The Online Photographer

Engadget Says Sigma Wants You to Focus on the Sensor

Not sure they've really demonstrated their premise, but Engadget is reporting that Sigma CEO Kazuto Yamaki wants you to concentrate on the sensor of the new dp2 Quattro and ignore the strange, futuristic, and somehow oddly appealing shape of the camera. Despite this, the dp2 Quattro appears to be getting a lot of attention because of the way it looks.

Which is not too surprisingly considering that image samples aren't easy to find yet.

You can find the specs of the new camera here.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2014 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:

Mike Plews: "The idea of different resolutions for each color channel is interesting. In video we have been doing something a little like this for a long time. DVCPro25 took over much of the broadcast market with a 4:1:1 sample system and it looked quite good (I shot it for almost 10 years). I believe the idea was that if you let the green channel provide most of the resolution and allow the others to provide color information you would tie up much less bandwidth and still get a nice sharp image. It worked. I'm a content guy and not an engineer so please take my comment with a grain of salt. Talking tech stuff on a site with the readership as sharp as TOP's can lead one to unwittingly demonstrate the Warren Buffet adage 'you don't find out who is swimming naked until the tide goes out.'"

andy sheppard (partial comment): "Personally I don't only think it looks foul, but it seems to be the most inconvenient shape it could be."

Kalli (partial comment): "I'm pleased you call it appealing. I've always seen the shape of the DP series as appealing. These new Quattro ones are certainly unusual, but I still think they're good looking."

Hugh Crawford: "At last someone is selling something that looks like a real film camera. It sure looks like my old Brooks Veriwide / XLSW mutt or the various 'cameras' I built out of Mamyia 23 backs and bits of camera junk in the '80s. Really this reminds me so much of the Graflex XLSW with a 47mm super-angulon, the Brooks, and that Plaubel 69 Brooks clone that I wonder if someone at Sigma didn't consciously decide to make this look and handle like the traditional roll film camera that occupied that niche.

"That XLSW was one if the cameras I wish I had never sold. I think that if Sigma made cars they would be Citroëns."

Man Seeking Woman

SA*

Rejected by eHarmony from an unknown man in Dubuque, IA:

I am a unique individual: I like financial security, excellent health, enjoying all that life has to offer, and giving my sweetie roses**.

Other things I enjoy: time off; cash windfalls; free swag; getting away with things; lying when it's convenient; being waited on; traveling on somebody else's frequent flier miles; fart jokes at times that are very inopportune for you; making you pay for drinks; hitting on your friends and pretending it's all in fun; having no responsibilities; not growing old despite the passage of time (me: a very young 52); ignoring you to watch football, because I just love football; ignoring you to watch random sports I don't even care about, such as skeleton luge and slopestyle skiing; promising to accompany you to church and then backing out at the last minute, every single time; eating, eating well, eating very well, eating very well without having to help clean up (in ascending order). I am fond of being accorded high status for no reason and when people tell me I'm handsome; people sucking up to me; people mistaking me for someone famous; heroin without consequences (impossible, and did I ever find that out); co-worker underlings acting deferential because they're frightened of my power and my intermittent capricious ruthlessness. Winning. Especially undeservedly.

What my friends say about me: that I am scintillating, brilliant, corruscating, incisive, charming, beloved, strong, infinitely bold, passionate and deeply spiritual. Actually I don't know what the heck they say about me because most of them live in other cities and we hardly ever see each other any more, and we talk "once a year" which is actually more like once every three to five years. But enough about me!

You: you should look like Amanda Holden but not be quite so old, even though the real Amanda Holden is ten years younger that my fake age (the one I'm lying about which is five years less than my real age)—but don't forget, you must agree to look like Amanda Holden looks now when you get to be the age she is now. Before I go to the hassle of meeting you in person, you must agree to marry me eventually if I want. You should also agree to go away quietly if that turns out to be what I want. Total commitment, true loyalty, and complete honesty on your part are a must.

 

My approximate appearance. If I were a little younger. And a little thinner. And had a little more hair on my head. And a little less on my upper body. And a better tan. What? What makes you think I
pirated this picture off the Internet?

I am very buff and fit. Oh wait, that was 25 years ago. My memory of once having been fit, however, exerts a powerful influence over my self-image now, even though I have not worked out since Clinton was President and the only way I could run fast is if I were being chased by a criminal or a large animal that was trying to kill me—which would be self-defeating, since running hard at my age would cause me to experience a massive heart event and die anyway. Or at least enter a vegetative state. Which, come to think of it, would probably mimic my general energy level fairly closely. My appearance now does not bother me—I'm still thin from in here, and I find it easy to ignore my added weight. So it should not bother you. I cannot however ignore excess weight on you, because I can see you—so you must be, and agree to stay, fit and trim.

So I guess what I'm saying is that my ideal mate should enjoy exercising alone.

You should earn at least $75,000 a year—that would make our combined income as a couple $100,000 a year, which I consider a comfortable level. So I am generously thinking of both of us with this requirement.

In short, am the kind of person who likes perfect weather, tropical island getaways, carefree fun, beautiful music, being adored by domestic pets, and being happy. I like to laugh—and really, how many human beings can say that?

Oh, and yes, I can tolerate walking on beaches as well as candlelight. So as you can plainly see, I'm perfect for you.

•     •     •

The foregoing is fiction. Any resemblances to anyone's real eHarmony profile are completely coincidental.

Happy [cynical, satrical***] Valentine's Day!

Mike

*Satire alert

**Exactly once per relationship

***And also the real, sincere, heartfelt kind, if and where applicable

Original contents copyright 2014 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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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Burton Randol: "I remember, as a bracing antidote to the usual personal ads, a 1999 Valentine's Day article in the New York Times that contrasted the British approach, as represented by actual postings in the Personal Ads section of the London Review of Books, with counterparts from the New York Review of Books. Excerpts from some of the (real) British ones:

Sixty-seven-year-old disaffiliated flaneur picking my toothless way through the urban sprawl, self-destructive, sliding towards pathos, jacked up on Viagra and on the lookout for a contortionist....

Why, oh why, oh why?...47-year-old male serving life sentence in Scottish academia. Respondents must know absolutely nothing about Byron or Shelley and loathe the thought of reading Wordsworth and Keats. Blake is a concessionary 'maybe' only.

Illiterate old bastard with not a single book in sight seeks someone to read poetry and wash away the interminable cynicism that comes with reading this magazine. Must harbor profound hatred of Tuscany.

A hopeful young student of Freud/Is looking for fun unalloyed/She's fresh, free and flirty/And loves to talk dirty/About dreams she's especially enjoyed.

"Here's the article."

Jim Witkowski: "Oh! I thought you were writing about me!"

Anonymous: "Funny story from me time. Last year, when Peter Turnley's book was offered, I ordered a copy and recall that it was suggested (if not by you, then by commenters) that it would make a good Valentine's day gift. Some time later, I reactivated a profile on a dating site and (skipping skipping skipping) tonight I'm taking my wonderful girlfriend to a nice dinner at a restaurant of her choosing, where I will be giving her the copy of French Kiss, and I will serenade her. FWIW, both of our profiles were oddly not like the satiric version you wrote, and in fact would have scared off many women (in the case of mine)."

Ctein's Matrix Set Sale

Written by Ctein

[Important: Please read the whole post before clicking the payment tab. A payment by itself does not constitute an order! —Ed.]

As Mike wrote last week, the best suggestion I got for what to do with my dye transfer matrices was, "Sell them!" At a reasonably low price, enough people seemed to be interested in having some printmaker Ctein work product, not to mention a piece of now-nearly-gone photographic history.

Ask and you shall receive! I have 280 matrix-and-work-print sets for sale, most of them one-of-a-kinds, although I have multiple sets for a few photographs. For the next five days (until midnight, Monday, Central Standard Time) or until I run out, you can buy these sets for a nominal price that won't be repeated.

Each set includes a work print (usually the first print pulled from the matrices), the three matrices (seen above) that were used to make the print in their protective paper folders, and a two-page letter from me that explains what the annotations on the work print mean. The work prints are exactly the same size as finished prints—90% of the sets are for prints in the 16x20" size range; most of the rest are 10x12" prints.

The price? $150 per set, plus a flat charge of $25 for shipping and handling, regardless of the number of sets you order (so long as they're all going to the same destination). International customers pay no more than domestic. I have to collect sales tax from California customers, so orders shipped to a California destination will cost $162 a set, tax included, plus the $25 for S&H (20% of all sales goes to Mike, so you're also supporting TOP when you buy a set).

The twist
There is a twist to this sale. Originally, my idea was simple—people would send me money, and I'd pull a work set from my files and send it to them. It would be entirely random. Then I decided to let you tell me which print you'd prefer to get and see how many of those requests I could satisfy. The odds are against being able to make everyone happy, but it will be a fun game for me to see how many requests I can match (I have an odd idea of "fun").

Here's the way it works. For each set you order, you can give me up to three picture titles of sets that you would prefer to get (you don't have to give me any choices if you're entirely happy with the luck of the draw). What I'll try to do is optimize all those preferences across all the orders to maximize the number of people who get one of their three choices.

Please don't try to game the system; it won't work. Making fewer than three choices won't improve your chances of getting the one you want. Meta-choices like "anything from Hawaii is fine" I will have to ignore, and will constitute no choice at all. You can't specify size.

This isn't first come first served. I'm going to assign prints to people based on what will maximize the number of happy people. Your odds of getting the picture(s) you want are just as good on the final day of the sale as the first (assuming I'm not sold out by then).

Beyond that, there are no hidden rules and no catches. You make three picks; I'll make you happy if I can. If people's choices were entirely randomly distributed (they won't be), 95% would get one of their choices. But....

There are no guarantees in this game, and, of necessity, no returns. I'll try to fill your request...but you have to be willing to take whatever I send you. You're not guaranteed to get one of your choices. It's still a grab-bag. If that doesn't sit right with you, then please don't buy.

The work print quality varies. A small percentage of them are so pristine and on the mark that you could hang them on the wall; a small percentage of them are so far off that it will amaze you how I could get from there to a finished print. Some are flawless, some badly cracked. Most are somewhere in between the extremes. Which will you get? No guarantees. Luck of the draw.

Ready to play? Then here's what you have to do. Please follow these steps in order! Don't jump ahead; it will just confuse things for me.

1. Make your choices. All the available photographs are shown on this page.

You can make up to three choices per order (e.g., if you're ordering two sets of matrices, you can make six choices, which would improve your chances of getting at least one of them).

2. Send me an email

It should contain the following information, in this order:

• How many sets you are ordering.

• The titles of your choices, if any.

• Whether you are paying by personal check or PayPal and the amount you are paying.

• Your postal mailing address, exactly as it should appear on the mailing label. I copy this into a database, so plain text, please. No HTML, no fancy formatting, written on three lines (foreign customers will have a fourth line for country, of course), thusly:

Ctein
42 Skyline Drive
Daly City CA 94015

This e-mail constitutes your order. This is what I use to record and track your purchase. If I do not get an e-mail with all this information, you don't have an order! If you choose to pay by PayPal, do NOT put this information in your PayPal order and expect me to see it. It needs to be put in an e-mail to me.

3. Pay me. You can pay by personal check drawn on a U.S. bank in U.S. funds, which will save me the PayPal fees, made out to "Ctein" and mailed to the above address. Or you can pay via PayPal with the buttons below. There's one for California buyers and one for everyone else.

[Ordering information removed—Sale ended midnight 2/17]

The PayPal price is the price for one set including S&H, because I think that is what the vast majority of people will be buying. If you want to order more than one set, you need to click through the order button once for each set. You'll get charged each time for the shipping and handling, but I'll catch that when I review the order and refund the difference to you, so you'll only pay the flat $25.

Orders will start shipping about two weeks after the sale ends. All orders will ship within 60 days. I will send you back a confirmation e-mail when I get your order, and another one when your order ships. If you do not get your confirmation e-mail within a couple of days of sending me your order e-mail, contact me. If you don't get a shipping e-mail within 60 days, contact me then.

Any questions? Please post'em and I'll reply!

Ctein

Ctein's column appears on Wednesday mornings on TOP.

©2014 by Ctein, all rights reserved

Original contents copyright 2014 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:

ross: "When in the process should we submit payment? I don't want to mail off a check or send PayPal to later find you have sold out."

Ctein replies: I will be tracking the number of sets sold, and the order links will get killed if and when the sets sell out. You should submit your payment right after sending me your email. Don't wait for my response.

Ken Sky: "Are the prints signed?"

Mike replies: Ctein is out for the afternoon but I'll step in—the prints aren't signed, and they shouldn't be. When a photographer signs a print it in effect says "this is finished work and meets my approval." A signature proclaims that the work fully expresses the artist's intentions. A first work-, test-, or guide-print would by definition not meet this standard.

Kevin Purcell: "I sense a Zipf-like (or similar Pareto-like) distribution in demand going for 'space-related,' 'lit up stuff at night' and 'anything with strong blue sky.' Then 'geology.' Then the rest. I'd be interested to see Ctein summarize the demand after the sale."

Ctein replies: Well, with approximately half the sets sold,  you're right about a power distribution, although the exponent is somewhat less than one. The range of choices, though, is considerably more eclectic than I would've guessed. Some are no-brainers to me, but there are a few real surprises, including one photograph that gets no traction in my portfolio but has four requests already for the matrix set. What this says is that TOP readers have broad and eclectic tastes.

(Before anyone asks, no I'm not going to say what particular photographs are being chosen heavily and which aren't.)

That will come as no surprise.

In terms of my workload, a power distribution is good and what I was hoping for. So far something like 35% of the photographs people have chosen were picked by only one person. That makes those easy—it's a no-brainer that if someone requested a photograph that no one else did, then of course they get it! I don't know if a global optimization on this kind of problem is an NP-complete problem (one of the mathematicians here, like DD-B, could say), but the local optimization is definitely in the N-cubed range. So, if this 35% holds through the rest of the sale (no way of knowing) it'll reduce the difficulty of my optimization by more than two-thirds.

I had no idea what to really expect. The pathological extremes made it very unpredictable. For example, if everyone had chosen only prints that were offered in TOP sales, it would be really easy: A double handful of people would get their choices and then everyone else would get random pics. Conversely, if it was a perfect distribution, with each and every photograph getting three "votes," that's the worst of all possible worlds in terms of the work required of me.

Blog Note, and Blanket Thanks

Ctein's Matrix Sale will start tomorrow at 11 a.m. sharp, Wisconsin time (that's U.S. Central time). Just so you know if you're a-waiting.

To answer another question about the sale, yes, he'll be shipping internationally, and there won't be any extra charge for international shipping.

I've been remiss about several duties recently due to my recent illness. One is that I haven't thanked anyone for donations in the past month (that is, people who clicked the "Donate" button in the right-hand sidebar and sent me a few bucks)—but, if I can be forgiven for the utter laziness of a blanket statement, thank you for your kindness! It's very considerate, and really very much appreciated. Those donations taken together paid for my first two doctor's appointments, so it really was very nice. I apologize for not sending individual thanks (which I try to do and don't always). I'm still only at about 70% of full speed*.

Finally, since 94% of our audience is male, and some subset are probably as absentminded and clueless as I am: Valentine's Day is this Friday, February 14th. You have been alerted!

Mike

*Of course, full speed for me is 80% of full speed, so I'm doing okay.

Original contents copyright 2014 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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Music Notes (OT): YouTubist (Hello 'Cello)

A few musical finds found YouTubing:

1. My second favorite piano player (after Hank Jones). Watched this three times in a row. I like how he starts out by mopping his brow like he'd been digging ditches or something. Didn't know this piece, the Berceuse ("a musical composition usually in 6/8 time that resembles a lullaby" —Wikipedia). Lovely.

2. Speaking of lullabies, a nice new song—simple, but lyrically elegant and unspoiled by the usual cruditup electronica-y productioniness. And a sentiment to coincide with the Tao Te Ching discussion.

I've listened to "Let's Be Still" about ten times and for some reason my brain doesn't mind. I have a pretty serious problem with "earworm," i.e., pop songs getting stuck in my head. There's a radio song in rotation right now called "Royals" by a New Zealander singer-songwriter called Lorde that was like poison to my brain—I only heard it like twice in the car and I could not get that damned ditty out of my head. I thought I was going to have to submit to hypnosis. That one was so bad I'm scared to listen to the damned thing again.

3. Beautiful guitars, for those more or less of my generation. Nice live performance.

The older I get the more I like live performances better. This clip also seems like a demonstration of how much pop music has changed in my short adulthood...like that 'cello? Hello? 'Cello?

Mike

Original contents copyright 2014 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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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Carsten W: "That Gilmour performance was just magnificent, exactly the opposite of the flamboyant, over-the-top, hundred-notes-per-second live performances that so many bands do, just quiet, beautiful, and true to the original. Gilmour has always been my guitar hero. Competent, unrushed, and with incredible feeling."

Cmans: "Chopin's Berceuse Op. 57 is my #1 go-to for defusing my negative mental energy. If I concentrate on the soothing tones and the interplay of the pianist's two hands, I'll have no room in my head for negativity.

"My favorite recording is from Maurizio Pollini's c. 1960 performance and is very similar to the Michelangeli you found, except that to my ear, Pollini's right hand plays a little softer and with slightly different coordination than Michelangeli's. Chopin's Berceuse seemed so complicated to me when i first heard it, that I had for a long time thought that it was played with four hands.

"If you search on YouTube for Chopin's Berceuse, you may find the post with ten different artist's renditions of this Bercuese. The portraits in the video that accompany these versions are as stunning as the various interpretations of this piece, and I think are worth the price of admission to view."

'Road to Seeing' Finally Shipping

Dan Winters' imposing 700-page tome Road to Seeing is finally shipping from Amazon, after being breathlessly awaited in numerous corners of the Web. Rather than try to cadge a few sales for myself by linking to it here (that's how we all survive, by linking to products), I'll refer you to Strobist, where David has been covering the book responsibly and well. You ought to order that one through his link, if you're going to*.

Mike

*I am not a good capitalist, when it comes right down to it.

Original contents copyright 2014 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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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Paul Bass: "Maybe not, but you're my kind of capitalist."

Michael Perini: "A classy and rare gesture to David Hobby's Site. Nice.

"Not sure what happened, but I've had my copy for over a month and it is a very impressive book. Part history of photography and process 'as told by' Mr. Winters, part photographic biography, as well as a biographic sketch of how a style comes to be. All done in typical Dan Winters style—meaning the amount of thought and the amount of work done is imposing, and evident on every page.

"I read the book cover to cover over the course of just a few days. This is very rare for me, and was not my intention, but I couldn't put it down. To say I admire the level of craft that Mr. Winters  brings to everything he does would be an understatement. All excuses melt away in the heat of the laser-like focus he brings to his work. He seems to treat every project, big or small with the same respect and intensity. To see that demonstrated over and over is a very valuable part of the book.

"Mr. Winter's work which can be utterly wonderful but for this viewer, not homogeneously so. There is work that I will simply say I don't 'get' (I've never been a personal fan of the famous Laura Dern portrait for example) But for the most part, I feel drawn to his work, I like looking at it and the way he solves the issues of doing commissioned work, and makes it his own.

"It is a book I will re-read in my more usual piecemeal manner and it is a book I have learned from and will continue to learn from. One of those books that you are happy to own. A very impressive work, on his part, and on the parts of his editors and publisher.  I wondered more than once while reading, 'how did he get this done?' I'm glad he did."

D B: "I'm curious—do Dan's pictures appeal to you? Are you considering spending Own Money on the book?"

Mike replies: Not really, and no, I've decided against it. Nothing personal, and no judgment implied—we can't all engage with everybody, and DW is just a bit far from my personal taste. (This is the flip side of the "touchstones' point I made recently.)

The Mystery of Fashion

Got the following comment from Thomas McInnis about the Victoria Will shot I posted the other day:

I am a die hard fashion photography fan, and this is a gorgeous documentary photograph. I think the biggest hurdle for a lot of people (particularly in North America and certainly here in Australia) is access to good fashion photography. Despite the leveling effect of the Internet, it's the kind of thing that is hard to find unless you already know where to look.

What you see in American Vogue and Harpers et al. is somewhat of a sanitised survey of Pop Fashion Photography. It's like going to the record store and seeing one of those bargain-bin "Best Opera Love Songs" CD sets and assuming (not unjustly) that this Opera stuff is a bit naff!

The industry-leading Nick Knight specified in an interview recently that fashion photography is not photography...but his work is closer to illustration sometimes, and particularly now he is working more with motion rather than stills. I would highly recommend, if you ever have a chance, a look at the monograph of Viviane Sassen, In and Out of Fashion, published by Prestel. It might be a nice counterpoint to what you typically encounter of fashion photography. :-)

As one who finds "fashion photography" (and fashion) a bit opaque, I'm always interested to learn more about what I'm ignorant about. Anyone else have an opinion about the Viviane Sassen book?

Here's the Nick Knight interview. I won't embed it because it's got some nudity in it and so probably doesn't qualify as work- and school-friendly. Speaking of which, the cover of the Sassen book is a nude as well.

Mike
(Thanks to Thomas)

Original contents copyright 2014 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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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Mattias: "Well, I have never been keen on fashion photography and have no such book in my photobook collection, but Viviane Sassen's photography managed to pry my eyes wide open and for the first time reconsider. Her strong originality, especially her graphical compositions and fun way of using colour, and the immense sense of mystery in the images have captivated me. I see almost only art and very little to no product marketing in her images and that appeals to me."

Ed Hawco: "Check out the video embedded in this blog post for a glimpse at how illustration-layered some fashion photography can be."

Mike replies: That's astonishing, although I have to say that if I had to do that for a living I'd jump off a building.

Yoram: "Also recommended is The Fashion Book: New and Expanded Edition by Phaidon."

Simon Griffee: "The Victoria Will still shot spoke more to me about fashion than Nick Knight's seven minute video."

Don: "I have no real knowledge of the fashion business but I find Viviane Sassen's work irresistable. I'm not even totally sure why, but I think there is a sculptural quality to her photography that I love. There's also a certain sense of fun and perhaps of not taking things too seriously, though I might be mis-interpreting the latter point. I would also recommend In and Out of Fashion for anyone interested in Sassen's work."

Open Mike: Against a Headwind

My head is full of pictures I didn't take, and they're all eloquent, perfectly composed and thought-provoking. Here's one I missed:

The entire world seems crusted in snow. It's eight degrees out (–13°C) and the wind is blowing, which makes the cold worse. A major thoroughfare near where I live, 50 mph (80 kph) speed limit, three lanes, no sidewalk. The landscape beyond is bleak, white, white steam escaping from squat buildings. Spindrifts of powdery snow in sheets blow across the surface of the roadway. And at the edge of the road, a middle-aged man, bundled up, head down, is cranking a bicycle against the wind and the cold. Pedaling laboriously. A mile away I encounter another citizen on a bike.

'Kay, you don't know much about what's happening there. But here are a couple of things that are pretty safe to infer:

1. Those people have somewhere they have to get to. You don't go out in this kind of cold on icy roads on a bike because you feel like a burrito or because it occurred to you that it might be time for a haircut. Who knows—but what's the thing most people don't have any choice about when it comes to getting somewhere on time?—work, probably.
2. They have no other possible mode of transportation—no car, no cab fare, no friend or relative with wheels to give them a lift. Because, again, the only mode of transportation that's worse than a bike in this weather is walking.

It's not the rich getting richer that I worry so much about in my town here in the heartland; it's the poor getting poorer. My guess is that being out on a bike in weather like this means you're in pretty dire straits.

Not too long ago a young man at the Walgreen's told me disgustedly that all the retail jobs in town were cutting back their hours, and that he was down to 22 hours a week behind that cash register. Worse, he said, the store wouldn't give him regular hours—each week his schedule changed. Why was that important? Because it meant he couldn't get a second job—the arbitrary schedule meant he wouldn't be able to guarantee his availability at either one. "But how am I supposed to live on 22 hours work a week?" he asked me, rhetorically.

Didn't sound like fun to me either. But it could be worse. You could have to ride a bike to get there, in the bleak February cold.

Mike

"Open Mike" is the often off-topic editorial page of TOP. It pedals laboriously past on Sundays.

Original contents copyright 2014 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Featured Comments from:

Thomas Tveit Rosenlund: "I usually do ride my bike to work all year round here in Oslo, Norway. I guess it's about 10 km each way. Most of the winter it's below freezing, and with plenty of wind from time to time, snow and ice are among the other obstacles (but the spiked tires are really good these days). I actually kind of prefer it to my car (parking is impractical), bus (I don't like the bus, it's slow), train or tube (not nearly as flexible). But most importantly I think biking to work is the perfect way to start the day as I work in an office, it's good to have one outdoor activity on the daily schedule."

Mike replies: Ah. So if I had taken that photograph, my interpretation of the photo would be only provisional. And if I were a reporter, then I would have had to talk to the cyclist to see why he was riding his bike.

Mark Steigelman: "You did take the picture, just not photographically. I saw it in my head as soon as I read your terrific description. I, though, imagined the people on the bikes have lost their licenses because of DWIs. The beauty of being the viewer or the reader is that we bring whatever we want to the story or picture. You never know the reality of the situation."

Mike replies: Ah, DWI is a possibility that didn't occur to me. Very plausible.

I do make these same kind of interpretations with photographs, by the way. Well, with some photographs. You're presented with a certain amount of evidence, and you weigh some possibilities as to what might be going on. With me it's seldom just fantasizing, however—I don't bring "whatever I want" to the picture, but try to see the evidence of the picture for what it might be trying to tell me. Always accepting that I might be wrong.

And I think you can know "the reality of a situation"—though perhaps only to a certain level or depth. For instance, with a photograph of a person riding a bike in a snowstorm, assuming you believe the picture at all, you know that a person was out riding a bike in adverse weather. In that case you can reasonably take the word of the photographer about certain things—for instance, the location, the time and day, the velocity of the wind and the temperature—because photographers are people who are as likely to tell the truth as other people are. You might be able to glean other true things from the picture, from his clothes, his bike, his posture or expression, and so forth. You don't know a lot of other things, some of which could be discovered by talking to the bike rider and asking him. My point is that what's usually true is that you can discover some things about the reality of the situation from photographs, a lot of which admittedly you don't know absolutely for sure, and then there are a lot of other things that you really don't know. It's just like evidence of every other kind—it needs to be weighed, considered.

John Denniston: "Peter Penn in his book It's All About the Bike tells a story of moving to a small village in Wales where the only people who were seen riding bikes were those whose driver's licence had been suspended for some reason or other. After living in village for over year and still riding his bike bike every day, a local leaned over to him in a pub and whispered in his ear, 'Did you kill someone?'"

Open Mike 2: The Problem of Translation (OT)

A week or so ago there was an interesting article in the Times called "Translation as a Performing Art." The author, Antony Shugaar, points out that there are really no untranslatable words, but that there are untranslatable worlds.

I thought what follows might be interesting for those who read my short book review of the Feng/English/Lippe translation of the Tao Te Ching the other day. I simply went to Amazon and made clips of a few translations, which you can compare for yourself.

These are all of the relatively simple first chapter. If even these are too much to ingest, try just reading the last sentence of every version (summarized below).

First up is Arthur Waley, an immensely well-respected earlier scholar (d. 1966):

Next, Stephen Addis and Stanley Lombardo (the latter famous for his "relevant" translations of the Odyssey and Iliad, intended to be simple, plain and direct in order to appeal to college-age young people):

Now the Gia-Fu Feng, Jane English, and Toinette Lippe translation I wrote about:

Here's James Legge, the Scottish sinologist who died in 1897:

Robert G. Henricks:

Red Pine:

Thomas Cleary:

Stephen Mitchell:

Note that I made no effort here to find translations that differed from each other; I just grabbed a few that came up relatively early in Amazon searches or that I knew about—or, in the case of the Addiss and Lombardo and Red Pine, that readers mentioned in comments to the earlier post.

Looking at just the last lines we have:

The Doorway whence issued all Secret Essences

The gateway to all mystery

The gate to all mystery

Where the Mystery is the deepest is the gate of all that is subtle and wonderful

The gateway of all subtleties

The door to all beginnings

The mystery of mysteries / is the gateway of marvels

The gateway to all understanding

So you can see what English-speaking readers are up against here. To really understand which translation might be best for you, you have to read a bunch of the commentaries on each chapter, to get an idea of which interpretations you tend to agree with, and then evaluate which translations tend to provide that viewpoint.

I might (gently) point out, however, that many translations have both certain felicities and certain shortcomings; none are superior in all ways, especially in light of the many interpreted meanings. For example, the first line of Chapter 60 in Feng/English/Lippe says "Ruling a country is like cooking a small fish" with no further explanation. The generally accepted view of this sentence is that when you fry a pan full of small fish, if you try to stir or flip the fish too much, they'll just disintegrate and you'll have a mess on your hands; so you have to be patient and keep your hands off and just let them cook, slowly. My preferred translation doesn't even hint at this explanation, but a number of others do.

And that's just one line of one chapter.

And then (whoa) consider that there are literally hundreds of translations...many more than just the ones available on Amazon now.

Holy mountain-dwelling Sage, Batman.

In the 1950s and '60s, when LPs first began to appear and there were only a few classical music performances available on records, audiophiles identified that people tended to be most loyal to the performances they encountered, and got used to, first: the first performance you engaged with tended to be the one that seemed most "natural" and "right" to you and that you continued to feel sounded like the piece "ought" to sound. The same might be true of Tao Te Ching translations—however you encounter the work first, the one you engage with first, is the one that seems the most right to you going forward.

The Feng/English/Lippe book is the one I encountered first, my gateway to the mysteries of the Tao as it were. Maybe that's why I like it best. But throughout all my subsequent happy tourist wanderings through various versions, interpretations, and translations, it has held up for me compared to many alternatives.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2014 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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psu: "You will generally find that the 'you like what you learned first' rule also applies to software user interfaces."

JK: "I won't try to pass judgement on these translations, but I can tell you that the one with the Chinese next to it is, by far, the most literal. I've found the same thing myself: if you ever have to publish a translation accompanied by the original language (especially something as impossibly distant from English as classical Chinese), it tends to keep you honest.

"As the old saying goes, the beautiful ones aren't faithful, and the faithful ones aren't beautiful."

FrasSmith: "My current favourite is the Ursula K. Le Guin version (possibly because it's the only one I own).

The way you can go
isn't the real way.
The name you can say
isn't the real name.

Heaven and earth
begin in the unnamed:
name's the mother
of the ten thousand things.

So the unwanting soul
sees what's hidden,
and the ever-wanting soul
sees only what it wants.

Two things, one origin,
but different in name,
whose identity is mystery.
Mystery of all mysteries!
The door to the hidden.

"I like it; it seems to make more sense to me."

Mike replies: As Ursula herself says, her version is a rendition, not a translation: she bases it on the 1898 transliteration version by Paul Carus. She doesn't speak or read Chinese. This doesn't make it worse, necessarily, but it's worth mentioning.

I haven't read her version but based on the 'taste' you've given above, I think I should.

Jim Bullard: "As a student of biblical history I wonder if translators of the Tao run into the same problem biblical scholars do, namely that there are no original texts, only later copies of copies of copies. Before printing presses books were duplicated by hand and changes crept in, mostly inadvertently but sometimes deliberately by copyists 'correcting' what they thought were mistakes in the version they were copying. As a result (in the case of the bible) a comparison of say the 1200+ oldest copies we have of the New Testament, no two are identical. Granted most of the differences are minor but some are not and some of the differences lead to significantly different interpretations.

"The Tao is, I believe, about six centuries older than anything in the New Testament and the oldest existing copies are at least two centuries later than the original.

"And then there is the imprecision of language. One of my favorite pieces of music from Cat Stevens/Yosuf Islam is the Foreigner Suite. Near the beginning and repeated near the end is the lament 'There are no words that I can use because the meanings are left for you to chose,' a thought that I hear echoed in the beginning of the Tao."

Burton Randol: "The inherent ambiguities which are aspects of translation between natural human languages are well-known. I don't read Russian, but have been told by many highly educated bilingual (English/Russian) Russians that it is impossible to capture Pushkin's 'Eugene Onegin' in English. Vladimir Nabokov, who was natively trilingual in English, French, and Russian, certainly thought so, and as a corrective published a literal prose translation intended to precisely preserve the sense, if not the rhyme and meter, of the poem.

"A story, quite possibly apocryphal, but which I have heard since the 'sixties, involves a supposed early machine translation from English to Russian:

'The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak' > 'The vodka is good but the meat is rotten'

"Another similar anecdote, this time from from English to Chinese, or in some versions, from English to Russian:

'Out of sight, out of mind' > 'Invisible insanity'

"For anyone wishing to evaluate the level of truth in these old stories (it's not really absolutely clear), a useful reference is a June 1995 article in MT News International."

Ken Rahaim: "'Holy mountain-dwelling Sage, Batman'— just imagine the variations in the future translations of that line some 2,000–3,000 years in the future  :-) ."

Random Excellence: Victoria Will

New York Fashion Week, for Vogue. Photo by Victoria Will.

In my opinion this gets the palm as one of the best fashion shots ever made. At least of the year.

Granted, I might be cheating—we all have styles and genres of photography we like more than others, and, generally speaking, fashion photography—along with, for instance, insect photography—is one of the genres I don't personally have a feel for; and this shot might intersect more than most fashion photos with the social-documentary mode of photography that I do like. Still, a fine, interesting, and elegant picture, whatever genre you want to assign it to.

Victoria Will is the photographer who took the haunting tintype of the late Philip Seymour Hoffman that I discussed three days ago. (The processing for that photo was done by Josh Wool.) I spent some time at Victoria's website—she's an excellent photographer. Celebrity portraiture is another genre of photography that generally leaves me cold, but I thought her portrait of Brad Pitt was outstanding as well.

TOP will be off tomorrow, as usual, so that I can sit around feeling guilty about not doing housework. We'll return with an "Open Mike" on Sunday morning.

Mike
(Thanks to Jeff Greer)

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Kalli: "This is to fashion photography a bit like what Garry Winogrand's classic football field shot is to sports photography. It's all street to me."

No-Sweat Video

Written by Gordon Lewis

Sometimes, no matter how hard you try to avoid it, you find yourself agreeing to shoot video for someone; maybe even yourself. For photographers who shoot video with DSLRs or mirrorless cameras all day every day, this is no big deal. For those of us who seldom shoot video, if ever, it stirs certain insecurities. How do you do a decent job without biting off more than you can chew or doing such a poor job that the recipient doubts your abilities as a photographer? Here are a few tips I’ve found useful. Feel free to contribute any other you think might be helpful to the well-meaning neophyte.

• Set expectations. Make it clear what you intend to deliver. Personally, if I agree to anything at all, it will be no more than a few short video clips, in focus, steady, correctly exposed, and color balanced. I will burn the resulting clips onto a DVD. I will not bring supplementary lights or microphones. I will not do any editing or post-production. If you are willing to do more and can do it well, fine. Just don’t set yourself up for failure or a steep learning curve by promising more than you can deliver.
• Remember that video requires continuous light, so make sure you’ll have enough. My niece once asked me to shoot video of her and her sister doing a two-minute dance routine for their mom. Piece of cake, right? On the day of the shoot I discovered that they had scheduled their dance routine for 9:00 pm outdoors on a dimly lit patio, where the only light was from behind. I had no choice but to record silhouettes. 
Even if you have a continuous light or two, the larger the area and the greater the light-to-subject distance, the more light you’ll need. My rule of thumb is that there should be enough light on the subject that you can comfortably read a book. (Oh, and just because you can crank the ISO on your camera up to 6400 doesn’t mean it’s a good idea. High ISO video looks pretty gnarly in my opinion.)
• Use a tripod. A tripod will eliminate “the shakes,” which with a telephoto lens can be enough to make your video practically unwatchable. A tripod will also relieve you of the stress of trying to hold your camera and lens steady for minutes at a time, which is a lot harder than you might think. Having your hands free of the camera also reduces handling noises.
• Focus manually whenever possible. Switch your camera and lens to manual focus and use live view with high magnification for critical focus. Provided there are no significant changes in camera to subject distance, this will result in sharp video clips from start to finish and will prevent the camera from attempting to refocus if someone steps in front of your lens for a second or two.
• Zoom and pan with restraint. Any camera movements you do should look smooth, effortless, and justified.
• Remember that video includes sound. If you’re lucky, you’ll be shooting in an environment where everyone else is quiet and the audio is amplified over a PA system with speakers nearby. To minimize background noise or conversations, try to get as close to the sound source as you can. You should also anticipate inquiries from curious onlookers, especially if your camera is tripod mounted. I find it helps to have a sign printed on a sheet of typing paper that says “I am recording video AND sound. Please hold your questions for a few minutes until I’m done.” Also remember that any noises you make will be recorded and, because of the auto-gain feature, they will be a lot louder than you might expect.
• Video image captures are based on your JPEG settings. With rare exceptions, RAW processing is not an option. You will therefore need to set the white balance manually. A custom white balance is even better, especially under mixed lighting. As for color rendering, you’re better off using general purpose settings such as Standard, Neutral, or Faithful than more specialized ones like Landscape, Portrait, or Sepia Tone.
• Use the highest-capacity flash cards you own. An empty 8GB card will store roughly 22 minutes of HD video. A 16GB card will store twice that. Even if you’re only planning to shoot five or 10 minutes of video, it never hurts to have extra capacity for stills or “one more take.” If the video is intended for the web, you might skip HD entirely and opt for 640x480, which will result in much smaller files sizes and double the recording time as compared to HD.
• Read the instruction manual. You may discover that although your card can record up to 22 minutes of HD video, your camera’s maximum file size limits each clip to 12 minutes. Some cameras have even shorter limits to prevent the sensor from overheating. Either situation can be a problem if you’ve promised to videotape your daughter giving a 15-minute commencement speech. You may have to record at lower resolution, break the speech up into smaller clips, or both.
• Finally, practice. Just as you wouldn’t try to photograph a wedding with a camera and flash you had never used before, you shouldn’t attempt to record video with your own camera unless you know exactly how to start and stop recording. Generally, when recording, your camera’s LCD should show not just a red dot but also some sort of timer that indicates how much time you’ve recorded and/or how much you have left.

Gordon

Friend of TOP and longtime photo writer Gordon Lewis shut down his well-received photography blog Shutterfinger last December (note #2 at the link—yeah, I did see that! —Ed).

©2014 by Gordon Lewis, all rights reserved

Original contents copyright 2014 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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Mike Plews: "Great advice. Do use a tripod but remember that most still tripods are not great for video beyond 'lock down' shots. Most still pan/tilt heads are not smooth enough for the task and ball heads are going to be of very limited usefulness but both will be OK if you don't move the camera. If you don't plan to edit your material and want to make the raw video easier to watch then try shooting a locked down long shot followed by a medium shot followed by a close up. Repeat this as often as possible and your stuff will be more polished. Good luck."

Bill Tyler: "All good advice. Here are two extra items. Make sure your memory cards are fast as well as high capacity. If they aren't, you'll have dropped frames and the video will be unwatchable. And if you want sound, spring for an external mic. Even a relatively inexpensive one will maker a huge difference in sound quality."

Steven Palmer: "The best advice I ever read was to never zoom, or at least cut it when editing. It looks very amateurish. Look at professional video (documentaries for example), there is almost never any zooming in the final edit. When I read that it was a 'light bulb' moment for me. And it's true, watching video with zooming looks so bad."

Guy Couture: "This topic could not be more appropriate, as I am shooting my first video on Monday for a client I use to shoot stills every year. If panning seems OK with my tripod head, tilting is a complete failure unless handholding the camera...as for lights, I have three 1000w quartz with blue gels to mix with daylight. I hope it'll do. Needless to say, I cross my fingers. Thanks for all the advice."

New LED Streetlights Will Make Night Photographs Look Different

No text, just a link to the article on Gizmodo. (They'll be installing these on my street next summer.)

Mike
(Thanks to a reader whose name I can no longer find [sorry!])

Original contents copyright 2014 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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James Sinks: "We've been getting these in northern Virginia for the last few years, particularly in Arlington, which is waging an enormously wasteful and counterproductive war on the night. LEDs quite a different photographic experience from sodium vapor lamps. They're rather blue, but with a decent spectrum, so color differentiation is good and you can white balance them without too much hassle. The most common model I've seen has multiple emitters without a diffuser, which makes for some seriously nasty flare. But on the plus side, they shouldn't flicker (I haven't tested it...but flicker occasionally crops up when I'm shooting under vapor lamps or fluorescents) and don't cycle off at EOL. The latter will really be a godsend. I can't tell you how many hours of my life have been spent waiting for a dying light to cycle off, or on, or reach exactly the right part of its cycle to give me the color I want, so I can finish my damned picture and go to bed."

Jim G: "Ah, electricity, how much I miss it. (I'm outside of Philadelphia. Best estimate for power is next week!)"

The Tao Te Ching

A most interesting photographic book reissued and restored.

The Vintage illustrated bilingual edition of The Tao Te Ching (sometimes translated as "the way and its power" [Waley] or "the classic of the path of virtue" or simply "the book of the way") was one of the great populist-spiritual bestsellers of the 1970s in America. It featured the Chinese text in calligraphy by Gia-Fu Feng with an English translation by him (more about that in a moment) and was decorated throughout by black-and-white nature photographs by Jane English, who assisted with the translation.

The Tao Te Ching (or Daodejing in Pinyin romanization) is one of the foundational works of Chinese philosophy and one of the most frequently translated books extant; it consists of 81 brief, elliptical, poetic, aphoristic verses that define a mode of approach to life and to enlightened governing. If Confucianism is the objective/extroverted/strict/public-duty side of ancient Chinese philosophy, philosophical Taoism is its subjective/introverted/live-and-let-live/interior-life counterpart. There are many classics in the sprawling Taoist tradition (Taoism is both a philosophy and a religion, and the two seem little related), but the ancient and mysterious Tao Te Ching is bedrock.

The text dates from six centuries before Christ. According to legend it was written by Lao Tzu (Laozi in Pinyin), which means "old boy" or "old one," as a last commentary on life as he went into permanent exile—a former advisor to the Emperor, he was exhorted to write down his philosophy by a frontier guard as he departed society. More likely is that it is folk philosophy, a collection of related passages (some of which probably had a common author or source) that took shape and form over time, much like a folk song being transmitted from person to person, place to place, and generation to generation, repeated again and again.

It's worthwhile to note that Alan Watts thought this view an error, the result of a modern fashion for skepticism about the reality of religious leaders as individuals. Watts wanted to leave open the possibility of an actual single author.

A perfect translation is not possible. The text is mysterious and enigmatic in the original, veiled by its ancient origins and its essential inscrutability before one even arrives at the problem of bridging the archaic Chinese language to modern English or crossing the divide of the many disparities in the respective cultures. The book even begins with the famous phrase "The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao"—and the Tao that can be translated is not the definitive Tao, either. (By the way, "Tao," which means "way" or "path," is pronounced about like dow, as in Dow Jones.) Many translators have made the text "their own," imposing their own interpretation or even their own philosophy on their wordings; some translations take a literalistic approach, some a scholarly/historical approach, some an impressionistic, communicative intent. The Tao Te Ching has even had its share of "translators" who do not speak or understand Chinese! They work from other translations or from literal transliterations.

Toinette Lippe

That was not the case with the famous Vintage book. Gia-Fu Feng was not "artfully" fluent in English at the time, but he studied the text very deeply and respectfully; his wife, photographer (and particle physicist) Jane English helped make his words idiomatic. The idea of combining Chinese calligraphy, photographs, and English translation was theirs. But the original manuscript text, while thoughtful, was rough. The task of editing it fell, very fortuitously, to English-born Toinette Lippe, then an acquisitions editor at Alfred A. Knopf. The project came to her fortuitously and she believed in it—becoming its "midwife" to use her word. Toinette was well suited in temperament and intelligence to edit the book, and worked patiently with Gia-Fu Feng to mold the English text. She did so by comparing a dozen existing translations sentence by sentence and then trying to understand what Gia-Fu and Jane's interpretation was, helping to put that into felicitous English using words that didn't echo other translations.

The result soared. Although not persnickety or strictly scholarly (which can lead to layered, shaded meanings but plodding, earthbound English), translators and editor collaborated to create a version that cut to the essence of the ancient work in a way that spoke plainly and directly to modern English-speaking Westerners. Given that the late '60s and early '70s were a time when interest in Eastern thought and religion was flowering in America, it was as if every element came together in the best possible way: over the years, the book has never been out of print and has sold well over a million copies, astonishing for a single translation of an ancient Chinese classic with hundreds of translations. (If you can count just the translations currently available on Amazon, you are more patient than I.) The famous book changed the lives of the three collaborators...and, it's no exaggeration to say, of many readers as well.

I liked to tell the "hidden story" of Toinette's involvement for many years. The new (2011) edition of the book makes that unnecessary—it has a great new foreword that details the story of the book's creation, and that shares the credit all around generously and accurately. The new "front matter" alone is worth the price of a new copy.

I think the newly modified translation is better than the now-"classical" original as well. Gia-Fu Feng died in 1985 after a distinguished career, but Toinette and Jane worked together, and in consultation with the eminent philosopher and Sinologist Jacob Needleman, to refine the translation still more—for one thing getting rid of the sexist "he" and "his" (ancient Chinese doesn't use pronouns) and replacing "the Sage" (which can be read as singular and exceptional) with "the Wise" (more inclusive and encompassing). Jane English, who created a Tao calendar for years for her fans using newer photographs, replaced almost half the photographs in the book—about 100—with newer work.

The Tao Te Ching has been translated into English more times than any other book except the Holy Christian Bible. There are other translations that are indispensible (at one time I owned more than 30 of them, along with at least as many books of commentary and scholarship on the text—speaking, as we were recently, of personal touchstones), but for readers whose native tongue is English, the Feng/English/Lippe translation is the first to have and the one I recommend most often. A must for everyone's bookcase.

Oh, and there is a text-only edition—but get the one with the photographs! Or don't I need to say that here?

(Here it is at Amazon U.K. , and at The Book Depository. Links to Amazon Germany and Canada can be found here.)

Mike

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Dave: "There is a well-worn copy of the original resting on my living room bookshelf. I leaf through it once every couple weeks. Of all my 'photography' books, this version of the Tao Te Ching provides the most inspiration. The photos are simple yet beautiful and they match the text perfectly. The book is a triumph of minimalist graphic design. It outshines the expensive hardbacks that surround it on my shelf. And, the lessons of The Tao are life-changing. What more could someone want in a coffee table book? I'm looking forward to this updated version."

Dennis Ng: "Zi is definite not 'boy' in this context and one hundred percent sure unlike those other arguments you may try. If you have to use this way then Confucius is a 'hole boy'...etc. It is more like 'master,' 'teacher,' 'respected name' as no one calling themselves zi except those old people around that time. 'Old one'...where you get that from? :-) A simple translation may be 'the old guy' if you have to remain colloquial."

Announcement: Matrix Dump!

What this is about: Regular readers have followed the saga of Ctein's evolution into digital, along with the closing of his darkroom and our dye transfer "Big Print" sale, in which Ctein used up the last of his dye transfer materials for 160 last large prints, priced at $595...which by the way sold out in five hours and six minutes.

So: You might remember that in a column from August 2012, Ctein wondered what in the heck he should do with all his matrices. A "matrix" in this case is one of the three separations from which a dye transfer print is made. Once crafted, these can be reused, so a dye printer will keep old matrices on file for future printings. But now that his dye transfer paper is gone and his darkroom is dismantled, obviously Ctein has no further need for the matrices. But the matrices are interesting, and (now) are historical artifacts, and even have a certain beauty and photographic interest.

He has some 280 "Matrix Sets." Each set includes a work print with printing notations, along with an article explaining what those notations mean.

A "matrix set" is three separations and a full-sized test or guide print (plus an article explaining what everything is)

Long and short: in response to his query, enough people said "I'd buy a set, if they aren't too expensive" that he decided his first step would be to offer the sets here, for a nominal price. So those who want a set can have one.

(I already commandeered a set from my favorite print, plus I'm going to ask the Photography Curator at our local Museum if she'd like a couple of sets for the museum's collection, in which case I will spring for a couple more sets and donate them.)

This isn't a regular "TOP print sale," although some similar limitations will apply: the sale will last for only five days or until sets run out. Ctein's got some interesting plans to try to accommodate peoples' individual requests. I'll let him tell you about that next week.

He'll commence the offer in the context of his regular column next Wednesday (February 12th). So if you're interested, be on the alert and check back here then. The column is usually posted late in the morning.

Mike

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The Little Olympus That Could

Just a brief interim report of cameras clogging the queue at Chez TOP: I failed to return the Panasonic GX7 in time, so I bought it [unsmiley face]. I guess that means I was intended by the Fates and their friend Destiny to use it and write about it. Not hardly a hardship.

I bought a review Olympus E-M1 at the same time and won't be returning that one, even though I am now officially swamped with cameras (I have two fine lenses that I like for my trusty NEX-6, and two full-frame DSLRs). About the film cameras in my cabinet, owned and borrowed, do not ask. Repeat, do not ask. Josh Hawkins, shut up.*

Like much of the Central and Eastern U.S., we have been beset here in Wisconsin with a relentless and oppressive winter this year, complete with round after round of enough snow that you have to get out and shovel, and just enough cold that you're quickly made miserable outside (<—applicable to couch potatoes and blogmeisters commonly shackled to the leg of the desk where the computer is; not (necessarily) applicable to youths, outdoorspeople, and those of hardy constitution). Or else way more cold than that. Winter has limited dog walking, neighbor visiting, and camera messing-arounding-with.

However, I have used it enough to be of the opinion that the E-M1 is the best camera Olympus has made since the original E-1 4/3 camera (five megapixels) in the Fall of 2003; I really liked that camera, although I never owned one. The E-M1 has a heck of a lot going for it: "just right" size and weight, not too small, definitely not too big; excellent feel in the (and when I say "the," I mean my) hand; excellent control configurations; weatherproofing; really good IBIS; a flip-up viewing screen; a good EVF; and pleasing (to moi) image quality. The slight annoyances I've encountered so far are the somewhat awkward position of the on-off switch and the fact that the review button on mine is difficult to engage. (This might be a sample glitch.)

You know, when I posted Crabby Umbo's "quote of the day" the other day, my view was that the sentiment he expressed meant no more than that Micro 4/3 is generally pretty decent for the same general kinds of things that 35mm used to be pretty decent for. I didn't really expect people to bore down hard with hyperdetailed point-by-point comparisons. Guess I haven't been on the Internet long enough to know what to expect yet. Relax; I kid.

The whole thing works together really well and feels really good. There's no such thing as a perfect camera, just those models that stick up above the ways in the ocean of choices, and the OM-D E-M1 sure seems to be one of those. It's expensive but I still feel the price reflects actual value.

More on that when the weather warms. (<—Believed to be coming, eventually; doubt on that point seems well justified hereabouts, where it has not been warm for what subjectively feels like a very long time.)

Mike

*Josh was the manager at Oak Park Camera when he was a smart and energetic post-teenager and I lived in Illinois within walking distance of the shop. He is now a husband and father and lives in Vegas but is still a friend. JH has seen the ugly side of my camera obsession close up, which he seldom neglects to rib me about, with a relish and even glee which is most unseemly.

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Josh Hawkins: "Let's be fair here. A little context. During the time when I was one of Mike's camera dealers—and dealer is the correct term here—I never saw Mike own more than one camera at any one time. I also never saw him own the same camera for more than any one month. (I'm sending warm thoughts from Vegas.)"

Mike replies: See, this is exactly the sort of thing I mean. A gross exaggeration. I owned several cameras for two or three times that long!! Unless you're talking about on average, in which case I guess the ones I kept for ten days or even less might count against me. (OPC had a large used section and was like a buffet constantly replenished with new delicacies.)

Good thoughts back atcha, Josh. Let's see some new pics of the kid some time. Did you know Nick has moved to Arizona? A few flakes of snow, a touch of ice, a lowish temp or two, and everyone turns soft.

John McMillin: "Go a little easier on yourself. Four cameras isn't such an 'obsession.' I have that many in current use, just to cover the bases. Go over to Ming Thien's blog and peek into his vast bag of gear. In your line of work, you're probably obligated to keep trying out the new, just to stay current and keep our endless curiosity fed."

Convergence Makes Complexity

This week's column by Ctein

Back at the beginning of the month I discussed how devices, both computer-ish and camera-ish, are converging and how that makes life more complicated. Let's talk some more about those complications.

A couple of people brought up the rumored 13-inch iPad last time. I didn't mention it because it is just a rumor, but should it appear it would only make my point more forcefully. Its size, weight, and cost would place it squarely in the middle of the already crowded set of choices I previously described. If Apple's line is model-heavy now, as I think it is, this only makes things worse.

Microsoft has had its own problems with convergence. The attempt to give desktop Windows a mobile-ish interface was not met with acclaim. There are two reasons for that, and to me they're pretty obvious ones (Apple's hardly the only company that makes bonehead UI mistakes). The first is that if your computer doesn't happen to have a touchscreen, as most don't, interfaces that are designed to be poked at don't work half so well for the user as ones that are designed for a keyboard and mouse.

Then there's that information density thing. I complained about how badly iOS 7 scales to the iPad. Ergonomically, it's designed for much smaller screen, so there's a huge amount of wasted desktop space and an unnecessarily low information density, combined with excessively large and numerous movements required by the user to accomplish things. I reiterate: this is fundamentally stupid—the principles of scaling geometries for different sized devices are well understood, both as a matter of theory and of coding. When those principles aren't followed, as in iOS7 and the "new improved" Windows interface, it becomes ludicrous on larger screens.

On the other hand, Microsoft did something very smart with hardware—the Surface Pro 2. John Camp pointed me at this clever beast, and I'm not sure I understand why it hasn't gotten more traction. It strikes me as an excellent convergence—a very decent tablet and a more-than-capable computer. It might even be the ideal portable Photoshop machine (okay, it lacks a full 24-bit sRGB-space display, but you can't have everything). Is it because two pounds makes it too heavy to be usable as a tablet? Or is it just Microsoft's lackluster reputation in the hardware area? I admit I didn't give it even a glance when it came out for that reason. I'd be interested in hearing what readers think, most particularly why it doesn't appeal to you.

Do-everything devices usually don't do well in the marketplace—it's the trap of convergence. It's hard to make one device that's a jack of all trades, and that's true of cameras in particular. The "Frankencamera" approach, for example, has met with very limited success, and that's because, honestly, it doesn't work very well. You end up with a highly adaptable device that turns out not to be superbly capable at any one thing. It turns out that while people (collectively) would like the ability to do anything and everything with their cameras, if they (individually) can't do the thing they most care about superbly, they turn somewhere else.

Maybe that affects the Microsoft tablet/computer? If not in reality, in people's perception that it can't possibly be good at being both a tablet and a computer?

Okay, back to the complexity side. Let's assume we do see these kind of convergences. It really makes life difficult for the software and operating system designers. Suppose, hypothetically, Apple went the Microsoft route and there was only one single device in the 10–13 inch screen category? What should it run? Mac OS? iOS? As a heavy user of both, I can tell you that while either of them is capable of supporting any activity you can imagine doing on a computer or a tablet (or a camera), each makes some endeavors extremely easy and others almost impossibly difficult (try writing an incremental backup program for iOS). It's a lot like your favorite camera interface; I don't think anyone's ever found one that was perfect for them, although some come close. But there's definitely no particular camera interface which seems anywhere near ideal for everybody. I could give you my gripe list about Olympus's, but there's no point. You can come up with your own gripe list about your camera. Worse, for designers, get 10 of us in a room and we'll gripe about entirely different things in the same interface.

This does not make the designer's life easy. Much like the Frankencamera, the infinitely adaptable FrankenOS is far more a fantasy than a useful reality.

On the other hand, he says cynically, this is what keeps many camera companies in business. So many of the products are so similar—that unavoidable convergence I talked about last time—that if there weren't these distinctions that are difficult to engineer out, there'd be little reason for choosing one over the other.

And, then, there are those who actively exploit this. My complaints about trying to divine the differences between cell service plans? I hate to say it but I think that's calculated. The different companies really don't have a lot to offer that's different. So all they can do is gimmick things up with features designed to target specific market demographics (which any one of you probably don't fit). They have no incentive to make the consumer choice process clear and simple. The more obscure and difficult it is to discern the real differences between the plans, the more likely you are, at some point, to just throw up your hands as I did and pick one. Because sooner or later, ya gotta. (The same can be said for health insurance. The insurance companies don't really want you to understand their policies.)

Will that state of affairs last forever? I doubt it. It aggravates people. They just don't have an alternative. That doesn't mean they always won't.

Remember the old Apple iMac commercials, back when getting online could be pretty complicated? The one that explained how to get connected to the 'Net in three steps...and there were only two. Clever design and exceptionally clever marketing. Very successful marketing, too.

Maybe complexity will give way to simplicity. It's not an impossible dream.

Ctein

Columnist Ctein converges on Wednesdays on TOP.

©2014 by Ctein, all rights reserved

Original contents copyright 2014 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:

Colin Work: "Exactly why I don't like video in my still camera. Sure, I know, I don't have to use it, but now my camera is more complicated than it need be—more menus, buttons that get in the way and/or could be put to better use. Interestingly, I've had to start shooting video—so I tried using my Canon 5D. Yes, it can produce some superb video—but is so awkward to use for this purpose. So I bought I decent camcorder—and was immediately amazed by how relatively simple the whole process became. Yes, I do appreciate that in the hands of a skilled cameraman, the 5D can produce amazing video. But I suspect very few decent stills shooters also make very good filmmakers—the disciplines are just too different."

Nerdie McSweatervest: "Re: cell service plans. Years ago, Dilbert creator Scott Adams coined the term 'confusopoly' to describe this."

Jim: "While you cannot please everyone, you can accommodate various users to make life easier. Twenty years ago we designed and sold test instruments that were tethered to H-P 200 palmtop PCs that let you set up tests and take data with one button press. I was just at a techie trade show where I saw several instruments, including some neat microscopes, interfaced to both Android and iOS devices by Bluetooth or WiFi. These systems allow setting up tests, taking, analyzing and storing data easily.

"Why can't I do that with a camera? An app should allow access to the camera to graphically set up all the parameters now handled with menus that are reminders of the 'dark ages' of the PC (DOS!) and store the setups in the camera under a easily-remembered name (e.g. 'critter cam' for my E-P3 with the Pana 100–300mm) accessible on a top-level menu or a programmable button.

"But, alas, camera company engineers appear to be clueless like the car companies were a decade ago. When I wrote a article on computer networks in cars, I found the original BMW iDrive had over 750,000 possible settings, many with unintelligible names...does that sound familiar?"

To the Moon, Alice

Here's a real conversation starter for your camera cabinet! Fourteen Hasselblads were used on the Lunar surface during the various Apollo missions, but only one of them made it back to Earth—the others were jettisoned to make more room for moon rocks (which means there are 13 very collectible cameras scattered as litter on the moon's surface—they're there for the taking; all you have to do is go get them). This one was used by Apollo 15 astronaut Jim Irwin in 1971. He took 299 pictures with it on the moon and 96 more on the way there and back.

It goes on the auction block at WestLicht's Photographica Auction on March 22nd. Pre-auction estimates start at about $200,000—not bad for such a genuine piece of world history. Er, make that out-of-this-world history.

Mike
(Thanks to Chuck Albertson)

Original contents copyright 2014 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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Kevin Purcell: "They brought Irwin's Hasselblad back because it was having some problems winding on to the next frame. They instructed him to leave the the last film cartridge in place and bring the camera back for inspection. 'The only camera known to exist, which was used on the moon surface and also came back.' Clunkily translated from the German, I think. There are rumors that Alan Shepard's lunar-surface Hasselblad was also returned to Earth but no-one seems to know where it went. I'm really suprised this camera didn't end up in the Smithsonian."

We Hear from Luis Nadeau

It's the nature of the blog format that as individual posts get pushed down in the pile, fewer and fewer readers encounter them. Sometimes, though, we get interesting comments to posts that are more than a couple of days old—which seems a shame, as few people naturally see them.

For example: we just received a comment from Luis Nadeau responding to Jim Hughes' "The Case of the Purloined Prints" post published last Thursday. Luis, if you don't know the name, is a pioneering researcher and expert in the fields of photographic conservation and restoration, with a special interest in permanent and archival alternative processes, including the elusive Fresson process. He is the author of a number of influential books and has long been revered by alt-process fans around the world.

You can see the comment and Jim's reply at the end of the "Featured Comments" at the original post. Just in case you'd rather not miss it.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2014 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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The Last Photographs of Hoffman

I've thought a lot over the years about why certain things seem "reasonable" to humans, musing on some of the possible reasons why. War, for instance, seems not only sensible but inevitable, whereas it has always seemed outlandish and appalling to me, the furthest thing from "reasonable." My small consolation is that, in early modern Europe especially, duelling seemed as utterly unavoidable as war seems to us still; and at various times and places the carnage was very considerable. It may return, but society has for the moment at least learned to dispense with duelling, for the most part. I'm sure such a development would have seemed impossible—incredible—to any conventional upper class nobleman in 17th-century France. My belief—all right, my hope—is that someday the same fate will befall the custom and convention of human warfare.

Just yesterday we touched on this—this idea of seeming "reasonableness." It simply doesn't seem reasonable to some people that a train can sneak up on you when you're on the tracks. Too much evidence suggests otherwise. "Counterintuitive," we call that. A phrase I've always thought shortchanges real intuition. So much of human activity is determined by such superficial assumptions.

The reason I introduce the topic this way is that it seems intuitively reasonable to some of us that fame, success and money would necessarily supply whatever is wanting in our psyches or salve whatever pain is in our souls, and arm us well in our personal struggles; the evidence doesn't support that either, at all, but somehow we keep being surprised that it isn't so.

I mourn the loss of the great actor Philip Seymour Hoffman. Demotic culture at the moment revolves in large part around "celebrities," many of whom act in order to undergird their notoriety, but real actors are still relatively rare and of course geniuses of the craft rare always. He was an extraordinary actor, fearless. Hoffman at 46 had a number of great performances to his credit and many great performances still to give, and his death is a deep loss to culture and art. His death is as senseless and tragic as that of a young person cut down in traffic. His body of work has been brought to a skidding halt.

Take a contemplative look at one of the most extraordinary photographs I've seen in a long time. Just a few weeks ago, many actors and actresses posed for tintype (wet collodion) portraits at The Collective and Gibson Lounge, "Powered by CEG" whatever that means, during the 2014 Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. The photograph of Hoffman is in the middle of the second to last row at this link, and the context is interesting. It's credited to Victoria Will. The picture cuts to the resignation of a human being overwhelmed by addiction, such that it's almost more a portrait of that than it is a portrait of the person. I interpret it as the look of someone who thought he had won his fight against the wolf of addiction but who suddenly finds himself right back in the battle again, as deeply as ever. That's just supposition, supplied by my imagination and a few cues from news stories. But his struggle is right there before our eyes—right there in his eyes. Celebrity and success utterly impotent as defensive weapons against the great weight of that despair.

As great a "psychological portrait" as I've ever seen, but one I very much wish we didn't have.

Mike
(Thanks to Arthur Elkon and Gordon Lewis)

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CharlieH (partial comment): "Or he was just acting. I say that because most of the actors who sat seem to express a similar melancholy. Its much harder to smile for the camera then to look mean or stoic, or just sad."

Steve Ducharme: "I've spent far more time around addicted people than any reasonable human being ever should and that haunted look is not unfamiliar to me. You are not reading too much into the photograph. In fact the process is almost like a filter exposing the anguish and resignation within. Sad and moving."

Paul De Zan: "Philip Seymour Hoffman's death is highly instructive. He wasn't a publicity-seeking diva. He did not flaunt his wealth. He did not do 'bling.' He worked very hard. He had kids he loved. His addiction did not play out in the tabloid media. He didn't experience a long, sad decline. And the drugs killed him anyway. He probably had no more idea he would end up dead with a needle in his arm than a person shot at random by a mad sniper. No idea at all. Bloody hell."

Tragic Train Update

Regular readers will recall a post a few months ago about the rather strange (to me) but widespread custom of photographers posing portrait subjects on railroad tracks. That post was called "Union Pacific to Photographers: Cut It Out" and it inspired a lot of discussion here. Many readers were skeptical that the practice could be dangerous, and a few flat-out refused to believe that someone could be surprised by a loud, large train that anyone could see coming from a long distance away.

It's unfortunate to have to get this kind of confirmation for any argument, but just a couple of weeks ago, on January 18th, in Auburn, Washington State, a 42-year-old Las Vegas man was struck and killed by an Amtrak Cascades passenger train traveling from Portland to Seattle. What was he doing on the tracks? You guessed it—posing for his girlfriend, who was taking pictures of him.

TOP says (again)—venture there yourself if you want to risk your own life—photographers do take foolish risks to get photographs—but keep your clients, friends and models off train tracks. Using train tracks as a setting for photographs is an illegal, unethical, and unsafe practice.

Mike
(Thanks to Jeffrey Goggin)

Original contents copyright 2014 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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Nate: "For my commute into Auburn, I'm quite familiar with with BNSF/Amtrak rail that passes through. The freight moves noisily through town around 40mph, but the Cascades line practically flies by silently at 60mph. You really don't hear it until it's too late."

John Hall: "As a photographer and rail fan: Thank you for using your position (as a blogger who can reach many) to remind all of us of such an important message."

T Bannor: "If you stand on one of Chicago's Metra platforms as an express highballs through, you'll discover that you don't hear it until it's right on you. In open country, the engineer might not see you in time to sound his horn. There are a lot of videos on Youtube of Amtrak trains at 110+ mph that illustrate the point as well."

John Krill: "You don't even want to stand to close to the tracks as the train passes by. The wind turbulence can suck you into the passing train. This happened to an Orange County Sheriff a few years back."

Soeren Engelbrecht: "Some 15–20 years ago, I taught basic acoustics at the Technical University of Denmark. I remember using trains as a real-world example of a 'line source,' one characteristic of which is that it doesn't emit sound along its own axis—only perpendicularly. In the case of a train, this means that it is actually not as easy to hear as one would expect."