The Online Photographer

Somber Anniversary

Photographs by Peter Turnley

As you no doubt know, today is the 10th anniversary of Donald Rumsfeld's "Shock and awe," the beginning of the U.S. war in Iraq.

Our friend Peter Turnley has posted a portfolio of pictures from early in the war, called In Memory: The War in Iraq, Ten Years On. Take a look back with Peter....

Mike

[UPDATE: It's understandably difficult to discuss photographs like these without letting the discussion become dominated by the underlying issues. I waited until the "here's my opinion about the war" comments and the "that other commenter is an idiot" comments outnumbered the ones that were at least vaguely concerned with the pictures; then I closed the post. Thanks to everyone who commented, whether it was published or not; I hope you can understand that I didn't want the comments to the post to become completely dominated by arguments about American foreign policy, partisan politics, whether there were or were not Weapons of Mass Destruction, whether liberals are traitors, etc. As I always say, TOP isn't a forum. —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:

Part I of Kevin Phillips' book American Theocracy, subtitled "Oil and American Supremacy," is still the best basic primer of energy politics I've read in the past ten years. Phillips is a somewhat polarizing writer: he was one of the early founders of Movement Conservatism (he wrote The Emerging Republican Majority in 1969 and was one of the authors of the notorious "Southern Strategy,") but is now considered apostate.

"Oil and American Supremacy" is not available separately, but it's a quick read, only 95 pages long, and it's easily worth the price of the paperback. (The Kindle e-book is priced higher than the paper book.) Here's the U.K. link —and yes, it would definitely be of interest to non-U.S. readers.

I've read lots more about the subject, but this is my kind of readin': short, smart, and right to the point.

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

Rick D: "Fine, gut-wrenching work. Thank you, Mr. Turnley, for bearing witness to the human face of war. (Has it truly been ten years?)"

Around the Web on a Monday

Ice with a tail: Take a look at these three pictures of the Comet Pan-STARRS over the skies of Kansas, by razor2277 on Dpreview. (Thanks to Rick for the tip.) I'm going to make a WAG and say that this comet will be better documented than any in history so far...so improved, and so much more ubiquitous, are our methods of image capture nowadays. These were taken with a NEX-5. 

Dead not forgotten: Carps Carpenter found this lovely 1966 Grateful Dead concert on the Internet Archive, there for the streaming. Allegedly from Avalon Ballroom on 16 September of that long-ago year, although there is some dispute about that. A veritable time capsule. And I trust those of you who like licorice have perused this? (Explanation of that cryptic reference at the link.)

From a group of 78 carte-de-visite portraits of Chinese subjects by various photographers, 1860s–70s. Sold for $60,000 at the February 26th auction at Swann Galleries. 

Will No One Buy a Forlorn Weston? The indefatigible and elusive Richard B. Woodward writes, and, having writ, moves on. Funny where he turns up. Here he surfaces on Artinfo (from Art+Auction) writing about the photography art market in the light of the savior pre-Christmas Sotheby's show, in an article called "Zooming in on the Trends That are Reshaping the Market for Photography" (not a very Woodwardian title; I smell an editor). (Chambers sent this in. Thanks.)

Who Pays Photographers? (From John Hogg.)

Without too much talk surrounding: Quietly continuing an expansive career as one of the most interesting of American photographers, Nicholas Nixon has given a pellucid, pinpoint interview to Ahorn Magazine. One could wish the questions a little shorter and the answers a little longer perhaps. Ken Tanaka told me about this.

By the bye, I recommend Family Pictures in the "Photographers At Work" series as a good starting point if you're not familiar with Nick Nixon's work. Here's a man who is due for a retrospective book, edited by someone outside his circle. Are Keith F. Davis and Richard B. Woodward available, by any chance?

The best book possible: Speaking of Ahorn Magazine, that's where Eric Marth's comparison of the image quality in all the various editions of American Photographs was published. Many readers emailed to tell me about this! It was a TL;DR for me, but then, I have two editions of the book already and already-formed opinions on the matter. Eric's article is called "Printing American Photographs." The current iteration of the book is still available here. (And here's the U.K. link.)

Nikkor 28mm ƒ/1.8G verdict: This might be out of place in this post, but I should have added it to my recent post about this lens and it has to go somewhere. Full-frame 28mm's of this speed (I mean ~ƒ/2) have a long and storied history, with many stellar offerings providing a plethora of high points along the way. The one I coveted in the 1980s* cost no more in absolute dollars than Nikon's newest, which means, when you factor for inflation, that this one is a good value. It's an excellent lens with many fascinating foibles, none of them fatal. Keeps me interested. Historically I'd give it a solid B+, and, by today's risen standards, still a B–. (I'm a strict grader, so B is high for me.) Here's the link to the lens; "Instant Savings" of $100 are currently in effect.

Photo: Landingfield

Picture elements revealed: For those of you with a digi-phototechnical bent, here's a cool thing. Landingfield, an astrophotography site, looks deep into innerspace with a number of photomicrographs of a CMOS digital camera sensor. The article is called "Peeping into Pixel." This is the equivalent of understanding the chemical constituents of a plating-out developer—i.e., not pertinent to photographs. But strangely fascinating anyway! (This one came from Ken T. too.)

Hold that pose: This is a weird one—the photographer who took the famous (well, American sports-world famous) picture of Desmond Howard imitating the Heisman statue is suing Howard, among others, for using the picture without permission. Howard, understandably, is saying "Huh?!? It's a picture of me." Of course, as we all know, Desmond doesn't have, uh, a leg to stand on...legally. But this might be the most direct clash between intuitive ideas of fairness and copyright legality we've come across.

Desmond Howard. Photo by Brian Masck.

Ironically, we have the right to show the photo here. The lawsuit means it's news; thus we can publish it under Fair Use. But I don't have the right to show a picture of the Heisman Trophy that the post mimics, because, for any given picture, I'd simply be using the content of the picture as an illustration.

Thanks to Steve Rosenblum for this.

It's coming, and we're watching: Dewi Lewis, of Dewi Lewis Publishing, tells me they're still planning a reprint of Pentti Sammallahti's Here Far Away, our Photobook of the Year 2012, but that there's no ETA (estimated time of arrival) yet. I'm still on sentinel duty, hoping I won't miss it when it happens.

Famous last words: "My computer problems are solved." Knock on my wooden head, and hope I won't have to eat those words. But everything went well. AppleCare was stellar. My AppleCare contract lasts until next February 3rd, which means I will be getting a new computer on that date. AppleCare is a must-have accessory, if you ask me.

Thanks to everyone who ever sends in tips! I appreciate them all, even the duplicates and the ones I don't end up using. Thanks to one and all.

Mike

*By the way, I never once heard that lens called the "Hollywood 28" back in the day. And I would have. I think that's a recent Internet meme rather than legitimately an historical nickname.

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:

Jamie Pillers: "Thanks for the link to the Nicholas Nixon interview. I love hearing what rumbles around inside the head of someone working passionately, like Nixon."

Tom Kwas: "...As a 'Zeiss-o-phile' and Contax user in the '80s and '90s, I never heard that lens called a 'Hollywood' either, by anyone, anytime, and I even met the reps and talked to them extensively about the system. I also never saw the thing, as the ƒ/2.8 was half the size and the difference in price was not worth the money...I also wasn't a 28mm 'guy,' and owned the very nice 25mm and ditto 35mm, both ƒ/2.8's, both wonderful...as for 'Hollywood,' that's some Internet smoke-blowin' there...."

hugh crawford: "The NYC area is pretty much all clouds or rain or snow for the next 10 days, pretty much the same as it was for Hale-Bopp in '97. The last time I put film in my Nikon F was for Hale-Bopp, when a friend and I got so frustrated that we drove for a few hours on the Interstate hoping for a break in the allegedly scattered clouds. The film is still in the camera. Maybe Pan-STARRS will still be happening when I'm in California on the 29th."

Armand: "I have the Nikkor 28mm ƒ/2.8 AIS and I love it. Great lens for pixel peeping I suppose. I am not sure how it compares to the Nikkor 28mm ƒ/1.8G."

Mike replies: That lens is one of the high points of Nikon lens design and manufacture. It is highly corrected with eight elements and a floating group. It was introduced at just the right time: in 1981, Nikon was indisputably the no. 1 cameramaker for pros, had some very talented lens designers, was optimizing its lenses for performance and robust build quality rather than price...and it was just before the "zoom era" really got going, and the slower 28mm was still a commercially very important lens specification. (In the '70s, the 28mm ƒ/2.8 prime was sort of the default wide angle for most SLR photographers. Lenses of that specification sold by the boatload and every cameramaker and independent lensmaker offered a version of it. By the time the AF lens came along, that ship had sailed, and the AF lens was actually based on the cheap "budget" E-Series lens.)

Your lens was a particularly successful design. It's small and light, handles well, and is particularly well balanced in performance, with all aberrations well controlled, very little distortion, good sharpness across the field, and balanced performance across the aperture range. And it's well coated. A premium camera lens in every respect, usability not least. The only possible cavil is that the out-of-focus rendition is not quite as good as that of the AI, but even that's not bad—and with a WA you seldom see much of it anyway. (And the AF-S ƒ/1.8G is not stellar in that respect either.) And a few samples could show decentering.

Not only can you still find the lens used fairly easily, it is also one of the few manual-focus AIS lenses you can still buy new from Nikon. The price is a bit higher now than it has been historically, but it's still a good bargain considering what you're getting. The lens works well on Nikon DSLRs in manual and aperture-preferred modes if your eye is up to focusing manually.

My advice: hang on to that.

Carl Blesch: "So if I gave you a link to a photo I shot of a Heisman trophy in a showcase at Ohio State's student union, you couldn't post it here because that violates copyright? Does that mean I'm violating copyright by posting my photo, taken in a public place of an openly displayed item, on my photo sharing web site? Is this like the story I once heard of the cypress tree at Big Sur being copyrighted, so no one is allowed to take pictures of it or show those pictures to anyone?"

The Heisman Trophy. Photo by Carl Blesch.

Mike replies: No, then I could probably post it—as I have done, above—because then I have a reasonable expectation that I have your permission to do so. (But see below.)

The point of copyright is that you own your photo. The people who own the Heisman trophy don't own your photo of it, just like Desmond Howard doesn't own Brian Masck's photo just because it's a photo of him. You can do what you want with your own photograph.

There are exceptions, however. "Fair Use" allows me to publish pictures owned by others without their permission, but only under certain conditions—if I'm commenting on or critiquing the picture or if it's news, mainly. It does not allow me to use pictures belonging to other people just because I want to. So I can't steal your picture and use it in my advertising, pass it off as my own, or use it to illustrate my article or as the cover of my magazine. To do those things, I have to get your permission—you have to grant me the right.

In many cases, this "permission" or transfer of rights becomes a commercial arrangement: if I want to use your picture on the cover of my magazine, you might agree to give me the right to do so if I were to pay you a certain amount of money, for instance. That's the basis for professional editorial photography.

By posting your picture above, I'm acting in good faith by presuming that, because you're a TOP reader and you left a link to it as a comment on my blog, you won't object to me posting it. But I still only have the right to do so because you've (implicity) granted it to me. I post a lot of pictures on TOP because I assume, according to my best judgement and "best guess," that the rights owner won't mind. But that's often just a guess. If you now send me an email saying, "Hey! I never explicitly gave you permission to post my photo. Remove it from your website right now," I would do so.

Clear?

In my years of writing TOP, I've only received requests to remove pictures twice. In both cases I complied.

Where people go astray in copyright is usually because a) they think the photographer's or rights holder's rights are unlimited, or b) they think the photographer doesn't have (or shouldn't have(!)) rights he or she does legally have.

An example of the first: let's say I find a picture by a stranger on Flickr. It's labeled, clearly, "Copyright 2103 by Joseph Blow, all rights reserved." I then copy that photograph, post it on TOP, and write a three-paragraph critique of it. The photographer finds out, is furious, and contacts me stating in strong terms that I've used his photograph without permission, that it's copyrighted, and that I must take it down immediately.

Guess what? Legally, he does not have the right to force me to take it down. Fair Use allows me to reproduce or publish other peoples' work for the purpose of commentary or criticism. I have the legal right to post his picture on my blog if I'm writing about it and discussing it directly. (As a practical matter, if someone is angry and threatening legal action, I'd probably take the picture down, but that would just be to avoid legal entangement, not because I don't have the right to do what I did.)

In this case, the photographer has assumed his rights are unlimited, and trump every other legal consideration.

In another case, say I took a portrait of a kid down the street for pay. Her parents paid me for the portrait shoot and bought two prints. A year later, I become aware that the parents have let their best friend use the portrait for a cover of a brochure advertising his business. When I request payment for this additional use of the picture, they become outraged and claim I am extorting their friend. In their view, they paid for the portrait, they paid for the print, it's of their daughter, and they assume they own it, lock, stock and barrel.

As you probably know, they are wrong—the photographer still owns the rights to the picture, even when it was taken on commission and even if the parents bought prints. In this case, they have assumed the photographer does not have rights he in fact has.

The cypress tree thing is a different issue altogether—trademark, not copyright.

Disclaimer: I am not a copyright lawyer or an expert in copyright law.

Five Days With a NEX-6

Compared to the big photo sites, which live in splendid mansions down in the green valley, TOP is like a poor mountain relation. Mostly, we cannot afford to buy cameras in order to test them and write about them. Borrowing cameras is always a possibility, and some (not all) manufacturers have proven cooperative; but this sets up a de facto relationship that I've always been uncomfortable with.

LensRentals to the rescue.

The World Wide Web is maturing. Not only is it getting more crowded all the time, but more cream is rising to the top. I do intend to do a roundup, one of these days, of the best photo sites on the Web. (I'd tell you exactly where it is on my 1,348-item to-do list, but, scanning down the list, I'm not seeing it just now.) LensRentals is one of them. It's a site worth visiting even if you have never rented a piece of photo equipment and never intend to do so; that registers as pretty high praise for a commercial site, in my view.

I think it worked pretty well when I rented a Nikon D800E and an AF-S Nikkor 35mm ƒ/1.4G for five days and wrote a modest rolling review. Of course, there was a slight problem, and a slight downside...the problem was that the weather was lousy for four of my five days, and the downside was that I got so dazzled by the wondrous Nikonish device that I bought one. Ahem. That is not a regularly reproducible behavior. It is also possibly also not a terribly professional reaction. Reviewers are supposed to be jaded, are we not?

But aside from all that, and up until the point that I smashed a hole in my bank vault and tilted it on end until everything poured out, it went well, I thought.

Hunka hunka burning Zeiss.

So, undaunted*, I'm going to try it again. I've just rented a Sony NEX-6 and a Zeiss 24mm ƒ/1.8 E-mount lens for five days. It should arrive next week, which will hopefully dodge the upcoming snowfall in our forecast.

The review period could answer certain burning questions:

• Can a tired old reviewer force himself to learn yet one more bleeping menu system in a mere five days?
• What will a Micro-4/3-loving NEX virgin make of his first NEX?
• How about that lens? (And some of you thought the Coolpix A was expensive.)
• Could Mike possibly be enough of an idiot to buy a review camera again? The idea of renting is to not spend money, not to spend it. Our indomitable reviewer needs to keep reminding his sorry ass of that.
• Will spring ever get to Wisconsin?

And others as well. Stay tuned.

Mike

*Or perhaps just doubly foolish.

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.

TOP links!

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

Jack: "I can only answer one of your questions: spring will never get to Wisconsin. Summer does come in late June, but there is no spring."

JohnMFlores: "Just be glad that you don't review motorcycles. I bought the first one that I reviewed, an Italian temptress that's still sitting in my garage. It was well north of the D800 in price...."

Examples

I'm working on an "Around the Web" post, which, despite their lightness, are the most research- and time-intensive types of posts I write*. Looks like it's not going to be ready for a while. So, in the meanwhile, a few nice examples of the lens in the previous post:

One from Nikon Europe. (Steve Simon)

Weird cat—note pretty good bokeh. The colors in this shot are pretty nice. Only about one out of every several hundred color pictures I see actually use color in a halfway sensitive way. The rest are just "colored pictures" I guess. (TAKA1111)

Wider-angle lenses are often needed for group pictures, but, paradoxically, it's important to keep heads out of the corners as this photographer does here. Perspective distortion and heads seldom go together well. (Del~Uks)

Another by Del~Uks that uses a bit of WA seeing. 28mm's on full-frame can go from looking pretty normal-wide to quite wide-angley, depending on the subject and composition. I like this photographer's work and it in fact influenced my decision to get this lens (I always research lens purchases by looking at tons of example pictures). It would be nice to see a more conscious, curated set.

Since we've already had a cat picture I guess we should include a flower picture and a bug picture, but I'm gonna kill two birds with one stone. Woo, block that metaphor, Mike. (myu-myu)

[UPDATE: Very sorry, but this is a mistake on my part. The flower and the bug were taken with a Zeiss 100mm Macro. Here is the photographer's AF-S Nikkor 28mm ƒ/1.8G picture.]

Strobist shot. (Charles Pryor)

More bokeh. I don't think you'd buy this lens to play with bokeh, but it won't kill you, either. This lens is a particularly good match to the D700 so far as I can see. (Jordan Polizzi)

I might point out that the 28mm focal length makes a perfect normal lens on APS-C:

A B&W portrait. (Massimo Masone)

Finally, a city scene, so Ken can't say I always prefer pictures of people. Oh, okay, I'm cheating. (Bengt Carlsson)

Mike

*And that might explain why I haven't written one in a long time.

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.

TOP links!

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

Marc Gibeault: "The picture 'a flower picture and a bug' seems to have been taken with a Zeiss ZF Makro Planar T* 100mm ƒ/2."

Mike replies: Oh, crap. I hate it when I make mistakes. I'll go fix it now.

Thanks, Marc.

The Nikon 28mm ƒ/1.8G

Here I was thinking that either a) all lenses have gotten pretty good, or b) I just can't tell any more, because I've been shooting the Dragoon with the AF-S Nikkor 28mm ƒ/1.8G which I bought, as opposed to the mucho luxe AF-S Nikkor 35mm ƒ/1.4G which I rented, and thinking that I just don't mind the mid-priced lens...it seems fine to me.

I dasn't snitch their image, but here's a picture of the 28mm on the D800. It's a handful.

I'm sure most of you who read Dpreview (which I'm sure is most of you) have seen the recent links to DxO's discussion of lenses for the Dragoon...er, the D800. DxO has considered medium teles and normal lenses so far, mainly because I am interested in wide-angle lenses and the Universe requires that I be frustrated. Sorry, free associating. Anyway, DxO very sensibly considers lenses and sensors together, and the D800 tends to bring the best out of any lens, which tends to bring up the ratings of Nikkor lenses. Still and all, you can go to the Lens Ratings page and see how highly they rank the modest 28mm ƒ/1.8G on the D800...13th overall, with a "score" of 33.

Well, I thought it was good. Little did I know, it's actually good.

Among DxO's other conclusions:

• "The often repeated line that prime lenses are better than zoom lenses is once again borne out here, with prime lenses outperforming zoom lenses by between 20 and 30%." I coulda told you that.

• "The highest scoring lenses tested by the DxOMark labs have all been 85mm primes—certainly something to consider if you’re looking for the' best' lenses on any camera." I coulda told you that, too. I've long known that short teles must be the easiest lenses to design well, as they exhibit the fewest compromises.

• "The Nikon D800 is the current undisputed king of DxOMark, with results that eclipse every other camera from all other manufacturers." I couldn't have told you that, but I believe it, and it's nice to know. Wish mine focused better, but whatever.

• Another thing I thought was interesting is that when confined to DxO's metrics (which aren't the whole story with a lens, of course—nothing is the whole story with a lens), there's not a terribly good correspondence between performance and price.

DxO's series of articles are accessible from this page. Next to be rated for the D800 are super teles and zooms, on the 22nd, and then, finally, on the 25th, they'll be considering wide angles.

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.

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

Joe: "Mike, you wrote, 'Wish mine focused better, but whatever.' Me, too, until I used the combination of LensAlign and FocusTune (trademarks galore!) to fine-tune the autofocus of each of my prime lenses. At that point, I finally became happy with my D800's autofocus, and I suddenly realized how much I had been spending energy trying to make up for the camera's focus shortcomings. Now I just forget about it and trust the camera to do the job I bought it for. Check out those products—something like $100 all told, but well worth it to get the most of my multi-thousand dollar lens collection.

"I have no co connection to Michael Tapes, who created and sells those products."

Mike replies: You might not, but we do—Michael is an advertiser / supporter / friend of TOP. And yet I've never tried those products. Seems like maybe I ought to make up for lost time sometime soon.

George Purvis: "As a D800E user and owner/user of both LensAlign and FocusTune, I've found FocusTune alone to be a superb tool for fine tuning autofocus and in my hands superior to LensAlign alone. Once I started using FocusTune, I realized that the reproducibility errors in autofocus are often on the order of three to five autofocus adjustment units when the autofocus adjustment is not optimum. The error in reproducibility makes discovery of the optimum fine tune setting almost impossible without software like FocusTune which uses multiple shots. I've also observed that the error in reproducibility is minimized when the optimum fine tune value is used.

"Frankly, I was never really happy with my results from LensAlign. With FocusTune, I understand the source of the problem with LensAlign (auto focus reproducibility) and I have a tool that averages it out in ways that adjusting a single image cannot. I've also used FocusTune to check for the left/right auto focus issue. It found none. The leftmost and rightmost sensors focus the same. As expected, neither focuses quite as well as the cross hair center sensor. After fine tuning my lenses, I am now much happier with the auto focus on all my Nikon cameras including the D800E."

Armand: "Mike, I have been trying to find many reasons not to buy the Nikkor 85mm since I already have few 90mms and couple of Nikon 105mm ƒ/2.5 LTMs. I have my Leitaxed 90mm ƒ/2.8 Elmarit R mounted on the D800E. Your post is not helping fight my GAS :-)"

Mike replies: When I used to participate on the Pentax Discuss Mailing List (PDML), I often signed my messages "Mike, LPE." It stood for "lens purchase enabler." Beware!

Marek Fogiel: "I am not a fan of lens testing, but without any effort whatsoever, I can say, that both the Sigma 50mm ƒ/1.4 or Nikkor 50mm ƒ/1.4D are light years behind the Zeiss Makro Planar 50mm ƒ/2 in any aspect visible on the print. I own all these lenses, and for me it is a no-brainer. It reminds me of one of these things about hi-fi, which you have also mentioned in the past: the measurement graphs are not the same thing as human perceptual effect."

Ed Richards: "I am curious about your love affair with the D800. I have followed your work since the old old paper and magazine days. None of the work that you have said you admire, or your own work that you have shown, has anything to do with high resolution. Cartier-Bresson more than large format pictures of grocery stores where you can read every label. It is a big, heavy camera, with big lenses, esp. the zooms, and it costs a lot. I would have thought your perfect camera would be the Fuji X-Pro or the OM-D. I just do not see you with your camera on a tripod using Liveview to tweak every shot. When you finally get to your review, I hope you put the D800 into the larger context of the work you do and like."

Mike replies: I believe buying the D800 was a mistake. But one that's on me, not on the camera. I suspect I was the victim of a natural human tendency—overcompensation. I'm most familiar with this with houses—most homebuyers buy so few houses in their lifetimes, and stay in most of their houses so long, that the deficiencies of any particular house become ingrained and the desire to alleviate them builds in pressure over time. When we finally do move—certainly if we build—we tend to overcompensate for the shortcomings of the last house we lived in. If your home is too dark, for instance, your next one will have too many windows and skylights. If your last home was too small, your next one will be too big. If your last home was too old, your next one will be new or close to it. And so on. (Only holds for things you perceive as negatives, though.)

I think I just got sort of tired of dealing with the IQ limitations of smaller and offbeat sensors and with quirky, viewfinderless cameras, and I went too far the other way. The D800 is a magnificent beast, but to be perfectly honest, it's really too much camera for me—too big, too involved. Not that there's anything wrong with that; it's just that it "exceeds requirements" for me personally is all. I still more often grab a Micro 4/3 camera when I want to shoot.

 

Need Some Fuji XF Lenses?

B&H just announced a pretty unusual deal...if you buy a Fuji X-E1, you can have you choice of nine different lens bundles, all at considerable savings. The bundles go from one lens (the 35mm or the 18mm), on which you save just over 50%(!), to four lenses, on which the savings amount to $913.85 ($825 on the lenses plus some free protective filters).

If you own a X-Pro1 it might even be worth buying a kit and then turning around and reselling the body, but I'll leave it to you to figure that one out.

Go here and click on the link under "Buy Together and Save" to check out all the possibilities.

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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Memory Card Hygiene

It would be useful if someone, somewhere, could collate all the known "best practices" of card management and provide "footnotes," that is, substantiation for the technical claims. (Lloyd Chambers? Shawn Barnett? Rob Galbraith? Thom Hogan?)

I ain't that guy. However, it seems to me that the recommendations would be divided into several partitions:

• Technical best practices
• Workflow concerns
• Security concerns

For instance, I like Gato's suggestion of keeping exposed cards separate from the camera gear, because no one would steal a card alone but someone might steal the camera bag. That's a security issue, but not a technical one.

Of course, that might not be good advice for me personally. I recently lost my Kindle in my very own house. I remember the last time I had it in my hand and yet I cannot find the @#$! thing anywhere. It's been missing for two weeks. Highly annoying. You can imagine how likely I am to keep track of a card if I were to remove it from the camera while shooting. Sticking a filled card in a pocket—or "somewhere"—in the middle of shooting would be tantmount to blindfolding myself and tossing it into a landfill over my shoulder.

This is only one reason why I assume my own practices are virtually worthless to most people. I end up using a wide variety of cameras, and I'm disorganized and lose things easily.

Of course, maybe that makes me more suited to recommend my practices, because I'm such a doofus in this respect that if it works for me, it'll work for you. I don't know. What I'm saying here is that you have to take your own personality, psychology, and abilities into account when you do stuff. For example, I am not going to try to take a backup hard drive offsite on a regular basis. It's a very good idea, and I can see the sense in it; but I also know exactly what I'd do: I'd swap the drive at the offsite location about three times, and then I'd stop. Presently I'd forget about it, and then, five years later, I'd think, "Holy crap, my former neighbor Annabelle still has that hard drive of mine that I was using for offsite backup. And they moved to Oklahoma two years ago. Wonder if they still have it?" Meanwhile, my five-year-old backup is sitting on a shelf in Annabelle's laundry room in Tulsa and has spiders living in it. You get the point.

At any rate, I virtually never use more than one card in a day, and never take more than one card when I go out photographing. I end up almost literally never swapping cards while shooting. I might have done it, but only in the early days with one of my first two digital cameras.

I know some people don't have this luxury.

For the D800, I have three SanDisk Extreme Pro 16GB cards. I just put a clean one in the camera, pointed it out the window, and shot until it filled up. It recorded 278 NEF (Raw) files of about 47.5 MB each, and 278 "Normal" JPEGs of about 9.5 MB each. All that data took 9:41 to download from the card to the computer.

That's with the 36-MP D800, of course, which records 7360x4912 files. Most people shoot smaller files (we all did, until fairly recently). Also, of course, there are bigger cards available, too. (Thank you, video.)

Now, it's quite possible that it's a holdover from shooting film for so many years, but 278 images is overkill for me. That's about eight rolls of 35mm film, and I could probably count on one hand the number of times in my life I've shot as much as eight rolls of 35mm film in one day.

Of course, "YMMV." How much we shoot is entirely a personal choice. Some people are "heavy" shooters (like Garry Winogrand); some people are "light" shooters (like Walker Evans). Back in my school days, there was one local teacher who used to advocate shooting 10 rolls a day, and another who shot very sparingly, 100 rolls a year or less. Actually, I think he shot less than 50 rolls a year, but that seems fantastical and you might not believe it if I said it, so I'll say 100.

I experimented, once upon a time. Severely limited my shooting for a spell, then forced myself to shoot a lot for a spell. I discovered I don't do as well when I shoot too much. It makes me "scattered" and too casual. I do better when I try to make every shot tell, and try to get "the" shot rather than "spray 'n' pray."

(Besides, I hate editing too much work. I'll tell you that story some other time.)

So I seldom hit the limit of the card. I generally have the opposite problem. I often shoot too few images on a card. It's sort of pointless to transfer 12 images (or 20, or 32, or whatever) to the computer and assign them their own folder. So I sometimes just leave the card in the camera for a while as it fills up. There have been a few times when I've hit the wall and filled up a card completely (not with the D800; I'm just speaking generally). But most of those times are just because I'm lazy and started out shooting with a half-full card.

If I'm going somewhere where I know I'll be doing a lot of shooting, I just make sure I have an empty card. That's enough.

If it was not enough—even once—I'd probably buy bigger cards. I don't mind paying for cards these days. Even good ones have gotten relatively inexpensive, and photography is my favorite thing. I can justify the expense.

The upshot is that the way I "think" is that there's a card in the camera and however many pictures the card will hold is how much I can shoot. Bear in mind I'm not a pro or anything close to it. If I were on some critical mission (almost never happens), I'd take a spare card as a backup. I've never experienced a card failure in recent years, though, so I admit I'm relaxed about that. I'm more worried about the camera failing, and much more worried about the battery running out of juice.

Such as it is...
Anyway, here's what I do:

• Take one card along in the camera, and never swap cards "in the field."
• Never reformat in the field.
• Never erase single images on a card (okay, except on those occasions when I mess up and start shooting on a half-full card. But that's a mistake, not a conscious practice.)
• Download the card to the computer using a card reader. The card then goes in a stack on top of my preamp next to my desk where I keep all my cards. I then take a different card and put it back in the camera.
• With the new card in the camera, I "Delete All" in the camera. I don't reformat unless there's any possibility that the card was last used in a different camera. For me, that means often with SD cards and seldom with CF cards, because I currently only use CF cards in the Big Dragoon (the Nikon).

I guess the only thing that needs explaining is why I put the just-used card at the bottom of the pile and put a different card back in the camera—although you've probably already figured that out. It's just so that I retain any particular batch of images on the original card for a while. My system backs up hourly, and sometimes it's a few days before I get around to looking through new images. Mostly, I'll have backed up the images and opened them in Photoshop before the card they came from is re-used. It's just a simple additional failsafe. I've never needed it, but I like doing it.

For example, the card I just filled up as a test is backing up right now. There's a clean card in the D800, erased and ready to go. The card with all the test images on it is at the bottom of the pile; it won't be erased for at least a few days. And possibly a few weeks, unless the weather gets friendlier.

I should mention that I have no real authority for my practice of "erasing all" rather than reformatting every time. I do it because there was one occasion, with one camera, and one card, where reformatting did not erase the old images. Or at least I thought it didn't—it's possible it was operator error. I can't give you chapter and verse. I don't remember. As I say, I use lots of cameras. But ever since then, I've preferred erasing rather than reformatting to clean a card before reuse.

I guess the only thing left to say is that one thing I don't do is to get rid of my old cards. I have all sorts of old cards floating around here, and that's probably not the greatest practice. I tend not to use them—I use my latest "set" of cards almost always. It would probably be more organized to formalize that and get rid of all the sundry older ones.

I'll think about that.

Mike

UPDATE: After filling a card with the D800 I figured I'd try the same thing with one of my new Sony 16 GB cards and the Panasonic GX1, to see how much it really holds, but lordy, I don't have that much patience. The buffer doesn't clear nearly as quickly, and the camera says it can hold almost 800 Raw+JPEG images. I'm going to take its word for that. You can shoot that many pictures in a day, but while you're beavering away at that I'll be over here in the shade of a tree, resting. Shooting 800 pictures in one go is just too much like work.

I'm left thinking I maybe should have gotten 32 GB cards for the D800 and 8 GB cards for the Micro 4/3 cameras.

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:

Keith B: "Just before your last step of deleting all in the camera, you might want to add this: Whenever placing a 'fresh' card in the camera, hit the playback button and see what's on the card. If you don't remember offloading those files, don't erase, reformat, or shoot with the card until you've confirmed the files have been safely saved into the system. Ask me how I know...."

Shawn Barnett: "I remember standing next to Rob Galbraith in either the Lexar or SanDisk booth at some trade show, asking them whether there was a way to detect when a card was nearing failure. The answer was no. When the card starts having errors, it's failing. There's no telling when that'll happen. Exhaustive testing of a card will just add to the wear and reveal nothing until actual wear builds up, when its too late. Since then, I've decided we're all on our own.

"The practices I follow and recommend are:

• Spend at least a little more than the cheapest card you can find.
• Don't format the card until you've copied your data to at least two locations.
• Format your card in the camera you'll use it with.
• Switch to newer cards after two years or less just to be safe.

"I try to keep a CF and an SD card in my truck for those times I forget to load the latest review camera. I also carry a few in a holder in my camera bags.

"I try not to put them in loose in a pocket, for a very good reason. I still carry and use a SanDisk Ultra II 8GB that the washing machine repairman recovered after a year in the 'gunk basket' of my washing machine. Its images were intact, despite the rust caked on the outside of its casing from the nail that was jammed against it in the basket. This disobeys my number four guideline, but it makes me feel like I'm getting away with something.

"I think Rob would be better able to answer your query, but I'll check with the card makers again to see if anything's changed on that longevity question, among other items."

[Shawn was Senior Editor at Imaging-Resource and is now a Senior Editor on the reviews team at Dpreview. —Ed.]

Andrew Hughes: "I would add one recommendation to Shawn's short list: Always buy your cards from a super-reliable source. As an example, Amazon is good, Amazon resellers less so. The likelihood of buying a counterfeit card is high and I would wager that failure rates on counterfeit cards are higher than on legitimate ones."

psu: "Note on formatting vs. delete-all.... Computer 'file systems,' including the storage systems used on flash cards are really just big multi-level lookup tables. At the top hierarchy is the whole system. At the bottom are the pieces of memory that make up the file itself. When you format the card, you just wipe the top level table, and replace it with an empty one. This makes all the files 'disappear' because the system can't find the pieces anymore. But all the pieces are still there. Similarly, when you delete a single file all you do is walk down to the entry in the file system tables that is keeping track of where that file starts and removing it, so you can't find the file anymore. The data is 'still there.'

"Now, like all computer programs file systems have bugs. So, it's possible to 'erase' a single file or a whole file system and for whatever reason maybe some of that old information leaks back in and you think you see things that you just 'deleted.' The only way to know for sure is to actually walk every block of memory in the card or disk and physically erase it by changing all the bits (but that's slow). And even that might not be enough. Those little memory cells just hold charge, or magnetic pulses or whatever, and they can hang around even if 'erased.' So some enterprising dude can come along with special hardware and read it all off. So if you really want it erased what you should really do is not write zeros, but rather write random gibberish over and over again until not even the magnetic remnants of the old data are there underneath anymore. Bottom line: there isn't much difference between format and erase. But format is faster (fewer things to remove). I generally use format."

Mike adds: Shawn tells me he also reformats. He feels there are fewers errors that way than after multiple erase-alls when using cards in many different cameras.

Why I Bought Bigger Memory Cards

This week's column by Ctein

My regular readers know that I am not a profligate photographer. It comes from having learned photography with Polaroid cameras. (Their motto: "Costs as much as 4x5, but a lot smaller!") My 35mm phase lasted barely two years before I migrated to medium format. That encouraged me to retain my conservative habits.

I make a lot more (too many, really) digital photographs each year than I did film, but I'm still not a heavy consumer of those electrons.

I own five 4GB cards, which is enough to hold about 1200 photographs from my Olympus OM-D. That's far more than I will ever make in any one session or trip; it's more than I make in many six-month periods.

Nonetheless, when Best Buy had 8GB cards on sale for four dollars apiece a few weeks back, I grabbed two of them. And, three days ago, when Mike alerted us to the 16GB card sale at B&H [now even cheaper —Ed.], I bought two more cards. I gave Paula two of my 4GB cards for her new camera, but I still, in the span of a month, I've gone from 20GB of photo storage to 60. That's about 3500 photographs. Considerably more than I ever make in a year.

What possessed me to buy all this additional storage?

Three weeks ago, I was photographing the Flying Karamazov Brothers Fortieth Anniversary Show (above) for the boys, and I made a lot (for me) of photos—something like 700 over the course of two performances, plus a series of posed photographs for publicity. I actually needed three of my five memory cards. That's never happened before (damn that ten-frame-per-second burst mode).

I did the unthinkable. I overwrote one of the cards during the sessions. Make that 525 photographs instead of 700. Augh.

I have no idea how I managed to do that. I'm sufficiently aware of the risk that I have three levels of protection against it built into my modus operandi. First, whenever I pop a new card into the camera, I momentarily flip to review mode to see what's stored on the card already, before I erase it. Second, whenever I take a card out of the camera, I set the file lock switch on it and don't reset it until I've offloaded the files into my computer. Third, whenever I take a card out of the camera, it's stored in a different location from the unused cards.

Somehow I managed to override all three of these security blocks. I'm going to blame it on alien influence or demonic possession. Your choice.

Whatever.

I got away lucky. The card I overwrote contained part of one of the performances. There was some really great stuff in there I'm sorry to have lost; it was overall the better set of photographs from the performances. But, I had full coverage from both performances, so there are no holes. If I'd overwritten the card with the posed publicity photographs, there'd be no way to make up for that.

If I'd had a 16GB card in the camera, none of this would've ever happened. There'd have been no card-swapping on site, no chance for me to overwrite earlier work.

The counter-argument to humongous cards, which I'd previously subscribed to, is the "all eggs in one basket" situation. A serious failure with the 16GB card would have cost me everything. But, I've never had that level of failure. I own a Swiss Army knife's worth of software that can recover files from just about any medium that's physically accessible, even if it's been "erased" or so corrupted that the operating system can't mount it as a drive. No, it won't protect me against physical damage or loss. But if I don't have reason to take the card out of the camera, I'm unlikely to lose it or damage it.

Life is uncertain. No working strategy guarantees against loss. But I've now had an unrecoverable failure in the first category, and I've never had one in the second. Consequently, I've decided that for extended photography sessions, it's best to have a big enough card in the camera that the possibility for handling errors goes away.

©2013 by Ctein, all rights reserved

Ctein, TOP's weekly columnist, appears on Wednesdays when all is well with the world and the hard drive.

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Featured Comments from:

Patrick Perez: "My theoretical solution to avoiding this type of handling error is to number all my cards and use them in ascending (or descending) order. Start a shoot with all the cards blank and you have a visual reminder of where you're at. Not a panacea, but another level of protection."

HT: "I went through the exact same thing while using a borrowed Nikon D700 and a handful of my own 2GB memory cards. Somewhere during a day of shooting, I inadvertently formatted a full card and began shooting over it. It was my first data loss in seven years of digital photography. Having reached the same conclusions Ctein did, I'm now using a 32GB card with my (very own) D700. So far, so good!"

Rick Kier (partial comment): "I like all my eggs in one basket, because the only time I've ever broken the eggs is when I'm juggling two baskets."

Blog Notice

Very interesting 24 hours here. I've been offline most of that time, not by choice. I've spent maybe 7 hours total on the phone with Apple Tech Support. It started with some email problems, and led to a discovery of some completely unrelated problems—discoveries which may well have staved off later catastrophe. The big problems are apparently all solved now, knock on wood, but the email irregularities continue.

Two tiny morsels of cheap advice, even though I realize a great many of my regular readers are far more computer savvy than I am: never buy anything from Apple without AppleCare (those guys are really great) and always, always, always back up!!! (Note that I do not splatter a page with exclamation points lightly.) My backup drive saved my bacon big time today! OS 10.8 allows you to switch between two separate backup drives, which I'll be implementing soon.

I hope to have TOP up and running again tomorrow sometime, with Ctein's overdue Wednesday column. Be aware that I am not receiving all of my email yet. The email problems will persist for at least another day and possibly through the weekend. If you've been trying to get in touch with me or have been expecting a reply—or just wondering about the radio silence—my apologies! We're a-workin' on it.

—Mike, learning IT crumb by crumb

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:

albert w erickson: "Mike, for those of us who live and die with our Macs, we would appreciate understanding your computer issues so as to avoid them in the future. Please write about the issues as well as the solutions. Thanks."

Mike replies: Pretty simple really, Albert, just scary...Disk Utility showed a corrupted system and couldn't repair it. So I had to erase my hard drive, download a new copy of the latest operating system, and reinstall my data from the backup drive. It's called a "clean install." Happens to lots of people, at least occasionally. At least I'm told it's not uncommon, whether with PCs or Macs.

It all went smoothly, but, understandably, I went from being very blasé about my backup protocols to being completely dependent on them for all of my data, including my 20,000-file digital music collection and all of my digital photographs.

That's an interesting experience. Remember that Time Machine is essentially unverifiable...you set it up, keep an eye on it to see that it's not complaining, and then essentially trust that it's doing its job. I do take certain precautions...for instance, I buy a new backup hard drive about every two years and put the old one on the shelf. My local tech tells me that hard drives need to be turned on once or twice a year to prevent freezing, so the old ones literally have a "limited shelf life." But I do it not for the sake of the shelved drive but mainly to insure that I have a new, late model drive keeping my backups. And I don't use the backup drive for anything else at all...just backups. My current one—the one that saved me yesterday—is a 2 TB OWC Mercury Elite Pro.

If you want to see what's up (assuming you're on a Mac, I know even less about PCs), just run Applications > Utilities > Disk Utility > Verify disk. (I am very much not an expert, but I have a slight advantage in that if I say anything dumb, a more knowledgable TOP reader will no doubt quickly step in and correct me.)

My local tech tells me that OS 10.8 (Mountain Lion) will allow you to swap out one hard drive for another and keep two physically separate sets of backup data. For maximum security you swap the two every so often and keep the off-duty one in another location. I doubt I'll go that far, but he told me he's seen several instances of a client's data being completely destroyed by a single fire. (This makes sense when you consider the photographers, Carleton Watkins and Jacques Lowe chief among them, whose archives have been lost to disaster—Carleton in the San Francisco Fire and Jacques in 9/11.) I've bought a second hard drive and plan to make a second backup in the future.

We discovered the problem during the process of troubleshooting the mail problems, which everyone agrees are on Apple's end, not mine. As we were waiting for something to happen, I was questioning the tech support supervisor about when I should buy a new computer, and I described some of the problems I've experienced with my computer lately. He said, "That shouldn't be happening. Let's just run Disk Utility so I can see what error messages you're getting." That's when one thing led to another.

The email problem still isn't fixed, but we're still working on it.

John Whitley: "Speaking as someone with years of experience avoiding disasters due to good backup policy, I'll offer this advice: Always keep at least three copies of any critical data. One is your 'working copy' on your computer, along with two other copies. Your backup process must be tested—can you access the backup when needed? Without this verification, you don't yet know whether you have a working backup.

"As the costs of disks have dropped, I tend to prefer full-disk bootable backups on small 2.5" bus-powered USB or Firewire drives. These work well and make it trivial to store one backup copy safely off-site. On OS X, software like SuperDuper! and Carbon Copy Cloner allow for great ease of use with this sort of process. The downtime in the event of a disk crash or other data loss is minimal with this setup. The last time I had a crash, I booted from the most recent backup, ordered a replacement drive and was working again in minutes.

"It's important to note that a 'cloud' or online service such as Dropbox, Google Drive, etc. only ever counts as one copy. Even if the provider nominally keeps backups, you have no visibility into what single points of failure ('SPOFs' in industry lingo) may exist in their processes. That also includes events such as catastrophic business failure, not just technological events. Use online storage wisely, but don't consider it to be magic."

HD: "One is none, as my colleagues mock me for saying perhaps one time too often. And two backups in one location is also none. One backup stays offsite, so short of an earthquake.... On Macs, Time Machine is a good tool, and SuperDuper has gotten me back up and running with only minutes of downtime on a number of occasions. Bootable backups are wonderful. Then there's the question of making sure that the backups work regularly, and are not corrupted (and that you're not silently losing pix). Drobos and the like start looking inexpensive."

Mike replies: What's a Drobo?

Murray Davidson: "The first time you lose serious data should be your last. May I direct all you grasshoppers to an entertaining and supremely educational site on the subject of backups? Read, embrace and achieve enlightenment."

WORM Cards

It's unfortunate that my little aside about write-once memory cards completely dominated the Comments yesterday. (Didn't see that coming.)

However, I did learn something. First, I learned that some people are already using their cards one-shot. That's a new one on me. Second, as Richard T. and several others pointed out, SanDisk has already been down this road, with its 1GB WORM card (the acronym is for write once, read many). The card is supposedly securely non-rewritable but readable anywhere, and the memory is optimized to last for 100 years.

Curiously, just about exactly what I was envisioning...before I knew it actually existed.

They're evidently not widely available and not well supported, and I couldn't find a list of devices than can write to them, a list which SanDisk implies is limited. I also tried contacting SanDisk, but my attempts bombed. (Curiously, the operator at corporate headquarters couldn't put me in touch with PR...she said she only has a name directory and not a departmental one. I've never encountered that before.)

Strange. I'd think that SanDisk would like nothing better than to encourage people to use memory cards only once and then keep them; it would provide them with a constantly renewing market. But, turns out, they don't even want to talk to anybody about it.

And in an unrelated P.S., I should have pointed out yesterday that I use 16GB SanDisk Extreme Pro CF cards in my Nikon D800.

Mike

P.S. I should probably also mention that I'm not necessarily advocating one-shot memory cards and probably wouldn't use them if they were readily available. It really was just an idle question.

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So Many Cameras, So Little Time

...And by the way, did I make a big mistake with the Big Dragoon? Here Canon has very considerately made a lens of ideal specification for me—35mm ƒ/2, with in-lens IS...and it apparently made it just for me, too, as nobody else seems to be buying them. And there are not one but two wider primes with IS, too. You know me, always gassing on about my finicky lens preferences. I probably should have gotten a 6D with an IS prime or two. I even have a Canon EOS-1v in the house, too. That lens could do double duty.

I need to stop thinking now. It just gets me in trouble. Too few cameras is definitely not my problem at the moment.

Mike

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Featured Comments from:

Hugh: "5D3 with the shutter set on quiet mode, 3200 ISO, 35mm ƒ/2 IS lens, and you've a street shooter to beat any Leica M. Sorry!  :-) "

Rob: "I recently shocked myself by shelling out $2600 for a new Sony RX1 with its superb Zeiss 35mm ƒ/2 lens. The camera is a blast to use, and the images it produces are jaw dropping. I can live with the RX1's obvious limitations as a fixed-lens, single-focal-length camera, but my biggest complaint is that it lacks image stabilization. I understand that Sony probably chose to omit IS because of size and/or cost considerations, but still it is something that I miss. The chief mitigating factor is that the sensor performs very well at ISOs up to 6400 (and above), so one can simply select a fast shutter speed to minimize camera shake. Still, as one who is accustomed to in-body stabilization with my Pentax DSLRs, I know how valuable IS can be. Having it in the Canon 35mm is a big plus for that lens."

Jay: "Now I have to send you some of my photos with this lens  :-)"

Mike replies: Yes you do!

Like a Sack of Bricks

The weather here has been particularly nasty lately, and here's why: It's out to get me.

The problem: ice. Over and over again: thaws, freezes; rains, freezes. It's been happening for weeks now. That the ice isn't everywhere makes it more dangerous: it's hiding, laying in wait for you. Ready to spring a nasty surprise on you when you least expect it. Why is it that 90% of the wet-looking places on the sidewalk are just wet, and the rest are glare ice? It makes no sense.

I've fallen three times so far. And this is one very good reason to lose weight, brother. When my feet go out from under me, I go down hard, like a sack of bricks. As overweight as I am, it's like hitting the concrete with a seventh-grader on my back. One time I fell so hard I just had to lie there on the sidewalk for a few minutes, silently repeating, "please nothing be broken, please nothing be broken." The dog was like, what now? The poor girl has had very few walks lately. It's just too treacherous on the sidewalks for the two-footed.

Nothing was broken. I keep hearing stories of other people who aren't so lucky, though. The nice lady at the supermarket told me her sister-in-law slipped, fell, broke her leg in three places, and now has a metal plate. So, could be worse.

On Sunday and Monday it rained. Melted maybe a third of the snow. It's miserable when it rains on the snowpack. Nothing can drain properly. I had water in the basement, and once again I was out in the rain trying to fix the #@%! gutter in the dark. Last night, yup, everything froze. One more round.

The older I get, the more I hate the end of winter. I don't mind winter; I rather like it. I just don't like so much of it. I can see staying in Wisconsin, but I'm going to have to learn to travel to warm places at least once per winter. I'm thinking twice would be a lot better.

I think of spring like baseball fans do. Except, instead of the beginning of spring training, what's coming is the beginning of photography. There are hopeful signs all around: my beloved Daylight Savings Time has returned (I adore DST, and shut up, please), daylight is lasting well past six, and the summer solstice is only a little more than three short months away. Spring—and photography season—will be here before we know it.

And not a single short moment too soon if you ask me. The dog needs her exercise. And so does the Big Dragoon.

Mike

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Featured Comments from:

Jeff: "Good thing Marcin Ryczek didn't wait for Spring."

Mike replies: You would think I'd take that as the zinger it's intended to be, but I do not. He's 30. I'm 56. When I was thirty, I was outdoors in the subzero temps making my winter pictures too. (In fact I recently found a beaut that's been missing for years, a 4x5" neg I've never printed but still would like to. And man was it ever cold the morning I took it.) But I am an old dawg now, and more than happy to leave such shenanigans to you youngsters.

Scott Marriott: "Your post today could have been written from here almost word for word. I'm 59 and live in Latvia. I was down at the frozen 'beach' this morning (the Baltic Sea), with my Pentax K30 and the 100mm ƒ/2.8 Macro WR, and fell on my ass faster than I could blink. We've got to be careful out there if were are going to make it to Spring. The dregs of Winter are indeed its most treacherous part. Glad to hear you're all right."

David: "Mike, another spanker here. 56? Im 53 and I was out almost every single day in December and January with a camera strapped on and lake effect snow blazing away here...straight across the lake from you in Michigan, all winter, same latitude. Did some of the best 'woods' work of my life (I'm a city photographer) and it's been exhilarating. Dude, get some cheap snow pants, like snowboarders wear...get your warmth gear and get out...like someone said on this comment section...why are you thinking old?"

Mike replies: You're as young as you feel, as they say.

Pentax Rebates (and My Memory Cards)

Starting now and for the rest of March, Pentax USA is offering a series of rebates in conjunction with the Wedding and Portrait Photographers International Expo (WPPI) taking place at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas beginning today. You don't have to be at the Expo to take advantage of the rebates.

The deal is: buy a 645D body and one or both of two lenses, and you'll receive a $500 prepaid VISA card for each lens you buy. The lenses are the D-FA 25mm superwide (19.5mm-e) and HD 90mm (71mm-e) short telephoto.

(In case you're not up to date on it, the Pentax 645D, with its 44x33mm, 40-MP sensor, now goes for $8,800 and includes the 55mm ƒ/2.8 normal (43mm-e) normal lens for free. If that sounds expensive, compare it to the $22,000 Leica S and its $5,000 normal lens that you do have to pay for.)

Or, buy a Pentax K-5 IIs body and one or more of three lenses, and receive a $250 VISA card for each lens. The lenses, among Pentax's best, are the 31mm, 43mm and 77mm Limited primes (~47mm-e, 65mm-e, and 116mm-e on the K-5 IIs).

To qualify, the lenses and body must be purchased at the same time and appear together on the same receipt.

Here's the information page. The offer is good through the end of the month.

Cards
Also current right now: B&H is offering another super deal on Sony 16GB SDHC cards: $23.95 for two. These are the cards I use now, thanks to a similar deal a while back.

There's also a deal on 32GB cards. [UPDATE: Link removed; deal has ended.]

An idle question: do you suppose the day will ever come when we'll use flash cards just once and just keep the full ones as a way to archive the files? Like we used to keep negatives. Download the card, and then, instead of erasing it and reusing it, label the card and store it. Use a new card each time we use the camera, just like we used to put a new roll of film in the camera before shooting. It's no longer an absurd idea, at least. Well, maybe it is, but not so absurd as it used to be.

Mike

Disclosure: Pentax is an advertiser on 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.

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bill: "SDHC cards for permanent storage a la negatives is already being done. A wedding photog friend has been doing it for years. When he started I thought the cost a bit high but at current prices? Also, if you consider what film used to cost and the cost to soup it (home or sent out), an SDHC card is a bargain!

"My baseline is medium format. So number of pics on a card vs. rolls of film and it may be a no brainer. Of course we shot a bit tighter back then. But edited and put on small cards or batched.

"I think permanence of the cards deserves investigation. My HDDs have failed a few times and while I have redundant backups and all that, I think it is not a bad ideas at all. I seem to think somewhere in the back of my addled mind there are some permanence issues?? Likely no worse than film though, especially color neg and cromes. Don't shoot so much as I did, but may start this now. Great idea."

Mike replies: I was actually envisioning a purpose-made new product, non-rewritable and optimized (assuming we have the technology?) for long-term life, complete with a waterproof and label-able case. But with current cards...well, okay.

David: "Although it seemed idle conjecture, flash memory isn't a suitable archiving medium because it's not meant to be as robust as (some) optical media, older magneto-optical media (which in their own way due to obsolescence have become poor archives) hard disks, or say, Kodachrome. Digital atrophy remains real, largely because robustness isn't inherent and must be engineered and secondly it's not being funded. Cheaper to retain multiples and hope one of 'em's good later."

John Willard: "I toss my cards in a shoe box and don't label them as to who would be in the pictures or where the pictures were taken. Just carrying on the tradition."

The Last Dye Sale: Date Certain

We now have a "date certain" and a final pricing structure for Ctein's Final Blowout Pre-Darkroom-Death Dye Transfer Sale.

If you've been following along, you know that Ctein—his only name, and pronounced "kuh-TINE"—long one of the World's master dye transfer printers, will soon be closing his darkroom for good and using up the last of his stockpiled dye transfer materials in one last grand gesture. (He mortgaged his house in the '90s to lay in a large supply.) The sale will offer four full-sized (about 16x20 inches, give or take) dye transfer prints. We're not quite sure yet how many prints will be available, but the number will be somewhere between 100 and 200. He's still counting his sheets of paper.

David Hockney, Artist, London, 1977. Photo by Bern Schwartz; dye transfer print by Ctein. Ctein was the dye transfer printer for many famous photographers, including rock and roll photographer Jim Marshall.
(This picture is not in the sale.)

Full-sized dye transfer prints are very expensive, even to have one made from your own photograph. Ctein's current price for large prints is $1,650 (and that will be going up sharply after his darkroom closes), and, actually, that's a bargain price for big dye transfer prints. The prints in this sale will be the most expensive we've ever offered at $575 each, but still, for what they are....

Shipping to anywhere in the world will be a flat $25 regardless of destination or number of prints.

The sale will begin at noon on Wednesday, April 17th and will proceed until the prints are sold out or until noon on Monday, April 22nd, whichever comes first.

We've had several inquiries already about pre-paying or reserving prints in advance, and I'm sorry, but we won't do that. It's first-come, first-serve beginning on at noon Wednesday the 17th. That's when you can first see the images, too. (There will be four.)

There are still a scant handful of working dye transfer printers in the world, and a few photographers (including Ctein) will continue to sell previously made prints from stock. (It has been many years since the materials were last commercially available.) But this will be the last large sale of made-to-order dyes in the history of photography, for what it's worth. My guess is that it won't be too many years before this glorious and devilishly difficult ancient process is entirely extinct.

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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Marcin Had a Hit

...So now getting back to this idea that it's your "hits" that make you famous. You've now heard of 30-year-old Polish photographer Marcin Ryczek, a native of Lublin now living in Krakow.

Turns out his photo of a man feeding swans from a snowy riverbank, taken from Grunwaldzki Bridge in Krakow, has been featured all over the world. It got him interviewed in Spiegel Online, for one thing. (Der Spiegel, which means "mirror," is one of Europe's largest weekly newsmagazines.) Here's an excerpt, in which Marcin talks about his picture's remarkable reach so far:

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Where has it been published so far?

Ryczek: It's on nearly all of the important social networks in the United States, China, Japan, Russia, Israel and many other countries. On reddit.com it got some 3 million hits within 24 hours, and the Polish TV station N24 even aired it too. Actor Jared Leto and novelist Jonathan Carroll also praised the photo.

It made PetaPixel and MSN and a myriad lesser sites, and in the U.K. it rated an article in The Guardian, no less.

We're talking about him here too, of course. He's undeniably more famous to me than he was before he took that picture. (I'd never heard of him before.)

Of course, one photograph, even a viral one, is not enough to make a career; if Marcin doesn't follow it up with more good work he won't be known as a famous photographer in the long run.

Still, consider a few things:

I get contacted by dozens of PR agents every week, seeking publicity for their clients and their clients' products. I have to ignore most of them, either because they're not a fit for our audience, or they just don't grab me, or I don't have room to mention them or enough time to learn more about them. The point is that those clients are paying for publicity—and they're not getting nearly as much as Marcin Ryczek. The level of publicity he's getting essentially can't be bought. There are million-dollar ad campaigns that achieve less.

Next, think of all the ways he could continue to leverage the photo's popularity if he wanted to. Part of the reason single photos become their creators' "avatars," as one commenter so aptly phrased it the other day, is because once a photograph achieves this kind of fame and public awareness, the photographer can continue to spread its fame and use it for added and continued publicity. What's required is to continue to associate the photo to the photographer's name, and to continue to extend the reach of the picture's recognition.

He has instructions for purchasing prints on his Facebook page: 

I set all the details associated with the sale of prints. Already this week I would like to set the size and price. If you are interested in buying and sell information, please send me a email with your name to the address marcinryczek@nieznanykrakow.com. Presently I will answer. Best regards, Marcin

I'll bet he's sold a few, too. A poster? Well printed and well placed, it could do very well on its own terms and also continue to gain still more publicity for the photo and its creator.

Of course, to effectively leverage a hit, you've got to be ready. Mainly by having a body of work to stand behind the "hit." Assuming he has that, he might also use this photo's success to get his portfolio looked at by museum curators and book publishers, or as a "foot in the door" for gallery representation. Assuming he wants that, of course.

Even a true hit is worth much less if there's nothing else there. And, of course, it's not worth as much if there's never another one. (Then you're Thunderclap Newman. Although I still love "Something in the Air.") But on the other hand, a hit is precious and rare. Even the greatest singers and bands only have so many. (I do think the pop music analogy is pretty robust, even after rolling it around in my mainly empty head for several days.)

Luck
I realize that this post—and this issue—is mainly of concern only to a subset of readers, namely younger photographers of ambition. And, granted, it takes a huge amount of luck to have a true hit, a sensation. It's absolutely not something you can make happen just because you want it to happen. It is, in the classic sense, a "big break."

But if you should chance to be so lucky, you can be prepared to leverage it:

• Help it along: work to extend the reach of the picture's fame even further.
• Make sure your name is associated with it as often as possible. It doesn't count if the picture becomes famous but no one knows who took it.
• Know the opportunities. And have a plan. Use your flash of fame to get your foot in whatever doors you want to be opened to you.
• Have your other work prepared and ready to show to anyone who wants to see more. You never know when you're going to need that.

Now I have to go listen to "Something In the Air," and hope it doesn't roll around in my head. Love a good bass line....

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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Gerard Kingma: "I was thinking about chiming in before, but I didn't want to sound ungrateful for what fate threw at my feet. In 2003 I took a picture of a sheep followed by three lambs against a clear blue sky. The moment I pressed the shutter, the middle lamb jumped up. The image won me the Travel Photographer of the Year 2005 award, Single Image category (a trip to the Bahamas for two and Photoshop CS2 were the prizes). The image was picked up nationally and I've sold it quite often. Within a year I was totally fed up with the image. Nobody wanted to look at my other pictures, for which I'd worked harder and which I valued more. 'Oh yeah, I've seen your work, you're the Jumping Lamb guy.' (So you haven't seen my work, I thought.) That comment went stale very, very quickly. Well, to cut it short, I was grateful, but after a while I really wanted to move on, so I decided I didn't want to be the Jumping Lamb guy anymore and instead of trying to milk ('leverage') the image for what it's worth, I decided to focus on the images I wanted to take, I took the image down from the front page of my website. It's still there somewhere and prints are still for sale, but please, no more Mr. Jumping Lamb."

Gerard's Photostream is here and his website is here. And although this is counter to Gerard's intentions, the jumping lamb picture is in the Groningen set at his website, in case you're curious. I will say I had never seen it before. —Ed.

Will Frostmill: "What is remarkable to me, is that when I first discovered that picture (via Twitter), it was so obviously a classic that I thought I had seen it before. Like, years before, like as a poster in a store. I am totally serious. I think this tells us something important about hits: they fit so thoroughly into the created world that their 'meaning' is inescapable."

Ben Donald: "The press this snapshot received (and receives) is way out of proportion. Personally I would have probably deleted this right in camera."

Open Mike: Sleep, Baby

It's curious that right after I underwent sleep testing, The New Yorker would have an article about it. I hope you can see the whole article at the link; it appears to be up on the open Web, but I'm a subscriber so I don't know what kind of special privileges are buried in my computer's protocols.

The article is by Elizabeth Kolbert, who I sometimes forget is a generalist reporter/writer and not just a brilliant writer about climate change. It contains a line that's as close to blatant humor as you'll find in David Remnick's incarnation of the magazine (humor being not Remnick's strong suit): "Of the many ways that things can go wrong in bed," Kolbert writes, deadpanning, "sleep troubles are probably the most prevalent."

The article doesn't end up delving into the subject in Kolbert's customary depth, but I'll quote a passage in case you can't access the whole article yourself:

Each of us has an internal clock, or, to use Roenneberg’s term, a 'chronotype.' Either we’re inclined to go to bed early and wake up at dawn, in which case we’re 'larks,' or we like to stay up late and get up later, which makes us 'owls.' (One’s chronotype seems to be largely inherited, although Roenneberg notes, not altogether helpfully, that the 'genetics are complex.') During the week, everyone is expected to get to the office more or less at the same time—let's say 9 A.M. This suits larks just fine. Owls know they ought to go to bed at a reasonable time, but they can't—they're owls. So they end up having to get up one, two, or, in extreme cases, three hours earlier than their internal clock would dictate. This is what Roenneberg refers to as 'social jet lag'—each workday, owls fall asleep in one time zone and, in effect, wake up in another. By the time the week is over, they’re exhausted. They 'fly back' to their internal time zone on weekends and sleep in on Saturday and Sunday. Then, on Monday, they start the process all over again.

For larks, the problem is reversed. Social life is arranged so that it's hard to have one unless you stay out late on Friday and Saturday nights. But, even when larks have partied till 3 a.m., they can't sleep in the following day—they're larks. So they stagger through until Monday, when they can finally get some rest.

This reminds me of one of the better progressive ideas I've read about. I know almost nothing about it (but then, I'm not writing in The New Yorker).

The idea is to have two workdays, running simultaneously. One would be a conventional, standard day that would begin at 8 a.m., break for lunch at noon, and conclude at 5 p.m. The "other" day would begin at 11 a.m., break for lunch at 3 p.m., and conclude at 8 p.m.

Not only would it accommodate "larks" and "owls" without discrimination, which would be accomplishment enough (as a longtime owl, I've never adjusted to the world's judgementally larkish schedule very well), but there would be all kinds of social and business advantages: restaurants could spread lunch and dinner hours over a longer period of time, schools and other institutions would be able to utilize their physical plants for more of the day, and the usage pressure on roads and other infrastructure would be relaxed. Assuming you live in a city that still has a defined "rush hour" (I do know that in some cities, rush hour begins at 6 a.m. and doesn't end until 9 p.m.), the periods of heaviest traffic would be split in two and everyone would get where they're going faster.

I would shorten the amount of time that "first shift" and "second shift" workers would have to do business with each other, but that overlap would still exist. And each "shift" would have hours in its day when only half of the rest of the world was working, which resumably would increase peace and quiet and reduce distractions, possibly increasing productivity.

Importantly, it would mean that high school students could start and end their days later. Human teenagers are programmed to be owls as part of nature's mating game, and forcing them to start their days at 8 a.m. or even earlier is simply a mild form of torture that impairs their academic performance. Elizabeth's article says, "A school district in Minnesota that switched to a later schedule found that the average S.A.T. scores for the top ten per cent of the class rose by more than two hundred points, a result that the head of the College Board called 'truly flabbergasting.'" But then she goes on to point out that "teachers and school administrators generally resist the change, preferring to believe that the problem is insoluble."

There are a few problems with the double-day idea, too. For instance, what if your day starts at 11 but your toddler's starts at 8? But parents of young children have to get dragged into the lark cohort anyway, so not much would really be changing there. And who knows? If society became normalized to two workdays, maybe larks could socialize earlier on weekends, and get to bed on time.

No later than
The problems don't really matter, though, because, like most good ideas, this one will never be implemented. We do things not because they make sense, but because we have always done them. Why is the entire world on a lark's schedule, when only some 25% of us are natural larks? Farmers, believe it or not. Farmers have to start their days bitterly early, when the proverbial cock crows. The rest of society went along with this schedule, back in the days when society was overwhelmingly agrarian and farmers were economically the most important players in most communities. And now that farmers amount to less than 1% of the population? Nothing's changed. And nothing ever will.

And before I leave the subject of sleep (like Elizabeth Kolbert, I'm going to content myself with a glancing pass at the subject that doesn't pretend to be thorough), I'll pass along something my doctor told me. He said the single, overriding factor in good "sleep hygiene" and the way you regulate your body's internal schedule is to set a deadline time for every morning, past which you will never sleep in. It doesn't matter when this is, but he said that the time you start your day, more than anything else, regulates the rest of the day; for everything else, the body and brain will adjust. All you have to do is to set that "latest awakening" time and never sleep past it.

For what that's worth.

I had a pretty good night's sleep last night, which is a good thing. It means I'll probably get some work done today.

Mike

"Open Mike" is a series of off-topic essays that appear on some Sundays on 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.
I just got this—Freud's best book, in my opinion, and the only one of his books worth reading now for the layperson non-specialist. This illustrated edition is delightful. And you might be able to find it for just a few bucks at your local chain bookstore...it has recently been on closeout.

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Phil: "That's an interesting notion—about the Larks and the Owls—and one I guess we're all familiar with on some level. Here's what's odd with me: I used to be a dyed-in-the-wool Owl, and getting up before 8 a.m. on any morning, no matter when I went to bed, was always a struggle. And it still is when I'm working my 'day job,' which I do only part of the year.

"When I'm off work and at home though, I am up every morning, pretty much seven days a week, at 4 a.m. The hours between 4 and 9 a.m. are spent in my darkroom. Whether I'm actually printing, processing, or doing anything at all productive makes no difference, I am up and at 'em and in there every morning. And this for like the last the or four years now.

"As it turns out, this particular time slot was the only one available where there were zero wifely demands or other domestic obligations or interruptions, and I am able to completely focus on my 'work.' I don't even need an alarm clock anymore, I'm wide awake and outta bed at 3:50 every morning and it doesn't matter if I went to bed at 9 or midnight.

"However genetically predisposed I am (or was) to the old Owl's 'chronotype,' my photography habit seems to have converted me to the Lark's. At least when I'm not working."

Mike replies: According to the lastest research when I was in college—which is not the latest research any more, n.b.—sleep is trainable. You can be trained to adapt to a longer or shorter day, longer or shorter nights, or (within limits) different schedules. The one thing people really do not do well is with constantly shifting schedules; people need regularity in order to stand a chance of adapting. And the influences appear to need to be exogenous, i.e., imposed on you from outside. Note that I am not an expert.

Paul Amyes: "I worked for a while at a place that had flexi-time. Core hours were 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. but when you started and finished were up to you. It was brilliant. I'd get in at 6 and could get heaps done without the phone ringing. You could also accrue extra hours which you could carry forward and take off so in effect if you could manage things right you could tack this onto your annual leave."

NBC Interviews 'Migrant Mother' Florence Thompson

Florence Thompson in 1979.

The short take: NBC's Bob Dotson is publishing a book. NBC is helping publicize it. An article on Today.com publishes the original video segment and an excerpt from the book, which is apparently the text from the video segment, closely followed but heavily reworded. The video segment is obviously archival, not recent. It's from...hmm. Doesn't say.

I'm noticing these days that "Journalism 101" violations are getting much more common...again and again I have to go fill in one or more of the "Five W's" by myself. (I was reading an article about a racetrack called "Riverside" in a car magazine recently, and nowhere did it mention where Riverside is. California, turns out. I didn't know.)

You know what they say..."oh well." Just so you know, the original air date of the video segment was October 30th, 1979. I think any article including it should have mentioned that.

I've seen the video segment before several times over the years. I never thought much of it back in the day. It doesn't offer any insight into the picture or discuss what Florence thought of it. It neglects to show the famous picture in its entirety (just a zoom-crop, and the same with several outtakes) and it doesn't even mention Dorothea Lange. The reworded article remedies that, at least.

Very oddly, though, the article/book also rewords the quotes, so that they no longer follow what Florence and some of the others actually say in the video piece.

Here's the article:

"Did you ever lose hope?" I asked.

"Nope," she said, snapping off a flower to take a sniff. "If I'd'a lost hope, this country never would have made it."

In the video, there's no flower, no sniff. And what she says is:

"No. If I'd ever left hope, I'd never [a'] made it."

(I can't quite tell if it's "I'd never a' made it"—i.e., I'd never have made it, with that "have" elided to almost nothing—or "I'd never made it." In any event, nothing about "this country." Not an accurate quote either way.)

You know what they say...about grains of salt, this time.

Mike
(Thanks to Hans Giersberg and several other readers)

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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Mike Plews: "Three hours ago I was looking at a 1965 vintage print of Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California, 1936, at a show at the Sheldon Museum in Lincoln, Nebraska. The Sheldon has been acquiring photography for quite some time and this exhibit consists of 110 selections from the collection. It was quite a show with work ranging from a Fox Talbot Calotype to some contemporary work on big sheets of aluminum. I never expected to see vintage prints from Ralph Steiner, O. Winston Link, and Robert Mappelthorpe in the same room. It made me a little dizzy. It was a real pleasure to look at such a variety of visions and methods. Nothing equals actually getting close to original prints. The show runs through the end of April. Highly recommended. The book is also rather nice. Good reproductions in the book but tough to be objective with the originals still so fresh in my mind. Finished it off with a slice of prime at Misty's with Mrs. Plews and had a nice, relaxed, rainy afternoon drive back to Iowa."

John Camp: "When you change language, you change the reader's apprehension of the interviewee's status and personality. Most people use language in a way that's as distinct as a fingerprint. As a journalist, though, I'd sometimes have to change quotes. If a politician said, 'Well, what we were trying to do, uh, John? Is that right? ...trying to get enough bond money passed to fix the gd'd runway before any more planes, you know, crashed or whatever.' I'd change that to, 'What we were trying to do is get enough bond money passed to fixed the runway before any more planes crashed.' Every reporter does this—you elide certain words and phrases in the interest of making the quote understandable. Though sometimes you wouldn't—and in those cases, you were usually mocking the interviewee, which is worse than not changing it. But for other interviewees, you leave the language alone, and this seems to me one of those cases where you do that. But they not only didn't leave it alone, they changed it.

"Actually, I've seen a couple interviews with this woman, and I have to say...she didn't seem to have much to contribute. It seemed to me like she didn't understand what had happened to her, what came afterwards, or even what the photo meant to a lot of people. Like, if you'd interviewed the fat guy jumping over the puddle, in C.-B.'s famous shot, what would he have to contribute? It's the shot that's important, not the jump or the guy. But I could be wrong."

Mike replies: But you do agree that changing "I would never have made it" to "this country never would have made it" is well out of bounds, right? The text and video offers other examples for closer reading if anyone is interested. Makes me wonder what people who only read the book are getting, vs. what they think they're getting.

Hugh Crawford: "Any time anyone edits something it gets further away from the truth, except for the times that it doesn't. I have been interviewed on a few occasions and many times I get asked more or less the same questions  and I give more or less the same answers. I'm sure that Florence Thompson has been interviewed a few times and I am sure that the questions and answers were pretty similar but not the same each time, and there is nothing to indicate that the the video is the same exchange as recorded in the text.

"Not only that, but the standard way of filming an interview with one camera is to set up one camera angle, do the interview, set up another angle and do a lot of the questions and answers a second or third time, then edit it together into one composite. Often the second or third versions in the same interview are a little different.

"As far as print journalism goes, successive edits for length style and clarity by persons not familiar with the subject can mangle meaning.

"Still, The Today story is a mess and the bit about the flower is the least of it. The author says, 'I found a trailer camp on the site of the old migrant camp in Modesto, California,' but the migrant camp was actually in Nipomo, 250 miles away on the coast. I grew up 20 miles from Modesto and it is not near the coast. Boston and Manhattan are closer than Modesto and Nipomo.

"The Today caption starts, 'Florence Thompson was a widowed migrant worker,' but both Dorothea Lange and Florence Thompson's account mention her husband.

"Dorothea Lange recorded them as being migrant workers in the parking lot of a pea pickers camp, and the newspapers shortened that to them being pea pickers (logical enough right?) when in fact they were beet pickers whose car had broken down near the parking lot and her husband and sons went to get repairs.

"We grew beets on our farm near Modesto in the '60s, and you don't pick beets, you dig them out of the ground with a machete with a spike on the end.

"Yet another inadvertent screw-up.

"When the Paulo Pellgrin botched caption brouhaha was boiling over, I was thinking of the Dorothea Lange / Florence Thompson caption mess.

"Incidentally, Florence Thompson died in 1986, and had complained  in 1983 about never getting any money for the picture. And she was ashamed of it. It's more complicated than that and if I made it simple and clear it would not be the truth. Read this, it's a good start."

Jock Elliott: "Once upon a time there existed in our universe wondrous creatures called editors and fact checkers. Editors make sure that essential information is included—like Riverside is in California—and fact checkers make sure that the facts in the story are right. I wonder where they went? In my experience as a writer, I found that most people—with the possible exception of politicians on the stump—do not speak in smooth sentences that are easily quotable. As a result, eliding quotes is common, and I find that most interviewees appreciate having that done. But—and this is standard procedure for me—I usually run the final quotes by the subject of the interview to make sure the quotes accurately reflect the conversation."

Random Excellence: Marcin Ryczek

Photograph by Marcin Ryczek

There are pictures you like and pictures you don't, but only rarely can one be called a "tour de force." (Random House Dictionary: "An exceptional achievement by an artist, author, or the like, that is unlikely to be equaled by that person or anyone else; stroke of genius"; Collins English Dictionary: "A masterly or brilliant stroke, creation, effect, or accomplishment.") Karl Knize, who sent us the link, titled his email "The Ultimate B&W Photograph?" You see his point.

This is by Polish photographer Marcin Ryczek, of a man feeding swans and ducks by a river in Krakow. For pictures of people feeding birds by a riverbank, of which I've seen numberless examples over many years, I guess this about closes the category.

Here's Marcin's Facebook Page, where you can see a bigger version. I like this shot, too (but then, I would).

Mike
(Thanks to Karl)

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:

Adam Lanigan: "Gorgeous. I'm always tormented when seeing photos like that. I feel the need to rise to a higher level blended perfectly with the desire to just hang it all up."

Ahem: "Whenever I see 'tour de force' on a book description, I stop reading since it's a tired, over-used phrase. Once in a blue moon (see what I did there?) it is an apt description. This is one of those cases."

Mike replies: I change the channel whenever a commercial begins, "Introducing the revolutionary...."

This Is Getting Serious

I started this site a few years ago (well, seven and a half, to be precise), thinking I'd be doing well if I could keep it going for a whole year.

Well, look what I just got—

I think this means I'm getting serious. Like I plan to keep this thing going for a while.

Either that, or it means I'm just about to win the Publisher's Clearinghouse Sweepstakes* and shut down for good. Because that would be just like the Universe, to leave me with 1,000 useless business cards.  :-)

The lens block diagram, by the way, is of a Zeiss Tessar (the early Leica Elmar was one copy of many, collectively known as "Tessar-types"), which I was just mentioning yesterday.

Mike

*And wouldn't that be ironic!

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All the Nikon Hate

If I'm reading the tea leaves right, the reaction to the Coolpix A seems to have traveled about the following course:

• Irritation at the uppity price
• Pleasure at the news with expressions of personal reservation
• Annoyance at what the product is not and disapproval of what it is
• General rejection
• Antipathy toward the product
• Antipathy toward Nikon
• Questions about Nikon's competence, judgment, and direction in general

Now, I could be reading way too much into much too small a sample. Perhaps forums which divide participants up into brand camps are experiencing more enthusiasm and less disapproval. But I have to say the pattern feels familiar...it's quite similar to the reaction I observed to the Nikon 1-Series, the just-discontinued (and future collectible) Pentax K-01, and the Canon EOS M.

It doesn't seem very warranted. Look, Nikon is a leading maker of SLRs, and of lenses and accessories for SLRs. Mirrorless cameras and smartphones seem to be showing they have serious "legs"—might be more than a fad, might prove to be more than a confined market segment—and might be starting to change the entire camera market in ways none of us quite understand yet. But isn't it possible that Nikon doesn't want to pour all sorts of resources into being a big player in an emerging category already dominated by others? In other words, we might be assuming we're seeing strategic moves, but the company might simply be dabbling dilettantishly in a sandbox it doesn't consider its territory.

Second thought: difficult though this might be for the English-speaking world to swallow, we ain't everything. The Nikon 1 was built with the home market in mind; maybe the Coolpix A is too. Or maybe it's tailored to the Chinese; they're an increasingly important market now too.

Nikon 28Ti, a "premium point-and-shoot" from 1994, with its delightfully steampunk (but unecessary) "stopwatch" dial panel. This one's for sale right now from Breguet in Hong Kong.

And a third thought: I wish we could not be so harsh on companies that try to raise product quality past market perception. I witnessed an amusing and revealing little scenario in the '90s. Leica released a four-element lens based on an ancient design—the collapsible Elmar-M, 1994–2007—that was hard-sharp but that I found almost offensive for its poor build quality, especially when compared to earlier Leitz collapsible Summicrons. That lens was praised for being economical: despite being ridiculously expensive for what it offered, it was cheaper than any of the same company's other offerings, which made it a "bargain" in the general perception. During that product's lifespan, Nikon released a better lens* of the same basic type (a modified Tessar), the 45mm ƒ/2.8P, 2001–06, that cost something like a third of what the Leica lens cost. Result? Nikon's offering was slammed for being excessively expensive, because it cost so much more than the same company's mass-market, high-value (and Chinese-made, and mostly plastic) consumer lenses of similar focal length. Which created one of those situations that make me chuckle: the shoddier, three-times-as-expensive product was getting praise as a bargain, while, simultaneously, the better-made, one-third-as-expensive product was getting slammed for being too expensive. Few people (well, besides me) thought to compare the Elmar-M to the 45P and conclude that the latter was a bargain.

It's the Volkswagen Phaeton phenomenon. (Ferdinand Piëch's 2002 luxury car, an attempt to threaten Mercedes, has been described as "spectacularly slow-selling" [Car & Driver]). If a company known for expensive products  makes a shoddy product, it will be praised for being affordable (cf. the McIntosh C15) and continue to be traded for high prices, but if a company known for value-conscious pricing tries to make a luxury product that's perceived as being too uppity for its neighborhood, it will be treated harshly—even if the product itself is outstanding!**

Sony is struggling in the same handcuffs. The A900 was perceived as aspiring above its label. (Too purist for its roots, too.) Now the RX1 is being subjected to some of the same prejudices. People are slaves to established brand hierarchies. Or perceptions of same. Remember, ladling in the value means leeching out the quality. And I like quality. I liked the 35Ti and the 28Ti back in the day, too—they had quality, even if it wasn't all needed for the photographic results. (They, too, got slammed at the time for being more expensive than necessary.)

So, summing up this post:

• Negative attitudes seem to calcify quickly.
• Just because Nikon is a big player in one area doesn't mean every product is a grand strategic market statement.
• Maybe the Coolpix A is made "for" the Japanese, or someone else other than us entitled English-speakers.
• We shouldn't be such price hawks.

My conclusion: a) as ever, we need to wait for real tests and hands-on reports before coming to judgement; b) the Coolpix A could be a nice option for a certain kind of customer, a sort of 28Ti for today. Regardless, the Coolpix A is just one product. Just because it comes from Nikon doesn't mean it's a major statement of where that major player is going, or what that major player thinks of us. My prescription for the hate: Take a few deep breaths. They're only cameras.

Mike

*I don't care how it tested, I thought its image quality was prettier.

**The exception is (sometimes) when they create a new brand. A Toyota LS400 never would have sold in 1989, but Lexus was allowed to be a different breed.

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Keith H: "I feel you have summed up this situation perfectly."

foresmac (partial comment): "I think you're just way off base with this analysis."

Mike replies: And there's the blogger's life in two brief comments.... :-)

MM: "I noticed this phenomenon with the Canon EOS M, which was very similar to the Leica X2. Despite the price difference (Canon: $800; Leica: $2000) and despite the fact that instead of having a fixed lens like the Leica the Canon could accept any of dozens of EOS lenses, guess which camera was pilloried in the blogosphere and forum world as hopelessly misguided and which camera was largely given a free pass?

"I think that photographers who buy multiple expensive items from a given manufacturer (or even merely plan to do so) feel more like shareholders than like customers. Not surprisingly, they're not not shy about speaking out when they think 'their' company is heading in a direction they don't personally like—or offering a product in which they don't have any personal interest.

"Your point about unfamiliarity with other markets is a very important one. I only read online forums in English, and I've often thought that the discussions would be very different if those forums had as many participants from Asian countries as from primarily English-speaking countries and western Europe."

cgw: "Not all criticism of Nikon amounts to splenetic rants. Their recent financials point to problems shared with other older Japanese tech companies: complacency, organizational rigidity, numb accounting, and indifferent market research. At present, North America is the only market that's not suffering. Chinese per capita GNP isn't stellar. Japanese domestic demand isn't enough. Like Canon, Nikon can't see beyond DSLRs. They're making product that doesn't sell strongly without profit-shrinking rebates. The Coolpix A, along with the CX fiasco and stumbling PR in the wake of issues with the D800 and D600, aren't encouraging."

JBerardi: "I can't comment on the wider market, but for me personally, it's absolutely accurate to call the A 'too little, too late.' I've always been a Nikon guy and I've wanted to see a compact camera with DSLR-grade image quality from them for nearly a decade now. Well, I got tired of waiting. About a year ago I picked up a Pany GF2/14mm kit for peanuts and really enjoyed it. Cut to today and I've added a G3 body as well as the 20/1.7 and 45/1.8 primes, and they're all great. And all those pieces together didn't even cost me as much as Nikon is asking for these things. So when the A was announced, I was hardly filled with regret for jumping ship. In fact I felt really smart for not waiting around.

"You know what the real kicker here is? My Nikon DSLR stuff now sits collecting dust. I enjoy my Micro 4/3 stuff more. I clearly prefer using mirrorless cameras. I have access to the small, affordable, high quality primes that Nikon has forever neglected. In their efforts to not introduce compact digital cameras that would compete with their DSLR line, they've effectively driven me away from buying any Nikon body, or any Nikon stuff in general. It's a little like Apple deciding to stay away from the smartphone market because smartphones compete with iPods. Well, either you can undercut your existing products, or you can let your competitors do it for you.

"Again, this is all just a personal account. But still, as far as a personal account goes, one would have to say it's a rather damning one for Nikon."

Thom Hogan: "The question is 'balance.' Is the Coolpix A the right balance of things? Size, capability, lens choice, price, etc.

"Funny that you should bring up the 28Ti. It, too, wasn't the right balance in choices, which is one reason why it sold in low quantities. The camera most of us were using at the time was the much cheaper Olympus XA. It was a better balance. I actually moved to a Minolta (TC-1?, can't remember the name at the moment) after looking at the 28Ti closely. Why? Better balance.

"A carry-everywhere camera is all about balance. If it's not going to get you a shot or compromise the shot or be too expensive to risk for a shot, it's no better than not carrying a camera at all.

"The camera that raised my eyebrows a bit in Nikon's announcement was actually the P330. Nikon fixed the two key problems I had with the predecessor. Might that be enough to get my shirt pocket? Maybe, but the Fujifilm X20 has a viewfinder, which in my experience adds about two stops to my handholding ability (braced against face versus two arms in front of me).

"I remind everyone that cameras are tools, not trophies. The tool has to work for you. My negative assessment of the A on specifications is that it isn't the right tool for most people.

"The complaints I hear from users of existing cameras all have a very common theme: missing something I need; or the corollary of forces me to do something I don't want to do. To get balance right in a tool, designers have to be well connected to users. What strikes me about the A and the criticisms of it is that people are saying that the designers weren't well connected to the users. On the other hand, the P330 shows that Nikon heard the users' complaints. So in a single set of announcements we see both sides of the coin."

William: "Don't co-mingle Nikon hate with disappointment and loss of respect.

"Nikon could have made this camera before Sony, Fuji and others entered the market. That is a disappointment. So the only way Nikon thought of to distinguish its first APS-C compact was to make a pocket camera...another disappointment.

"Steve Jobs said if you are afraid to cannabilize your own products, somebody else will happily do it for you. It seems to me Nikon's primary strategy for the past three or four years was to protect the DSLR cash cow from attackers in the Micro 4/3 and now APS-C mirrorless segment. This perception reduces my respect for Nikon. Where is the vision and leadership? How come the CoolPix A does not have built in Wi-Fi? I have a thermostat in my house with built in Wi-Fi.

"I own about $10k worth of Nikon products. This equipment provides me with all of my non-investment income. Since the X100 came out, I've spent zero dollars on new Nikon products and $3,600 on Fuji X APS-C products (and I will buy two more Fuji XF primes as soon as they are released). This is not Nikon hate. I would have never spent a penny with Fuji if Nikon sold the tools I needed for my personal work."

Alan Fairley: "I think that there is a reservoir of ill-will towards Nikon in forum-land that has built up from its handling of the D800 and D600 QC issues that may be feeding into this...."

Mike replies: You got that right, I think. I have, ahem, been hearing from people.