nikon "buy together and save"

Canon "buy together and save"

The discounts are also being offered at Amazon.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2013 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.

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hlinton: "Could this sale have something to do with this?"

Little Truths

I probably shouldn't admit this, because I'm supposed to act like big serious Mr. Expert and all (although I'm not much for pretense and ostentation, as you might know if you've been reading me for a while—cf. the book link at the bottom of this post), but here goes: I actually kind like those jokey collections of cutesy/funny pictures that the Internet is full of. Not the sort of pictures I should be looking at? I guess. But we all look at more kinds of pictures than we can even categorize. It's almost like breathing the air. Lot of chaff in those, of course, but the gems that fall past really are gems.

A photograph at its most basic can tell us something true about the world, or about human beings, or animals, or about something that happened...not "Truth," capital T, but just truths. Little ones.

It's the main thing that separates it from art. It can be more about Observation than Creation. Note caps.

I have a friend who passes these along sometimes. Here's one that made me actually "LOL" (he's all gung-ho about the start of baseball season):

Hilarious. Very human, seems to me. Also very photographic in its essence—not something an artist might think to invent. (Also something you might look at and not even "get" unless you were thinking about it. I think we humans "see mindlessly" the great majority of the time.)

Here's one the same friend also sent me:

He has no idea where it came from. Anybody know anything about it?

This picture strikes me as funny, yes, but poignant as well, and layered—it says a lot about photography, about human concerns with image, in the sense of status and appearances, meta-concerns about truth and falsification, about imagination, about the ideal versus the real, even about hope in the face of despair. It's a wonderful photograph about photography.

I want to know more about it.

Mike
(Thanks to Kim)

UPDATE: It's from the AP, captioned, "A photographer uses his own backdrop to mask Poland's World War II ruins while shooting a portrait in Warsaw in November of 1946. (AP Photo/Michael Nash)." A big thanks to sepp and several others for the information.

Original contents copyright 2013 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:

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Featured Comments from:

Kenneth Tanaka: "'...Not something an artist might think to invent.' Exactly. These are scenes that only work as photography. Paintings and drawings might be cute but they would not carry the testimonial value that a photograph carries. Further, one way to measure your progress as a photographer is whether or not you're consistently able to see and capture such moments."

John Wilson: "The camera the photographer is using is interesting. It looks like one of those old street box cameras which used paper negatives and were developed inside the camera. Apparently they are still being used in Afghanistan and Pakistan. There's a very interesting site that goes into some depth about how they are used."

Stan B.: "Apparently, they've reconstructed Old Town Warsaw down to the very last detail—not necessarily as it once was, but as an Italian painter once imagined it to be...."

Mike replies: Good post; good find. I'd like to see it anyway, just for what it is. They don't have this reputation here, so much, but Polish craftsmanship can be amazing.

Chris Lucianu: "After looking at the picture of the photographer using a trompe-everything-backdrop, read the entry on the planned destruction of Warsaw, then look again at the picture. I think it deserves quite a caption.

Likewise, if you look at the page linked to by Stan B., don't just read the brief intro (which I find condensed to almost the point of flippancy). Do yourself a favour and listen to the audio feature untangling the threads of a story as poignant as it is complicated, courtesy of Amy Drozdowska, Michał Murawski and Dave McGuire. Or, taking a somewhat less post-modern view, read art historian Małgorzata Omilanowska's Views of Warsaw by Bernardo Bellotto Called Canaletto and their Role in the Reconstruction of Warsaw's Monuments. Vana Tallinn (2010), if you can obtain it (and kudos if you do).

It becomes clear that the post-war reconstruction team led by Jan Zachwatowicz aimed at re-creating the aspect of an ideal late-Baroque Warsaw (with its Gothic and Renaissance heritage) as it would have existed at the time of Stanisław August Poniatowski, the last Polish king. Bernardo Bellotto's alleged 'imagination' can hardly be faulted. On the contrary, Bellotto was an astonishingly accurate painter of urban landscapes, who used a camera obscura to draw minute documentary sketches which were then integrated into a grand veduta. (Perhaps it is a good opportunity to remind ourselves of the synthetic aspect of painting as opposed to snapshots.)

I spent some time last year studying Bellotto in Dresden, the other center of the painter's activity; and also a city victim of the war, although, unlike Warsaw, a a more haphazard victim. It takes some time to realise that Bellotto was a painter of the social fabric as well as of architecture. The passing of time would have sufficed to transform the buildings he minutely documented into as much a trompe-l'esprit as the Warsaw photographer's canvas. But now, with his paintings more 'original' than the very cityscapes they depicted, we might as well be painting on a mirror.

Andrew Molitor: "I actually wrote a little thing about the 'meme' thing, where you take a picture and apply a caption and get that pseudo-motivational poster.

"It's actually a great lesson in how a caption alters our perception of a photograph. You can take the same photo of some dumb cat, apply 30 captions to it, and create 30 quite different 'experiences of the image.' The captions tend to drive a little imagined narrative to go with the image, and the successful ones drive quite a strong narrative.

"So, they're not just silly funny fun things! They have a little something to teach us about art and the human brain!"

 

Image Atlas

UPDATE #2: Broken.

Since yesterday, when we published this post—the whole point of which is to link to imageatlas.com—that site has been working only intermittently. Not working, mostly. I haven't been able to get it to work since yesterday afternoon. Maybe they have very slim bandwidth and we're stomping on it?

It's possible it's related to the recent suicide of Aaron Swartz, the site's co-founder.

I guess I'll leave the post here, since it's gotten some comments, but...sorry for the...well, not "inconvenience," exactly; "pointlessness" might be a better word, under the circumstances. —Mike the Ed.

P.S. It's not Ken's fault...the site was working when he submitted the post.

-

Posted by Kenneth Tanaka

I recently attended a lecture given by Taryn Simon, someone whose work I've been curious about for quite some time. Taryn is a very energetic, ultra-curious researcher who uses a camera and her brain to examine seemingly fringe subjects which ultimately seem to tie firmly back to mainstream Earth life. Strangely, her work is heavily promoted within an art or photography context. But it's not really art in any expressionist sense. It really falls under investigative journalism.

Anyway, at the end of the lecture she demonstrated a project that she and the late Aaron Swartz had completed last year shortly before Swartz's death. The project is a unique search engine called Image Atlas. In brief, unlike conventional grab-all search engines, Image Atlas returns only images. But unlike, say, Google, "Image Atlas investigates cultural differences and similarities by indexing top image results for given search terms across local engines throughout the world." (Source: the Image Atlas About page.)

Rather than blather on about Image Atlas, I invite you to just give it a try. Warning: Don't start investigating it if you have anything urgent to do.

© 2013 by Kenneth Tanaka

[UPDATE #1: The Image Atlas site has been up and down, up and down today—first I took this post down, then put it up again when the site appeared to be working. Now it appears to be not working again. I think I'll leave the post alone and we'll see what happens to Image Atlas in the next 24 hours or so—if it's persistently down then I'll remove the post again; if it seems to be consistently working again I'll remove this Update. Very sorry for any frustration or inconvenience! I'll try to stay on top of it the situation. —Ed.]

[Ed. Note: Taryn Simon's most celebrated book, An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar, is on deck to be reprinted in April.]

Original contents copyright 2013 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.

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Featured Comments from:

Thomas McInnis: "I can wholeheartedly recommend An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar. It is a beautifully simple idea expressed so eloquently. Apart from the gorgeous plates (printing is really good in my copy), the binding is familiar to anyone who has submitted a Ph.D. or other post-graduate thesis, and I think it is the perfect choice. It is one of the only non-fashion photography books I have ever been moved to purchase, and one of my most loved. I feel it is the breadth of 'topics' or 'issues' photographed by Simon which makes her work appeal to the art community more than the journalism community. This contrasts her other work about death-row inmates, which feels more at home on the New York Times Lens blog than in a gallery. The only quibble some will have is that the photographs cannot be separated from their accompanying text without losing a lot of their meaning, but for me they worked so harmoniously that I stopped caring about that almost immediately."

latent_image: "I am no fan of Taryn Simon. She photographed my dying father without being honest either to him or my family about her intentions for publication. It really bummed me out to see her name mentioned on The Online Photographer. I'd managed to suppress memory of her during the past few years."

Reflections

I've spent the last several days of "time off" doing a number of things—working on my old list of "226 Books by Genre," which has already sucked up hundreds of hours of time and could stand another hundred; thinking about the past and future of TOP (including a few odd 'n' ends, pace Ctein on Wednesday*); and writing down some of my personal aims and ambitions, so I can attempt to prioritize.

Of course, that list turns out to be rather funny. A few items plucked from it that are cases in point:

• Fix up my old Miata
• Sell my old Miata and use the dough to buy something else cheap and fun

• Use the D800 more
• Sell the D800 while there's still time

• Rehab the house**
• Consider moving

• Increase the number of daily posts on TOP
• Make the posts fewer in number but longer and better

• Print a portfolio of old 35mm Tri-X negatives
• Forget printing old negs, publish a book of them instead

...And so on. It's a good thing I'm a blogger; it seems well adapted to the limit of my attention span.

I see the doctors next on Monday. I have very high hopes for what adequate sleep might do for me. Will it improve...decisiveness? Organization skills? Will I suddenly be able to play the piano?

Mike

*I've left quite a few loose ends dangling in the past, turns out, such as the Canon Pro-1 printer and the Reader Print Sale.

**"Redecorate" is far too grand a word here, take my word.  :-)

Original contents copyright 2013 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:

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Featured Comments from:

Oren Grad: "This is the fate of a pack rat."

richardplondon: "I keep getting distracted from my 'to do' li [sic]"

Ed. Note: Oren's link above was to an eBay auction entitled "Huge lot of old cameras collection for Sale [sic]. 1,000+ pieces":

It was being offered at $35,000. (I'd actually seen it before on eBay, for higher prices.) And what do you know, it actually sold!

Even odds as to whether it will be worth it for the buyer. The price of $35 per camera seems low, but I'll bet an awful lot of the cameras aren't worth $35 and I'll bet they're also not very liquid, meaning it'd take a lot of time and effort to get $35 back out of each of them.

On the other hand, throughput is how collectors find the gems—I actually knew a camera collector in Chicago who opened a used camera store just so he could cherry pick what came through. It's not impossible that a few dozen of the cameras could make the whole pile break even. Interesting situation. I'd love to know more about this, too. —Mike

 

Big Muthuh Comin' Up

Companies and stores have sales all the time, but there will be a rare one starting at midnight between Saturday and Sunday.

My sources tell me: "For the first time in many years Nikon is going to be deeply discounting many legacy pro lenses individually (no need to bundle)...."

Under embargo yet, but check back here at 12:01 late tomorrow night for the details.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2013 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.

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No featured comments yet—please check back soon!

Happy Valentine's Day!

L'Esplanade de Trocadero, Paris, 2012. Photo by Peter Turnley.

Happy Valentines's Day to everyone...from those who are in love now to the lover in those who don't have one now. Peter Turnley's wonderful picture above (taken with either an M9 or an M-Monochrom) is from a small set of his pictures published today at PDN (née Photo District News). They come from a large project of new and old work with the working title of "French Kiss," most taken in Paris, centering around the theme of love and affection, that will become a major new book approximately a year from now. We will of course keep you updated!

Have a great day, and gentlemen, here's your warning: don't forget flowers.

Mike
(Thanks to Peter)

Original contents copyright 2013 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:

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Featured Comments from:

Ben Syverson: "Before I even scrolled down I knew this was Peter...wonderful."

Chaz L: "I'm not enamoured of everything that Peter does, but this picture is just wonderful. A modern classic and the perfect complement to Valentine's Day. Thanks for showing this one, Mike."

Peter T.: "Tango and photography. My two favorite activities, together."

Roger Overall: "This is such an evocative photograph. It captures location so beautifully, and suggests romance through the ages. The way the slender physique of the lady in the foreground suggests youth (the common association with romance) is contrasted with the more mature couple on the left. Love is for everyone, and for life, the photograph says. Of course, this is one interpretation: the one I want to read into it. Isn't that the great thing about photography? We take what we want from an image by giving it our own story."

Jlsalvignol: "The magic of classicism: Framing, Timing, Rhythm. Here is Paris. Merci Monsieur!"

Guest Post: Lasting Pictures?

Written by John Camp

The Norton-Simon Museum in Pasadena, California, is near a major intersection a few blocks from my Pasadena home, so I have the privilege of being able to stop by on a whim, and often do. And, often as not, I stick my nose into the bookstore to see if there's anything new since my last visit.

On a Friday last August, I came up with a curious photographic book called The Last Pictures, by Trevor Paglen, an accumulation of one hundred photographs that could be, sometime in the distant future, literally the last existing pictures of humankind.

The photographs, which the book says have been "etched into an ultra-archival silicon disk nestled inside a gold [plated] shell" will be attached to the Echostar XVI satellite. The satellite was scheduled to be launched into a stable geosynchronous orbit last November, according to the information I could find on the net. According to the book, the satellite could remain aloft for literally billions of years; or, for only a few seconds, depending on how well the rocket works—this last being my observation, not that of the book.

A lot could be written about the book, not all of it flattering.

Trevor Paglen, according to the blurb on the back flap, is "an internationally recognized artist, writer and scholar working across multiple disciplines in a variety of media."

The back cover, under the headline "Praise for Trevor Paglen," has three quotes: "Awe-inspiring…timely…Paglen's art matters," from Artforum; "Paglen’s own life experience and academic training reflect the blurred boundaries so widely celebrated as a new media hallmark of contemporary art," from the L.A. Times; and "Brilliant," from  New York Magazine.

Further excavations on Wiki reveal that he has an M.A. in fine art from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and a Ph.D. in geography from U.C. Berkeley. The Wiki does not say exactly what form of art he worked with at Chicago. His projects, published in three previous books, tend to deal with military-involved secrecy in the U.S., apparently with some geographic considerations in most of them. From the descriptions of those other books, they sound quite interesting. You can get all this other information, including titles of his books and so on, by checking his entry in the Wiki.

•     •     •

So, to The Last Pictures.

A book begins with a brief, interesting but somewhat rambling discussion of time, and how the human concept of time has changed over the centuries. In the first few tens of thousands of years of human experience, time was local and tended to be short and fractured. "Deep time" and "universal time" were discoveries and inventions that humans made only fairly recently. But given the concept of "deep time," the question arises, can we, humans of the early 21st century, send graphic images into the future, much as unknown ancient ancestors of ours did with the Cave at Lascaux?

The answer is, well, yes, we can do that, and, in fact, a number of highly technological efforts in that direction have already been made—efforts to build warning signs of nuclear waste dumps that would last thousands of years; images and even music sent off on deep space probes; and so on.

Paglen's effort, then, was to find a way to project an aesthetic impulse from our time, out over the centuries and millennia and eons. He hit upon attaching contemporary 20th and 21st century images, suitably engraved upon a resilient, space-worthy medium, to a satellite whose time in orbit may extend out billions of years, ending only when the sun becomes a red giant and sucks up everything attached to earth.

His route to this decision is covered in the books' lead essay, which will not be further reviewed here, other than to say that there are some rather curious plums in this pudding, such as an apparent hostility to the concept of pi; the belief that mathematics is basically anthropogenic and thus cannot be used to create a universal language; and the information that Nature magazine has withdrawn valid scientific papers because of industry pressure.

•     •     •

In any case, Paglen winds up choosing one hundred photographs to send into the future, assuming, of course, that the rocket doesn't do a face-plant.

To me, the interesting thing about these photos is that given the same project, I wouldn't have chosen a single one of them.

With some of them, I agree with the idea, but I feel the image is either poor or non-representative. Others, I think are nonsense, like the photo of the back of a painting by Paul Klee.

Understand, none of these photos are "famous." They were chosen to be a kind of slide show of our times…a rocket blasting off into orbit; a wave breaking over a pier during a typhoon; illegal immigrants seen through a camera on a Predator drone; some electron micrographs; Leon Trotsky’s brain, clutched in somebody’s hands, apparently taken during the autopsy; stills from not-very-good movies; a "study of perspective" in which the Chinese artist Ai WeiWei gives the finger to the Eiffel Tower; a snapshot of an Occupy demonstration; a number of photos involving atomic weapons; a Union Carbide advertisement entitled "Bringing Science to India," a reference I think might elude many people even now, much less in a billion years.

All the photos are in black-and-white, and many are not what you would call "good." The thing to keep in mind, however, is that this is an art project, not a conventional photographic book.

The questions that plague me are, "Does this achieve any kind of goal?" followed by, "Is it necessary that a goal be achieved?" And, "Is there an aesthetic that is eluding me here?" or is the thing just dumb?

Paglen doesn't seem dumb, though he says things that are, in my opinion, dumb, though who doesn't do that occasionally?

In any case, I've read the book through twice in one day, and I just can't decide: Is it really deep? Or is it really bullshit?

The book is here, and for eighteen bucks or so, and, I promise, will give you something to think about, even if you send it out the next day with the garbage.

©2013 by John Camp / All Rights Reserved

[Ed. Note: I am toying with a slight change of format, to highlight the authorship of our posts somewhat, owing to the fact that readers inconsistently notice who writes what.]

Original contents copyright 2013 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.

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Featured Comments from:

bill vann: "I've seen way too much 'acclaimed art' crap to bother any further. Thanks for the post, seriously, saved me wasting my time, the only irreplacable gift the good Lord gave us. well kind of."

SerrArris: "A book that one reads twice in one day is (in my eyes) definitely worth every cent and should not be thrwon into the garbage. For sure, if you read it twice in such a short time, in a short period you'll feel the urge read it again. I'll definitely have a look at it (that I have deep respect for the other works of Paglen just adds to the words you wrote)."

Hans Muus: "Of one thing we can be absolutely shure, I think, and that is that this art project is meant for us, here and now. And that includes the geostationary move. SF-like speculations miss the point entirely, if you ask me."

Bear.: "Re your ed. note, all of TOP's readers are exceedingly clever, as well as good looking; so we always notice whom has written what."

Mike replies: Thanks for reminding me!

Odds 'n' Ends

By Ctein

Periodically I write columns to bring you up-to-date on topics that I've addressed in previous ones. This is one of those.

Printing papers, revisited
Years back I wrote about the quality control problems with inkjet papers, especially the Harman by Hahnemuhle Gloss Baryta. It had such severe quality control (QC) deficiencies that a majority of the sheets in a 13x19" box would be bad.

They're selling Us Crap Paper

Postscripts

Their paper engineers worked hard on their QC. They did manage to improve things. Unfortunately, that meant the reject rate dropped back to a "mere" 25%. Not really acceptable.

I've been using Ilford Gallerie Gold Fibre Silk, which had almost-but-not-quite as nice a surface and has no quality control problems at all. Annoyingly, Ilford pulled a fast one last year. They renamed the product line from "Gallerie" to "Prestige" with much fanfare, and quietly upped the price by an astonishing 50%. Same product, just a sneaky price hike. I resent that.

Canson Platine*

Last fall, when I was in Toronto, Michael Reichmann recommended two papers: Canson Infinity Baryta Photographique and Platine Fibre Rag. Both are cheaper than Ilford. The Baryta paper is a lot cheaper, less than 60% of the cost of Gold Fibre Silk.

Fortunately, he said penuriously, that's my favorite of the two. It's just about a dead ringer for the Ilford paper. There's nothing wrong with the Platine, but it has a bit more of a surface texture, and I like my "air dried F-surface" papers to have less presence.

I gotta say the Harman paper still looks the best of all to me, but I can't deal with their QC issues.

What, no new iPad?
You guys know I'm on a regular iPad upgrade path:

2012 iPad, Part I

2012 iPad, Part II

So, how come nothing about last fall's new iPad or the one they just announced? Well, it's because I haven't upgraded. I wasn't expecting them to be trotting out incremental changes every four or five months. It's not about the money; the resale value on a top-end previous generation iPad is excellent. It's the time and hassle involved in switching machines. It just didn't seem worth it to me.

The beefier processor in last fall's model doesn't mean much for me yet (I may need a lot more when I start doing photo handling on the iPad). Unpromoted, though, was a beefier power supply. Only by 20%, but that should trim an hour off of the annoyingly-long charging time.

The model announced a few weeks ago matters more to me. My 64 GB iPad is 92% full. It's a fundamental law of physics: nature abhors an empty hard drive. What's stopping me from grabbing a 128 GB iPad is that I really haven't sussed out Apple's new release schedule. Is there going to be another major upgrade in the spring or are we just going to see incremental ones as they feel like it? I'm holding off a couple of months to see what's happening. Either way, expect a report on the latest and greatest, whatever that happens to be, sometime in the spring.

Speaking of fundamental laws of physics...

I buy yet another laptop drive
One of my reasons for testing that 960 GB SSD last fall was because my laptop's 500 GB drive was 95% full. That's a very bad regime to be working in. I need more space.

Unfortunately technical problems required me to pull that SSD. The holiday season kept me from getting it back to Other World Computing for analysis until just this last month, so I haven't heard anything back yet. If I get an explanation for the problems I had, you'll definitely learn about it. It's possible there won't be one; OWC would love to figure this one out, but sometimes technical mysteries remain mysterious.

I still need space, so I just purchased OWC's 750GB Seagate Momentus XT 7200RPM/SSD Hybrid 2.5 with an Express USB2 enclosure and tool kit.

The enclosure and toolkit was only five dollars more. Normally I wouldn't settle for USB2 on an external drive enclosure, but what the heck.

This is the big brother to the drive I currently have in my machine. You may recall from my SSD tests that the SATA bus in my "ancient" laptop won't sustain more than 128 MB per second. This was more than my current drive could pump, but not massively more. It's quite possible the better performance of the 750 GB Momentus XT means I'll see no significant difference between it and and that SSD.

The hybrids are twice as much per megabyte as a conventional hard drive but several times less expensive than an SSD, which will make it quite a bargain if it delivers comparable performance in my system. If so, you'll see another product report.

Late-breaking news: my glasses are here!!!
As I was writing this, i got a call from my optometrist—my Superfocus glasses have arrived!

I am so excited. I told you last week that it would probably be next month before I could give your report on them. Well, it might be as soon as next week. I'm going to pick them up in a few hours. I am really trying hard not to get my hopes up, and I am being very unsuccessful at that.

Ctein

[*Ed. Note: Platine is the paper Charlie Cramer used for the pictures in his TOP sale announced two years ago today.]

Regular columnist Ctein is exciting every Wednesday on TOP. Sometimes even when Ed. is away.

Original contents copyright 2013 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:

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Featured Comments from:

Christopher Holland: "It's worth mentioning that Canson has an Infinity Discovery Pack that lets you sample their various Infinity papers, including both of those mentioned here."

Recombobulation Break

TOP will pause for a day or two for a pit stop. Back on track soon!

—Mike, Slacker Head of Housekeeping

P.S. To keep you amused in the interim, a few goodies from the oldies:

On the names of things

On, Wisconsin!

Pity

Billy the Kid

In a nod to the car post a few days ago, here's the World's ugliest car

Alien abduction, and a note of appreciation for—you.

L8r.

Heads Up: The Scoop

A brief print sale update. The Michael and Paula print sale was a big success, with something right around 237 prints sold altogether (tying up a few loose ends will determine the actual number, but it will be very close to that). The two of them are immersed in work right now, trying to get all the prints made and shipped before their next obligation begins.

Now I can clue you in about our next one. As you know, Ctein is closing down his darkroom for good this spring, going 100% digital. Because dye transfer printing has been an important part of his custom printing business, he's carefully conserved his stock of full-sized dye transfer paper. No longer. Now he's going to use it all up at once, in one last big blowout.

He has enough materials to provide somewhere north of 100 full-sized dye transfer prints. He'll know the exact number once he's finished carefully examining the paper sheet by sheet for flaws.

This will be our most expensive print sale ever; big dyes just aren't cheap. But the price will be about a third of what they usually go for.

After the sale, Ctein will close down his darkroom permanently.

Ctein's opinion is that I have a knack for picking pictures people will like, so he's let me have the run of his whole dye transfer portfolio to pick however many pictures I want to offer. So far I've chosen three (two are old favorites, one's new to me), and I will pick one more.

I'm very enamored of the three I've chosen, but I'm having some trouble with the fourth one. I'd like to pick an atmospheric or astronomical motif because those are important to Ctein's work overall. But I find myself a bit torn. That's where I need some input. I have a longstanding attraction for this picture, called "Moon, Mars, and Circumlunar Arcs, Anchor Bay, California, 1995":

I first saw it in about 1996. I was attending the Photo West convention representing Photo Techniques magazine, and went to Ctein and Paula's house as a dinner guest and to review Ctein's portfolio (and to get squawked at by the resident psittacines). I was very enamored of it then and have had an ambition to purchase it ever since, which of course I've always put off because I never have enough money. But my affection for it makes me doubt my judgement...would it be a good fourth print for the Great Dye Blowout print offer, do you think, or am I being misled by my own attraction to it? Is this the one, or should I keep looking? What's your advice?

Don't hesitate to look through the whole portfolio and suggest alternatives, if you want to.

We're nearing the end of an era here; this April sale will be the last time Ctein will make new dye transfer prints for sale from us*. I want to get this right.

Mike

UPDATE: Sorry, I should have specified that the only prints that are candidates for this offer are the large prints, which will be marked 14x19" or 15x19" or something similar to that. The smaller prints in the Dye Transfer portfolio aren't eligible. My mistake.

P.S. Oh, and I almost forgot to mention: the next two sales after that are going to be "two-digit" sales, with every print (well, with one possible exception) priced less than $100.

*He'll still have a limited inventory of already-made prints, but for much higher prices. And those won't be offered through TOP.

Original contents copyright 2013 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:

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No featured comments yet—please check back soon!

Framing P.S.

I'm not even close to finished dealing with all the car comments, and I've gotten so many private emails that I won't be able to respond to them all individually...but thanks to everyone! That post really did cheer me up.  :-)

But here's a P.S. to the recent framing posts...remember how I said I never use anything but white mats? Well, look what Carl Blesch did...

Carl writes, "I have matted my TOP print purchases from Ctein and Charles Cramer with the 'conventional wisdom' white mats. But for my first TOP print purchase, your 'Wisconsin #7,' I tried something different. I love how the gray and deep red double mats work with your photo."

Looks pretty good, doesn't it? I feel complimented. (That same scene was lovely this morning at dawn, with fog and a blanket of new-fallen snow. I almost got the camera out.)

Goes to show: all advice is only a suggestion.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2013 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.

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Featured Comments from:

Bárbara: "Great shot and while I generally agree about the white matting this looks really great! Oh how the world is so filled with 'exceptions to every rule!' That's one of the things that I really love about your blog—you aren't shy to state your own views and are open enough to share other point of view as well. Very refreshing."

Mike replies: Thanks! I do try hard to do that.

Who Shoots Cars?

This is gone now. I like to imagine it's been completely restored, and
is now a dazzling showpiece....

I was mulling over writing an article about genres or categories of photographs, and the way in which some of those categories appeal to us and some don't. For instance, I've never been very interested in fashion photography; I could be Amish as far as clothes are concerned. I wore the same four pairs of black jeans throughout the entire George W. Bush administration, and I am not kidding.

On the other hand, I've always loved car photographs. Sometimes I go to eBay Motors and just poke around looking for good shots of old cars. Or I'll do a Google image search on "Riley Imp" or something and just enjoy the photographs that turn up.

For all that, I've never really photographed cars.

Is there anybody out there who does, either as part of their living, or for fun? Straight pics, or quirky ones? I know lots of railfans photograph trains, but I don't know if there are as many carfans who photograph cars. Do you know of any car photographers, or have a favorite? Or maybe you have a tale or two that revolves in some way around photographing cars? Lulu and I are feeling a bit low today, and I'd love to see some of your car pictures or hear a few anecdotes about car-shooting adventures. 'Twould perk me right up.

Mike

P.S. Here's the code for uploading an image to the Comments:

Of course you replace the "http://image.jpg" URL with the URL for your picture. (URL = web address; your picture has to be on the web.) Unfortunately, the largest size that will work is 470 pixels wide; otherwise the image will be cut off. (A limitation of the TypePad template TOP uses.)

Original contents copyright 2013 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.

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Featured Comments from:

Dillan: "I have a friend, Matt Vieweger, whom I work with from time to time who specializes in car photography. I am his 'voice activated light stand.' He does really try to do some unique things with lighting. I've been helping him for the past year, and it's been a great time. We've shot mostly American muscle cars, but Matt's heart lies with European makes. He's been quite successful with it; he had a feature article in Canadian Hot Rod last year. I am proud to be a part of the project. I too love cars. I can't really afford to own anything other than a basic car, so photography has once again proven to be an outlet my pent up passion. You can see the results here."

Leslie Ashe:

"I photographed rally cars here in Ireland (and on the mainland UK) for some 20 years in the 1970s and '80s. The sun doesn’t always shine here in Ireland. Rain, wind, and poor light made for interesting (challenging!) conditions for action photography. Tri-X rated at ISO 800 for black and white—but don't even think about colour transparencies in the 1970s in poor light (high speed Ektachrome at ISO 160).

"We had great cars and drivers, great action, the pressure of the rally schedule (with little sleep at times), and once back home the pressure to get the processing done and pictures off to magazines. At the end of the day some very satisfying images. And now in retirement I am finding some time to scan all the old material for my website and am enjoying seeing pictures I never looked at before. After a year I am about half-way through so lots of work still to do. Judging by the traffic to my website there are many others who are also nostalgic for the rallying of this era and this makes the effort worthwhile."

Rowan: "This flies in the face of your request, but one thing I've never liked in photographs is cars. For some reason, any cars appearing in a picture just spoil them for me. It's completely irrational—I think cars are great. Just not in pictures! That said, Lee Friedlander's America by Car is fantastic...."

Mike replies: Oh, you had to go and remind me. I've never, ever spent that much for a book, and I'm permanently tempted. Tortured might be a better word.

GuyB: "'Dead Slow' has some wonderful car/house double portraits from San Francisco."

Mike replies: Those are great! Thanks.

See also this page by Tom Wik, from Minneapolis. (Thanks to G.G. for this one.)

Dana Thomas:

"...Hey Mike...how about this for a pick-me-up. I was shooting a job in La Jolla, California, when a convoy of beautiful old cars drove up the driveway of the inn where I was working. This car not only caught  my eye but the driver, a dapper gentleman, asked if I would like a ride to dinner, not knowing that I was not on the guest list for the outing."

Crabby Umbo: "...Now you've got me looking at Riley Imps...Mike, you're the devil...."

Mike replies: A couple of days ago I was Frankenstein.

John Brewton: "Two of the best professional car shooters are James Haefner and Simon Harper. They regularly display their work on the MF forum on Luminous-Landscape. Their work is simply incredible. I shot a spread for Autoweek in 1989 and shot many exotics and classics during the '70s through the early '90s, but everything is on film and I never got around to scanning it."

Jason Bonello: "I photograph cars. I grew up in Detroit and worked there as an assistant and photographer. The founder of Midcoast Studio, James Secreto, is the foremost collector of car photography, especially when associated with advertisment. Feel free to contact me if you need more info or have questions."

Mike replies: So do you know Madison Ford?

New: Fuji XF 14mm Ultrawide

The XF 14mm ƒ/2.8 R ultra-wide-angle lens from Fujifilm is designed for its X-Pro 1 interchangeable lens camera system. This is the fourth prime lens Fujifilm has introduced for the X-Pro 1 and the widest focal length to date. The 35mm focal length equivalency is 21mm, and its angle of view is 89°. The lens has a circular aperture and is said to feature very high resolution from the center to the corners. Price is $900.

Some samples here, and here's Fuji's page. Five more XF lenses are planned for this year:

Mike

Original contents copyright 2013 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.

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Featured Comments from:

Carsten Bockermann: "I got mine about two weeks ago. Really nothing bad I can say about it. If you use a Fuji X-Pro1 or an XE-1 and need a 21mm-e lens, this is definitely a good choice."

Walter Glover: "My testing of the 14mm a fortnight ago convinced me to add one to the kit. I now have a redundant Canon 5D system for much of my commercial endeavour."

Paul Crouse: "I played with one at Yodobashi Camera in Kyoto the other day. It is very lovely. I kept walking between the Micro 4/3 displays and the Fuji X table. Hmm...which mirrorless system? The Panasonic GH3 fits my hand like a glove, but there is a something about the Fuji cameras and lenses.

"You would love Yodobashi Camera, Mike. It is like a toy store for photo geeks. You can play with everything with out asking. And then you can go try out the massage chairs when you get tired. Japan definitely leads the world in massage chair technology. Hmmm...camera or massage chair?"

Mike replies: I crave a massage chair. Really. We need to do more print sales this year....

A Deep and Thorny Issue

In what is surely a deep and thorny issue, with many facets glinting in the sun as one turns the issue this way and that, The Sunday Times (U.K.) has acknowledged that it is not accepting submissions of freelance photographs from Syria. The paper's motive is to discourage freelancers from taking the risks of doing photoreportage there.

Calling the situation in Syria "incredibly risky" and invoking the late Marie Colvin, the paper calls its decision "a moral one."

At least one freelancer feels "disheartened and extremely let down." Others say the work is better done by staffers, because having a large organization backing you up reduces the dangers; still others point out that freelancers are more likely to be younger and thus less likely to have spouses and family (an advantage which, when you think about it, sort of reinforces the paper's point; I mean, they're arguing that freelancers are more expendable if they get killed, which doesn't exactly do much to contradict the paper's position that the work is excessively risky).

PressGazette.co.uk has the story.

Mike
(Thanks to Robert Howell)

Original contents copyright 2013 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.

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John Camp: "War zone freelancers are one of my pet peeves and I applaud the Sunday Times' decision. The problem is complex, but it comes down to this: when first-world newspapers pay freelancers for their photos, they set up a competitive situation that eventually spreads to locals. That is, if one newspaper or news organization gets terrific battle photos, the others feel obligated to try to match that. The cheapest way to do that is to hire locals, who work on their own. By doing that, the news organizations avoid all kinds of liabilities—high salaries, high insurance, the possibility of having to pay ransom, and so on.

"But the locals are not treated like staffers. A salaried staffer can make an objective decision about whether to take a particular risk: he'll get paid whether he takes it or not. He'll have to take some risks, but being able to pick and choose provides a good measure of safety.

"But nobody buys photos from locals that aren't really ugly. Photo editors want combat and bodies. Nobody really wants pictures of empty streets, which is what most combat zones look like. So the locals literally have to risk their lives to get the photos the news organizations will buy. Every photo that they offer represents a risk. Why do they do it? Typically, because they live in war-torn economies and there are few other jobs available. So, they pick up a camera. There are almost always other ways to feed their families, at least at a subsistence level, but to a lot of these guys, the photo pay looks pretty good.

"So they get killed, essentially to provide entertainment for readers or viewers in more affluent countries. And it's entertainment: try to think of what you might have learned from a photo of a guy crouched behind a wall with a gun, or smoke over a hillside. The answer is, 'Almost nothing,' but some guy risked his life to take the photo.

"If all of this were restricted to staffers or Western college-educated photographers looking for a thrill, I wouldn't worry so much. I might think they're being stupid, I might think they often have no idea of what they're getting into, but who am I to tell them that they can't do it? So if they get killed, that's their problem.

"But that's not all that happens—they drag these others into it, people who might prefer not to risk their lives, but who do it because of a sense of obligation to their families. In a lot of these cultures, these men literally have no ability to refuse that choice if it is offered to them.

"And lots of them get killed."

[John Camp won a Pulitzer Prize for journalism in 1986. —Ed.]

Ken Jarecke: "This is not a moral stand by the paper; rather, it's immoral. They couldn't care less about the death of a photographer. Their concern is being held liable. That's it.

"The Wall Street Journal and many others have stopped accepting submissions, answering emails, or putting people on assignment in war zones because they don't want to be held financially responsible. Instead, they'll tell a youngster on the phone, with no paper trail, that they'd love to see their work from XYZ Hellhole if that photographer decided to travel there, wink-wink.

"That's why you've started seeing photo credits which read 'courtesy of' from war zones. They're trying to say that they didn't ask for the photographers to make these images or travel to a dangerous place, but if a photographer gives them the images they're happy to publish them.

"By the way, The Wall Street Journal was paying $50 per image they published from places like Lybia, and refused to put photographers on assignment. Fifty bucks won't buy much healthcare. That's immoral. Meanwhile the director of photography was bragging about their coverage. It's pathetic. (I don't mean to bash on the WSJ alone. The same can be said for most publications today.)

"Last time I went into a war zone the standard day-rate was $500 and that was doubled for working in a dangerous area. So a grand a day, plus insurance and paid expenses. This of course was twenty years ago when you could buy a professional camera for $500 (as a reference point). Freelancers working in the same area would often be put on assignment for the same fees, plus they could be on multiple assignments from magazines and newspapers in different countries, so you can see the financial incentive.

"Plus everyone was treated the same by the publications if they got wounded. I can tell you stories you wouldn't believe. Like when Time magazine paid for an air ambulance (upwards of $100,000) to get a photographer to safety who was working for Newsweek.

"All I'm saying is, don't let the Sunday Times claim the moral high ground on this. They (and most of the other media) are happy to pull images from an Instagram feed (and not pay anyone) if it suits their needs.

"Another reason why I say 'immoral' is they (the press in general) are ignoring, under-reporting, using bad, unprofessional, or biased sources to report on what's happening in Syria (and dozens of other places that are closer to home and a lot less dangerous), and these reports are used to form public opinions which politicians act on. Bad input leads to bad output, to say it another way."

[Kenneth Jarecke is an accomplished photojournalist and combat photographer who took one of the most famous photographs of the Gulf War. —Ed.]

Distractions (OT again)

Frankenmike. All we need is a lightning bolt and we should be in business.

If you've noticed that things have been quiet (and a little too off-topic) here at TOP this week, you're not imagining things. I've been distracted. As part of an ongoing effort to solve my health mysteries, I went in to the Sleep Wellness Institute on Tuesday evening for an overnight evaluation. A friendly tech named Michelle hooked me up to a dizzying array of monitors and electrodes (the latter using using a sticky goo she politely called a "paste") until I looked like Frankenstein's monster. I snapped a record shot with my phone. I was asked to sleep.

I spent an uncomfortable night—I don't know how you could not, being wired up like a cyborg—but the verdict is the one we were looking for: I suffer from OSA, obstructive sleep apnea. I won't know all the details for a few more days, but I stop breathing for ten seconds or more at least thirty times an hour when I sleep. That qualifies for the diagnosis.

Somewhat counterintuitively perhaps, this is good news. My doctor told me he was hoping I had sleep apnea—he said it could help explain some of my symptoms and it's easy to fix. That's patently better than some other things that also might explain my symptoms but that are not easy to fix.

In the breakfast room the following morning, after I'd showered all that goop out of my hair and beard, I had a nice conversation with a pleasant and interesting fellow patient, Bill, a former railroad guy recently retired to Milwaukee who said he's been sleeping with a CPAP (continuous positive airway pressure) machine for five years. He said he "sleeps like a log." I've forgotten what that's like, so I have high hopes. I should be geared out with a CPAP machine by the end of this month (about the same time Ctein gets his ubergeek glasses). I'm really looking forward to it.

Between Ctein's presbyopia and my apnea, this is middle-aged-guy week at TOP! All of you twentysomethings and thirtysomethings out there? Contrary to what Ctein said, none of this will ever happen to you. You're fine. On the bad side, I've probably been suffering from apnea for at least ten years, and maybe fifteen. I wish I'd done this long ago.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2013 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 CD of interest today:

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Ben Marks: "Michael my boy, you are going to love getting a good night's sleep. Speaking from experience."

Peter Robinson: "I'm really happy for you. I'm not a CPAP user myself (I opted for the UVPPP surgery) but I've worked for manuafacturers of sleep monitoring equipment and, more lately, for a CPAP manufacturer, and I have met many people who have said how much their CPAP machine has changed their life. It can take a while, and a lot of people do get issues with using them at first, but stick with it and you will feel a different person.

"If I can give you one piece of advice, stay away from the CPAP forums. They are full of misinformation and psuedo-experts who will mess with your mind. Go with what your doctor advises and, if you have problems, go back to him. Although I'm no longer in the industry, if there is anything you want to know and you want to ask me, please feel free. Good luck."

Mike replies: Hmm. Forums...misinformation...pseudo-experts...what does that remind me of? [g]

Dave Polaschek: "I had a sleep study a couple years ago. All we could prove by it is that I can't sleep while wired up, though while tossing and turning, I can almost strangle myself with the wires."

Howard Sandler: "I've had a CPAP for about four years now. I turned my situation into lemonade. I did a series of stock photos of myself posing as a sleeping man with the mask on and they have sold very well. The only problem is that on about four occasions now, I have been contacted by people who found me through my stock agency and were convinced the photos of the bearded overweight sleeping man in the mask were unauthorized photos of themselves taken in the sleep lab. Apparently apnea is an epidemic among balding bearded heavyset men!"

Will Frostmill: "Mike, I can't tell you how happy I am that you got this diagnosis. I lost my dad when I was a teen to what was almost certainly apnea induced heart failure. I well remember listening to his breathing start and stop as he gasped for air in his sleep. I'm glad you caught it in time. The similarity in age and shape between you and he has given me pause for several years now."

Mike replies: Very sorry about your Dad. I do hope not to succumb to his fate...I'll do my best.

David Boyce: "I was diagnosed with OSA a couple of years ago. A CPAP machine changed my life. More energy, better thinking and reasoning skills, I could go on. It is amazing how much better life gets when you sleep well. Be well."

Superfocus vs. Presbyopia Man

By Ctein

Unsurprisingly, human vision pops up regularly as a topic in these pages. Most especially, its failings. We take it for granted when it works perfectly. Unfortunately, sooner or later, it stops working perfectly.

Many of us develop the need for glasses at an early age. I became nearsighted when I was six or seven. By my teenage years, I was very nearsighted. This could come in handy. Without my glasses, I could focus down to about six inches, meaning I could do delicate and meticulous close-up work without the aid of magnifiers. Great for spotting prints.

My bio-cameras have unusually good specifications. My visual acuity is 20/12 in my left eye and 20/15 in my right, meaning I can resolve details about one third finer than average. I also have unusually good color discrimination; a 1 CC color change is obvious to me.

As I've aged, I've gradually become less nearsighted; my close-focusing distance is now out to nine inches. It's normal to become more hyperopic over time. Unfortunately, I'm normal in another way: I developed presbyopia. With age the eye's lens becomes less flexible and cannot focus over as wide a range as when we were young. I have almost no focusing ability left. Basically, my "cameras" still have great resolution and great color fidelity, but they're equipped with fixed-focus lenses.

Presbyopia happens to everybody; how soon and how severely vary with the individual, but we all lose focus accommodation. Folks with previously perfect eyesight find themselves needing reading glasses as they get older. The muscles in their eyes cannot distort the stiffer lens enough to bring the focus down to a comfortable reading distance, especially with slight progressive hyperopia.

Presbyopia is responsible for a lot of the arguments over camera ergonomics. If you've still got good focus accommodation, a non-adjustable eyepiece on a camera isn't a big deal. If you've got serious presbyopia, the lack of an adjustment can be a deal killer for you. Similarly, folks who are going hyperopic and presbyopic with age can find camera-back LCD screens a real pain to use. (They work great for me; after 40+ years of looking over the top of my glasses for doing close-up work, it's instinctive for me to peer at an LCD that way.)

I really, really hate presbyopia. How much? I've actually investigated getting flexible corneal lens implants, even though I'm not even close to needing nonelective cataract surgery. Unfortunately, they're not really ready for prime time, according to my expert counsel.

Bifocals only give me two zones of sharp focus, with everything in between fuzzy, and even after 20 years I'm still not used to the dividing line. Progressive lenses? Then I'd never have the entire field of view sharp, just some portion of it. That would drive me nuts even faster than uniform blurriness.

Around the house, I only wear my reading glasses unless I'm watching TV. Most everything I do is within a couple of feet of my face. I live with the rest of the room looking slightly blurry. I travel with three pairs of glasses; the bifocals, the reading glasses, and an intermediate pair that's good for things about 10 feet away (if I'm going to an art exhibit, that's what I'll usually wear).

Vision-wise, I am not a happy camper.

A few months back, Paula caught an item on NPR about adjustable-focus eyeglasses called Superfocus. The lens frames contain a liquid-filled adjustable lens with a tensioning slider in the bridge. Moving the slider back and forth causes the lens to flex, changing its optical power over a range of 2.75 diopters. Your pair of prescription lenses magnetically snap into the frames. Those lenses would give you correct infinity vision in a normal pair of glasses. In the Superfocus glasses they combine with the liquid lens to give you a continuous range of focus from infinity down to near reading distance.

Last week I got a new eye exam and plunked down a honking big wad of cash. I'm out nearly a grand for the exam, the glasses, and a one-year loss/damage insurance policy. (I've never lost or damaged a pair of glasses in my life, but this is new technology—I'm willing to buy a little insurance for the first year just in case I do something stupid.) If these work, they may not be as breathtakingly expensive as they seem. One pair of glasses replaces the two (bifocals and reading) that I'd be buying usually.

The big question is how long the frames really last. I'm not sure anyone knows, seeing as the technology isn't that old. The company only warrants materials and workmanship for a year. I'm hoping that's a pro forma thing and not a predictor of future performance. If the frames hold up well, I'm only spending $100 or so every time I need new glasses instead of $300. If I get five years out of the frames, it's only about twice as expensive as regular glasses. Ten and I break even.

I can think of reasons why I might not like these. But what the hey, it's an experiment. And one that's a lot less expensive and risky and, well, nuts than voluntarily getting my eyes cut into. Fortunately, there's a 30-day money-back guarantee. If I hate them, I can return them and buy my usual regular glasses.

Delivery is supposed to be in 3–4 weeks. I'm keeping my fingers crossed. I should have a report for you early next month.

Ctein

Columnist Ctein meets you eye-to-eye every Wednesday morning at TOP.

Original contents copyright 2013 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:

Bear.: "When I first came to Oz as a kid, I was introduced to Norman Hunter's 'Professor Branestawm' books (which seem to be completely out of fashion).  I now—unintentionally—look rather like the good professor. To quote from the highly reliable source (SA), Wikipedia: 'He has five pairs of spectacles—one for reading, one for writing, one for out of doors, one for looking at you over the top of and a fifth pair for looking for the others on the frequent occasions when they get lost.' And other pairs of spectacles are often mentioned.

"My ophthalmologist says it's bunkum that my presbyopia issues are caused by reading as a kid—rather, my eye's natural focus distance was affected by my childhood reading, and also my present extensive reading and computer use, but not the ability to focus." 

R. Edelman: "The statement that 'it is normal to become more hyperopic over time' needs some clarification. With the loss of accommodative ability that eventually progresses into presbyopia, hyperopes who are under-corrected require more hyperopic correction, and myopes who are over-corrected require less correction. With continued aging of the natural crystalline lens inside of the eye, many people develop nuclear sclerosis of the lens. In these cases, the lens becomes more dense and therefore more effective at bending light. In other words, the index of refraction of the lens increases. This causes a shift towards less hyperopia or more myopia. In some people, this process actually improves their uncorrected vision, a phenomenon that was described in the past as 'second sight.' All of these changes are caused solely by the aging of the lens of the eye, as most adult eyes that are untouched by surgery remain fairly stable in their dimensions, such as axial length and corneal refractive power."

The Skeleton in the Car Park (OT)

It has naught to do with photography I'm afraid, but for history buffs the news of the identification of the mortal remains of the Hunchback King, Richard III, has been positively electrifying. The skeleton found under a parking lot (English translation: car park) in Leicester (pronunciation: Lester) last September has stood up to mitochondrial DNA testing when matched against known descendants of the King's sister Anne. The unmarked grave was at the site of Greyfriars, a medieval Franciscan monastery demolished in the 1530s.

Although King of England for only two years, the last of the Plantagenets left an outsized imprint on history. Not only is he the subject of the Shakespeare play, but he is implicated in one of the great murder mysteries in Western history, the suspicious disappearance of the 12- and 9-year-old sons of Edward IV from the Tower of London sometime around 1483. That dark tale is probably known to most English schoolchildren, but might be news to many English speakers in the former colonies and beyond.

Also credited to Richard III are some famous lines, including "A horse! My kingdom for a horse!" (cried out after he'd lost his horse from beneath him at Bosworth Field) and "Off with his head!", the latter probably put into his mouth by the Bard of Avon (and made more famous, of course, by the Reverend Dodgson's Queen of Hearts).

The legend of the Princes in the Tower is a cracking good story, tragedy at its pathetic best. If you don't know it, I've got a book for you—a 1992 publication called (logically enough) The Princes in the Tower, by Alison Weir. A splendid book of popular history, and (at least if you don't already know the story) a page-turner.

Richard III (inset, below: forensic recreation from
the recently discovered skull)

Richard III ended up as the last of the ancient Plantagenet monarchs. Defeated at Bosworth by Henry Tudor, he was the last English King to die in battle, furtively laid to rest by pious friars who feared retribution from his enemies.

To the victor belongs the telling of history, and it's widely believed that at least some of Richard's reputation as one of England's greatest villains was assigned to him vindictively by his Tudor conquerors. (And remember that Shakespeare himself was the subject of a Tudor queen, the politically adroit Elizabeth I.) There is plentiful evidence that Richard—like another supposed tyrant before him, Julius Caesar—was at heart a liberal reformer, another sin which the bloody-minded are hard put to forgive. A novel centered around this revisionist view is The Daughter of Time by the renowned crime writer Josephine Tey, which I've not read. The famous Laurence Olivier movie is due out on DVD from the Criterion Collection in April, and is already available for streaming on Amazon and Hulu Plus.

A number of years ago I put together a list called "The 225 Books," meant as a cultural curriculum of self-education for high school students*. The Princes in the Tower made my cut then. It hasn't found universal approval from passionate fans and apologists of the Hunchback King, of whom there are many, but it tells the most likely tale. I found it a first-class read.

Now would be an appropriate time to acquaint (or re-acquaint) with it, along with Shakespeare's play. In fact, I think I will.

Mike

*But consisting of books that are pleasurable and easy to read, as opposed to being punishingly dull, archaic, or weighty.

Original contents copyright 2013 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.

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

Ed: "I do hope that this doesn't turn out to be another 'cold fusion' where academics were so keen to get publicity that they didn't do all their due diligence. It might just as plausibly be a monk who had a bad back. The DNA evidence is not really all that strong and so they have used it as support for other factors like location, age and spinal deformity."

Mike replies: I agree, it does have a whiff of that "too good to be true" air about it. And under the "follow the money" principle, note the sponsors of the archaeology. I don't know anything about it beyond "what I've read in the papers," so to speak, but I'll keep a thimbleful of skepticism in reserve just the same.

Anders: "Josephine Tey's Richard III book, The Daughter of Time, was voted greatest mystery novel of all time by the Crime Writers' Association in 1990. The few books she gave us are all delightful."

Jed Wormhoudt: "The Daughter of Time is worth reading. If Josephine Tey's argument is not wholly persuasive, it is certainly charming. As are Ms. Tey's other two novels, A Shilling for Candles, and my favorite, Brat Farrar.

"While the Olivier version of Richard is very fine, the Ian McKellen is much more amusing. The famous opening speech—'Now is the winter of our discontent...'—is brilliant, and very different from the traditional nasty inward version. McKellan starts it as a celebratory political speech and ends it in front of a urinal. Robert Downey Jr and Kristin Scott Thomas add to the fun. A Netflix must."

Bruno Masset: "Now is this winter of our disinterment / Made spurious fodder by this piece of blog...."