The Online Photographer

Historical Significances

I hope you won't read this as some big pronouncement or hard-and-fast claim. It might constitute an assertion, of sorts, but I'm not making the assertion aggressively, at all. It's more in the nature of musing—turning ideas over in my mind—.

My thought is that the Caponigros' print will be the only one of our print sales with lasting photo-historical significance.

It has such a clear story. I see it as a future microcosm of 2013—I'll bet even the printing style will one day be recognizably characteristic of the present era. And its status as a rare collaborative work of two well-known photographers who happen to be father and son will never lose interest.

That can't be more than a guess.

My only puzzlement is how to frame mine...and where to put it. Where to put it so I can get to know it.

But I promised to tell the story of my poster.

Many years ago, when I first got bitten (hard) by the photography bug, I was moonlighting part-time in a frame shop. One of the other employees, whom I've long since lost track of, was a talented but impoverished painter. During one of the dead times at the shop he and I were shooting the breeze about our favorite artwork on the walls. "That's the only thing in here that's worth a damn," he said, pointing to this poster.

Curiously, I'd never even noticed it before. It was so visually "quiet" amidst all the louder, more "attention-seeking" work on the walls. I looked at it long and hard that day, wondering what my co-worker saw in it.

It didn't sell; which meant it stayed on the wall, while the "Hang In There Baby!" cat and a certain Fred Maroon photo of Georgetown in the snow flew out of the store, replenished again and again. (This happened back in D.C., where I lived for many years.) I found myself looking at it day after day, and, as I did, it began to grow on me. I began to find a sort of peace and nourishment in the simple forms, the delicate tones, the way the stones mutely conjured a mysterious bygone world. Eventually it was like it was the only poster on the shop walls, the only one I saw; it was the only one I wanted to look at.

At the end of a month or so, I found myself one day walking the two miles between home and the shop, deep in thought, probably feeling sorry for myself for having to work all evening after already working an eight-hour day. But one good thing I could look forward to, I thought, was that at least I could visit "my" poster yet again. Then the thought flashed across my mind—if no one's bought it!

I put a down payment on it that day; I think it took me another thirty days to finish paying for it. I lived in a run-down group house at the time, and I painted my room there at my own expense, picking the color entirely to show off the poster. That would have been about 32 years ago now. (It even looked good in moonlight.)

The poster taught me a lesson, too. That many photographs (many advertising images, for instance) are deliberately intended to catch the eye and provide immediate gratification—but their appeal is often quickly exhausted; and some of the best photographs grow on you slowly , and yet continue to reward long familiarity. I still like photographs that have staying power, and it's something I look for in photographs.

Some music is the same way. I'm sure you know of catchy ditties that you loved on first hearing but soon got sick of, and other music that you almost didn't hear at first but have grown to love, and can return to again and again.

The other thing is did is that it introduced me to the work of Paul Caponigro, whose work in books I soon became very familiar with. Unfortunately, I've never seen a show of Paul's original prints, but I did see a few originals when I published a portfolio of his work in one of the magazines I worked for. Maybe one day I'll finally catch up with one of his shows.

There's always something to look forward to in photography.

And oddly enough, when I had my bedroom painted a few weeks ago, I once again chose the color specifically to set off this poster, just like I did in that grimy group house 32 years ago.

Mike
(Thanks to MM)

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's links!

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

Steve D: "Thank you for this. It's timely for me. I'm in my third year of taking photographs (as something other than mere snapshots) and I've noticed that the images I return to again and again are not what I would have 'expected' to gravitate to when I started out. They are not flashy or particularly eye catching but they've 'got me.' I've been trying to verbalize the 'why' of my feelings but it simply escapes me. I like them on an almost primal level and that's that I suppose."

Robert Billings: "I too have a Paul Caponigro poster that has been with me wherever I have lived since the early 1970s. 'Running White Deer, Ireland 1967.'"

Presentation, Presentation, Presentation

This week's column by Ctein

After my earlier column, "We Need Our Audiences," Kathy Li (a.k.a. inkista) and I continued to discuss online venues and audiences. When I wrote that column, I got things a little wrong. I said that Kathy didn't have a website or online gallery for presenting her work, and that was technically correct. But she does post to Flickr, and I knew that at the time. Mentally I discounted it and so it didn't make it into the text. I should have been clearer from the get-go.

Now, why did I discount Flickr? Understand, I have nothing against Flickr. I don't use it myself, but I don't have any quibble or quarrel with people who do and I take a pretty firm stand against the self-appointed Gatekeepers of True Photography who say that folks who make heavy use of Flickr are somehow doing it wrong. How dare someone set themselves up as the arbiter of how other folks should enjoy their photographic activities! Smite them, I say.

So, no, it's not a disrespect for Flickr. But I don't respond to it as a serious venue for the presentation of work. As many a wise soul has explained to newbie photographers trying to get their work seen, presentation counts. It's like going for a job interview; you dress (up or down) to play the part of the job you're trying to get. If you want your work to be taken seriously by some high-falutin' gallery owner, you don't bring in a bunch of mismatched, dogeared prints in an old paper box, drop it on their desk and say "Here, have a look." A nice portfolio box or binder holding prints that are presented uniformly and individually gets you a lot more serious attention.

No, it doesn't guarantee that they'll like your work, but it gets you past the hurdle of unconscious dismissal.

A photo from Dave Reichert's clean, simple, and functional website

To me, Flickr is just what it says it is, a social sharing site for photographs. It's a lot like when you get together with friends who, in the Good Old Days, might say, "Hey, I just got back from vacation, you wanna see my snaps?" And they'd haul out a bunch of envelopes they got back from the photofinisher (hopefully with the real dogs culled out), and you'd flip through them casually. Maybe something would jump out at you as especially impressive, maybe not, but it wasn't a situation designed nor intended to invite deep scrutiny.

Yes, some folks can look at photographs that way and do the deep investment/scrutiny thing almost instinctively and with astonishing rapidity. They are in an acute minority. Not close to the norm.

Serviceable site
I repeat, this kind of casual social viewing is a fine thing, in and of itself. It's not a good way, though, to get your work taken seriously by most people. In these days of the Internet, that's where a dedicated website or gallery site comes in.

It doesn't have to be a fabulous site, it just has to be serviceable. Some people are real fashionistas when it comes to designing such a site, and more power to them. They are rare and exceptional, like the folks who could design perfect portfolio cases and presentations to make gallery owners and curators sit up and pay attention to their work. That's a whole high art in itself. Very few people have those skills and, truthfully, very few in the audience have the sensibilities to respond to it.

Mostly it's about having the web equivalent of a nice, competent looking portfolio case or binder. Something that doesn't get in the way of looking at the photographs too much and doesn't visually draw attention away from them. It's just a vehicle that lets the viewer examine the photographs in a contemplative, undistracted fashion and so it encourages them to look at what they're seeing.

That's what I was getting at when I said that Kathy lacked a proper web presence and needed more confidence in how good her work was. My feeling is that if you want people to see how good you really are, you need a better venue than the virtual equivalent of photofinishing envelopes. Of course, if you're entirely happy with those envelopes, then carry on! But you might be selling yourself short.

©2013 by Ctein, all rights reserved

Weekly columnist Ctein presents himself on TOP on Wednesdays.

Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

TOP's links!

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

Stan B.: "You're right all around. Was thinking of putting together a greatest hits set on Flickr—but setting it up on an 'official' website is what I really need to do. When are you going to have a post where doing the right thing requires less work rather than more?"

Josef (partial comment): "I set out to post 3–5 good photographs on Flickr every week, and that has been crucial in getting me out more to exercise my creativity on a regular basis. My website doesn't get near the traffic that my Flickr page does."

Alan Sailer: "A well written post that I completely agree with.  I have most of my work on Flickr and it has worked out fine. I have no desire to  make my living as a photographer so the amount of attention I presently get is good enough.

"One very negative aspect of having your portfolio on Flickr is that the site can be radically changed without your consent. The new Flickr is much worse than the old Flickr and I can't do anything about that.

"One aspect of many professional photography gallery sites are very elaborate graphic interfaces that take a long time to load. They can be very beautiful, but often I just want a quick glance at a few pictures to see if the photographers style is to my liking...."

Richard Skoonberg (partial comment): "The amount of incredible art photography on Flickr is astounding. One needs to just starts looking. There are so many accomplished artists on Flickr and in all areas of photography: street, portraiture, landscape, figure, abstract/minimalism, studio, and event photography."

New Products in September

They're just about to close for an extended holiday (Succos, which I found very interesting when I learned about it a few years ago), but B&H Photo has created a series of pages showing all the new products introduced so far this month. I don't really agree that the Pentax lenses belong there, but the rest of it makes an interesting summary.

(And I wonder...how close does the Sony A3000 come to the "simple camera"?)

Mike

UPDATE: Oops! Looks like we have a firsthand report from a trusted friend, and the answer to my idle query at the end of this post is "not very close." See Kirk Tuck's report of the A3000. (Thanks to Nigel for this.) You know what they say: Oh well.

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's links!

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

No featured comments yet—please check back soon!

A Strange Twist on the Limited Edition

Our current father-son print sale by John Paul and Paul Caponigro incorporates a rather strange twist on the idea of limited editions. For the one week of the sale—this week—there's no limit placed on the number of orders, and every order we receive will be filled. However many are sold is how many will be made. But, as of 9 p.m. on Friday (Eastern U.S. time), the sales will close. At that point, the number of prints will become fixed. John Paul will number all of the prints—and that will then be the edition.

So if, say, 62 prints are sold, then the edition will be limited to 62. If 113 are sold, then the edition will be limited to 113. (Plus a few artists' proofs.)

It's a rather strange situation, I think—when you're buying the print, it's not part of a limited edition; but by the time you receive it, it will be.

I have no idea what this really signifies, I have to admit. And yet I kinda like it. It's almost as if it's democratic and exclusive, at the same time....

Mike

Original contents copyright 2013 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

TOP's links!

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

Jeremy Daalder (partial comment): "It's generally called a Timed Release. Quite common in the art reproduction (a.k.a. Giclée) market. Can be quite an effective sales technique, and indeed a good balance between accessibility whilst still having some element of a limit and exclusivity."

Paul Bass: "Coincidentally,I attended a slideshow/talk by Paul Caponigro last night at the Thomaston [Maine —Ed.] Public Library. A warm, unassuming man, he was thoroughly engaging, and very funny. 'Frosted Window' was one of the prints he showed last night, in another nice bit of TOP coincidence. If I had my way, we'd still be sitting there, looking at pictures. It was a great evening. My head is still spinning."

Update: The Simple Camera

Re the Simple Camera post on Saturday (which got featured on Reddit and Daring Fireball and a bunch of other places out on the Web, and brought in a lot of outside traffic—who'd'a thunk?): I wish just one camera manufacturer would take a flier and hire me to design a super-simple camera for them. Just one. I'll bet I could design a camera that would sell and sell.

I'd even write the instruction manual myself. Heck, I'd even work cheap.

(I approached Apple and tried to pitch them on making an "Apple camera." But there already is an Apple camera: it's called an "iPhone." Not what I had in mind. But you know what they say: Oh well.)

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.

TOP's links!

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

KeithB: "Apple already had a digital camera."

Mike replies: Yes, I made that point—there was precedent!

Ross: "Manual? Manual! I have to RTFM? Not simple enough :-) ."

Marten Collins: "Good grief are you proposing to write an understandable handbook?  Never get off the ground in my humble opinion. I remember, having bought many years ago a Nikon flashgun, finding parts of the instruction book incomprehensible. Friends couldn't help  so I 'phoned Nikon professional here in the U.K. Answer—'we don't know what it means either!'"

Leica On High

My friend Jack took this view of Green Bay's Lambeau Field yesterday from the roof deck of the brand new South End Zone, which adds 7,000 new seats to the old stadium. Last year, he would have needed a hot air balloon to get this view.

Here's a larger version, and here's the story. Note the crops showing the ball in the air, as a demonstration of the Leica S2's resolution. And that's with a 24mm (19mm equivalent angle of view*) lens!

The Packers beat the Washington Generals 128-3, and Aaron Rodgers' QB rating was 286. He threw for 680 yards**, tying a Packers record.

Mike

*The S2 has a 45x30mm sensor, so the crop factor is ~.8x.

**These numbers might not be 100% accurate. As I've mentioned before, I have a poor memory for numbers.

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's links!

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

Jason Sewell: "Great shot. But there appears to be slight up/down motion blur. Or is this a lens issue?"

Mike replies: As always with the Web, you have to keep in mind that you're not seeing the actual picture--you're seeing a small JPEG of it through several generations of web software. I'm sure what you're seeing is some kind of digital artifact, given how sharp the extreme crop is:

And even that is several generations away from the original!

Ctein comments: Normally pixel-peeping is an inappropriate way to look at a photograph, but you can't say Mike didn't invite it in this case! Hell, made it well-nigh irresistible. [Grin]

Anyways…there's definitely an asymmetry in the sharpness. It could be partly a depth of field issue as semilog suggests, as the picture is sharpest at the bottom (closest) and gradually loses definition towards the top (further away). You wouldn't think depth of field would be an issue at this distance with an ultra-wide-angle lens, but when you're pixel peeping at this level (at 100% size, it's almost a 3.5x5' photograph on my screen) DoF can be astonishingly shallow.

I'm thinking that's not it entirely. There's a peculiar doubling of the fine detail in the big screen at the top of the stadium. Quite evident in the lettering. It looks just a little bit like camera shake. Does the Leica S2 have a vertical-traveling focal plane shutter? If so, it's entirely possible to have a photograph where a bit of camera shake affects the top of the photograph but not the bottom (or vice versa).

But…I'm thinking that's not it entirely, either. Because if you look at the trees  near to the screen, behind it, they are pretty blurry, but look a little further to the left or the right and they become quite sharp. (And towards the extreme edges get a little smeary, but that's normal in ultrawide angle lens, especially with this degree of pixel peeping.  Remember—3.5x5' print! That's feet, not inches.)

So, my vote?  What semilog says: toss in turbulence/thermals in the atmosphere. It can produce effects just like this, that vary from spot to spot in the picture. Normally you only see them with telephoto lenses, which magnify the effect. But normally you're not pixel-peeping on such a high-resolution image.

I'm pretty certain what you're seeing is not a lens quality issue. Decentering in a lens can produce an asymmetric image in pretty complex patterns, but the superb quality at the bottom of the photograph—tack-sharp along the lower edge and no noticeable smearing until you get to the extreme corners and there it's quite symmetric—argue against that. Decentered lenses can look good on one side of a photograph and bad on the other, but not this good.

My two cents' worth.

Andy Kowalczyk: "Yes, the color balance is atrocious. The entire stadium is overwrought with Green and Yellow. A superb football picture demands a color palette rich in Navy Blue and Orange! —Andy Kowalczyk, Chicago."

The Caponigro Father-Son Print Offer

John Paul Caponigro, Uyuni, Bolivia, 2012, and Paul Caponigro, Frosted Window, Revere, Massachusetts, 1957, printed together on one 17x22" sheet

Pictures can work in pairs. The interplay of their tensions and their consonances can work off each other and give the eye and the mind more to contemplate. This is something most of us learned from books, where pictures on facing pages often share a spread.

I learned it primarily from a wonderful 1984 book called The Wise Silence by the landscapist Paul Caponigro, one of the major American art photographers of the second half of the 20th century. The distinguished designer of that book, Eleanor Morris, who still uses Eleanor Morris Caponigro as her professional name, was married to Paul at the time. She designed many famous photo books, working with artists such as Eliot Porter, Laura Gilpin, William Clift, and Georgia O'Keefe. She has a particular gift for the mysterious art of pairing facing pictures, and worked in concert with Paul on that aspect of The Wise Silence.

Their son is John Paul Caponigro, who will need as little introduction to photographers of the digital age as his father Paul does to photographers of his generation. John Paul has deliberately sought to exploit the creative potential of digital imaging at every step of its evolution and at every stage of his career. His accomplishments are many, from consulting with Adobe and Epson on the development of their products to presenting Google and TED talks on creativity.

An era in one artwork
I'm pleased to say that this is the first original artwork ever created specifically and exclusively for our ongoing series of TOP print sales. The pairing highlights the differences of the two pictures the father and son created and chose, differences that mirror the current age of change in photography: digital and film, color and black-and-white, large format film and small-sensor digital, old and new...it's an early picture of Paul's, taken eight years before John Paul was born, and a picture from John Paul's latest work, made in Bolivia just last year. The cameras are a contrast of old and new—the 4x5 Deardorff Paul used was somewhat antiquarian even in 1957, when 35mm was the latest, hottest thing (the Leica M3 was a mere four years old that year), and John Paul's picture was taken with an Apple iPhone 5 and processed with Google's Snapseed app. John Paul was among the first photographers to use cameraphones for creative work—his first iPhone was recently acquired for the permanent collection of the Smithsonian Institution for that reason. (The Smithsonian will also be acquiring this print for its collection.)

And yet despite all the differences, it's the way these two pictures still work together as a pair that's remarkable. John Paul chose his picture first, and Paul chose the pairing. Paul selected the paper type (Epson Velvet Fine Art). John Paul made the print (on an Epson 3880 with Epson Ultrachrome K3 inks with Vivid Magenta). Paul sat with his son to consult as the print was processed and proofed.

Each print will be signed by both photographers.

John Paul (left) and Paul Caponigro

In case you aren't familiar with the way our sales work, we collect orders for a limited time—five days—and then the prints are made to fulfill the orders we receive. In that way, we can offer fine art prints that are priced considerably lower than they would be if they were sold by traditional galleries. (For comparison, consider that John Paul's usual print prices start at $2,000 and Paul's start at $5,000, and both sell steadily and well at those prices.) So it's a great opportunity for TOP readers. Yet the photographers still do very well because they can print in volume knowing that each print they make is already sold. Plus, the photographers keep a full 80% of the proceeds—again quite unlike traditional galleries, which often must take as much as 60 or 70% of the proceeds of sales in commission. The final third of this "win-win-win" proposition is that TOP's share of the proceeds helps keep the website going.

The single print consists of both pictures printed together on one 17x22" sheet. Image sizes are 7.5" square and 7.5x9.5". International orders are welcome. The prints costs $495 plus shipping; please allow up to eight weeks for delivery, although many prints will arrive sooner than that. There is no limit to the number of prints any individual can order or that we will sell in the sale, but the prints will be numbered and limited to however many are sold in this five day period. Paul's picture has been printed before as a silver print and might be sold again alone, but John Paul has never printed his picture before and never will again—so, for these pictures presented comme paire, this is it.

The sale starts now and ends this coming Friday, September 20th, at 9 p.m. Maine time, and all orders must be received by that deadline.

[Link removed—sale ended 9/20/13]

For my part, I'd like to thank John Paul and Paul and all the people at John Paul's studio who have worked so hard on this. And as always, I hope you like the print!

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.

TOP's links!

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

Barry: "I'm confused about the cost. Is it $495 for one piece of paper with two images on it, or is it $495 per image = $990 for the pair?"

Mike replies: I should thank you for this question...it didn't occur to me that this might not be clear. It's both pictures printed together on one 17x22" sheet of paper. The price is for a single print that includes both pictures side by side. I've modified the post to make this more clear.

Open Mike: Simple Cameras

First, I wanted to mention that I had a very nice experience yesterday with Nathan Benn's Kodachrome Memory. My copy arrive yesterday in the mail, from Nathan himself. (Along with a beautiful small print of this picture! Thanks so much, Nathan.) It's rich work, and will be worthy of repeated visits. It's not unlike Eggleston, and will appeal to people who like Eggleston, except I think Benn may be a better photographer.

Sorry, that's one of those opinions you are not allowed to express, because it steps outside of accepted conventions. I'm afraid I do it all the time, in my mind.

A page from Nathan Benn's Kodachrome Memory

He reminds me of Sam Abell, too. I do think Nathan is one of the few photographers I know of who can really handle color, and Sam is another.

Believe it or not, my main reservation about the book is the title. I think the photographs are much more significant as photography than just idle nostalgia for an old film. I guess "Kodachrome Memory" will help it sell, because it will seem nice and contained—demystified—for the general public, but it's a bit like titling Hamlet "A Danish ghost story" or the Mona Lisa "A commissioned portrait." Too flat and literal by half.

But I'll talk more about the book after it's available. On to my topic for today:

I mentioned recently that I visited my uncle Smokie Polk* and cousin Pam when I went to Michigan last weekend. My aunt Mary wasn't there—she was off canoing in the Boundary Waters of Canada (alone, at age 74, more or less!). But my uncle asked me a question at dinner I thought was telling. He said that Mary wanted a camera that would give good quality pictures (he emphasized that several times) but that was very simple to use. She used to have a Contax T2, I think, and she wants a digital camera that's at least as simple as that.

I had to tell him I don't think there is one—despite the hundreds of cameras on the market.

I still wonder why that's so. Even cellphone manufacturers can manage the trick, with the famous Samsung Jitterbug, for the technology-phobic. I really think this is one reason why normal citizens like cameraphones—many of them are so bog-simple. You call up the camera app and you get a go button and not a lot else. Frame, shoot, take what you get. Which is often quite good—my sister-in-law confessed somewhat sheepishly to me last night that she gets better pictures with her phone than she does with her digital p/s.

But camera manufacturers don't seem constitutionally capable of making a super-simple camera. They must be deeply convinced that the complexity of the feature set (which certainly does appeal to a lot of us) is an indivisible part of how they add value to their product, and the temptation to add more and more is something they can't forswear even for one product. I mean, with hundreds of cameras on the market, wouldn't you think they could make one that was super-simple, just for that segment of the population that wants it? And market it that way. You'd think. But no.

I think it's one of the "stealth reasons" why cellphones are encroaching on the camera market so rapidly. Not the only reason, not the main reason, but a reason. (I also think that as cameraphones gain an ever-enlarging share of the camera market, the cameras in them will inexorably get more complicated.)

As always, I could be wrong, etc.

Mike

*Real name Albert, making him, of course, my uncle Albert.

"Open Mike" is the Editorial Page of The Online Photographer. It usually appears on Sundays, but is shifted to today this week because of our big announcement scheduled for noon tomorrow.

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's links!

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

Ed Hawco: "It is my humble opinion that the complexity of modern digital cameras is due to them being designed by engineers and software makers instead of by photographers and camera makers. They have an entirely different mind set; they see cameras as 'gadgets' and they set out to exploit every possible thing they can do. It's their mind-set—and their job—to push the technology, to reveal all, and to leave no possibility unexpoited. Whereas photographers and (old-school) cameramakers are more likely to think in terms of the prime objective (no pun intended) of framing and exposing an image, and the few basic controls that affect the outcome. There is a huge chasm between those two ways of thinking."

Steve Rosenblum: "I would get Aunt Mary a Panasonic TS5 and tell her to set it on Intelligent Auto mode and shoot away. I own the TS3, which is an earlier version that I bought to take with me when fishing. It is one of those cameras that is impervious to almost everything (truly waterproof, shock proof, etc.) so she need not fear taking it to the Boundary Waters, and it takes good quality photographs. It has simple controls.

"Yes, it has a number of features that she doesn't need such as GPS tagging, HD Video, etc., but she need not worry about those—she can either ignore them or turn them off. It doesn't record RAW files, but I doubt she needs that, and the JPEGs it does record look very good to me in most situations. Given your description of her and her activities I suspect it would be a perfect choice for her."

Tom V: "Quite right! I have been selling cameras for a big box retailer for six years, and every manufacturers rep who comes in I tell them I need two things: a very simple camera, and a camera with a viewfinder. When a customer comes in and asks, 'What's the simplest camera for my 80-year-old mother?,' I reply, 'How about an iPhone?' When the customer comes in and asks for 'that peephole on the camera you look through,' I point them to a Canon G15 and say, 'that's about it.'"

Daniel S.: "Don't blame us Software Engineers; when we design a product for ourselves, results are quite elegant and simple—just look at UNIX, for example. So powerful it's the system of choice in the corporate world, and yet so simple, people have rewritten it from scratch in their spare time; imagine building yourself a fully-functional D800e in your basement for comparison purposes.

"No, problems start when we start having to cater to you, normal people, and the reason why is self-evident once you read the replies to this post: 'just give me a camera with controls for focus, exposure and ISO,' 'put everything on auto and don't let me change anything,' 'make it fixed focus, but with autoexposure,' 'maybe add HDR and panoramas,' etc. Define the smaller superset that fulfills all the provided requirements, and you end up...with any of the cameras out currently on the market.

"Honestly, just give them anything your budget allows, then use duct tape over any setting your intended user doesn't fully understand. You guys manage to use Windows and OSX just fine, don't you? and yet, I assure you: you don't even know how to use half its capabilities. How do I know? I don't even know how to use half its capabilities, and I'm a professional Software Engineer — the key is, ignore anything you don't fully understand, and rely on the sane defaults picked by engineers and usability experts who hopefully did."

Eric: "I was going to say the Leica M, thinking about my years as a newspaper photographer shooting with an M6, and the 35mm and 75mm ƒ/1.4's for about 80 percent of my work. SLRs were for sports.

"But Leica put video in the M. That's about the worst example of this trend I can think of.

"Don't get me wrong. I shoot with a D800 now. I use some of its special features (including video on occasion) but only what helps. The level indicator has made my horizons level to a degree I simply can't do without it. But most of the custom functions are lost on me. It's the best camera I've ever used, including film cameras of medium and large format. (Hasselblad, Rollei, Sinar). But what I love about it most is that it just does the job without much fuss. It's so reliable and capable I can forget about it and shoot.

"As for Nathan Benn, I met him once. Really nice guy. I'm going to have to get this book!"

B. J. Segel: "I was walking around downtown tonight and saw a fellow break away from the group he was with and pose in front of a mural painted on the wall. 'Hey, look a this,' he shouted. 'Aw, gee,' said a woman in his group. 'I don't have a phone with me.' You're right, Mike. The phone has become today's Instamatic."

Coming Up: Call for Work

N.b.: This is not a call for work! Thank you, but do not send anything yet!

^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Very important!

This is, rather, advance warning that I will be making a call for work in the near future, for our first book.

(You can tell from the above that I know some people are going to ignore my pleas.)

My publishing company still doesn't have a name. I'm heartbroken that I can't name it "Bayard Books," after Hippolyte Bayard. Hippolyte Bayard was an independent inventor of photography who was beaten to the punch by Daguerre and Talbot and never got credit for his researches. He later made a satirical self-portrait of himself as a drowned corpse, implying that he was driven to suicide by his undeserved oblivion and the treachery of those who wronged him.

Unfortunately, there's already a publisher called "Bayard Canada Livres" which I'm sure would object.

However, we now do have a printer (in the good ol' USA), a fulfillment house, sufficient capital (made possible in part by people who subscribe! Thank you!), and a production management team. We soon might even have a schedule, which, according to the TV shrink Dr. Phil, is the surest sign that a dream is turning into a plan.

Anyway, our first project—which I'm thinking of as a sort of test bed or trial balloon—will be a collection of photographs by different photographers, and we will be looking for submissions of quiet color art photographs. Among my "touchstones" for the kind of pictures I'm looking for are these two pictures from our long-ago Reader Contest:

Photo by Leigh Perry

Photo by Bill Hanson.

They're both "straight" pictures despite their ambiguity: Leigh's, of the floor and wall of a parking garage, with "found" marks that happen to echo each other; and Bill's, of an abandoned storefront through its front window.

Note that I'm not looking for pictures just like these two, but rather for pictures that look like they might go with these two. The only real requirement is that the pictures should have rather muted color. I have so far picked only six pictures, and the book will have 30 reproductions, so there are slots yet to fill.

Again, do not send anything yet. I am not set up to handle submissions yet.

You'll be able to suggest your own work, or the work of others—either way. We'll make the call for work some time after the end of the upcoming print sale, and well before October 1st, when we have another big announcement planned.

Just wanted to give you some advance notice so you can be mulling it over.

(Oh, and if you happen to be Leigh Perry or Bill Hanson, I'll be trying to get in touch....)

Mike

P.S. Please just be thinking about pictures you might want to nominate. Don't send anything or contact me about this yet. (I hope I've said that enough times.)

P.P.S. This publishing venture, quixotic as it might yet turn out to be, is very exciting. I'm really psyched about the possibilities and I often find my mind racing with ideas for future projects. I know not everyone is interested in reading about this stuff very often, so I'll try to keep updates to a minimum, but there's a lot going on behind the scenes here at TOP these days and it's really got me goin'. This is going to be a whole lot of what I call fun.

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's links!

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

No featured comments yet—please check back soon!

This Is So Cool....

John Paul Caponigro just told me this yesterday: his first Apple iPhone is in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.

Why? Well, John Paul has been deliberately using the very latest digital tools for his real work* for more than two decades now, and the Smithsonian collects his digital tools as a useful sampling of the equipment digital photographers have been using as the present era has unfolded. (They have his first Epson inkjet printer as well as a number of other things.) They have prints of a number of the earliest images he created with a cameraphone, and the Director of the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History wanted the phone itself too. And is delighted to now have it, apparently.

And guess what else? The "Father-Son" print we'll be offering starting on Sunday at noon will also be added to the Smithsonian's permanent collection, a gift from an anonymous art collector who has already made the donation sight-unseen.

I just think that's cool.

Mike

*Please don't be tempted to treat that term contentiously...it's just a phrase I slapped in there. All I mean is actual finished personal artwork as opposed to testing or messing around.

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's links!

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

No featured comments yet—please check back soon!

XKCD Critiques 'Ken Burns Effect'

N/t.

Mike
(Thanks to Bernard Scharp)

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's links!

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

Mark Kinsman: "Flickr did not get that memo...."

Jim Bullard: "Given the reference to website operators I don't think Ken Burns was the target."

Mike replies: No, it's just the name of the practice. Wikipedia has an article explaining it. (Note that I had the name wrong at first...I called it "Ken Burns Syndrome" and that's wrong, it's called "the Ken Burns Effect." My bad memory.)

From the linked article: "Steve Jobs and Apple engineers met with Burns to obtain the filmmaker's permission to use the term 'Ken Burns Effect' for Apple's video production software. (The description had been Apple's internal working title while the feature was in development). Burns declined, saying that he didn't allow his name to be used for commercial purposes. Jobs then took Burns aside and the two agreed on a sum that would be donated to charity in order for Burns to allow the term's usage in Apple products.

"Burns says that on occasion, strangers will stop him on the street to enthusiastically describe how they use the Ken Burns Effect on their Apple software. Burns, who writes his speeches longhand and calls himself a Luddite, claims he doesn't really understand what these Apple users are telling him (despite the inherent technical sophistication required in modern documentary filmmaking) and tries his best to make a quick escape." (Citations at the link.)

Bob Rosinsky: "Pan to the right, zoom in. Pan to the left, zoom in. I know the guys (Ed Searles and Ed Joyce) who shot Ken Burns' photo sequences for documentaries such as 'The Civil War' and 'Baseball The Tenth Inning.' They also shot Blackside Inc.'s 'Eyes on the Prize.'

"The two Eds owned and operated a motion-control studio called The Frame Shop in Newton, MA. Their animation stand was outfitted with a 1920s Mitchell movie camera (Mitchells are known for their rock-solid single frame accuracy). They adapted the camera and copy stand to a computerized motion-control system. I think their rig had at least four or five axes. Each move was shot single frame onto 35mm film and then transferred to video. Anybody that has worked in the Boston film and video community from the 1980s up to the turn of the century likes and respects the two Eds. Broadcast and cinematic camera moves on flat art are now executed through software and high-resolution scans. The digital age mothballed their craft. Here's a link that describes the Eds, their studio, and lists many interesting clients that hired them."

Bad Science vs. Good Science: A Guide for the Layperson (Part 2)

This week's column by Ctein

Continuing from last time...into the realm of genuine crackpots. The problem with crackpots is that they can truly blind you with science, or at least with lengthy discourse and arguments about minutiae that you can't possibly fully dissect. Nor should you even feel obligated to try.

Crackpots exhibit many of the symptoms I described in Part 1. They're misunderstood geniuses; they see the truths that the whole scientific community has managed to miss or is suppressing because the rest of the community can't recognize their brilliance. Largely, this is the province of fiction. It's not impossible, but it's bloody damned unlikely.

Often they suggest darker, more malign motives keeping them out of the limelight. Again, it makes for gripping novels, but in the real world, scientific conspiracies are few and far between.

Sometimes they'll claim that other scientists have been bought off by the lure of grants and prestigious positions. The problem with this thinking is that all research involves money. Everyone gets paid for what they do. You can't use money to demonstrate that one scientific position is correct and another isn't. It's an ad hominem game that anyone can play, declaring the other side's information to be corrupted by money. And both sides do. It doesn't really help you, as a layperson, distinguish Good Science from Bad. It just reinforces people's prejudgements.

Some folks are just born crackpots, but the more serious cases start off as good scientists. They come up with a novel hypothesis that are entirely legitimate. But, when the science doesn't pan out, they can't let go of it. They just know they're right, so they keep looking and looking. Once in a blue moon their quest proves justified. More often, it destroys their careers and their reputation. It's extremely sad, because they frequently are brilliant and (formerly) productive scientists who just couldn't accept that they were wrong about something.

Most of these folks are harmless and just an annoyance in the scientific community. Occasionally, however, they're genuinely dangerous. Peter Duesberg was a well-respected virologist. In the 1980s, early in the AIDS crisis, he observed many peculiarities in the way AIDS worked that didn't fit standard models for infectious virus disease. He became convinced that AIDS was caused by environmental and lifestyle factors, not HIV.

In the early days of the epidemic, that was not implausible. Many researchers allowed for the possibility. But as work progressed, one after another those peculiarities got explained (the god of the gaps problem) and more and more infectious disease experts concluded, correctly, that Duesberg was wrong. Now, the overwhelming consensus is that HIV causes AIDS.

...Except Dr. Duesberg won't let go. Thirty years later, almost no one in the biomedical field believes him. This would not be a problem if he'd only destroyed his own reputation. Unfortunately, he has millions of believers worldwide. Some whole nations have adopted his crackpottery as national policy. Tens of thousands of people have died because of his Bad Science.

Arguably the worst kind of Bad Science is the outright, blatant fraud. This is relatively rare, but when it happens it can be extremely pernicious because it's very hard to detect. Most of the meta-warnings aren't present. These are people who know how to walk the walk and talk the talk, so even experts can't tell that they're in the presence of fraud. It only gets discovered when further work in the field contradicts their "discoveries."

The worst of these, in modern times, is the autism-vaccination connection promulgated by Dr. Andrew Wakefield. Like the anti-HIV rhetoric, this has killed tens of thousands of people outright and will kill more in the future. Dr. Wakefield published an utterly fraudulent paper in 1998 that reported that vaccines caused autism. Numerous further studies failed to replicate the connection, or did so erratically or at a much lower level than what Wakefield reported (that trend-line-in-results problem I described in Part 1). His results had been pretty well discredited when it was discovered that they were fabricated to begin with.

Folks like Duesberg and Wakefield go beyond Bad Science; so far as I'm concerned, this is genuinely Evil Science. I neither know nor care what their personal motivations are; I just know that they do massive harm in the world.

Most of that harm comes because laypeople honestly can't tell when they're being presented with Bad Science. Maybe these two columns will help to reduce that problem by some minuscule amount.

©2013 by Ctein, all rights reserved

Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

TOP's links!

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

Geoff Wittig: "As a physician, I can categorically state that the utterly bogus vaccine-autism 'link' has caused immense mischief, suffering, and unnecessary death. Evil science is right. Vaccines have prevented more premature death than any medical tool we have at our disposal, including antibiotics. So it makes us want to beat our heads against the table when people tell us they 'don't believe in vaccines.' It's rather like not believing in gravity.

"Pertussis (whooping cough) is a bacterial infection that can be lethal in infants. As of 30 years ago it had become extremely uncommon in the U.S. due to high vaccination rates with a very potent vaccine. Many of my contemporaries had never seen a case of it. But last year we experienced a nasty little epidemic of pertussis in my area. I personally saw about a dozen cases. Several factors were in play, one of them the poorly understood tendency of pertussis to peak about every 12 years or so. Roughly 15 years ago we changed to a safer pertussis vaccine that is much less likely to cause fever in infants receiving it...but which unfortunately is also a bit less immunogenic, with immunity that is more likely to wane over time. In small part the spike in cases was an artifact of better testing which can now detect pertussis much more reliably. But mostly it was due to a an expanding pool of susceptible individuals who had never been immunized at all, or who had 'aged out' of prior immunity.

"In our area, ground zero for the epidemic was an affluent community with a large number of vaccine skeptics who had 'protected' their kids from vaccination. Such a pool of non-immune individuals can then propagate the infection into the larger population around them.

"Bad science isn't just a pie-fight in a technical journal. It can have dreadful real-world consequences."

Alan Hill: "Bad science happens all the time. Mostly it gets filtered out by the system (repeated experiments, referees etc.). But no system is perfect: in the case of Andrew Wakefield's paper in The Lancet, a most reputable journal, the system fell down.

"However the real problem comes when bad science is exploited by vested interests or people with an axe to grind. Wakefield's paper would have had very little consequence if certain sections of the British media, particularly The Daily Mail, had not hyped it up wildly, with global consequences. I suspect that a bad scientist is usually a naïve fool rather than an evil genius, but I would never trust a non-specialist who promotes an unorthodox scientific idea until I had examined his motivation very carefully."

The Ed.'s Motto

"Ytpos never rest."

You may qoute me!

—Mike the Ed.

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's links!

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

Roger Bradbury: "The Guardian newspaper was famous for its typos. It was often called The Grauniad, after it once referred to itself by that name. When computer typesetting came in, they proudly declared that there would be no more typos. They were soon proved wrong."

Neil: "And remember the quote attributed to Mark Twain: 'I don't give a damn for a man who can't spell a word two ways.'"

And the Winners Are...

Nigel Robinson

$1,000 First Prize

The judge noted that "this contest asked for photos on the subject of work, and none of the entries said 'work' more definitively than this one—two big guys caught in the act of doing the roughest kind of job. Formally, the curve of the curb and paving stones, echoed by the curve of the hose, help focus the eye."

-

Sherrie Larimore

$500 Second Prize

The judge called Sherrie's picture "an excellent and non-obvious street shot...the colors are exceptionally good, and the reflections add a nice abstract element."

-

Peter Brian Schafer

$100 Third Prize

The judge said of Peter's picture, "you could tell endless stories based on this one shot: about women, about men, about sex and its symbolisms...about commerce, about work, and about grace and beauty."

•     •     •

Congratulations to the winners, the finalists, the semifinalists, and indeed everyone who stuck their neck out and put their work out there. Most especially, thanks to the guest judge (who prefers to remain anonymous), and to the anonymous donor of the prize money.

We hope this has been an interesting and informative little interlude for everyone, and a nice way to kick off the fall season of 2013.

Mike

The winners' comments...

From Sherrie Larimore: "I'm so pleased to have my photo chosen as a winner among such competition! There were so many terrific photographs. Thank you very much to Mike and the judge for the time and consideration they put into this. The contest was such an honest and real process from start to finish. I've learned a lot from all the commenters and I'm delighted with how much this has refreshed my ideas about evaluating photographs. Thank you again to everyone who contributed!"

From Peter Brian Schafer: "As I said in the Finalists thread, that I very much appreciate the opportunity to participate in this contest. It's been gratifying to read the comments of the readers and of the judge—ideas, thoughts, and even confusion that I hoped to provoke, as I was filled with ideas, thoughts, and confusion doing the project. I also feel fortunate to have my pic shown with others that I like a lot, particularly Vincent Manna and Turkey Man. The Dahiana pic is from a series I'm still working on. The current edit can be found here. And I also have a shorter edit in a slideshow set to a song. There are indeed many stories from these women's lives, most very ordinary; one of those stories is having loved and lost.

"The contest called for pictures of people working and that's what's here for all to see, even if it requires opening more than your eyes. Thanks again to Mike and the judge and the anonymous donor. It's been a lot of fun."

From Nigel Robinson: "Wow, this was unexpected! I'm delighted with the result, and especially with the generosity of the comments. I feel like I have graduated from the TOP School of Photography. Thanks to Mike and our anonymous judge and donor, two more people working. I hope you both enjoyed the process and result. My son Stuart, who brought my attention to the scene, is enjoying his new 1/16 scale digger, a replica of the one he found so fascinating."

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's links!

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

Nick Van Zanten: "Yay to Nigel! A very well-deserved honor. And thanks to you Mike for initiating this; it was fun from beginning to end."

Mike replies: You're very welcome Nick, and I'm glad you had fun. I feel obliged to point out that I didn't initiate it...it was the idea of the donor of the prizes, who approached me with the idea.

Matt Miller: "Those 'big guys' haves curves as well. The curved back of the man running the hammer brings sympathy pains to mine. Congrats to the winners!"

The Father-Son Print Sale

We all have our special touchstones. For me, one of the most influential photographers of my life has been Paul Caponigro, one of the leading landscapists of the 1970s and in my view one of the towering artists in the medium. His presence on the current scene has quietly receded—by all accounts he is a quiet and spiritually-oriented person—but not for me. I revere his books, especially The Wise Silence, and have pored over them—you might even say meditated over them—too many times to count. I have never met Paul or spoken with him, but he was certainly one of my teachers, through the prism of his work, which is as deep as the sky.

A bit of a digression, if you can abide it...I recently remodeled my small bedroom. All my life I've had problems sleeping, problems that have gotten worse in recent years. Following a sleep specialist's recommendations, I've endeavored to make my bedroom a peaceful, comfortable, quiet retreat, with no electronics, as few distractions as possible, and minimalist decor. In contrast with the rest of the house, there's only one piece of visual art in the room. Although "only" a poster, it's one of my favorite pieces of art, one that has followed me through thick and thin, and many moves, for more than thirty years. I love it today as much as I did the moment I first brought it home. There's a good story behind that old poster, and I'll tell it soon.

Paul is very fortunate in that his son John Paul is also a major photographer. It's amazing how much John Paul Caponigro is his father's son artistically, even though his work is essentially not derivative of his father's at all. John Paul needs as little introduction to digital photographers as father does to view camera traditionalists; virtually since digital became viable, John Paul has been at the forefront—among American photographers—of those continually exploring the newest artistic and creative possibilities of digital technology. He has lectured, consulted, and taught workshops about digital techniques, written books about Photoshop, and counted as clients many of the big-name companies. And yet he has never allowed his extensive activities in the field to interrupt his life as a practicing artist, or his ongoing growth as a creative person. 

Nice guy, too!

Old and new methods
For the initial print offer of our Fall season, Paul and John Paul have created, between them, a unique single artwork combining one picture by each. From a phototechnical perspective, it is truly a contrast of old and new. It exemplifies and encapsulates in one work of art the "digital transition," the period in the history of photography we have just passed through.

Paul's picture, in black-and-white, was taken in 1957 with a 4x5 Deardorff view camera and an 8-inch lens. John Paul's color picture was taken last year with an iPhone 5 and processed with Google's Snapseed app.

As if that's not enough difference, the two images could not be more different in terms of subject matter as well. And yet the technical dimension and the subject matter are really just the surface. The visual interplay of the two pictures (which you'll see next Sunday—we don't reveal the images in our print offers before the start of the sale) is wonderful; you can clearly see the unanimity that exists between the artistic concerns and approaches of father and son, and the way the work of each of them echoes, informs, and (in this case) enhances the other's. Paul chose the pairing. It's really quite an amazing piece, from a purely visual as well as from a photohistorical perspective.

Both pictures will be printed by John Paul on one sheet and will be signed by both photographers, father and son. A unique and unusual original work, and one I am proud and happy to be able to bring to you.

Please stay tuned for more information. The sale starts on Sunday at noon, and orders close on the afternoon of the following Friday. As you might know, we take orders for our sale prints for only a limited time, and then the prints are made to fulfill the orders already placed. The work is limited to those prints sold during that time.

Please spread the word, would you? And please check in on Sunday to see the work.

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.

TOP's links!

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

Marcelo Guarini: "I met Paul Caponigro, in 1986 I guess, when I was commencing my Ph.D. At U of A. The occation was an exhibit opening of his recent work, at the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson. Quite different technically from his view camera work, although the subject was again landscape, walls etc. The prints were large Cibachromes made from 35mm Kodachromes he made with a Leica M, and they were beautiful. I got the opportunity to talk to him for a few minutes where he told me about how his family arrived to the U.S. from Italy, and about how much he was enjoying that little camera (the Leica), we even talked some Italian, his much better than mine. From those few minutes, I realized I have met more than a top photographer, but a superb human being."

Bruce Van Valen: "I was very fortunate to have been in Maine in 2011 and to have been able to spend time at Paul Caponigro's show at the Farnsworth Museum in July of that year. That show was incredibly impressive to me as a photographer. I had been aware of his work before but this collection of his work blew me away! I also have a great deal of respect for John Paul's work, and would like to do one of his workshops one day. But I have to say that the notion of one of these photographs coming from an iPhone puts me off. Obviously, I haven't seen the photograph yet, but as a previous purchaser of TOP print sale prints, I can't see iPhone photography as being the pinnacle of the state of photography at this time."

Mike replies: Consider that in the early decades of 35mm, there were many who called them "toy" cameras or "miniature format," and wouldn't take work made with them seriously...there's actually nothing deficient about John Paul's image technically (I might even enjoy the contrast between the two a little more if there were), but I'd say the artfulness is in the artist, not in the device. Of course you must judge for yourself, so you're right to reserve judgment.

Steve Makin: "Hello Mike. Long time reader here. Just wanted to share my Caponigro story. The Wise Silence has long been my favourite, a shared passion with my good friend John. Imagine our surprise when out photographing trees at a local wood and we came upon the very same tree that Paul photographed and included in The Wise Silence (titled 'Cheshire UK' if I recall correctly). John and I had spent a whole winter photographing every Sunday morning at this place (Alderley Edge, Cheshire) with a view to putting together a joint exhibition. It was to be our last visit for this purpose and we both instantly recognised the tree! A magical moment. Obviously we have both attempted to capture something of the tree ever since but never managed to do so."

Mike replies: Man, I know what you mean. I tried once to mimic a Lee Friedlander photograph, which I initially thought would be a piece of cake. I spent a week perching my camera on the hood of various cars and posing behind the wheel, and I never even got close. Not even close.

Marilyn Nance: "I was on a photographic workshop to the Antarctic Circle led by John Paul and Seth Resnick this past February. JP is a wonderful, kind person in addition to being a great photographer and instructor. Hope to be able to attend one of his printing workshops."

Is the RX[x] Coming? (And: Magic)

It's been very close to a year (the anniversary of the announcement date is tomorrow*) since Sony delighted the camera cognoscenti of the world with the RX1, the smallest-ever full-frame digital camera. Barely larger than a point-and-shoot, the RX1 featured very traditional controls. The current version is popular enough that it's currently in a stock-depleted state more or less everywhere.

Now, David Kilpatrick at PhotoClubAlpha is bandying the rumor that photographers from two French photojournalism agencies, including a big name photographer from Magnum, are "roaming the night-time streets of Paris" with a soon-to-be-announced interchangeable-lens version of the tiny FF wonder.

True, or rumor? You know how these things sometimes turn out to be wishful thinking. The article claims we'll know by October.

•     •     •

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, I had to go to Michigan on business last weekend. We sold of the lakeside manse that had been in the family for exactly 100 years—a bittersweet event to be sure, although it seems to me a bit more on the "sweet" side—I mean, it's scary being stuck with a million-dollar white elephant that, in an ideal world, really needs either a half million dollars' worth of work or an expensive teardown. (The house was never owned by me, I should add.) We'd been struggling to find a respectable buyer for years, with no success. I loved the place in my youth, but I have my memories; all things must pass. Good luck to he or she who now pays the bills.

Anyway, the journey involved another trip across the lake on the Lake Express, and I took a few snaps, something I seem to do almost by habit even when preoccupied with other things.

Nothing happened, which is okay. In pool, there's an expression: "The balls roll funny for everybody." Same with photography. Sometimes the photo gods smile, sometimes they don't. No good shots this trip. Just from a technical perspective, however, once again I was amazed by something I wrote about in my initial review of my NEX-6: the metering system's ability to ignore the sun.

This is more or less straight out of the camera, shot with absolutely no exposure controls. It's a little on the underexposed side, maybe, but not much: there's lots of detail in the not-quite-silhouetted figure.

Crop manipulated to show the detail in the file

I suppose it's not good for me to admit that I have no idea how a camera works**, but, well, I have no idea how they do that. It was a bit hazy out, but that sun was bright, brother. If there's one thing every photographer has always known, it's that you can't just point an autoexposure camera straight at the sun and expect everything to be all right. Every other camera I've ever used would clamp down the exposure to compensate, and you'd have to figure out some way to compensate back.

I'm mildly curious about how this is accomplished, but I guess I don't really need to know. I've considered that it could be an incident meter hidden somewhere in or on the camera, an algorithm programmed to ignore subject brightness past a certain level, or magic.

I've decided it's magic. I'm okay with that explanation. All I have to remember is what the camera does visually; I don't need to know how it does it.

Mike
(Thanks to Robin Pywell)

*Thanks to Amazon's dpreview for archiving these facts. A most useful site.

**Except that none of us really has much idea how any digital camera works.

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's links!

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

Oskar Ojala: "My feeling is that live view cameras are more accurate in metering than traditional cameras, simply because a lot of useful analysis can be made from the image from the sensor, whereas light meters rely on some reflection patterns."

Mike replies: See also Kevin P.'s comment in the Comments section.

Pak-Ming Wan: "It is probably doing some sort of funky real-time histogram mapping algorithm that caps X% of blown highlights and Y% of dark beyond black. That's got to be more accurate than just measuring the scene over, say, 50 different areas and then mapping it to the theoretical dynamic range of the sensor. Back at the ranch, you're then tone mapping this on your computer and getting a much better on-screen result again. Why manufacturers haven't built in tone mapping (shadow/light areas) into the JPEG processors is beyond me...it's the two most useful sliders in Lightroom and I think digital cameras (with live view) should have those as settings as well."

Picking Winners

The Guest Judge of our recent "People Working" contest has left the choice of picking the winners (and awarding the substantial $1,600 in prizes) up to me.

Gulp.

It strikes me as more or less an arbitrary choice; none of the six finalists strike me as obviously "better" than the others, in the sense of being clearly more deserving of reward.

Anyway, I've been going around and around. I'll have a decision for you tomorrow.

Mike the Ed.

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's links!

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

Michael: "Well, Mike, what the Brits say when they are enjoying Schadenfreude: better you than me, mate! But I can also say that these are absolutely splendid shots and any one of them is an education in itself. So don't worry: we'll just enjoy the result."

We're Back Up

...Sort of. I returned to action this morning to find computer problems. Of course. (Modern life is good, but not simple.) I have to reset my browser (Firefox), which I'm dreading.

I haven't yet been able to contact Amazon to try to get an answer as to why many peoples' longstanding orders for Here Far Away are being cancelled. I can speculate it's that maybe it's because you ordered the first edition and only the second edition is going to be available? Many people are reordering through Amazon U.K. and the Book Depository. I'm not sure that's necessary—I'd just place a new order through Amazon.com—but if you don't want to try that it's understandable. TOP readers have so far ordered or purchased 318 copies of the book through our links.

The new statement camera of Micro 4/3

The new ÜberOlympus became available overnight, as did its new companion premium-quality zoom, a 24–80mm ƒ/2.8. [Correction: Whoops, it's a 12–40mm, of course. 24–80mm angle-of-view equivalent. Shows you how my mind works. —Ed.] These are statement products for Micro 4/3, which demand a certain level of attention even from people who are down on Olympus because of its soon to be two-year-old corporate troubles with malfeasance.

...Which, by the way, are continuing: Britain's Serious Fraud Office (SFO) has decided to prosecute Olympus. It's the first time the agency has prosecuted a company instead of an individual. The U.S. Justice Department has not decided on a course of action, but has not closed the case.

Meanwhile, the camera division, which has taken a bad hit from all the bad press for things I'm sure no one in the division ever even knew about, continues to struggle to fight to right itself after getting swamped by the rogue wave. Behind all the brouhaha, they still make very good cameras. I naturally sympathize with citizens in the streets rather than governments, soldiers in the trenches rather than the high command, and workers on the line rather than the fat-cats in the corporate jets, so of course I feel for the people actually designing, engineering, and making the cameras and lenses. YMMV.

The new lens is especially interesting. If you are familiar with Olympus's top-line lenses for the 4/3 system, you know just how good they can potentially be.

Last item of news: Ctein's column will be one day late this week. As usual, not due to him at all; due to the Ed. (me) having been away.

More anon.

Mike
(Thanks to Andreas Sakka)

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's links!

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

Marc Gibeault: "I got my copy of Here Far Away yesterday from the Book Depository. Even though I'm here far away in Canada."

Kurt Shoens: "I've given up on Here Far Away. I'm sure it's a lovely book and that I would have enjoyed it very much, but I've fretted enough attempting to get a copy. I'm sanguine about it. I'm sure whoever gets the copy I might have gotten will treasure it and I will turn my attention to books I can get instead of the one that got away."

J. White: "My reason for cancelling and placing an order with Amazon U.K. comes from the sad fact that Amazon U.S. were unable to fulfill my pre-order for the first edition of the book. Seeing that the second edition is now shipping, I called Amazon in the U.S. this morning to ask whether or not they will be able to acquire the book from the publisher. The two people I spoke could not confirm this, so I cancelled the order. I will not miss out on an opportunity to own this book again!"

Kosch: "I feel like I could make a side business on your photo book recommendations. For the past four years now, I have bought two copies of what you say is good. Not only have I enjoyed each purchase (no joke, my photography has become better because of what I have bought and devoured), I have been able to sell my extra copy for a lot more money (minimum 4x). When you drop a link, Mike, I buy. This is called consulting; you could make a living doing this. Keep up the blog please."

Mike replies: Jeez, now you're putting the pressure on...!

Ooh, and Look What's Finally Coming

This beautemous thing, as you can see with your own two peepers, is the Fuji Super EBC XF 23mm ƒ/1.4, the [drumroll] long-promised fast lens for the Fuji X cameras that has a 35mm-equivalent angle of view. Super tasty. Finally. To call this "long-awaited" is an understatement.

Only available for pre-order at B&H (which is closed until the end of the day) and at Amazon, expected to ship in mid-October. I know a lot of people who have been waiting for this.

Some samples here (all the blown highlights appear to be the photographer's style, not evidence of some technical problem). Funny how much of a Fujinon this is; looks just like film Fujinons of yore.

(Remember, TOP won't be updating for a few days, while I take care of some necessary business. Don't forget our Archives....)

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.

TOP's links!

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

Stephen Scharf: "Count me as one those who have been waiting a looonnng time for this baby. And it's bloody weil time, too. The 23mm has a design that is very similar to the absolutely fabulous XF 14mm ƒ/2.8, which I recently used to shoot Pro NHRA Drag Racing, of all things. With fully optical correction for distortion (the 14mm's design is the same, and has no, and I mean NO, barrel or pincushion distortion), so I have high expectations for this. Yowza!"

Pentti Update

I promised you an update about this: the publisher tells me that the second edition printing of the English language version of Finnish photographer Pentti Sammallahti's Here Far Away was 3,750, "quite a lot more" than the first edition. However, the book has barely started shipping and 2,200 of those copies have already been sold. (TOP readers account for 192 of those as of Wednesday, not counting anyone who ordered prior to August.) So it's possible the second edition won't last any longer than the first did.

Book Depository link (shipping now)

Amazon U.K. link (shipping now)

Amazon U.S. link (shipping later in September or in October)

Here's a nice portrait of Pentti Sammallahti.

Mike
(Thanks to Dewi Lewis)

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's links!

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

No featured comments yet—please check back soon!