The Online Photographer

Fujifilm Gets It and Sony Doesn't

All things considered, is there a more desirable lens line on the planet right now than Fuji XF? In fact, mid-2014 also seems to be smack-dab in the middle of Fujifilm's moment. It's just on one great big roll right now. Everything coming up sevens.

In just a few years, Fuji has created a coherent, consistent line of all-new lenses that essentially have it all when you consider all the factors that impinge on desirability—size, weight, performance, handling, specs, and consumer cost. Expensive but attainable, fast but not too big, sensational image quality—nothing clearly beats it for general non-specialist photography even now, and users have faith that the vaporware on the lens roadmap will show up when Fuji says it will. The company's track record has been excellent. All that is priceless.

So satisfying.

Such fun.

That's why I was amused/appalled to come across two conflicting headlines on Fujirumors: 

April 2014: "New Source: X-PRO2 will feature a Full Frame sensor. Initially 3 to 5 FF lenses!"

May 2014: "X-PRO2 will feature an APS-C sensor! (trusted source)"

Well, one of those might turn out to be right.

Evolving perfection: The sensible yet spectacular XF lineup. Due soon: the pro normal zoom, a fast constant-aperture 16–55mm that will be weatherproof and have image stabilization. Ideal for the X-T1.

Profit is like heroin to companies. Fuji camera division executives are probably looking at Sony raking in the bucks with the A7 series and it's gnawing at their intestines like a hungry hyena. However, they'd be shooting themselves in the foot to make an interchangeable-lens camera with a 24x36mm sensor now. No, scratch that: they'd be shooting themselves in the head*.

We've all heard that Sony wants to break the Canikon duopoly and become a major cameramaker. Sadly, it will fail at that goal.

Its Achilles' heel will do it in. Brief recap on Achilles: he was the mighty Greek hero of the siege of Troy. To make him invincible, his mother dipped him in the River Styx as a baby, the magic waters of which reached every part of him but the place where she gripped him by the heel. Later, he was killed by a poison arrow which hit him—lucky shot—on the heel. The ancient Greeks loved to explain things with confabulated stories that involved completely implausible back-formations—they'd all be considered mad as hatters in the modern world—reading Homer just makes me want to slap people—but never mind: the point is that the story gave us a nice expression. An "Achilles' heel" means a weakness which will fatally undermine fundamental stength.

Fundamental strength: a coherent, comprehensive lens line that consumers feel safe investing in and are confident will continue.

All you have to do to know why a full-frame X-Pro2 would be a miserable idea is to imagine yourself as an owner of an X-Pro1 and three lenses. How would you feel?

Alternately, you could just imagine yourself owning any Sony interchangeable-lens camera now**.

About that last, a quick question: If you're a Sony owner, and you frequent any forums whatesoever, have you ever written that you'd really like for Sony to release an X lens for Y camera? Of course you have. A Sony camera owner who is completely satisfied with the lens options for his or her camera is the owner of a fixed-lens Sony camera.

Well, there are certainly other options for lenses. Photographers have never had more or better lenses to choose from that right this historical minute. Canikon have extensive lines for the flippin'-mirror 35mm-legacy cameras that people are beginning to not buy; Pentax has stuck with APS-C and makes many sweet lenses that have no counterparts in other lines; Micro 4/3 has a delightful motley of all kinds of lenses from a variety of makers—anyone who cannot window-shop an appealing Micro 4/3 lens arsenal isn't trying very hard.

But there is something exquisitely special about the XF lineup.

And lens lineups are what ensure long-term health. Even if you have to start over from scratch once in a while***. Sony is doing it all wrong, all wrong. Fuji is doing all right. So far.

Mike

*Pardon the metaphor density of that paragraph. We'll speak to the writer.

**Lest the teenagers out on the forums dismiss me as a h8er, I'm a Sony fan and a Sony owner. I have two.

***Cf. FD—>EOS.

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.

If you're gonna buy a Fujifilm XF lens...

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

Gordon Lewis: "I agree. For the sake of elaboration, Sony has three separate lens lines: one for its DSLRs, one for APS mirrorless, and a third for full-frame mirrorless. Cross-compatability between lens lines is limited and requires bulky adapters. Many of their lenses are already relatively bulky to begin with. No one, including Sony, seems to know what lenses they will introduce next or when or for which line. I suspect for reason for this state of affairs is that Sony views lenses more as 'accessories' than as the raison d'être for a camera line."

Hugh Smith: "Fuji ( I seem to recall) back in the '70s attempted their beautiful STX but it never took off. This time around, they are killin' it and show no signs of stopping. I for one, love my X series. My two pesos."

SeanG: "Indeed. Had an A7 briefly. The all-too-familiar angst I had with the A700 and NEX-5 returned. The X-Pro1 (with 18mm ƒ/2 and 35mm ƒ/1.4) are quite satisfying. Cheers!"

Aaron: "Fuji's lens lineup is exactly why I owned a X-E1 and now have a X-T1. Not only do they get it, they're the only company that gets it. Even the basic kit lens is terrific: useful range, small, sturdy and a full stop faster than all the other kit lenses out there. I've yet to be disappointed with any of the Fuji-X lenses I've purchased."

Steven Scharf: "I don't think there is 'a more desirable lens line on the planet right now than Fuji XF.' The X-Pro1 was my introduction to Fuji's interchangeable lenses, and its lens lineup at that time was far more limited at that time that it is now, but the Fuji lenses have proven, in my experience, to be the most pleasant surprise and the real jewel in the crown of the Fujifilm X-system. There's several X-bodies that provide superb images, including the X-Pro1, X-T1, etc., and even the completely overlooked little X-A1, but it's the lenses that really define this system as becoming one of the finest on the market. I've been so impressed, in fact, that I've now come to the conclusion that they are amongst the finest lenses I've ever used. The 18–55mm 'kit zoom' is as good as any Canon L standard zoom I've shot with, and the Fujifilm XF 14mm ƒ/2.8 and XF 23mm ƒ/1.4 primes are truly spectacular. I'm really waiting for that constant-aperture ƒ/2.8 16–55 'pro zoom.' Yowza."

Eric Onore (partial comment): "I believe the lack of Sony lenses for the E mount at least is overstated. Here is a partial list... [See the Comments Section for Eric's list —Ed.] I will also note that Fuji rolled out the X-Pro1 with three lenses and no zooms. Sony rolled out the A7 and A7r with two primes and two zooms. The primes are of particularly good quality based on testing websites (I don't own either system). It remains to be seen if Sony will support full frame as well as Fuji has supported its system, but it is too early to declare that Sony doesn't get it."

Michael Steinbach (partial comment): "Fujifilm should get an award for understanding what enthusiasts want."

Eddie Davis: "It appears that the majority of people are linking their passion and degree of success to a particular camera maker being based on what that camera maker has done in regards to their lens lineup. Applying that logic to many other camera brands is probably an honest way of knowing whether that company stands behind its camera. However, applying it to the Sony A7, and you are no longer comparing apples to apples, as it is a model of camera that is not dependent on its own lens lineup. The new Sony FE Mount is something altogether different. As far as I am aware there is not another camera manafacturer that has done anything similar in producing a body that can use pretty much almost any lens in existence."

Robert Roaldi: "I remember reading in Road & Track magazine years ago that the problem with GM (at that time) was that nobody in their senior management actually drove cars. They were all finance corporate types who were chauffeured everywhere. I wonder if the people at Fuji responsible for this array of products spend their weekends taking pictures. If I won a lottery, I'd buy everything they make just to reward them."

Mike replies: ...In the same way that NBC News covers commercial aviation every night because Brian Williams flies all the time and thinks everybody else does too.

And funny you should mention GM, because Ford has one big problem starting this very day: Alan Mulally retired today. He was a car guy who started from a love of cars and knew what car people liked. He knew that the company's success started from a vision of one customer buying one car. Ford is going to wish they could clone that guy. A clear thinker.

Paulo Bizarro: "I think Sony make more interesting cameras than Fuji, but Fuji make more interesting lenses than Sony.

"Given the nature of the companies (electronics giant versus smaller company), Fuji have to stay more focused, and that is what they are doing. I have used a small Fuji X system for a while, wonderful lenses indeed, but fidgety cameras. Never used Sony, because I place lenses before cameras. In the end, I have settled with Olympus OM-D E-M1, a system that provides wonderful lenses and cameras."

Mike replies: My head is leading me in the same direction. My heart is more fickle....  :-)

Fabio Riccardi (partial comment): "I bought both the Sony A7 and the Fuji X-T1, both of them with a reasonable set of lenses for a 'complete' system.

"After a couple of months of usage, I decided to keep the Sony and sell the Fuji. Quite frankly the quality of the images I was getting out of the A7 is unbeatable. Even though the X-T1 is a really cute and fun to use camera—and yes, it has lots of lenses to choose from—I found myself gravitating towards the A7 way more than the X-T1.

"The Sony's sensor is in a completely different league than the Fuji's, and pretty much so is the rest of the camera. The 55mm Sony/'Zeiss' lens is one of the most amazing pieces of glass I've ever seen, breathtaking. The 35mm is pretty good, though a bit to expensive, and the 24–70mm is 'OK.'

"Theoretically, the Fuji's 18–55mm is a better lens than the Sony/'Zeiss' 24–70mm. But in practice, when I compare pictures taken with both camera systems side by side, the A7+24–70mm runs circles around the the X-T1+18–55mm, under any possible circumstance. That's it."

Jim Woodard: "I own two Sonys, NEX-6 and A7, and two Fujis, X-E1 and X-T1. The Sonys are much easier (IMHO) to shoot my old OM, Nikkor, and Leica mount lenses with than the Fujis. When I bought the Sonys (A7 as a backup for my D700), I planned to use mostly those legacy lenses. Then I bought the Fujis, with the same plan, and wasn't as pleased with their ease of use with the older lenses.

"But!! I did get hooked by the Fuji lenses, totally! Except for that same aperture ring issue you brought up. Hooked enough that I haven't been shooting with much but the Fujis for the past few months."

Roadbuilding! (and the Cameras I Used)

Time to make road! Windsor Drive, Waukesha, prepped for concrete.

So we had a very interesting day on Windsor Drive on Friday. The road construction crews had carefully prepared the ground with graders and "steamrollers." Do they still call them that? Forgive me, I'm going to be relatively vocabulary-deficient today. (Road construction is far from my field, and I was playing spectator, not reporter.)

The Power Paver SF-3000 showing the screws that chomp concrete. Xander thinks this is my new favorite thing. I think he's right. It has a 260-HP Cummins diesel and can move at speeds up to 36 feet per minute, although it wasn't going anywhere near that fast on our street.

Guide wires were set up on either side of the street (you can see them in the foreground here), and a giant contraption that moves on tank treads called a "Power Paver" was fired up. [Thanks to Steve Snyder for the link. —Ed.]

A succession of dump trucks and cement mixers deposited loads of wet concrete in front of the Power Paver, which has a worm drive all the way across the front of it that you can see in the second picture. The Power Paver then slowly crawls up the street munching raw concrete and...

...Spitting out a continuous slab of smooth, pristine road behind it. I had never seen the process before, and it was way cool. See the horizontal pink line near the bottom of the frame? That's the guide wire—it looked to me like sensors on the Power Paver keep it on track as it trundles along and does its work.

Time for my little stretch—that's sprawling TOP World Headquarters in the background.

This picture shows most of the process—loads of wet concrete being delivered in front of the Power Paver, which then slowly crawls over it and ingests it. Exactly how it turns it into road is, well, magic, in accordance with Clarke's Third Law.

 It leaves behind a continuous, very clean slab of 8-inch-thick concrete road surface. The Windsor drive project is 1,324 feet long and was estimated to cost $470,000. However they're also doing Charles Street at the same time, and I think the estimate for both was considerably higher. The builder is Willkomm Construction Inc. of Kenosha.

Following along later is a smaller road-spanning apparatus, also on treads, to surface the road with grooves and (I'm guessing) repair small imperfections. These pictures are a bit out of strict order.

Here's the new road in front of my house. Ain't it beautiful?

Hours later, after dark, this guy comes along. It's his job to saw cuts in the concrete about two inches deep, so the concrete will break cleanly along the cut [see vbsoto's comment below]. He has to wait a certain fairly specific amount of time after the concrete has been laid, after it's set but before it gets too hard, so he has to work through the night.

I had fun shooting this guy in the dark. His saw has a light on the front that illuminates the clouds of concrete dust. He was a nice guy—told me he sometimes worries about security, working all alone in the middle of the night. The flyer the company passed out to residents said he might be working until six o'clock in the morning, but surprisingly the noise didn't bother me. I was surprised, however, that he wasn't wearing hearing protection. His machine was pretty loud.

A note on cameras
I have about five mirrorless cameras in the house right now. The first one I grabbed was the Sigma DP2 Merrill (you can buy a new one at the link, but they're plentiful on eBay right now too). I used that for the top two pictures. Lots of bright light, right? Well, was it ever the wrong tool for the job. I needed a zoom lens to be able to frame better, and the image on the Sigma's viewing screen was fugitive in the bright sunlight—aiming was hit or miss. Then, after I'd left the house with a full battery, the camera spluttered off after about fifteen minutes. Dead batt. Rats. Forgot about that. When they say the battery in the Sigma is good for ~60 shots, they ain't lyin'.

After that I switched to the Olympus E-M1 (pictures 3 through 9). This is currently my favorite camera to use—a luxurious-feeling device, responsive and comfortable to hold, with a stellar EVF. I currently only have one zoom lens, and it's for Micro 4/3—the slow 12–50mm that came with the now-departed E-M5. That's the lens the middle pictures were taken with. Very good lens, but not sexy.

When it came time to shoot the cutter, though, I realized I don't really have a camera that's highly suited for high ISO. I picked the Fuji X-T1 because its marvelous 23mm ƒ/1.4 lens is faster than any other lens I currently have. I set it on ISO 3200 and ƒ/1.4. Used that for the last two pictures (and many more like them). Great lens. I trust it already. That last picture has camera shake, but that's not the lens's fault. (It doesn't hurt that particular shot.)

I have only one serious gripe with this camera, and it wasn't in play here—it's that when you set the aperture ring on "A," it's very easy to knock it off that setting. The lens really needs a lock for the A setting. (I also wish the X-T1's ISO dial had a two-position in-out locking switch like the E-M1's PASM dial, instead of the push-and-hold one it has—but then, I wish the Olympus had an on-off switch where the Fuji's is. Oh well, you know what they say about greener grass.)

It's kind of BS to have so many cameras cluttering the closet. I know some people are motivated and energized by having a large selection of cameras to use, and I'm not saying they're wrong. For them. But for me, it starts to get to be a Camera Cabinet of Babel, especially with my fairly woeful mix 'n' match hodgepodge of various lenses—I tend to have one or two lenses for each mount, and not very rationally chosen, either. I've got a whole shelf cluttered with chargers and I'm always getting batteries and accessories mixed up or lost. I've got to pare back down to one or two cameras. I will do that soon. (And if you believe that....)

The X-T1 is a very nice camera to use as well. That's the camera that ate the Nikon Df's lunch, done all up with ultra-traditional dials and knobs and doing it even better than Nikon. It makes the camera feel sensible and controllable even when you don't know it very well. Its EVF is good too, and the form-'n'-fit factors are just as good as the Oly's if a trifle different.

Of the cameras I currently have, the Olympus E-M1 is the one I think I'd standardize on if I could have only one. I need a better lens for it, though. With the latest lenses it focuses extremely quickly. I covet the Panasonic 12–35mm for it—you recall that Ctein had John Camp's copy in Madison and I got to try it. I really like how the camera operates. And, with IBIS, it has all the features I want.

I will say, though, that the Fuji's files are so good that the X-T1 makes me a little—a little—less satisfied with the image quality of the files out of the Olympus. Not that there's anything wrong with E-M1's files, but the X-T1's are that little bit better. It really is a pleasure to work with the Fuji's files, and I love the look you get from technically good shots.

That 23mm could use a few more pixels behind it, though. Its aperture ring foible aside, it really is a lovely lens. Best lens I currently own, in fact.

Mike

Note: Open Mike, which usually appears on Sundays, appeared on Friday last week.

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.

TOP's links!

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

vbsoto: "I'm a civil engineer out in Los Angeles so can give you a little more behind-the-scenes rationale on the nighttime cutting of the concrete. All materials expand as they rise in temperature or in this case shrink as they cool. They cut the concrete at the coolest part of the day because that is when it's the shortest (most contracted) and it's actually under tension and will most likely crack the remaining six inches beneath the cut before the guy calls it a night."

Les Myers (partial comment): "The paving machine you photographed is a kid's dream! Tonka, where are you?"

Mike replies: Seriously. That's what I kept thinking. I also envy the guys driving the giant front-loaders and rollers up and down the street. (Interesting that I know the words "steamroller" and "steam-shovel" but I don't know what those vehicles are actually called in the modern, real world.)

Darr: "I use a Hoodman loupe over the screen and a tripod most of the time when shooting the DP Merrills; think of them as mini field cameras without the bellows. My snap-shooter is a Sony NEX 7 with a Zeiss 16–70mm. Interesting story and images."

Mike replies: Thanks for the Hoodman tip Darlene. Is the H-LPP3 is the one you use?

Darr replies to Mike: "That should be the one Mike. I let it hang from my neck and use it with the Merrills on and off tripod. Really easy to use and very beneficial."

R: "Are they still using the old Power Paver SF-3000? I heard that the SF-3010 might be released soon."

Mike replies: ...Available for pre-order, but at a price premium, right?  :-)

Jim in Denver: "I fully believe you could be happy using nothing but the E-M1. I've gotten rid of everything except mine, and a Canon compact for which I have a scuba housing. No worries, no regrets; the size is wonderful, the lenses are jaw-droppingly amazing, and it handles beautifully. I didn't know it was the camera I've been looking for all my life, but it seems that it is."

Daniel Stevenson: "I have to agree with the Hoodman comment for the DP2M, although the actual Hoodman was a bit pricey for me. I have a third party one that works essentially the same but for a lot less money. And I don't even consider the DP2M as the camera I take out for snapshots. I consider it my large format camera and treat it the same. If I am going to use it the big Gitzo goes along. I also use an external meter. Although the size makes me feel a bit silly sometimes, until I look at the results. That thing puts out awesome 'negatives.'"

Mike replies: That seems like the smart thing to do. Treat the DP2M like a much larger camera. Makes a lot of sense in fact.

Open Mike: What I Did on My Day Off (OT)

...I started another blog.

Very different from this one, though. I have a past, you see, and I've been carrying around this great story for a lot of years now—the story of how my son Xander came into the world and how I somehow ended up with him. I don't tell the story very often any more, but when he was young I told it innumerable times. It takes about 45 minutes to an hour and a half to tell, and the comment I got most often was, "Wow, you should be on 'Oprah'!" (That was back before Oprah disappeared into cable-land. Xander was born in '93.)

Writing the story as a book seems to be beyond my powers. I can slap words together pretty good, but I lack the aptitude of organization. I don't mean I'm a bit on the disorganized side. I mean I have a deficit—I'm at the lower end of the scale. If we were talking about reading ability I'd be a moderate dyslexic reading at about the sixth-grade level. I'm not faking this, and it's not something I can magically fix. My house is messy but I hate messy houses and I would love to live in a well-ordered one. I just don't have the skill*. And the very thing that makes me a good writer of blog posts—skipping around from this subject to that, going off on wild tangents and digressions, interrupting myself, following threads wherever they lead, spicing everything up with stories and anecdotes—makes me, I think, poorly suited as a writer of books. I can't stick to the story, and in any event I have only a vague idea where the heck the story is going anyway.

The thing about writing that's not terribly natural is that it is remoselessly, relentlessly linear. Even a great novel—even Moby Dick—is one single line of words from beginning to end. This is not how human beings think and it is not how we interact (write a cocktail party as a single line). It's not the way we perceive things (write a complete description of anything as a single line of words; heed the parable of the sunfish). To organize a highly complex story with many facets into a single continuous string requires formidable mental organizational skills.

What you might not know about me is that, while I can be a decent writer of blog posts (and emails and letters and school papers and short essays and magazine articles and magazine op/ed columns and even, once in a while, a halfway decent short story), at the length of a long blog post or a magazine article I'm right about at my limit. I don't write long form because I can't write long form, not because I would prefer not to.

So my idea is to try to write down the story in blog format. Just get started on it and meander along until it's all out in the open for all to see.

You know what they say: Could work.

[A question: The last time we talked about WordPress, somebody mentioned a good app for writing posts offline. Anybody remember what that was? TIA. —M. the Wrtr.]

When it's done it won't be a book, probably. Or not a very good one. But it'll still be a good story. And it might be entertaining along the way.

If I can get it done. As regular readers here realize, I sort of already have enough to do; I not only need an assistant, I need an assistant who has an assistant. So this new blog won't be a big thing. I'm hoping to write 500 words maybe three times a week. That's cake for me. I could do that in the time I spend waiting for the water to boil for the Kona. No biggie.

I want to get the first chapter done before I post the link for the first time. Maybe Sunday?

Hope you have a nice weekend!

Mike
(Thanks to Ctein and Kirk, whose book projects inspired me)

*Organizational aptitude is a fascinating subject. People who are very deficient in it tend to gravitate to highly structured situations, such as the lower ranks of the armed forces or even prison. They're a small minority in either place, of course.

In extreme cases, it explains people who join cults. Again, it doesn't account for every cult member by a far sight, I'm sure, but some fraction of cult members are people who have such extreme organizational disability and lack of decisiveness (often accompanied by low willpower and lack of ego-strength) that having someone to tell them not only what to do 24/7 but also what to eat, when to get up and go to bed, how to dress, and even what to think, can be comforting and regulating.

I'm not that bad by a far sight...unless you consider TOP to be a cult.  ;-)

"Open Mike," the Rambler and Tattler and Spectator of TOP, usually appears on Sundays, but this week it's Friday on account of this new writing project Yr. Hmbl. Ed. is getting into. Hope you don't mind.

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.

TOP's links!

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

raul vomisescu: "Go for it, Mike ! Dostoevsky also published his Brothers Karamazov in serial format in a magazine over the course of two years. I guess that would be called a blog today."

Mike replies: Yikes!  :-)

NancyP: "A fellow disorganized person greets you. Oddly, my disorganization became an issue in mid-life. I know how to be organized, but have trouble sticking to habits that would keep me organized. Need I say that my Lightroom catalog contents have not been thoroughly keyworded, starred, and collected, though I constructed a very good (for my needs) keyword tree.  ;-)

"Dragging myself to do the electronic paperwork and to throw out the trash (unsuccessful photos that have been examined for reason of the failure) is a nighttime or stuck-waiting pursuit. I am an amateur photographer and have the luxury of putting off cataloging and editing. Pros can't afford lack of organization."

Paul Amyes: "I read the illustrated version in Black & White Photography magazine and it made quite an impact upon me. I was left wondering for quite some time how I would have coped in a similar situation. Having never met you both and only being allowed glimpses from afar I think you have done a great job and I think it is a story worth telling."

Nikon D810

I had to laugh—every time I try to take a day off, there's a major product announcement. Oh well, it's my life and I love it.

The Nikon D800 replacement, the D810, was announced overnight, and is available for pre-order. More details later.

(Back at the ranch, I had an extremely productive day yesterday, I'm very pleased to report. News about that when the time is right, but I thought you might want to hear.)

L8r,

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.

TOP's links!

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

Greg: "...There it is!" [See Greg's comment on the "Gone Fishin'" post, below. —Ed.]

Gone Fishin'

As is our wont on occasion, TOP's taking a day or two off. (There's heavy equipment operating continuously on the street and it's driving me out of my skull. I cannot work; I can just barely think.)

Back on Friday! I shall see thee anon.

—Mike, resident caretaker and APES*

*"All-purpose editorial slave," a term coined (or used, at any rate) by a magazine editor I used to work for. He was describing his put-upon and overworked assistant, who ended up knowing so much more about the magazine than he did that she replaced him. So the meek sometimes actually do inherit the earth.

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.

'A storyteller makes up things to help other people; a liar makes up things to help himself.' —Daniel Wallace

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

Matthew Hunt: "I imagine that being the head coach of the Pittsburgh Penguins will really eat into your time, but I hope you will continue to post here regularly."

Mike replies: See? Told ya I was busy.

Greg: "I'll be checking in tomorrow, fully expecting a couldn't-stay-away post...." [See Greg's comment on the Nikon D810 post, above.  —Ed.]

Aaron Britton: "We all know you are really just watching World Cup 2014. I don't mind, because I am too."

Mike replies: Actually I don't have cable, but I'm sitting here being jealous of those who do. Enjoy the matches!

Sony RX100 III First Impressions

A street photographer’s take on the new Sony RX100 III

Zeiss Ikon ZI with Leica lens and Sony RX100 III with Zeiss lens

by David Lykes Keenan

Wow, is it ever tiny.

That was my first impression of Sony's new RX100 III point-and-shoot camera. Even the box it came in is small. "The camera is inside this?" I thought when first seeing it.

I ordered the camera sight-unseen from my hometown camera store, Precision Camera & Video in Austin, Texas. I had seen pictures of it online and the fact that it has a built-in electronic viewfinder (EVF) sold me. I had never handled either of the model’s predecessors either so I really didn't know what to expect when the UPS package arrived.

Prior to the Sony, my go-to point-and-shoot had been a Samsung EX2F which I bought for its fast ƒ/1.4 lens. I'm a big fan of very shallow depth-of-field, which is very difficult to achieve in small sensor cameras. Photographing with this camera at or near wide-open helped to produce results closer to what I like.

The RX100 III comes in at ƒ/1.8 at the widest focal length (24mm-e) and at ƒ/2.8 at the longest (70mm-e), so it doesn't sacrifice much in that regard when compared to the Samsung.

I'm primarily a rangefinder street photographer and, as such, I demand a viewfinder. With no viewfinder, the Samsung EX2F was useless on the street in my opinion. Not so the Sony RX100 III. When I photograph with a digital Leica rangefinder, the LCD remains off 95% of the time. Now, I have a very compact camera that can be used exactly the same way.

Samsung EX2F and Sony RX100 III

I'd like to relate my impressions of the Sony RX100 III after owning it for a few days and carrying it for the first time today in place of the rangefinder that is usually attached to my right hand.

These will be purely usability impressions—I will leave the image-quality comparisons to those relish comparing technical specs. Personally, I am of the opinion that if Sony (or any other modern, major camera manufacturer) has gotten to the point of releasing a new camera into the market, its IQ is going to be completely satisfying for my needs when it is used within its known limitations.

Okay, here we go.

Did I mention the Sony RX100 III is tiny? Not iPhone tiny but just about, except for the hump that is the lens housing. Frankly, the camera is smaller than I like, much smaller than my hand. I've ordered an accessory grip that affixes to the front which I think will help me to not accidentally drop it!

When the camera is on, the lens extends further out than I would have expected for a camera of its size—considerably further than the Samsung. Actually this not a bad thing, all things considered. This extension does improve the handling a bit by giving my fingers something more to wrap around.

The build quality is excellent, as I have come to expect from Sony. I own an Alpha 99 and had an a7 for awhile before deciding it was redundant in my collection of cameras. The pop-up EVF is perfectly positioned and, very smartly, opening and closing the viewfinder housing acts as an on/off switch—and when the camera is turned on this way, the LCD stays off. I love it. When the EVF is extended, it feels very solid.

On the other hand, the fact that I rarely use a flash may be a good thing when considering the long-term reliability of the Sony RX100 III. Unlike the EVF, the pop-up flash unit, while not filmsy, does not fill me with confidence that an accidental bump won't cause some serious damage. One word of caution: do not leave the flash extended when carrying the camera.

In use, the EVF is superb. It totally suited me during the time I was walking and photographing with the camera. I did not use the LCD at all. The EVF makes the Sony RX100 III useable in all lighting conditions, even bright sun. Not sure that this can be said for many other point-and-shoot cameras.

When photographing on the street, the camera is very responsive. I have it set to issue a very satisfying shutter click on each exposure. The auto-focus is faster than I am and always seems to lock on by the time I press the shutter.

I have the camera set for aperture-priority exposure (just like my Leica M9) and the nicely knurled accessory ring on the lens is a perfect substitute for the aperture ring on my Leica lenses (minus the click stops). There is a nice visual display of the f-stop setting in the EVF, so it's easily adjustable with the camera at eye-level.

The menu system is easy to navigate especially for users of other Sony cameras. The control buttons, etc. on the camera are all familiar to anyone who has used a digital camera. I did not find it necessary to consult the user's guide at all.

One gripe is that Sony did not include an external battery charger in the box. I bought one separately for about $30 on Amazon. This is certainly not a deal killer, but I think it reflects badly on Sony (and any other similarly guilty camera manufacturer) as being cheapskates.

My friend Jerry Sullivan is the owner of Precision Camera & Video. Jerry sold me the Sony RX100 III. Having been in the camera business for a long time and running the largest camera store in Texas, he's in a position to know what he's talking about. He tells me that that Sony has it sights set squarely on Canon and Nikon with the goal of becoming #1. It certainly seems to me that the recent string of innovative products, of which he RX1000 III is clearly one, indicates that Sony is up to offering a serious challenge to the big boys.

No point-and-shoot camera will ever replace my rangefinder. But as a pocket digital,  the new Sony RX100 III will be a perfect companion, especially when I'm using a film camera. In this street photographer's opinion, Sony has hit a grand slam with the RX100 III.

Dave

RX100 III at B&H Photo
(Out of current stock at Amazon)

David Lykes Keenan is photographer now living in Brooklyn, New York. He recently moved from Austin, Texas where he was both a software entrepreneur and the founder of the Austin Center for Photography. Presently, he is managing a Kickstarter campaign to publish his book Fair Witness: Street Photography for the 21st Century. The project has gotten support from Eli Reed, Elliott Erwitt, Mary Ellen Mark, and many other significant figures of contemporary photography. You can pre-order a copy of Fair Witness and/or support the Kickstarter campaign at the link.

(I liked the writeup for the project as well, especially the comments about voyeurism and the part that begins "What is a Fair Witness, really?" although the latter might not come as news to sci-fi fans. —MJ)

©2014 by David Lykes Keenan, all rights reserved

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Kenneth Tanaka: "I understand your delight, David. To use a terrible cliché, these RX100s can punch way, WAY above their weight class. My RX100II is so good that I began wondering just why the hell I have all the rest of this other camera gear.

"But I'll be sticking to my RX100II for several reasons. It's already tricked-out with an essential Franiec grip. I actually greatly prefer the II's removable and articulating evf to the III's pop-up evf. I also prefer the II's longer focal length reach to the III's slightly wider view. But, most importantly, operating my RX100 II has become as second-nature to me as any camera. But enjoy your RX100 III! It won't be long before you stare at that old rangefinder and ask yourself...."

Ann: "The best way I found to hold the RX100 is to put the wrist strap on the left. Turn the camera on, wrap thumb and first finger around the lens from underneath, and sit the base of the camera on the palm. It takes two hands to shoot that way, but it's much more comfortable and stable than trying to pinch the thing with the fingers of my right hand."

Roy: "What I fail to understand about this camera is why incorporate a pop-up VF, with all the fragility and potential for damage and malfunction that implies, when they could have made it integral? The answer I guess is that there's an obsession with ever bigger and better screens on the back of these things and to make the VF integral would have restricted the screen's size. Now that we have live histograms, apart from set-up I only use the screen occasionally for a quick review. If I want to be certain about focus etc I just zoom to the area in question. Still, this class of product is now almost to be regarded as 'disposable' so perhaps durability no longer matters."

Kevin Purcell responds to Roy: "The reason for going to popup, I suspect, has more to do with getting an optical path in the EVF that is longer than the camera is thick. It's similar to the way 'tough shapshot cameras' use folded zoom lens optics to contain the lens inside the sealed body.

"A significant issue with EVF design when you have larger display panels (as we have in newer high(er)-res EVFs) is you need larger optics for the EVF and they end up needing longer optical paths. You can see this trend in mirrorless ILCs with the return of the 'SLR-like hump' for the EVF. The hump is there to give more space for the EVF (and has a secondary marketing advantage of looking like a 'real' camera). Fuji takes a slightly different approach to keep the 'rangefinder style' but they put their EVF optics at right angles to the VF port in the top deck.

"Optically large EVFs (with large apparent field of view) and thin camera bodies are opposing parameters in camera design."

Showing Just to Show

I went to a family reunion of my sister-in-law Basia's family yesterday at Lake Koshkonong in Wisconsin. (Xander volunteered to stay home with the puppy, who isn't crate-trained yet—thanks again for that, Xander.) I got to see, among many other people, Ray Poppert, Basia's sister Liz's husband, a guy I've known for years but don't get to see very often. Ray works full time but is also a longtime craft artist—he used to make beautiful, very tasteful modern style lamps, and he told me he's now making artworks out of sheet copper.

We talked for a while about selling craft work and trying to make money from it. Really, though, Ray wants to work as an amateur, doing what he wants to when he wants to, without the obligations brought on by making a business of it.

Which brought up a further topic. There are lots of reasons to show original artwork/craftwork, and not all those reasons involve making money. One good reason is to share and get responses. As I thought back on it, I could bring to mind several people I knew who exhibited their work just for the many "interactive" benefits it brought them—strangers could see the work; their friends could send friends to see it; and they got gratifying feedback from people who liked it.

I think that's fully as valid a reason for exhibiting originals as selling and making money, if the latter doesn't interest you or motivate you. Artists like getting feedback and sharing their work with people who enjoy seeing their work. Seeking feedback can be just as good a reason to show as seeking sales.

As to how to do this, well, that's where Ray might have to get creative. I knew one woman who had a (customary, not contractual) arrangement showing her work in a bank lobby, where she kept up a revolving exhibit for years. I used to show my portraits in my friend Judy Schlosser's frame shop in Georgetown, P Street Pictures (they've moved, but the shop still exists, and they're still showing artwork. Don't know if Judy still owns it, though. I did get commissions from showing there, so I'm not sure if it really counts.)

Have you ever exhibited your work "altruistically," i.e., not hoping for sales?

Mike
(Thanks to Ray Poppert)

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Clayton Jones: "Yes, and it was an enlightening experience. Some years ago I was invited to display my B&W Florida landscape prints at an annual south Florida Audubon Society gathering. It was not to be a sale (no prices on the framed prints), but they provided a very nice space and help setting it up and it was very well received. At one point a man came up to me and very enthusiastically said, 'Wow, these are great. Too bad they're not in color.' I politely thanked him, knowing that he didn't fully grasp what he had said, and he had obviously enjoyed seeing them.

"Towards the end another man, after spending a long time looking at every print, said in a very considered and thoughtful tone, 'I never knew there was so much color in black and white.' It's the nicest comment I've ever received for my work. I remember thinking, 'He gets it.' That made all the effort worthwhile.

"So in the course of the event I received a lot of appreciative remarks, bookended by those two which are etched in my memory forever. It was a pleasant and gratifying experience to exhibit the prints without the 'shadow' undercurrent of desire for sales darkening the atmosphere."

John Leathwick: "I had never exhibited in nigh 50 years of photography, despite repeatedly extolling the virtues of performance as means to development to my son who is doing a piano performance degree. However, after getting some large prints done at the local print/frame shop, they invited me to exhibit some prints there, altruistically as you put it. I thought I should walk my talk, and found that it lifted my whole approach to the critical taking, appraisal and presentation of my images. And I got not only some great feedback, but also a beautiful set of prints to hang at home. I highly recommend it!"

ben ng: "I find it the most rewarding way to show pictures. A couple of years ago I did a show on how a First Nations burial ground was being dug up by mountain-bikers for their course. The result was the City Council agreeing to fence off the site. And hospitals and drop-ins for the homeless like pictures; my reward being the homeless tell me of great locations to take pictures, which is worth more than selling for money."

Jonathan Morse: "Emily Dickinson wrote about 1800 poems, but only ten were published in her lifetime—and some of those were published against her will. People (including publishers) begged her to publish, but she was interested only in sending her poems as letters to her friends.

"And about Dwight D. Eisenhower's paintings, there's this."

Sunday Open Mike: High Volume at the High End

Yesteryear's top-of-the-line isn't a patch on today's high end where price is concerned. This gorgeous c. 1976 Sansui AU-11000, now the kind of thing pursued avidly by vintage audio enthusiasts, is for sale on eBay
right now. (See Footnote 2.)

I'm a member of "Generation Jones" and for teenage males of my generation the toy of choice was a stereo—music during our formative years had achieved a cultural prominence it hadn't had before and hasn't had since. (My parents bought me "Abbey Road" for getting all A's in 7th grade, and I still have it.)

As we've aged and made more money, some of those who continue to indulge in the old toys have gotten pretty silly (a.k.a. "serious") about it. The Pear-Shaped One (Harry Pearson of The Absolute Sound) coined the term "the high end," and it has become possible—almost easy—to spend $500,000 on a stereo. It's partially status-seeking and/or obsessiveness (fun only if you can afford it), and I got sick of all of it a few years ago and cancelled all my subscriptions to the audio magazines. I listen to music all day (one of the primary attractions of working at home), but my main stereo (I have two) is a bit of a Rube Goldberg contraption (see footnote 1).

The question there isn't really "who spends that kind of money on a stereo?" The answer to that is obvious: people who aren't "price sensitive" to spending tens of thousands of dollars for toys. That means multi-millionaires, in this case those with typical generational Boomer or Joneser enthusiasms. They're out there (cf. the Piketty phenomenon).

The new VPI Classic Direct, an American-made direct-drive, fully manual turntable that costs $30,000. In this case, the cost might actually be related to development and manufacturing costs (but at the link, notice what's in the upper-left-hand corner of the page). Even the cartridge for a turntable of this caliber might cost $5,000 or more.

The more interesting question is how do manufacturers survive selling audio components for tens of thousands of dollars? How does that work? I find that interesting, so I thought I'd sketch it out for you.

The idea is to take the low-volume model to a reductio ad absurdum.

The way it's done is this. First, you do whatever you can to add value to, say, a pair of speakers (there isn't that much, so you have to get creative—and that might include concocting a comprehensive sales pitch of quasi-magical claims). Then you price them at something like $80,000 for a pair, projecting to one and all that they must be great, because, as we all know, price correlates to quality. Then you send a few pairs out to reviewers and let the reviewers pay, say, $8,000 if they want to keep them. You then pay for multiple lavish full-page ads in the audio publications. You thus assure your project of glowing reviews and the admiration of the magazines. (This is not necessarily dishonest—if you pour that much money into a pair of speakers, they will often indeed often—not always—sound good.) Then, say you sell a grand total of…ten pairs of your incredible speaker o' the moment.

A product run of ten doesn't sound great on the face of it. But hey: gross, $800,000. Total investment, $250,000...or whatever it was. (These aren't real numbers, just illustrative.) Your break-even point was three pairs of speakers. At ten, you (and the dealers) have profited half a million dollars or more. If you have a big hit and you find two dozen customers, well, you have a real bonanza on your hands.

Beats working. Also beats the exponentially larger headache of having to earn $800,000 by selling 800 pairs of speakers for $1,000 each or, God forbid, 8,000 pairs of speakers at $100 each.

Six months later the reviewers sell the review units onward for the incredible bargain price of only $16,000 for the pair, the magazines find new components o' the moment to exalt to the skies, and everybody moves on. Including, sometimes, the customers who paid $80k for their speakers, because audio at that level is in many cases an expression of severe obsessive/compulsive disorder, and perfection remains but a holy grail. In fact there is a whole subculture of somewhat less well-heeled audiophiles who feed on the castoffs of the superrich ones.

I heard—just a rumor—of one manufacturer that was boasting of a particular success: a grand total of 60 units sold of a particular high-end component. That's high volume at the high end! As I said, I don't buy the hi-fi magazines regularly any more, but recently I bought one for the first time in a couple of years, and in its pages were not one but two product reviews for electronic components that retailed for $45,000. One a pair of power amps, one a preamp, from different makers. Both from companies that are most likely hoping to sell a total worldwide production run of a few dozen units at best.

That's the way that world works now, for the most part. It's taken all the fun out of audio for all but the few—which is why many people now enjoy vintage audio as a hobby and hang out a places like AudioKarma. (My second system is a vintage system.) Building a great stereo system from multiple independent components is already hopelessly complex, involving million of possible combinations; adding to that all the problems of older components increases the difficulty another five- or tenfold...

...Meaning, it's even more fun.  :-)

Mike

TOP goes off-topic on most Sundays, and don't think I didn't want to write even more about dogs again today.

Footnote 1: My music files are stored on a hard drive. I use iTunes for what we photographers call digital asset management, and Pure Music as a driver (much superior to the software in iTunes). My DAC (digital to analog converter) is the marvelous Halide DAC HD, which I recommend as a middling-expensive DAC for anyone who runs a system from their computer—whether it's a full rig or small high-quality desktop powered speakers. The Halide runs to a McIntosh C40 preamp within reach of my right hand, from which interconnect cables cross the room to a Belles 150A power amp. That feeds my speakers, which were custom-made for me by the talented Bill Waara in gutted Silverline Audio speaker cabinets. Cabling is all by Blue Jeans Cables, which I recommend unless you want to follow the March Hare where he leads.

It's an expensive system, but not crazily so. The amp and pre-amp were bought used. I sunk more money into the speakers than I might have liked, but I was trying to rescue a disastrous purchase—the Silverlines as they arrived were among the worst-built components I've ever seen in my life, and I've seen a few. The worst things about my stereo are a) the room, which is too small and too square, and b) the fact that I have a 27" iMac in front of my nose all day. About that, you know what they say: Oh well.

Footnote 2: And if I didn't already have a restored Accuphase (Kensonic) E-202 from the same era, I'd be tempted. Note that equipment this old often needs to be "serviced," which can mean anything from enough repair to get it running to a full-on restoration, replacing all the worn-out parts and re-doing all the solder joints. A restoration of a vintage piece can cost more than the component itself. Note also that old equipment being listened to in various states of decay complicates online reviewing to a truly marvelous degree, raising ordinary chaos to a higher plane altogether.

Mike

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David Kieltyka: "I'm very particular when it comes to guitar and keyboard amps, and the speakers and cabinets connected to those amps, but not in the least when it comes to the reproduction of recorded music. I can certainly hear the differences between a higher-end audio system, a more typical consumer-level one, and my iPhone's tiny built-in speakers. But those differences have little if any impact on my enjoyment of the music. I guess this has saved me lotsa $$ over the years!"

Mike replies: Your attitude is curiously common among musicians. I speculate it might be because we music listeners are so dependent on our reproduction equipment for our music that it becomes closely associated in our minds with the emotional gratification of music, whereas musicians themselves associate the gratification of music with the making of music rather than the playback of recordings.

It's also possible that musicians are so aware of what music "should" sound like that they're able to translate much more effortlessly in their minds from whatever recorded sound they're presented with to what they know it probably sounded like in real life. I'm convinced I do this with photographic prints; I studied prints so obsessively for so long that when I see a small JPEG of a picture that started out as a print, whether it's a news shot from 60 years ago or a platinum print, I draw on my experience of originals to immediately visualize what the original probably looked like. (I think wilderness landscape photographers do a lot of this too—when they see heroic landscapes they associate the image intimately with their in-person experiences of real landscapes, so they "see more" in the picture than is there for people who haven't done any hiking.)

But back to musicians and stereos: in Hanover when I was in college, there was a classical composer who preferred a horrible old suitcase-style record player like this one, on which he played 33 1/3 records at 78 speed! He said the speeded-up playback let him listen to the structure of the writing more easily. Efforts to entice him to buy a nicer stereo system fell—excuse the expression—on deaf ears.

David Brown: "Back in the 1980s, Bob and Ray (remember them?) had a radio spot about a guy selling dot-matrix printers for $1 million. 'Yeah, but I only have to sell one!'"

Earl Dunbar (partial comment): "The thing about the 'hi-fi bug' is that you can enjoy both equipment acquisition and the music it reproduces at price points to suit one's means."

Mike replies: Excellent point, and you are right, you can.

John McMillin: "When it comes to audio gear, there's an amazingly flexible relationship between cost and performance. I though about this when I attended the Rocky Mountain Audio Fest, where I sampled the sound and style of the upper reaches of the High End. You could spend hours there, wandering between demo rooms—so I did, impersonating the kind of person who spends five figures for a bespoke, boutique stereo component. All sounded great, and some sounded better than that. I was convinced, consecutively, that small two-way box speakers were best; that ribbon tweeters were better; that big multi-driver speaker towers were supreme; and then that 'free air' panel-mounted cone speakers with no box at all rule the universe.

"If you had given me a check for$50,000 and told me to spend it all right there, I'd still have to watch the budget...but I'd probably go mad first, trying to choose. Also, I couldn't figure out how their customers possessed the savvy and thrift to earn high incomes, but were willing to plow a sizable chunk of it into a small-batch gadget from a tiny company, with unknown future prospects and possibly scarce parts reserves.

"There's good news in audio these days for us 99-percenters, though. The price of good used gear has never been lower. I have three complete component systems in my home, including three Rotel components, a Luxman tuner, two Denon CD changers, two tube amps and four sets of NHT, Polk Audio and Mourdant-Short speakers. The average cost of the components, absent one $500 tube amp, comes out to about $75 each. On average, these speakers cost me $50 a pair, too. That's affordable—it may even be the best benefit I've felt from 'trickle-down economics'! So many people have lost interest in two-channel stereo, CDs, FM radio, in favor of one-box iMediocre audio, that the good gear has become very available, if you know where to look."

I'm Just Sayin' (Blog Notes)

I need just a little extra time to answer my email. All I need is one extra day every day. Too much to ask?

Mike

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Ming Thein: "Totally sympathise. I get an average of anywhere between 200–300 emails on a normal day; I've had north of 500 on a busy one...."

Terry Letton: "Sorry Mike there just aren't enough days in an hour."

Mike adds: I hope this post wasn't too roundabout. It's my way of apologizing to people whose messages I have missed or let go unanswered. I just can't do it all.

I'm Impressed

It's Saturday, and as you know I don't post on Saturday. TOP is closed for the day while I pretend to take the day off but actually use it to work on other work-related things. But in any event, I don't write posts today.

But what do you make of this?

Our friend Kirk Tuck down in Austin Tejas has written a novel. From scanning his post about it, looks like it's a photographer-centric thriller. It's called (well, I guess you can read the cover) The Lisbon Portfolio. It's available as a Kindle book right now, and will evidently be followed by a print edition later.

Whoever finishes first should definitely send me their thumbnail review!

The only Amazon review as of this writing says "Nothing about the book requires an interest in or knowledge of photography (it never gets bogged down in technicalities), but for those who do have an appreciation of the craft there are tasty photo-nuggets here and there which draw the reader even further into the story." 

Which reminds me...there is or was an audio writer who also wrote mystery novels (I think it was) that sometimes had audio-hobby subplots and leitmotifs. He used to write for Fi and then for TAS. I can't recall his name—can anybody tell me? [UPDATE: Jonathan Valin. Thanks, Jon Erickson. —Ed.] Maybe Kirk will be the photography-hobby novel author, like that guy was the audio-hobby novel author. Hey, the concept can work—didn't Dick Francis set most of his murder mysteries around horse racing? I'm sure John can inform us of some other examples.

The weapon on the cover looks like an F3 with a 105mm ƒ/2.5. (The camera, anyway. I have no idea about the revolver*.)

In any event, congratulations and a big pat on the back to Kirk. Success comes to those who finish things, and I think I can speak for many of us when I say I'm impressed.

Mike

*A joke. Don't go ballistic. 

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John Camp: "The 'revolver' looks like a version of the Beretta 92 semi-automatic pistol, a specific version of which is the U.S. Army's standard-issue sidearm.

"Most of the lifestyle thrillers don't involve hobbyists, but professionals. Dick Francis wrote his books about horse racing, but not about amateurs. Randy Wayne White has a lot of Florida fishing in his books, but  his series character is a marine biologist. Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe was an amateur orchid grower. There have been a number of novels about photographers (Bridges of Madison County, most famously, about a National Geographic photographer) but the characters are pros. I believe Chicago's Sara Paretsky's female character V.I. Warshawski was an amateur basketball player who was able to dunk the ball....

"You might find a lot more amateurs (hobbyists) in older British works (Miss Marple).

"It's a very common tactic in thriller writing to give the main character special skills involving violence (how else would he/she survive?) while also working another job, or following another enthusiasm. Michael Connolly's character Harry Bosch is a jazz enthusiast, but can a jazz enthusiast be considered a hobbyist? He doesn't try to play an instrument, he just appreciates. Anyway, you often have a guy in a straight job, who has these violent skills as well, usually from a past as a soldier or an intelligence agent. For example, Daniel Silva's Israeli character Gabriel Allon is a famous restorer of Renaissance paintings, but kills people on assignment from the Mossad. Usually, the hero or heroine just wants to be left alone, to lead a quiet life with his new family, but no, Dr. Evil won't allow that, so he has to resurrect his rusty skills in murder...."

David Bostedo: "I'm not sure if the 'revolver' joke is good or not, but I know the 'ballistic' joke is TERRIBLE.  :-) "

Mike replies: Thenk-yew, thenk-yew.

Mike R: "I just finished it last night. Was completely lost in it for two days. Will post my own review when I get home Sunday."

Fred: "These comments seem to be revolving about the cover and shouldn't one not judge a book by its...oh whatever.  :-) "

Jon Erickson: "Jonathan Valin is your crime-fiction-slash-music-audio writer. TAS and Fi, good memory."

Staffan C: "Maybe Sweden is the only country boasting a photographer as the main character of a celebrated series of crime stories? Author Stieg Trenter wrote more than 20 novels featuring photographer Harry Friberg, and the series was continued by his wife Ulla Trenter after his death in 1967. Friberg is modelled on a friend of the author, the very successful K. W. Gullers, and is, like him, a commercial photographer also doing book projects—Friberg and Gullers also share a studio address in central Stockholm. (Trenter’s Wikipedia article wrongly describes both Friberg and Gullers as press photographers.) The books are still great reads, not least because of the atmosphere and the location details of Stockholm in the middle of the last century."

Roger Bradbury: "I thought the 'Ballistic' joke was of extremely poor calibre. I can't believe that jokes of that standard are doing the rounds."

Mike replies: I'd fire back, but that would just give you more ammunition.

gary isaacs: "And the standalone senior point goes to: 'success comes to those who finish things....'"

Mike replies: To give credit where credit is due, that came directly from John Camp. He (generously) spent some time discussing novel-writing with me, and at one point I asked him what the secret sauce of success is, hoping he'd unlock the core code of making millions as a writer. He replied—I paraphrase—just finish it. He said that in his experience, everybody who writes is either thinking of writing a book or in the process of writing a book, but that very few people actually finish their books—and that, when they do, his observation has been that good things tend to happen. So that was his advice to me. If you want to succeed at writing books, finish one.

Apropos of Nothing (OT)

"Yer a lang time deid!"

—Scottish saying

Carpe diem in other words. ("Seize the day.") Make the most of the present time. You only have one life, so live while you have the chance. Take risks, go after what you want, experience things even if they don't last, don't fret so much about the future. (And as ever, to thine own self be true.)

I just ran across the Scottish way of saying it and I think I'll adopt it. It's plainer yet more vivid than most of the many other ways of saying the same thing.

Mike, who let too many days fly by

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David Miller: "Och, yoor a guid lad, Michael. (Foor a Sassenach….)"

Mike replies: Had to look that up. Sassenach: "The Gaelic term for a Saxon. Survives in modern day Ireland and Scotland as a derogatory term for an English person." (Urban Dictionary).

Actually I'm ethnically lowland Scottish as much as English—Hamilton on my mother's side and Johnston on my father's—unless all Americans are automatically Sassenachs?

Dillan: "I think all of us 'let too many days fly by.' Thank you very much for the reminder. A message like this is welcome with me any time."

Justin Blakie: "I have Hamilton on my father's side. Hello cousin!"

Mike replies: Greetings Cousin.

...Which reminds me of a story.  :-) 

When I was in college I got enamored of a girl right before she left for a semester in England. We planned on meeting in Ireland when she got out of school at the end of summer, where we were going to rent a caravan and wander the Irish countryside for a fortnight in a happy romantic adventure. (Who knows how that would have gone.) But in England she fell in love with an Englishman, who (of course) insisted that she break her plans with me. But she couldn't face telling me, so she procrastinated...forgetting that if she waited too long, it would be too late for me to get my airline ticket refunded. She finally called me to tell me not to come...on the day before my flight was supposed to leave.

So I had my airline ticket, which was worthless if I didn't use it. I was even packed. So I went to Ireland anyway. I ended up spending three weeks wandering Ireland alone.

One of the places I landed was a small town called Kinvara, on the West coast. I stayed at a pub and boardinghouse called "Winkles." (I found this online: "Tiffy Winkle Moylan—the unofficial 'Queen of Kinvara'—and her husband Kieran (both now gone) ran the family’s famous old hotel and pub, 'Winkles' (no longer extant), on the small town square (now barely extant). Tiffy was intensly curious about, and probably knew most of, everything going on in Kinvara.")

Because there were a great many Johnstons in the Kinvara phone book—they came to Kinvara during the 'Troubles' in Scotland in the 1700s and many of them emigrated on to America in the 1800s—Tiffy assumed I was sprung from the Kinvara Johnstons, so she welcomed me with open arms, immediately began calling me 'Cousin,' and introduced me all around to the locals as "Cousin Michael from America."

It was nice, being a cousin. I was hitchhiking one day when a tiny car hauling a large open flatbed trailer went careening past me. Up the road it stopped, and started laboriously backing up for me. As I ran up to the car, I heard a child's voice from inside say, "We must stop, he's a cousin!" The car was so chock-full of kids and dogs that I rode into town on the trailer, and the ride was a little hairy. But it was kind of them to stop.

The stern policeman
Another story of Winkle's...in Ireland at that time it was illegal for the pubs to stay open past 11:00 at night, I think it was. But on Saturday night, come closing time, a lookout was stationed up at the corner to look for the policeman on patrol, and the party went right on into the wee hours. Every twenty minutes or so, the lookout gave a signal, the music stopped, the lights were doused, and everybody in the place hit the floor and lay there without uttering a sound while we watched the policeman amble past the windows.

This went on for hours. I had befriended a "Black Irish" girl who cleaned the rooms of the boardinghouse. (The term, which I guess the Irish themselves don't really use, refers to people in the West of Ireland who have pale skin and black hair—she also had blue eyes—who, according to legend, are descended from shipwrecked Spaniards). Her unusual Gaelic name is lost to my memory now, but we were dancing together that night, so she and I would crouch on the floor side-by-side when we were all hiding from the constable. 

As we lay there illuminated by light from the streetlight outside, it seemed to me that the policeman would see us all pretty easily if he were to just turn his head and look in the windows. Whispering, I asked my dance partner why he never looked in.

"Because he might see us!" she whispered back, as if explaining something to an eight-year-old.

I pondered this one for a moment, then asked, "You mean he knows we're in here?"

"Of course he knows we're in here. He's not simple." she said.

"But...but if he knows we're in here...then why are we hiding?"

"Well, for heaven's sake. For the same reason he doesn't look in the window. Because if he were to see us, he'd have to break up the party, and then everyone would have to go home. And that wouldn't be very much fun now would it?"

At about two-thirty in the morning, as I recall, the constable finally did stick his head in the door, and shout very sternly that if any of us lawbreakers weren't gone by the time he passed by on his next round, he was going to run us right off to jail.

And then, in a mood that seemed as buoyant as it was convivial, everyone said goodbyes all around and the place quickly emptied.

Gerry Winterbourne: "Apropos your policeman, much of Wales was 'dry' on Sundays back in the '50s (and other decades). One Sunday a couple of us tried to persuade a publican to serve us—his door was open while he cleaned the bar. He refused on the grounds that the local policeman would be round shortly so we wandered on. An hour later as we returned there was, indeed, a police bicycle leaning by the door so we congratulated ourselves on our escape. I didn't mention we were under age at the time. It was only with the wisdom of later years that we realised what the policeman was doing inside the bar...."

The Best Mobile Device Camera

Y'know, I should never say "I don't write about X." Whenever I do that, then I hear about nothing but X for the next week, and end up writing about it.

'Insanely awesome,' and yes, we quote
So. The best phone in a camera, currently, as far as I can tell from quick-search research, is the Nokia 1020. Described as a niche device for mobile photography enthusiasts, Sam Sabri at Windows Phone Central said, "...to oversimplify the Lumia 1020, you could call it a reworked Lumia 920 with an insanely awesome camera...the big difference (and we mean big) being the gigantic camera hump on the rear of the Lumia 1020. That camera hump houses the best imaging technology found in any modern smartphone." Sam concludes that the 20-MP Nokia Lumia 1520 and Lumia Icon are better all-around devices, but says the 41-MP camera in the 1020 is still better for photography. Adding, "we love our Lumia 1020’s. Unashamedly, unabashedly."

Note that there is a nice grip-case for the 1020.

Fire. Fire?
Meanwhile, Amazon announced its own phone, the Fire (surprisingly, from Amazon, not a good distinctive/searchable Internet name. Also, is "fire" a word with good connotations? Not for me, whether you get fired or you get burned). (And I actually didn't even know the Fire was coming when I wrote about cellphone cameras the other day. Maybe it was just around and about in the ether and I sensed it by cultural osmosis.) The Fire features a 13MP camera with optical image stabilization, 1080p HD video, a 2.2 GHz quad-core processor and 2GB of RAM, and a 4.7" HD display. I wonder if it also portends a completely new category of photograph: the dynamic perspective still image, which would sit somewhere between a still photograph and video. Or between and off to the side a bit. (That was a joke, get it? See, the Fire...oh, never mind.)

Manual camera controls in iOS 8
Not to be left behind, the world's largest camera manufacturer (Apple, that would be) has announced that it will add a suite of manual camera controls to iOS 8.

And so the complication begins! This could be good for dedicated-device camera makers...we'll probably soon get to the point where ordinary people no longer know how to use the cameras in their mobile devices, so if they want to take pictures they'll have to buy cameras again.

I kid.

Sort of.

Mike
(Thanks to John Hogg and several other readers)

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:

Andre Y: "I've said this over at Ming's blog, but I'll say it here, and perhaps get flamed... Seeing the BBC report on the Leica centenary makes me think that the iPhone may occupy the same niche that the Leica rangefinder did 60 or 70 years ago. This quotation from the video says it all (about 1:08 in): 'Its strength is that it’s incredibly simple to use…It's incredibly ergonomic and feels part of you, but you make great pictures with your head and your heart, not necessarily with the camera. Professionals tend to use it for jobs where you need to be quiet and unobtrusive.' He also goes on to point out that HC-B used one focal length for his career.

"Which part of this isn't fulfilled by the iPhone today? None! And in its day, 35mm film was considered inferior in image quality to larger formats, just like the iPhone's tiny sensor when compared to its larger digital brethren. One more point: many consider a strength of the rangefinder that you can see the scene outside of the len's view, so you can better anticipate when to press the shutter button. What is a live-view screen but a rangefinder view expanded out to infinity? (Yes, sunlight washes out LCD screens, but consider the idea, and screens will continue to improve.)"

[You won't get flamed here (despite the news item about the Fire). I don't allow it. —Mike the Ed.]

David Evans: "I already don't know how to use the camera in my phone. Admittedly that's because I haven't bothered to learn, feeling that it's a higher priority to learn how to use my real cameras."

Let's Get to the News (and Jokes)

• Carolyn Wright, who runs the website Photoattorney.com for photographers and has written a book that I've recommended in the past, has been named in this article as a party to what the article calls "copyright troll[ing]."

To insure a steady stream of "accidental infringements," "trolls" put up images on free wallpaper sites. "But if that image is used for any commercial purposes whatsoever," the lawyer "swoops in with a lawsuit."

Perhaps some of the attorneys in the audience (Cal? Adam? Laura?) can weigh in on whether this behavior is ethical.

• Three-legged dog walks into a bar. He's wearing a six-gun. Bar goes quiet. Dog says, "I'm looking for the man who shot my paw."

Bunny Yeager, Bettie Page, and two friends.

• Bunny Yeager, the pioneering pinup and nude photographer who was part of the "sexual revolution" of the 1960s and the early days of Playboy magazine, died on May 25th at the age of 85. Resource Magazine has a nice article about her. (Link is not safe for work [nudity]. —Ed.)

• Dyslexic man walks into a bra.

• Stanley Roberts' People Behaving Badly. Moral of story: when you're being a jerk, don't make it worse for yourself by threatening the cameraman. (This is pretty amusing, especially if your taste runs to schadenfreude.)

• Submarine sandwich walks into a bar. Bartender says, "Sorry, we don't serve food in here."

• Has Magnum taken a page from TOP's book? Its current print sale looks an awful lot like ours!

• A rabbi, a priest, and a minister walk into a bar. Bartender says, "I've heard a lot about you guys."

• The reputation of the late Saul Leiter is vaulting ahead of many of his contemporaries who were more famous in his own time because his work seems so suited to now. We've received news that the long-awaited new book Saul Leiter: Early Black and White (the companion to the now-famous Early Color) finally shipped to distributors this week. Amazon's listing as of this writing seems befuddled (the link leads to the wrong book), but it can be ordered from the Book Depository for worldwide shipment. Might sell out fast*. Mine's ordered and I can't wait.

• Horse walks into a bar. Bartender says, "hey buddy, why the long face?"

Mike
(Thanks to many readers, and Scott)

*Early Color sold out notoriously quickly but later received a much larger second printing and remains in print. No telling what will befall to this one, but demand will be fierce at least at first.

Ctein adds: Okay, I'm having a lot of trouble making sense out of the first item (about copyright trolling). There's a hell of a lot of smoke, that is, myriad complaints…but I can't find the fire—namely the "honey pot" or the "free wallpaper" websites that are enticing people into downloads. Maybe one of the other readers here can point me to the sites that are supposedly enticing people into unwitting copyright infringement?

What I do come up with is Vincent Taylor's website where he talks repeatedly (and sometimes forcefully) about offering photographs for sale, not for free. There are prominent homepage links to stock usage, about copyrights, products, and right at the top of his "about me" page there is this: "(Click HERE for information regarding Copyrights." If he's enticing anyone to download his stuff and misuse it, I'm missing it.

So I went looking for the other supposed culprit, Hawaiian Art Network. Which by itself does not have a webpage of the sort that people are getting het up about, but it does lead me to this:

http://www.hawaiipictures.com/copyright.php

Which starts off with this paragraph:

By using HawaiiPictures.com ("Website") owned and operated by Hawaiian Art Network LLC ("Owner"), you agree to abide by these terms of use. If you do not agree to these terms of use you may not use this website. The purpose of the HawaiiPictures.com website is to sell Hawaii related Media ("Media" includes pictures, photos, videos, graphics, vectors, qtvr, prints, and software). You agree to comply with any and all copyright statements on the Website regarding use rights and our Media License Agreement.

Which seems pretty clear to me. Appropriate information is even on their not-especially-cluttered homepage:

http://www.hawaiipictures.com/

The first paragraph reads:

HawaiiPictures.com hand selects the best stock photography from all of the Hawaiian Islands. Each tropical location is brilliantly represented in high-resolution detail for personal or professional use. Buy and download Hawaii photos, video footage, wallpapers, and more. Fine art prints are also available.

And at the bottom of the not very long nor cluttered page, there are links for:

NO COMMERCIAL SHARE USE ALLOWED WITHOUT A LICENSE

© 2014 HawaiiPictures.com | Commercial Use Price Quotes | Media License Agreement Hawaiian Art | About Us | Links | Privacy Policy | Terms of Use | Email Us

Which I think makes it pretty clear what business they're in and their policies.

Mind you, I'm not saying I have any idea what's actually going on with the alleged trolling. But, if there is real copyright trolling going on, there has to be some source for innocent (or at least plausibly ignorant) infringement or misinterpretation of the conditions of use, or there aren't any unintentional victims out there, just people complaining because they got slammed for doing something they were clearly informed not to.

I don't want to see genuine trolling going on, of people who are entrapped or at least seduced into getting themselves sued. But, I'm happy to see aggressive, even vicious enforcement, when people should genuinely know better. The whole "but you should just ask them nicely when they infringe on you, or bill them a reasonable usage rate" approach fails badly—it doesn't provide any disincentive for the thieves, and it's not cost effective for the content creators to try to chase them down.

Omer replies to Ctein: "The images shown here are stripped of any copyright info."

Chris: "For copyright trolling, you can start reading here."

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:

John: "As a motorcyclist, I find the video segment 'People Behaving Badly' to be extremely funny. It's difficult to come up with a plausible reason why the rider thought that confronting the cameraman, Stanley Roberts, could possibly be a good idea. Suspended license, no insurance, flagrant traffic violation. Wearing a full-face helmet guaranteeing anonymity. I think I'll go with this: a few clowns short of a circus."

Mark Roberts: "In my humble, non-legal (but experienced—more on that later) opinion, both parties in that copyright lawsuit need to get real.

"First of all, anyone running their own web site, especially a commercial one, is obliged to do at least a little reading about copyright issues before putting someone else's images or other content on their site. It's not 1994 any more. And the claim that someone is 'copyright trolling' simply by offering images free for use as desktop backgrounds but demanding payment for commercial uses is fatuous: plenty of photographers, myself included, offer our images free for such use as a form of publicity that one hopes will lead to future sales.

"That said, the demand for $9,500 for a single use on a website looks like copyright trolling to me. As does initiating proceedings with a lawsuit rather than a simple request for payment.

"I base these opinions on my own experience: A couple of years ago I received a notice from Getty Images about unauthorized use of one of their photos on my site. Puzzled, I looked into it and found that a book I had reviewed had incorporated one of Getty's licensed images as part of its cover design and my link for readers to purchase the book used Amazon's thumbnail image of the book cover. Getty Images billed me $750 (less than 1/10 of what this unknown photographer in the story you reference is demanding). So I phoned them up, their representative looked at my web page (up to this point everything had been done by automatic image recognition software) and instantly determined there wasn't any issue with my use. No bill. No problem. All handled quickly and professionally.

"Both parties in that lawsuit need to take chill pills and settle this for a couple of hundred dollars.

"The book I recommend to my students on using other people's materials (and licensing their own) is Getting Permission: How to License & Clear Copyrighted Materials Online & Off. [There's a Kindle version too. —Ed.] The information in it is fundamental enough that it's unlikely to get significantly outdated. The author, Richard Stim, has a great blog on the subject of IP matters."

How to Color-Correct a Picture File

Not everyone knows how to color-correct a picture. Here are some basics.

First, you need to memorize the opposing colors. Cyan is the opposite of red, yellow is the opposite of blue, and green is the opposite of magenta. Getting that very straight in your head is the first step.

If you're not very familiar with what those colors look like, go look at them until you recongize them. You need to memorize the three pairs of opposites and what each of the six colors looks like.

Subtracting one of those color has the effect of adding its opposite.

Most modern photo editing programs for digital files make all the above nicely obvious and clear by providing a set of sliders for color correction or color balance. Here's what that looks like in the editor I use:

This is nice, but remember, you need to have these pairs of colors in your head. If they're not in your head, you won't learn to know what a picture needs by looking at the picture.

So here's how you color balance a picture:

1. Look at it.
2. Decide what color it has too much of.
3. Add the opposite.

As with most things relating to photography, you use your visual intelligence to solve problems. That is, you do things by looking. So although the three steps above are "all there is to it," there's more to it, because you need to learn to recognize what it looks like when there's too much of one color in a picture.

The way to calibrate your visual intelligence in this way is to add the wrong colors to your own pictures on purpose.

An example:

Too much blue. Solution: add yellow.

Too much yellow = needs more blue.

Your mind should be telling you "needs magenta" when you see too much green.

A magenta cast is usually easy to see. Add green to correct.

Now here's an interesting aspect of this particular file...

This is 20 points of added red. But there's no overt red in the picture, which brings up why it's important to try this exercise on many different pictures. When there's less of a particular color in the file, it becomes relatively more difficult to see that there's too much of that color when you look at it. It takes a little practice.

Open files, add too much of a color, and then study it, really letting yourself look at the result.

The other reason it's valuable to practice seeing in this way is that it's a good way to learn to see smaller and smaller amounts of color cast. If it's a bit difficult to recognize that the above file is too red when it has 20 points added, imagine how difficult the red cast would be to see when it's only had 5 points added. As you do these exercises, try to start with files that you think are neutral or "perfect" and then add smaller and smaller amounts of color cast, to see if you can detect what that looks like. At what point does it simply become a judgement call? At which point does it cease to really matter? Pay attention.

A tip: as is probably obvious, just as pictures without a certain color make it hard to see a cast, pictures with areas that are supposed to be white can make it easy to see color casts.

When there's no clear neutral to work from, don't forget that looking at small areas can give you good clues as to how overall color can be "off." This is also a good way of evaluating some pictures that might have a lot of light of a particular color.

This picture, for instance, has a lot of blue in it naturally—even the rider's pants are blue and the shadowed building facade is bluish—which make it easy to assume a blue color cast. By looking at the rider's face, the green grass, and the streetlight post, you can get a feel for whether there's really a cast or if that was just the light. Or, add too much yellow and then back off on it until the blues start looking right.

Here's the last picture to round out this set:

Too much cyan. Cyan is fairly close to blue visually (compare this picture to the top one), so it can take a bit of practice to learn to see the difference between cyan and blue casts.

When you've seen the "right" cast, adding the opposite color can seem sort of "magic," a falling-into-place quality, transforming the file into looking "right" effortlessly. Pay attention when that happens, so that you can recognize when it's not happening—if you're struggling with a file, trying different things haphazardly yet still not quite getting it to come 'round, it's a good sign that maybe you haven't seen it properly.

Psychological color
Our eye-brains aren't color agnostic. We're quite sensitive to green, for instance—probably the result of having evolved on a green planet—but to most people, on the other hand, more yellow just reads as richer (sun)light! Cyan and magenta are unnatural colors and look "wrong" to most people, so a little too much can be disturbing, whereas excessive yellow tends to make pictures more pleasing to most viewers. Or at least they're quite tolerant of it. Look at the iPhone picture of Xander from yesterday's "Re Cellphone Cameras" post. It's quite yellow, but still quite tolerable. You can err a lot on the side of too much yellow and not suffer for it. Some automated printers just heap on the yellow like sugar in food. Well, maybe not that bad. But it can be annoying to people who are used to evaluating color.

Here's a nice exercise that I do purely for fun sometimes: when you run across a picture on the web that has obviously, blatantly wrong color, download it and correct it. Yes, small JPEG files downloaded from wherever will not stand as much correction a full RAW files you own, but you might be surprised both by how well it works and by how well you can do. And it's good practice.

Another tip: sometimes when you think you're seeing all kinds of different casts, and it's confusing you, it can simply mean there's "too much" color. Try backing down on the overall saturation, then color correcting, then (if need be) adding saturation back in until you reach the point of sufficiency. The fashion these days is toward oversaturation, which, ironically, can make color correction more difficult.

Interpretation
I recommend that starting to practice color balancing by aiming for a neutral result—it's easiest. And work on pictures that have natural color.

Then, once you've practiced seeing deliberate color casts on your own pictures and have gotten a pretty good eye for it, you can start introducing artistic interpretation into your efforts. I'm sure you've noticed that many files have a fairly narrow range of acceptable interpretations, while others have a wide range of possible colors and hence possible effects. I have a few pictures that I think look best with color that departs from normal or neutral—or from the reality as I remember it. I also have a few files—one sunset picture comes to mind—that have so many valid interpretations it's almost confusing. these can take quite a bit of work before you feel you've really arrived at the optimal result.

When you get a difficult file (and note that a difficult file can be good as a learning opportunity), try working on it for a while and then coming back to it later when you're fresh again. Sometimes, your mind will figure it out in the interim, and the solution will seem relatively easier to find. Starting over with old files of your own work once in a while can be fruitful practice too.

There's obviously much more you can read about color theory, but remember what I said about visual intelligence—the best practice involves looking and evaluating on your own, and doing it again and again, honing your eye's ability to see and your brain's ability to understand rather than merely amassing theoretical knowledge.

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.

Yo. TOP's links.

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

Bryan Pollock: "When it comes to colour relationships and you want to have some eyebending fun pick up one of these babies. A great rainy afternoons entertainment. The individual colour cubes come in two pieces and are all jumbled up in the box. You have to sort and assemble each little cube and then arrange them in their proper order in the larger cube. If you think they are easy to assemble think again. The hours I spent staring at two halves of what I thought was the same colour was an eye-opener I can tell you. It really can teach one about subtle colour variations over the whole spectrum. I think there also might be something in the assembly part of the process since one is using ones eye, brain and hands to build the colour relationships."

Mike replies: They used similar tests at the NIMH labs in D.C. when my brother was an intern there—subjects were asked to arrange painted metal disks in color order (very similar to the Pantone Online Color Challenge mentioned in the comments by Paul and John). I did very well on those tests then, and I attributed it to the fact that I was doing a lot of color printing at the time (I do less well on the Pantone test now). And, no joke, I do think your ColorCube would be an excellent exercise for color photographers!

Paddy C: "Nice overview and I would do well to follow your advice and practice more even after all these years. One additional thing I find quite useful is correcting/adjusting an image until you have it 'right' then stepping away. Come back to it in a few hours or the next day and you may find your 'right' was a bit wrong."

Stephen Scharf: "Mike, thanks for the informative post. Always good to refresh how color balance is achieved by understanding the colors and their opposites. Color cast correction is very easily dealt with in Lightroom. The white balance dropper tool makes this incredibly easy to do. The dropper tool zooms in to a pixel by pixel level view and lets you see the balance of red/green/blue so you can get very close to picking an individual pixel that is very close to a target neutral, click, and you're done. I haven't used the color balance sliders in Photoshop since 2006 because of this functionality. Fuji X-cam shooters have an even easier time of this because the auto while balance on Fujis is so good that trying to find a white balance that is more neutral than what the camera finds is pretty difficult."

Mike replies: I would recommend against using the dropper tool method unless you're already very experienced. It's much better for people to learn how to understand color, which will improve color seeing with and without a camera. And the excellent out-of-camera WB of today's cameras—which many photographers simply default to, thus more or less throwing in the towel on interpretive possibilities—is why I said "a difficult file can be good as a learning opportunity." I actually enjoy finding pictures that I can't immediately figure out because I appreciate the challenge.

Hugh Crawford (partial comment): "Yikes! That's very C-print way of working. I can almost smell the blix. I certainly wouldn't use the color balance tool for color balancing. I've sort of forgotten that the color balance tool was there. I always do color balancing with the curves tool if I'm in photoshop, taking advantage of the nice black, gray, and white point tools. You can also grab the red green and blue curves individually to do the same thing as the color balancing tool does with more finesse..." [large snip; see Hugh's full comment in the Comments Section. —Ed.].

Hugh's interpretation of the biker picture

Mike replies: You missed the bit at the very top that said, "Here are some basics."  (Smiley face.)

I like your interpretation of the biker shot much better...except that now it no longer works as an illustration of what I was talking about. (Smiley face redux.)

John Sparks: "Reading your post was like looking at a web page in a foreign language. I totally understand the concept that red and cyan are opposites, but that doesn't help when I look at your examples and the one that is supposed to look too red and the one that is supposed to look too cyan are almost indistinguishable. In fact, I can only easily see two sets of your images, the warm ones (too yellow, green, red and cyan) and the cool ones (too blue and magenta and the motorcycle one). I can see subtle differences between the ones in each group but have no vocabulary for what the differences are. I have still have one of those Kodak viewing filter sets and still wonder why the cyan ones are clear.

"I worked for a year in a photo studio where a large part of my job was making color prints. No amount of trying larger changes made my eyes able to see most of the large differences much less smaller changes (except in the blue and yellow directions where I don't have problems). I could only make final color prints when there was someone else around to tell me what changes I still needed to make. At the end of that year, I could see color better than I ever had before or since, but mostly that just pointed out just how bad my color vision really is.

"I find color balance on the computer much more satisfying than when flailing around in the dark (no pun intended) of a color darkroom. My method of color balances is to take the color temperature slider and move it back and forth until the cool/warm balance looks right to me. Maybe keep it a bit on the warm side as that is generally more appealing.  Some photographs never look right so I just go on to something else.

"My commercial artist wife who can look at a white wall and instantly tell what tint it has looks at my prints and she likes the color so it can't be too bad.

"Maybe I should have stuck with B&W, but, with digital, that brings up the whole toning thing which is even worse than color balancing. At least in the darkroom days, you just picked a paper and chemicals and lived with what you got.

"Your words make it sound like I just need to follow your steps, but it might as well have been written in Mandarin."

Mike replies: It sounds like you might be dealing with a deficit of some sort, in which case it would be desirable to use whatever automatic aids that technology can supply. We all have knacks for certain things and not others. And as far as B&W "toning" is concerned, bear in mind that most people can't even "see" the tone (i.e., color cast) of B&W prints when first faced with the task, unless it's made very obvious. Most non-photographers miss what we consider routine distinctions between "cool tone" and "warm tone" silver papers, for instance.

If others are dealing with similar incomprehension just because they're beginners, keep in mind that the examples here are only illustrations. What you should do is pick some of your own pictures, open them up, and play with the color controls, looking at the effect of adding and subtracting various colors. That's what will help you learn to begin recognizing the subtleties.

Dave in NM: "My first suggestion to anyone looking to have control over color balance in their natural light photos is to start out with a known quantity. Calibrate your monitor with a hardware device and create a profile for your camera (to be applied automatically at import to Lightroom or ACR) using an X-Rite ColorChecker Passport. Then turn off Auto White Balance and shoot with your camera's Daylight setting. Natural light varies greatly in both color and quality—using AWB or an eyedropper tool to achieve a 'neutral' color balance basically discards all those variations and ignores the character that different types of light can bring to a scene. A gray card in early morning is not going to be the same color as a gray card at high noon. The warm light of the 'golden hour' is going to impart an entirely different feeling than the cold green light that precedes a violent summer storm.

"By starting out with a reasonably accurate representation of the scene, rather than the camera or computer's software interpretation of what's correct (neutral grays), you're preserving the unique properties of the light that was present when you tripped the shutter. If you don't like it, you can always adjust it later. But if you don't have an objective example of what was there to begin with, recreating the essential quality of the light as it was will be much more difficult after the fact."

Jack Foley: "I was taught to remember which colors affect which with the phrase 'Red Corvettes BY GM'; that is: Red/Cyan, Blue/Yellow, Green/Magenta. Silly, but helpful."

The Wrong Camera

I was walking away from the Smithsonian in D.C. one time with my friend Kim, who has taught photography there for many years, and I noticed Kim was walking with his head down. I asked him why, and he said, "I don't want to see a picture. This is just the kind of light I like." He didn't have his camera with him.

Not having a camera with you is one way you can miss those serendipitous opportunities that pop up every once in a while. People discuss that a lot. But the other way you can lose out is having the wrong camera with you.

As a camera reviewer, that's happened to me a lot over the years. So maybe I'm overly sensitive.

But I tend to use one camera for my "real" work in any given period, and the look of that camera is important to the look of the work. So when I'm caught out snapping away with some different device, then, suddenly, great photo opportunities become a bad thing.

Here's one of my standard examples of this:

I was testing a Ricoh GXR at the time. No offense to GXR users, but it's not a terribly good file. I really wish I'd had a better camera with me when this situation developed. I'm pretty sure there was a good picture there. I might even have found it.

Having the wrong camera with you is the problem with cellphones, in my mind. What if you see a good picture?

Of course, the cellphone could be your camera of choice—the one you're using for your "real" work. Then, naturally, you'd need your cellphone with you when you got lucky and hit a great opportunity. For me, however, it would be the wrong camera. And when I have the wrong camera—as with Kim that day on the Mall—then, seeing a good picture goes from being a good thing to being a bad thing.

There's nothing worse than seeing a fantastic picture when you don't have a camera with you. But seeing a fantastic picture when you have the wrong camera with you is almost as bad.

Mike

P.S. You're in no way obligated to agree with this post. It might not be true for you. And if it isn't true for you, I'm not saying you're wrong. I'm just describing what's true for me. Please don't take it the wrong way.

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.

When you use a TOP link, an angel gets its wings.

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DavidB: "That's funny. I am almost locked into a mindset for each of my cameras. For my Sigma I see industrialization, smoke stakes, dead birds. These are the images I see on a walk. With my SLR/n I see textures, I just want to image trees, rock surfaces. My phone seems to be just for snap shots, ete. But maybe that's just the craziness of my brain. I feel for a specific image I want to create with only a specific tool."

Mike replies: I think the important thing is knowing how your own mind works and then accommodating that. Sounds like you have.

David Miller: "I couldn't agree more. A while ago I bought a Fuji X-20 specifically as a carry-all-the-time camera: small, quick to use, functional optical viewfinder, reasonable zoom range…ready for anything, right? A few months later the Fuji X-T1 was released, along with great sale prices on most of the X-mount lenses. I got the camera and several prime lenses, deliberately staying away from zooms for a while to see how that would influence my photography. To my great surprise the 23mm prime (equivalent to 35mm focal length on a full-frame camera, and not a length I've ever used much with zoom lenses) 'clicked' with me. (Pun intended.) That lens now lives on the front of the X-T1, and the outfit has become my carry-all-the-time: it's surprisingly versatile and I've discovered that I don't mind missing the occasional not-bad shot in exchange for capturing a smaller number of higher-quality images that really please me."

Mike replies: Yeah, isn't that lens amazing? Impresses every time.

Scott Price: "I used to worry about having the wrong camera/lens/whatever with me. It seemed that the more I learned about photography, the more likely I would miss an opportunity to capture a special moment. Then, I encountered a 'decisive moment' in my development as a photographer—the realization that my growth as a photographer was allowing me to recognize these moments more often. In effect, the act of searching for beautiful things to photograph taught me to see and appreciate beautiful things in my daily life. Once I realized this, I no longer mourned the 'loss' of these moments because I lacked the 'right' tool to capture them. Instead, seeing these moments for what they are has made me more thankful for what photography has given back to me."

Re Cellphone Cameras

Z by me and me by Z, Father's Day dinner, his treat. Camera used: none

David Vestal used to warn people not to tell him things he was supposed to keep secret. He gave a reason for not signing non-disclosure agreements: "I'm in the disclosure business."

Even though I'm in the disclosure business and I tend to be confessional by nature (in other words: a blabbermouth) I have to be careful sometimes. There are things I've agreed not to say and things I shouldn't say. Occasionally I transgress. The issue makes me nervous, because I have a holy memory and poor filters.

So maybe I shouldn't say this, but here's why I don't like cellphone cameras: I don't sell 'em.

TOP is first and foremost a community. Secondarily, however, it's a store. It generates income when people come here and click through to Amazon and B&H Photo and buy stuff.

Neither "e-tailer" sells iPhones [UPDATE: see Speed's comment below]. Long and short: if everybody shot with a cellphone and nobody bought dedicated cameras and lenses any more, TOP would be history and Xander would have to pay for all my dinners. So yeah, we could do posts about iPhoneography and get all enthusiastic about it and create a lot of interest in it, but...why would we do that?

It's not like I never mention them. We even had a print sale of an iPhone picture (I still really love that piece, by the way. Gotta get mine framed). And we do post things like this from time to time. I'm not averse. I'm just not a fan. The trend to cellphone cameras and away from dedicated devices makes me nervous. I don't like it. But, I freely admit, for purely selfish reasons.

But maybe Xander will pay for all my dinners someday anyway: his latest video got 2,000 views overnight and drew 51 new subscribers, both of which are records for his YouTube channel The Best Hobbies Blog, which, by the way, is now also an actual blog.

And notice how much clearer the video quality is since he got his new Panasonic HC-V550K and he doesn't have to make videos with his dang phone any more.  ;-)

So now you know why you won't find a lot of phone-cam boosterism around here. Maybe I shouldn't have said it out loud. But hey, I'm in the disclosure business.

Mike
(Thanks to the world's best son)

P.S. There's one more reason I don't like cellphone cameras, but it requires its own post. Someday.

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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Speed: Re 'neither sells iPhones': Amazon does sell iPhones."

Mike replies: Oh...okay...but TOP doesn't...isn't there some reason why people don't tend to buy iPhones from Amazon? I thought there was. (You can tell I'm out of my league on this topic...I was the last person I know to get a cell phone, and I still just use it to get driving directions and communicate with my son. Oh, and play Angry Birds. At least I know more about phones than I know about video.  :-)

John Camp: "Amazon starts selling the most ballyhooed cell phone in years in the next few days. Like, tomorrow, maybe?

"You should give cell phone photography some coverage, but without worrying about it too much. I don't think you have to cover lenses, sensors, all of that, because they're not important. Cell phones will probably never make genuinely inflected photos—they're snapshot machines. If you're a hipster big on trends, of course, you can use a cell phone to do more serious photography, at least for now, before that trend fades. But, basically, using a cell phone for serious photography is like that Iowa farmer who drove his riding lawn mower several hundred miles to visit his brother. You can do it, but why, when there are better tools, and not all that expensive? (The Iowa farmer's better tool was his thumb—he could have hitchhiked.)

"So, cover cell phone photography as you'd cover snapshot photography. It's totally legit, and can produce some amazing photos, especially of news events. But there's another kind of photography, involving introspection and  long-term study of the subject matter, for which there are simply better tools. You can cover that, too."

Mike replies: Another thing I probably shouldn't disclose is rank ignorance, but until I started searching around to try to figure out what you were talking about in that first paragraph, I had not even heard about Amazon's planned phone. That could cut both ways though. I might sell some phones, but then does that give every Amazon phone user a direct link to Amazon with no need to be steered by little affiliates like me? It's been a pretty harrowing ride for Amazon affiliates over the years, as you may know. Ken Rockwell packed up his family and moved across the country when Amazon temporarily cut off its California affiliates.

As I always say, something's gonna kill TOP, I just don't know what it's going to be yet. I just plan to ride this horse all the way to the inn and have a good ride along the way, that's all I can say.

Gunnar Marel: "I'm a film guy (case in point, I just finished mixing up a fresh batch of D-76) but last year the local photography museum contacted me and offered to host a small show of my pictures. Of course I was thrilled. But what did they want to exhibit? A selection of my Instagram (i.e. cell phone) photos (theme: abandoned shopping trolleys). As I've read somewhere: 'You know what they say: Oh well.' It opens next week if you happen to pass through Reykjavík, Iceland this summer."

atmtx: "Mike, your honesty is refreshing."

Mike replies: Honesty being refreshing reminds me of one of my favorite ads. A Washington, D.C. bank had decided to be up-front about all of its small charges and fees, and was running a campaign on the theme of "Honesty: Isn't It Refreshing?"

So in the ad, a fresh-faced young couple are standing at a kitchen counter, on which are spread stacks of plans and drawings. On the other side from them is a contractor, a rough-looking heavyset middle-aged man chewing on a cigar. Behind them all is a wall with a window in it.

The contractor says, "Oh, your new kitchen is gonna be beautiful. You're gonna love it. Now, the first thing we're gonna do [he gestures to the wall], we're gonna knock down this entire outside wall. Sure, that will open your house to the elements for a while, and anybody who wants to can waltz right in, but ya gotta do what ya gotta do when you're remodeling, you know what I mean?

"Then, me and my crew, we're gonna disappear for—oh, I don't know, four, five, six days. You're not going to know what the hell happened to us. Sure, you can call the office, but you'll just get the secretary and she won't tell you anything...."

The young couple exchange bewildered looks and the voiceover says, "Honesty—isn't it refreshing?"

No offense to any contractors in the audience!

Vachnie: "Given the monthly service fee, which in some instances is $200, some iPhone users will have paid enough in four years to have purchased the Leica APO lens."

Gato: "My only real gripe about my phone camera (cheap Android) is how slow and awkward it is to use. Otherwise it is perfectly fine for many kinds of photography—family memories (as you demonstrated), record photos, quick sharing of daily experiences, and even once in a while a print up on the wall. My last vacation I carried a small camera, a tablet, and a phone. I hope within another year or so I can do all that with one device. I'll still keep a more serious camera for the kind of pictures that demand the flexibility and technical quality, but it is also nice to have a phone included in the one compact device that is almost always with me."

The Perfect Lens (Two Variations on the Concept)

Fuji has just introduced a new superzoom to the X-mount lineup, bringing the total number of zooms to six (vs. seven primes).

The new Fujifilm XF 18–135mm (~28–205mm-e) ƒ/3.5–5.6 R LM OIS WR lens uses 16 elements in 12 groups, including four aspherical elements and two extra-low dispersion glass elements. The lens is weatherproof, having over 20 weather seals. Fuji says there is a "ventilator" which allows zooming without allowing dust or moisture to be sucked into the lens. The 18–135mm includes newly improved image stabilization said to provide five stops of improvement, which you should consider to be another way of saying "better than before" (generally speaking, manufacturers' claims of image stabilization are excessive).

All of this lens's specs bespeak a great deal of care and cost in development, indicating that Fuji expects this lens to be a big seller within the XF system. The slowish ƒ/5.6 maximum aperture at the long end and large 67mm filter size (meaning: the lens is large, although, at just over one pound [490g] it's not heavy) are probably its major drawbacks, but when you try to do this much in one lens, something's gotta give.

Cost: a nickel shy of $900, and it's available for pre-order.

Curiously, $900 is the same amount as the price rise that Leica has announced for July 1st for its super-duperized version of the traditional plain-Jane normal for rangefinder 35mm and FF cameras, the 50mm ƒ/2 Summicron. (Officially the APO-Summicron-M 50mm ƒ/2 ASPH.)

A lens with a long and interesting history, the current version features three anomalous partial dispersion elements, two high refractive elements, and a floating group for closeup correction.

The APO-Summicron-M 50mm ƒ/2 ASPH, which is closer to my own idea of a perfect lens than a superzoom, is perhaps the most highly perfected single lens it is currently possible to buy for use on cameras. At the very least, one of a scant handful. Even the bokeh is outstanding. Its only drawback, if it has even one, is that enough other lenses are close enough to it in performance that the differences might not be easy to detect in practice; we've passed the point at which most lenses are sharp enough. But if you would rather not worry about whether you have the very, very best, this is the lens you should save your pesos for.

The price after July 1 will be $8,250. Until then, you can order it and the Fujifilm XF 18–135mm for the same amount.

The July 1 price hike will affect a dozen other Leica lenses as well. Hope you'll use our links when you stock up!  :-)

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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Tim: "I read this article around three times, clicked the 50mm ƒ/2 link twice, and then searched Google before my brain let me read the critical word 'rise.' I kept reading the sentence as 'Curiously, $900 is the same amount as the price that Leica has announced for....' I thought the deal of the century was happening and I could get the latest 50mm Leica for a scant $900. Well, if it's too good to be true...."

Mike replies: Some numerology for you, courtesy of my friend Oren Grad:

Popular Photography, Sept 1988, B&H Photo ad:

Leica 50mm Summicron-M: $649.00
AIS Nikkor 50mm ƒ/1.8: $68.00
AF Nikkor 50mm ƒ/1.8: $56.95
OM Zuiko 50mm ƒ/1.8: $66.00
SMC Pentax-A 50mm ƒ/1.7: $65.00
SMC Pentax-F 50mm ƒ/1.7: $67.95
Canon EF 50mm ƒ/1.8: $64.00

Today, B&H Photo web site:

Leica 50mm Apo-Summicron-M ASPH: $7350.00
Leica 50mm Summicron-M: $2350.00
AF-S Nikkor G 50mm ƒ/1.8  special edition: $276.95
AF-S Nikkor G 50mm ƒ/1.8 : $216.95
AF Nikkor D 50mm ƒ/1.8 : $129.00
Canon EF II 50mm ƒ/1.8 : $110.00

Kent Phelan: "And, not apples-to-apples, but related, $900 (more or less) is the price of a Zeiss 50mm ƒ/2 Planar lens—new. Not an Apo Summicron, but certainly in the same conversation as the 50mm ƒ/2 'regular' Summicron. On an M Monochrom I am finding that the differences between Leica and Zeiss lenses diminishes. All of the concern over color shifting in corners simply goes away on the Monochrom."

Sunday Open Mike: Songs and Songs (Music Notes)

Musical taste is subjective, of course, and what I've been in a mood for recently is popular music (my usual staple being jazz), but of a particular variety: wistful, slow-drag, plaintive, romantic folkie songs with a certain gentleness.

Rats. This is the spot for a great quote I ran across recently about the difference between  tradition and nostalgia. But I've lost the link. (I think I ran across it in a book, so the link should be in my brain. Not there. Typical.) Anyway a few of these songs are backward-looking in style.

Off we go: if you like psychedelic rock, which enjoyed a brief brief sunburst of popularity in the late '60s (I kinda had a thing for Tommy James and the Shondells at one point when I was a kid, and I prefer post-LSD John Lennon to pre-*), you might like the song "Lavender" by Ray LaMontagne, which makes use of certain cues from psychedelia to fine effect.

If your taste runs more to neo-R&B (if you favor the Black Keys, for instance, or the late Amy Winehouse), see if you like the Nick Waterhouse album Holly. He apparently doesn't want anyone to know about it, if the album cover is any indication. It looks like something you'd flip past in the LP bins at Goodwill. But it's a fascinating, tight, tense album, featuring sax and organ no less. I don't own it, but have heard it.

I'm a total sucker for banjo as an accent instrument—just love it. Old example, "Seaweed" by the Fruit Bats. When the banjo comes in it's heartrending—gets to me every time. Unfortunately, that song belongs on the "coulda been a classic" list—beautiful melody, beautiful arrangement, but a woefully wrong turn with those awful lyrics. It's a product of that short-lived fad of putting trivial lyrics with grand music, the pinnacle of which was the so-called sweater song by Weezer. Oh well. Anyway, a nice new song with banjo in it: Beck's "Say Goodbye" from the album Morning Phase. (Another album I don't own—I have to say I don't entirely get Beck, and I'm not sure he does either.)

Local boy plays good: Peter Mulvey

For those who like acoustic guitar, check out Milwaukee's own Peter Mulvey playing "Black Rabbit." The iTunes download features better (and very fine) sound.

Easy segue from there: I've unofficially become kind of an aficionado of covers since our big post about them a few years back. Recent favorite: "Seven Nation Army" covered by Zella Day as a single (iTunes is the best source). Sounds pretty great for leaving out the famous bass riff altogether. Don't know a thing about Zella.

I'm not very good at writing about music, because I don't know the vocabulary and I don't have any technical background. But there seems to be a strain in hip-hop that is slow and mournful and full of drones and refrains. A song I discovered that's been on replay in my head is "Eve's Perspective" by Lorine Chia of Cleveland, Ohio. Other bits and snippets from the album I've heard sound interesting so I'll probably investigate further. (She covers "Strange Fruit," which is either a good sign or a bad one.)

All the above are from albums I don't own and generally by artists I don't know anything about. It's harder to find whole albums you like. My major personal discoveries are unfortunately few and far between, coming along at the rate of maybe one a year. Slint's classic Spiderland has been on heavy rotation at sprawling TOP World Headquarters lately, in case anyone is interested in '90s post-rock masterpieces. I think the latest Mikey fave (I can never quite tell until some time has passed and I find out if it has legs) is "The Double EP: A Sea of Split Peas" (note that it's also available on vinyl) by an Australian youngster named Courtney Barnett. I liked it the first time I heard it, and, as rarely happens with me, I seem to be liking it more with every hearing.

In photography one of the qualities I value is an offhand, casual feeling-tone, which you sometimes have to work very hard to achieve. I used to say I aspired to make photographs that look like you just picked up the camera and made a single shot (even if it took you all morning and five rolls of film to get to it). Courtney Barnett's languid singing and interior-oriented compostions achieve the musical equivalent. (I miss the days when musicians smoked lots of marijuana. It's very beneficial for them. Nothing worse than a bunch of musicians trying too hard to please, which you see all the time now. Calm down, kids.) Anyway, I think I'm in love again.

All you fans of Sri-Lankan-American Pete Seegers doubtless already know about Bhi Bhiman, but those of you who don't should check out his extraordinary paeon to 1930s hobos, "Guttersnipe." An anthem, I think you'll agree. For what, I don't quite know.

Happy music gets no respect, but people like it anyway. No matter how isolated you are from pop culture, you're probably aware of Pharrell Williams, he of the exaggeratedly big hat and constant mentions on the Ellen show. His song "Happy," which he performed at the Oscars, is one of those, well, happy hits that everybody needs to dance along to (remember "Walkin' on the Sun" by Smashmouth?). It overstays its welcome by the third time you hear it, true, but let's not be grumpy. Anyway, Pharrell used to be part of an act called "N.E.R.D" (which stands for "No one Ever Really Dies"—okay, the less said) that once received a description I prize: "a hip-hop duo consisting of Pharrell Williams, Chad Hugo, and Shay Haley." Ya gotta love a duo with three people in it. It's a duo with more. Anyway what I'm getting to with painful slowness is that a N.E.R.D song I like, "Run to the Sun," has been resurrected due to Pharrell's recent newfound stardom, and you could listen to that too.

We could get into Jake Bugg, but that's enough for now I guess. In recent weeks I've already been feeling the gravitational pull of jazz gathering me home again (Tord Gustavsen Trio, a trio with only three people in it, is playing as I type), although I do enjoy my occasional toe-dippings into the vast ocean of pop.

And for those who would like a little gear-porn to leaven all this content talk, here are some neat snaps of a turntable I sold yesterday. A sweet one, but I'm into vintage direct-drive Japanese 'tables now.

Enjoy the last day of the U.S. Open. (I think we should get some country without its own golf stars to adopt Martin Kaymer, since Germany is preoccupied with soccer.) Or have a nice Sunday relaxing with tunes. I'll depart with another delightfully loopy quote I heard that somehow gets it right despite getting it wrong: "Music is the music of the soul."

Mike

*Are you only sleeping? Are you looking into a glass onion? Does tomorrow ever know? If you were a large flippered marine mammal, which one would you be, goo-goo-goo-joob?

"Open Mike" is the editorial page of TOP, when we let Mike off his leash to write about his various wayward enthusiasms.

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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HT: "Some of my favorite banjo moments: The opening of 'I Believe' by R.E.M.—which I believe falls under the definition of pastiche. The bridge of 'To Sheila' by Smashing Pumpkins (starts at 2:23)—which marks the first and only time banjo appeared in their music. This isn't the most traditional use of banjo but I love how it sounds like raindrops."

Mike replies: Beautiful. Thanks.

John Camp: "Since you like both banjo accents and good covers, you'd probably enjoy Town Mountain's cover of Springsteen's 'I'm on Fire.' And you being you, I suspect you'd also like Gillian Welch's 'Elvis Presley Blues.' For all the criticism of YouTube that you hear from time to time, I love following musical threads across the different genre landscapes. I mean, you could start out with something delicate by Gillian Welch and wind up at this."

Mike replies: Isn't it interesting how YouTube is evolving as a way to listen to music? I never would have guessed. My son and his friends prefer it to iTunes samples because you can listen to whole songs.

Judith Wallerius: "It looks like Youtube is about to significantly change in how useful it is to discover new music. Apparently they have a new music service coming and will simply remove the videos of all record labels and artists that don't sign up to license for it. That hits mainly smaller independent labels (a.k.a. music you might not know and have to find by chance) that would get significantly worse deals than the big labels, so are reluctant to sign on. Let's hope there's enough protest to make them reconsider."

(New Pics)

(I just added a few doggie snaps to the "Pupdate" post, if you're interested. I know, I'm supposed to be taking the day off....)

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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Last Day

[Note: Because TypePad* (and hence TOP) was down for a number of hours on Friday afternoon and evening, we're keeping the sale open until noon on Saturday. Very sorry for any frustration. —Mike the Ed., 11:57 p.m. Friday]

*Or "TypeBad" as Jim Hughes now calls it....]

-

Our June Print Offer comes to an end in a few hours. Last chance!

Jack MacDonough, Mirror Lake, New Hampshire. Image area 24x36 inches.

It's the largest print we've ever sold. Cost is $395 (normally $3,500). Available until tonight at 7:30 p.m. Central U.S. time [Note: see above.]. Shipping is $30 to anywhere in the world.

["Buy" button removed—sale ended at noon, 6/14/2014]

• Your PayPal payment constitutes your order, with no need to send a separate email.

• If you need the print to go to an address that's different from your PayPal address, please click "Add Special Instructions to the Seller" on the PayPal form.

• If you'd like to pay by mailed check, please email Jack [link removed] to make arrangements.

More details at the original announcement page from Monday.

Last chance to click that buy button—did I say that already? (Here's how our Print Offers work, which should explain why we can't take your money after 7:30. We're not trying to be rude.)

•     •     •

TOP is off on Saturday (he said hopefully), so I hope you have a nice weekend. I'll be back on Sunday with another off-topic edition of my ramblings about music, complete with several fistfuls of song recommendations—I've amassed quite a backlog.

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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