The Online Photographer

I Love Today's Cameras (the Golden Age)

Posted by: Mike

One way you can look at camera reviewers is that they've made careers of complaining about cameras.

I've done my share of that over the years, so I think in all fairness I should report that the opposite is currently the case. I really do love the cameras we have available to us today. They're just utterly delightful, beautiful, captivating gadgets. Specifically mirrorless cameras, which hit the sweet spot for me. The cameramakers are maturing with digital, working out the problems and beginning to evolve into the possibilities. I'm "gobsmacked," as our friends in the UK might say.

The current cameramakers I appreciate the most are Sony and Fuji first of all, Panasonic and Olympus next. I have a lot of "legacy" sympathy for Nikon, and I keep trying to like Leica because its film cameras were so cool back in the Leitz era. (Leica aficionados greatly downplay the departure of the founding Leitz family ownership, but I think it was epochal.) But it's really not a natural fit for my budget. The main four mirrorless makers are where my most ardent admiration is aimed.

The cameras we have today are like catnip to me. (And it's only with difficulty that I restrain my natural tendency toward exaggerated metaphor: I'd like to name some stronger addictive substance.) I like them so much I'd be happy to surround myself with a number of them, shooting with each in turn, just to enjoy their beauty and elegance.

Of course, we were talking about diversions the other day. Being a gearhead is, admittedly, a distraction from photographing. Cameras don't matter all that much, at least after you already own the ones you need to do your work.

And I'd never judge a photographer based on the camera they use. It's the work that counts as far as I'm concerned. Consider this: longtime TOP reader and commenter "The Lazy Aussie" (Andrew H.C. McDonald of Perth) is currently one of 47 finalists for Australia's prestigious $25,000 Bowness Prize for this photograph of a fountain in a storm, one of his personal favorites:

Photo by A.H.C. McDonald

...Taken on film with a pinhole camera! And, he tells me, he guessed the exposure and counted it off. The picture simultaneously suggests an alien landing craft and and some sort of reptilian or amphibian eyes gazing balefully from the woods, in addition to what it actually is.

But back to cameras
Still, I have an inordinate love of the cameras we have now. I do covet them, and more than one. I would just love to have the new "right sized" Panasonic GX8; I've owned three of its predecessors. I know I'd get along with that one. I have a Fuji X-T1—my current camera—but that doesn't stop me from coveting either the graphite silver model or the X-T10. Or the X-E2, if I'm really honest. I was privileged to own an Olympus OM-D E-M1 for a while, and only with reluctance chose the X-T1 in preference to it; and although the Panasonic GX7 came in third in that shootout for me, I could have lived happily ever after with that one too, no question in my mind. If I had one now and was happy with it, I'd never consider trading it in.

Photo by Eric Rose, taken with my former Panasonic GX7

Of course the Big Dog of International Camera Lust right now, and certainly not just for me, is the Sony A7R II. Thoughts of pairing that camera with the surprisingly reasonably-priced Zeiss ZA 35mm ƒ/1.4 (compare to any Leica equivalent) make me go wobbly. That one's out of my league, but talk about one awesome camera. Sony's A7 range is da bomb, if you'll pardon the now-unexplosive '80s expression.

(Of course, the A7R II, like the GX8, is in the Vaporware Honeymoon Period right now—that interregnum between announcement and shipping when dreams of new toys are as yet unsullied by Internet sour grapes. Let the camera come out, and the forums will soon tell you everything you should think is wrong with it.)

Golden age?
And that's not all. Subtract all the cameras I've mentioned above, and I'd still have a decent choice of great options I could live with, just from those four cameramakers. That's how deep the field is right now.

I hope in the future we don't look back and remember the mid-teens as a camera golden age. The market is constricting—not because cameras are getting worse or less popular, but possibly because gearheads like me are surfeited with choices and already have too many fine cameras and a lot of people, not just me, just can't justify another purchase even though we'd love to. The shrinking market is sure to constrict R&D and the pace of competition. I've already predicted that smartphone cameras will be better by 2025 than any single-chip camera we have now...development won't stop. But the choices we have among today's cameras sure look an awful lot like this is an era we'll remember. With fondness, and I hope not with regret.

For now, take your pick from 2015's pastry cart and enjoy, enjoy!

Mike
(Thanks to Lazy Aussie and Eric Rose)

Original contents copyright 2015 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Featured Comments from:

Gordon Lewis: "I notice all the cameras you mentioned are mirrorless. Was that just a coincidence, or do you no longer have any love for the quotidian DSLR?"

Mike replies:No hate for DSLRs at all...see Greg Bolarsky's comment below. Sounds good to me. The smaller, vaguely retro mirrorless cameras are the ones that tend to give me the warm fuzzies I'm talking about here, though.

AHC McDonald (The Lazy Aussie): "Thanks for posting my picture Mike. What I was trying to get across is that this is what for me is the reason for shooting film. I would never have got this with a screen to view or digital. I took a test with the phone for framing and it was dull. It was a gloomy day, but nowhere near this dark. The exposure is waaaay off. But correct exposure would have been...not this.

"Another example is a photographer I really like, Mark Olwick. Although he doesn't really get into what camera he uses here, he frequently uses toy film cameras. This amazing elephants shot would almost be impossible with high-end gear. You maybe could emulate it, but every part of your gear would be screaming at you to go in the opposite direction."

Eric Rose: "I loved the GX1 I picked up from Frank Petronio. IQ was amazing. When Mike's GX7 came up, I just had to upgrade. The only thing missing is a mic jack.

"It's funny—years ago I felt that the Nikon F2 was the be-all, end-all camera for me. It did everything I wanted or needed a camera to do. That lasted for about 10 years; then I felt the need for a 'better' camera. Picked up an F5 plus a couple of N90s bodies for underwater work (in a housing naturally). To make a long story short, I have the latest and greatest but am still making the same types of photographs. Are they technically better? Probably. Can I make the image easier? Certainly. However the needs of my customers and even myself have only changed because technology has changed. I feel we have been in a 'golden age' since the '60s. There are now and have been tremendous cameras for many decades. What has changed is that you can now get stellar images out of very reasonably priced cameras. If you are interested, here's the back story of the roadside memorial image Mike featured above."

Paulo Bizarro: "I think all ages in photography are golden. I remember 20 years ago lusting for a Canon EOS 1, but I only had money for a Rebel kit. Later on, wonderful SLR cameras were available, Canon EOS 5 (the cheaper surrogate for the 1), Canon EOS 3, Nikon F100, you name it. In all ages, we were always at the peak of technology, and with plenty of choices available."

Jeff: "I'm glad some of the commenters see the real issues with the 'golden age.' Nobody loves yesterday's cameras. Cameras, cell phones, and other portable electronic multimedia devices are constantly adding functionality that the industry convinces us we need and we all play along. The reviewers sing the praises and the consumers get excited, over and over, year after year. Very few keep the one they have now regardless of whether they were or ever could be happy with it. It's a cultural problem. Since we don't see the perils of our over-production and our over-consumption and can't directly tie our behavior with the degradation of our environment we fool ourselves into thinking of it as a golden age. You can't even find a viewfinder on a 35mm digital camera that compares to a 35mm film camera made by Pentax or Olympus some 40+ years ago. The latter still works and makes good pictures and the former is headed straight to the landfill."

Peter Croft: "I'm doing my best to keep Olympus, Panasonic et al. in business. My motto is, The More Cameras You Own, The Better Your Pictures Will Be. It's not working so far, but I haven't bought every camera yet. ;-) Pentax K-5; Olympus E-M1, E-PL2, E-PL3; Sony RX10; Panasonic FZ1000; Fuji S100-fs; Sigma DP1M; Konica Minolta A2. Plus film—Olympus OM2SP; Pentax MZ1; Contax G1; Contax G2.

"Yes, I know it's a bit silly, but I love fine, precision equipment of any kind and I think cameras are the pinnacle of electro-mechanical design and manufacture. In the case of the E-PL2 and E-PL3, the camera and a lens combo were offered for substantially less than the price of the lens alone. Buy the lens, get a free camera. Couldn't pass it up.

"Although the E-M1 is a fabulous machine, I keep coming back to the Pentax K-5. It fits my hand and most importantly, I don't have to consult the manual to use it. I find the buttons and dials easy to use and the menus simple and quick. Not so the E-M1. Not at all."

Bill Wheeler: "Just today I arrived home to find a package at the front door—a used, refurbished Olympus OM-1 camera. What a beauty!"

[Mike Update 3: House Names]

How do you pronounce 'Patience'?
I'm completely in limbo. We leave the vacation house my girlfriend rented today, and I don't yet have a closing date for the new house. All my worldly possessions are in storage, the dogs are at the boarding kennel (I miss them), and I'm living out of a suitcase.

Byword for the week: Patience!

Reminds me of one of my favorite stories. My high school students used to have to roll their own film on to the developing reels, of course in total darkness. And obviously I couldn't go in there to help when someone got into trouble. So, to encourage them, I wrote a sign on the wall of the film-loading room in glow-in-the-dark tape (no, it doesn't hurt the undeveloped film as long as it's far enough away).

One day I could hear a girl in there just getting more and more stressed out, swearing and moaning. Finally she stormed out, saying, "WHAT is that word?!? Why did you put that there? 'PAT-eye-ents.' 'PAT-EYE-ense.' I could NOT figure out what that meant. What in the hell does 'PAT-EYE-ENTS' mean?!?"

The word on wall, of course, was "Patience."

She did feel appropriately chagrined at herself when I told her.  :-)

Hope springs
Its been delightful to be here in the Finger Lakes, my new home. Although my "new new house" is smaller and much older than my "old new house" (1400 sq. ft. rather than 2,000, built in 1880 vs. 1961), it's been very artfully renovated and restored by its previous owners and I'm just in love with the place. I love the spaces, the feel of the neighborhood, the grounds. It's about an hour's drive from S. and we hope to get together every week.

The Finger Lakes are utterly beautiful.

I want to name the new house, and nothing I've tried has quite stuck yet. "Eastlake" is the name of the road it's on, conflating the two; "Redwall" (there's one deep red wall in the kitchen) sounds too much like the title of a Stephen King novel.

[UPDATE: We decided to call it The Eastlake House, after the road it's on, and after Lady Eastlake, the first photography critic. I currently plan to put the office on the front porch, so there'll be a small portrait of Lady Eastlake out there that visitors can spot.

I also really, really want this to put inside the front door—it was made right up the road in Rochester, and it is gorgeous—but I absolutely can't afford it. Rats. —MJ]

With any luck this coming week will be eventful; I could be all in before week's end. There are still a few things up in the air, and I'm not in control of all the variables. But you know what they say—hope springs eternal!

Mike

Original contents copyright 2015 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:

Stephen McCullough: "Feels like you are struggling a bit with the limbo thing. Well, you know this period will end, so be in the moment as much as you can. As for naming the place...Finger Lakes—your lake isn't by any chance the middle one? Just a thought.

"By the way, this entire story of you getting your son started in his next phase, moving on with your life, making a major shift, entering into a relationship and so on is all pretty inspirational."

Chuck Albertson: "Admit it. You're homeless."

Mike replies: I am.

Hugh Crawford: "Every time I was on the verge of buying a house I always asked myself if it would be appropriately named Toad Hall, as I looked upon Mr. Toad in The Wind In The Willows as something of a role model.

"Another thought: I used to know someone who called her house 'the small house' and called her car 'the green car' because she thought that way people will assume that she in addition had a larger house and a car that was not green."

Quote o' the Day: Gordon Cahill

"I'm a full-time photographer. That means I spend nearly 10% of my time taking photographs."

—Gordon Cahill

-

[Gordon commented on the "Diversions" post. Truer words.... This is a big shock for a lot of people when they first innocently "turn pro." —Ed.]

Posted by: Mike
(Thanks to Gordon)

Original contents copyright 2015 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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Oh, Tea! (OT)

~ written by Ctein, TOP Technical Editor
(who is posting on-and-off while Mike's nomadic)

Folks, it's been a long time since I've regaled you with tales of tea. Partly, it's because I haven't written lately. Partly it's because Mike felt I'd hit that topic enough for a while. Oh, those perfidious coffee-drinkers.** But, here I am in the driver's seat of this jalopy, so…

The first tidbit is a fine little hack I came up with last year. You will all remember (of course) how much I love my Paio Infusion Tea Pot.

(photograph courtesy of Amazon)

It gets used every single day (well, any day that I'm not making macha, which is most of them). After a couple of years of use, the very fine screen on the bottom was getting pretty badly clogged up. The pot was draining slowly. With some very fine greens, it was hardly draining at all.

Scrubbing it with a toothbrush didn't work; the screen was way too fine and I couldn't get to the underside of it. I tried soaking it repeatedly in hot baking soda solution, which dissolved all the tannin but didn't clear out most of the holes in the screen.

I thought on it. Okay, dissolving the tannin isn't working. There's clearly bits of tea leaves clogging up the holes. What  would dissolve organic-matter clogs?

Put it that way and the answer is obvious. Drain cleaner! At least, so long as it doesn't dissolve the infuser. I knew it wouldn't attack the screen or the stop valve ball, which are stainless steel. (You don't want to try this on aluminum––it will dissolve!) I didn't know about the adhesives or plastics.

Nothing ventured, nothing gained. I poured a few ounces of liquid plumber stuff into the infuser, pressed the ball valve button to allow some of it flow through the screen, and let it sit for 10 min.

Success! My infuser came out looking practically like new.

Kids, if you do try this at home (with or without adult supervision) I make no promises about what will happen to your particular tea strainer or infuser. You're on your own. Do remember to rinse it out very thoroughly when you're done. Lye tastes yucky.

~~~

When Jon Singer and I visited my friend Bill Waddington, the owner of TeaSource in the Twin Cities, in June he introduced us to two extremely unusual teas. I've never had anything like them before, and they're both wonderful.

The first is a white tea called Silver Bud or Ya Bao. This is a winter pick–– the leaves haven't even started to come out of the buds and the pick is of the entire bud.

(photo courtesy of TeaSource)

You brew it with boiling water. No kidding. Half-fill the pot with buds; they are very fluffy.  Try a two- or three-minute brew time for the first infusion. The brew is very very pale, nearly water-clear. It has a lovely floral aroma and extremely light and delicate flavor. It's almost all in the nose.

You can get up to four infusions if you increase the brew time by about 50% on each successive pot. It doesn't get bitter, it just takes longer and longer to pull enough flavor and aroma out of the buds into the liquor.

It's surprisingly inexpensive––$10 for 4 ounces, and that will fill up a quart-size jar with buds.

The website says that it "Can also be aged, as a puer." How strange! I've queried Bill about that; I'll let you know what he says.

The other tea he served us is a new puer that he'll be stocking in September. What makes Long Run Puer unusual is its brew time–– 15 seconds with boiling water. Yes, really, one-quarter minute is enough!  It produces a lovely brew. Not smoky nor heavy, but still very full-flavored. I suspect it will tolerate a lot of infusions. Bill thinks it will also age exceptionally well, although we won't know for years to come.

Enjoy your weekend and have a nice cuppa on me.

(** And now that treacherous swiller of java tries to bury this column with posts of his own. An unsavory lot, those bean-sippers.)

Ctein, TOP Technical Editor
(who is posting on-and-off while Mike's nomadic)

Original contents copyright 2015 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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My Shiny Retina iMac

~ written by Ctein, TOP Technical Editor
(who is posting on-and-off while Mike's nomadic)

I tend to buy computers towards the high end of the scale and keep them for a long time. I don't know if it is, in fact, more economical than buying towards the low end and getting a new machine every two years, but I find it a lot less annoying.

Both the laptop and the desktop machines here have been approaching the replacement point. My laptop is particularly long in the tooth. My 15" MacBook Pro is a 2007 model. I've upgraded it several times along the way, but one can only push so far. It runs a lot faster than when I bought it, but I'm doing more complicated things with much bigger files than I was eight years ago.

I have, without question, been salivating over the retina MacBook Pro. True 24-bit color, close to sRGB right out-of-the-box, that's a real nice thing to have a laptop. Plus, it's an incredibly powerful machine. It'll handily outperform our 27" 2009 iMac, which is still a satisfactory work machine. Pump that MacBook Pro up to 16 Gb of RAM, add an Adobe RGB external monitor, and I'd be a pretty happy camper.

The thing that's kept me from moving to a new laptop is that my e-mail program and a couple of other business-critical programs I use won't run under anything later than OS X 10.6. A new machine means a new OS, which means a new e-mail program, etc. Insert any number my previous rants about planned obsolescence here. You can Google for them. Adapting to new software, especially a program I'm using many times a day, is not my idea of fun. Still, the laptop was high on the replacement list.

Until this spring. The graphics card went out in the 27" iMac. Down it went to the Apple Store. Turned out the graphic card is a separate component, so it wasn't going to be an expensive repair. Whew! Only problem is they had to be able to find a graphics card. It took Apple over a week to come up with one because, you know, like, six years is old, dude. Insert aforementioned rants.

The iMac was out of the house for almost 2 weeks. Thank heavens, it happened during a rare window when I really didn't need it for anything. I can't count on that kind of luck, and I can't afford to be down for two weeks. That kicked replacing the iMac to the top of the list.

(The critical difference between my MacBook Pro and my iMac is that my MacBook Pro is 100% user-serviceable at my level of technical skill. I can easily get parts for it on the used market, and there's nothing in here I can't replace if I have to. The iMac is nowhere so accessible.)

The day the advance for the novel landed in my bank account, I was online ordering a new 27" retina iMac.

Dave Polaschek, of Adobe, was the one who convinced me that a retina iMac would matter to me. I'd been thinking, “I'm not doing 4K video and stuff like that, so why should I care about a 5K display? It's not like I can see the pixels in the standard display at normal working distance?”

Photoshop has a quirk. OK, it's designed in there on purpose, but it looks like a quirk. When you're running at screen magnifications of 50% or less, it cheats on the rendering, doing calculations in 8-bit color to speed things up and subsampling the image. This massively speeds up performance, so you can see near instantaneous real-time updates of what your file looks like even on a (relatively) slow system. if you've had the experience of working at the lower magnifications, jumping up to 67% or 100% to look at some detail and noticing that there's a visible lag while the screen updates, that's exactly what I'm talking about.

This has a downside. Screen renderings become inaccurate in annoying and sometimes really obstructive ways. View a stitched-together panorama at lower magnifications, and you'll see seam lines between the segments. That's an artifact of the subsampling, and it's only a minor annoyance. A major one is the banding and contouring that appears if you're working with adjustment layers that do any degree of substantial correction. I have that a lot, especially in my restoration work. the contouring isn't real, it's an artifact of each of those layers getting calculated at eight bits per channel. It can make it very difficult, sometimes impossible to accurately see (and work on) a full photograph.

The 27" retina display doubles the size of the image I can see the entirety of at 67% magnification and higher. Now my 12 and 16 megapixel photographs fit on the screen. It makes working on my photographs and restoration jobs a lot more comfortable and a lot faster. Plus, it's just plain nice to be able to see all that detail in the photograph without having to print it out

Dave was right. It was what I needed.

There are other ways I like my new iMac better. The newer thin-edge design is about 10 pounds lighter than the old machine. Not a big deal, except when you're trying to rearrange your office and lugging around a very awkward hunk of metal and glass. Apple eliminated the air gap between the glass and the screen that was on the older iMac and they substantially improved the anti-reflection coatings. I am no longer bugged by reflections from the glossy screen.

The color quality and brightness are better. Actually, I have way more brightness that I need. The color gamut of the retina display is a very close match to sRGB. My machine, out-of-the-box, was almost dead neutral and an exact match for sRGB. I did run a custom profile for the display, but other than opening up the shadows and linearizing them very slightly, I couldn't see any visible difference. If it weren't that I prefer a monitor calibrated to D50 then the iMac's native D65, I'd have been happy with the out-of-the-box display.

There was one unexpected bit of joy. Migrating from the old iMac to the new one was pain-free. I really wasn't expecting that. After all, I was jumping four generations of OS. A lot more stuff should break than did. Following Apple's instructions I hooked up my Time Machine backup from the old iMac, told it to migrate everything over, and let it run overnight. The next day the new iMac looked just like the old one… except better. I launched every single app — only four of them had broken, and only one of those was unexpected. That was solved by minor version upgrades, plus I needed a few new drivers for my printers.

I expected it to take days to get the machine configured. It took less than one.

You can get a basic 27-inch iMac with Retina 5K display for $1,900. It's not the machine I would recommend if you're serious about Photoshop.

It'll have a 3.3 GHz Intel Core i5 CPU, 8GB RAM, a 1TB 7200 rpm drive and an AMD Radeon M290 GPU (2GB) graphics card. 8 GB of RAM is going to have you caching to disk pretty quickly in Photoshop, and then a rotating hard drive is going to be a real performance bottleneck.

The first thing you want to do, maybe the only thing, is max out that RAM at 32 GB. Don't buy the RAM from Apple; you'll save yourself $300 buying it from Other World Computing. It is the one part of an iMac that is user-upgradable.

I went for the whole-hog maximum machine: 4.0GHz QC i7 Turboboost 4.4GHz CPU, 1TB flash drive, and the AMD Radeon R9 M295X 4GB graphics card. Just because. The graphics card is the least important upgrade; there are some Photoshop operations where you may see an improvement because of it; it won't be much. It's more important if you're doing AV work or running multiple monitors. The better processor does produce a noticeable pick-me-up in a few circumstances. Both of these together add about $500 to the cost of the machine. Upgrading memory's far more important and cost-effective.

Then we come to that blasted drive. Apple has this thing called a Fusion Drive, which is a very, very smart hybrid drive. In a lot of circumstances it will substantially speed up performance. Photoshop is not that kind of circumstance. Especially not if your cache file and your photographs are on the same drive. What you want, what you need is 100% flash.

That'll cost you. Well, it cost me–– a $1,000 upgrade. All told, my maxxed-out configuration cost about twice as much as the baseline machine I linked to at B&H Photo. Oof.

Lastly I added an OWC Thunderbolt 2 Dock so I could continue to use my existing peripherals.

Oh my, does this machine fly. What difference does a flash drive make? For illustrative purposes, I copied a multigigabyte file folder from a subdirectory to the desktop. That meant I was “simultaneously” reading and writing from the same drive. Think of it as a stand-in for the worst possible Photoshop scenario, where the program is trying to simultaneously cache states, save a file, and load chunks of code.

On the old iMac, this read/write operation ran at about 40 MB per second. If I copied the folder to an external FireWire 800 drive, I could get it up to about 70 MB per second, because the drive head was no longer thrashing back-and-forth doing reads and writes on one drive.

On the new flash-equipped retina iMac? 400 MB per second. I don't know if would be even faster going to an external drive, because I don't own an external flash drive. Ask me if I care. 400 MB per second is good enough for me.

All in all, it's quite shiny. Even two months later. Still smells like a new computer.

Comments? Questions? The floor is yours.

Oh yeah, with one qualifier: if you're inclined to comment with a rant about PCs vs. Macs or Windows vs. Mac OS vs. UNIX, just don't go there. Save yourself the time and effort of composing such a dismissive missive, because I am simultaneously pre-bored and annoyed by such. They will be malleted.

 

Ctein, TOP Technical Editor
(who is posting on-and-off while Mike's nomadic)

Original contents copyright 2015 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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Diversions

Written by Mike

You'd think this would go without saying, but photographers photograph.

For a lot of photographers, photographing isn't enough. Take me for example. I like to learn about photography (the whole panoply—history, technology, cultural issues, figures great and small, on and on), and when people ask me what kind of photographer I am, I say "I'm a writer."

Fact is, for many people, diversions away from photographing are important elements of their involvement.

The most common diversion (and it's sometimes fatal) is shopping—a great many people in the Internet age have become independent experts on many aspects of the equipment market, from sensor technology to the business strategies of the major companies. This is interesting, but it has little to do with photographing.

This morning reader jpbeal sent us a wonderful link about building a wooden tripod. What a great woodworking project, and nicely presented. The kind of thing I'd read about and look at, naturally. (Thanks, jpbeal.)

But I keep in mind it's a woodworking project. It, like many such things, is really only incidentally connected to the activity of photographing.

When I edited Darkroom Techniques I got a bit jaded about the extreme "perfect darkroom" projects that came along every once in a while. Out of curiosity I went back and asked some builders of these perfected darkrooms how they liked working in them once the grand building process was complete. Most of them seldom worked in their beautiful darkrooms at all. For them, the researching and building of the project had been the point, not so much working in the room once it was finished. So most of those folks were hobbyist builders, rather than hobbyist darkroomers.

To quote the famous Seinfeld show: not that there's anything wrong with that. None of the myriad diversions from photographing are necessarily bad. My longtime position on all this is that anyone can have fun with the hobby of photography however they want to, as long as they're not hurting anyone else.

But it's important, I would think, to see diversions for what they are, and be clear about the distinction. Reading books, testing cameras, arguing fine points online—or reading TOP—these are all part of the photography hobby, but they're not the same as photographing.

I've always thought that actually photographing is an important part of being a photography enthusiast. I don't know why it has to be, actually—if someone consciously decides their interest lies in another direction, different but related, then so be it. I can't see anything wrong with that.

I just think it should be conscious, is all. The danger is that all these diversions, in their many forms, can be insidious—they make us feel like we're being photographers when we're actually doing something else altogether. We might be doing woodworking projects or talking about Olympus's business statistics or planning future purchases or collecting or reading pleasant essays online. Photographing is being "out and about with a camera," in Ivor Matanle's genial phrase. (Or being inside with one—nothing wrong with studio photography or still lifes.) Looking at things and exposing the sensor or the film to light. If you want to be a photographer, diversions are fine. Just make sure none of them sneak past you wearing a disguise: know them for what they are.

Mike
from the West Bluff of Keuka Lake, New York

Original contents copyright 2015 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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aaronL: "Mike, you're supposed to be moving! Ctein was going to give his Retina iMac review which I'm checking for hourly...Please stop hogging the blog  ;-)  "

Anthony Shaughnessy: "So what about printing? Does that count as photographing? What about managing your photo web site? What about mounting your prints? Etc. Perhaps if you look at the totality of the activities you can see them as a whole thing, from exploring locations to taking the pictures, to printing them and then publishing them. But then perhaps this becomes more than photography and photography is just a part of it, in which case where does photography begin and end? For me, photography is the whole thing, not just the taking pictures part."

Bill Wheeler: "What about someone whose favorite thing about being a photographer is taking pictures—that is, going out there, frequently, looking, composing a picture, and releasing the shutter? The rest of it, for me, is secondary to taking the picture, my favorite part, by far, of the photographic process."

James Sinks: "I am a photographer. Taking pictures is awesome. I love to do it. It pays for itself and is an essential part of my 'real job.' But my passion is curation. Processing, organizing, re-processing, printing, and presenting. That's what I love. If it weren't for that, I wouldn't bother taking pictures beyond what I need to do to keep paying the bills. When I put the camera to my eye, it's always with the hope that I will wind up with a picture that I can work with, a picture that can work with other pictures to create something more powerful than a rectangle full of shapes and colors. Just pressing the shutter release is not enough."

John Camp: "Same is true of writing. Going to conventions, reading how-to books, joining writers' groups, selling your book on the internet—none of it is writing. It seems so obvious, but a large number of would-be writers can't quite seem to grasp that.

"I would estimate Mike's column above as 500–600 words [554 —Ed.], and we all read it in just a few minutes. If you can write that much per day, five days a week, taking the weekend off, you'll have written the equivalent of a typical best-selling novel in about 40 weeks. Most best-selling authors write a book a year, or so.

"So you write on the above schedule, you have a solid draft in 40 weeks, then you have roughly three months to edit. The problem is, you actually have to do it. Each step is simple; most people can't put together all the steps. I think it's exactly the same thing with photography—take one thoughtful photo a day, maybe on your lunch hour, at the end of the year you have 365 thoughtful photos, and it didn't even take much time. You may even have a trimmer waistline. Easy to think, hard to do.

"I think this is true of most of the arts—give it an hour a day, and you will eventually become quite good at whatever you're tying to do. But, most people want what they call a 'life.' But what's that, browsing the net? Watching TV? Give it an hour a day, and you can be a guitar hero in three or four years, or less. That's way better than watching the tube."

Steve Rosenblum: "So...what if a person becomes a master of part of the photographic process that does not involve walking around taking photographs with a camera? Is that a diversion from true photography? I'm thinking of someone like Voja Mitrovic, the master Parisian traditional B&W printer who has worked in collaboration with many of the greats and contributed to the success of their art through the creative printing process. I don't know if Voja is much of a photographer himself, but I would certainly view him as intimately involved in photography."

Mike replies: Right, but all I'm really saying is that we should be clear in our own minds about what we're doing. I wouldn't guess that Voja has any troubles on that score.

Rod S.: "I very much agree, Mike. Though I would suggest that getting that portfolio or print exhibition together are also core activities to being a photographer. And thanks for your past urgings on that score."

Alan: "Ha, so true, I print about 10 photos a year but read TOP every day! It's funny, my real passion is surfing and I surf every day but only engage with surf media about once a month!"

Martin: "I have found it interesting in this online digital age how many photographers spend so much time discussing the financial health of camera companies and pontificating about the sales prospects of new models of cameras (e.g. mirrorless vs. DSLR). As I recall none of this took place in the pre-Internet era. Photographers then just bought a good camera and used it; they didn't discuss the financial health of the company that made it. I suspect this new trend is due to just how much information is available online these days. It does strike me as one of the more pointless non-photographic things you can do—and I write that as someone who does it myself at times."

James Weekes: "You have finally written a column that doesn't make the spectre of guilt rise up in me. Am I organized enough? (No.) Do I devote enough time to learning how to print better? (Sometimes.) Should I pay more attention to my weight knowing full well how to lose it? (Not much.) But...do I go out and actually photograph, look, take pictures, almost every day? A resounding yes. I love the act of looking, noticing, seeing and photographing. I do not do well if I don't/can't take pictures for even a few days."

The Best Thing About a Wooden Tripod

Big coincidence—I've corresponded a few times in the East with a TOP reader named Earl Dunbar, who lives in Rochester, New York, about an hour and a half by car from where S. lives. We never met last Winter during my trips East even though we talked about it. (I'm often not able to meet with readers but I almost always enjoy it when I can.) After my last post he shot me a quick email that said, "I'm here on Keuka!" Earl and his wife were visiting a friend on the lake.

He included a picture that looked almost exactly like the shoreline where we're renting.

Well, long story short, it turned out that Earl was virtually next door to us. So I dropped down and spent a pleasant late afternoon chatting with Earl at the lake's edge.

Tripod tip
Along the way he told me something interesting about wooden tripods that I had never heard before. He used to have a Zone VI tripod that he said was great because it was very solid and could really take abuse—it had nowhere for water or dirt to collect, so it could be submerged or used in dirty conditions. It eventually became too heavy for him, so he replaced it with a carbon fiber model.

But the best thing about the wooden tripod, according to Earl? He was able to refinish it before he sold it. Took it apart, sanded it down, put a gleaming coat of varnish on it—and sold it for top dollar looking good as new.

That's a "feature" of wooden tripods that was new to me.

Made me chuckle—no matter how much you think you know about a thing, there's always a new wrinkle hiding somewhere.

Mike
(Thanks to Earl)

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Joe Holmes: "I tried sanding down and repainting my Nikon 400mm lens, but it seems to have reduced the lens's value. Bummer."

Kodachromeguy (partial comment): "I used the smaller Zone VI tripod for many years; it was stable and dampened vibration. But it was heavy and bulky so I reluctantly sold it. If you want that type of tripod, most surveyor's tripods are essentially the same thing. You can find well-worn units for sale cheap. Much lighter Crown wood tripods often come up on eBay."

Sunday Open Mike [Mike Update 2]

[In case you haven't been keeping up...TOP is on partial hiatus as Editor MJ moves from Wisconsin to New York State. Technical Editor Ctein has been filling in partially with columns and reviews of his own, but the site is being updated only intermittently. This is likely to continue until I am able to close on my new house and get the office set up again.]

The great relocation has happened. Finishing the packing and preparing for the movers was truly grueling and stressful, but Michael and Emily Ray of First Choice Moving came to my rescue and I ended up not having to move myself.

I had originally envisioned putting half my stuff in storage (which was accomplished) and then loading the rest into a 15-foot U-Haul Truck, putting my two largish pups in the cab with me, and towing the car behind.

I'm very glad that vision didn't have to become a reality. Michael and Emily and four of their employees helped me finish packing, and then we headed to the Public Storage facility at 7 p.m. on Thursday to get the rest of my things. Shortly after 9 p.m. a dim light went on in my brain, and I remembered something about the facility closing at night. So I called Public Storage's Customer Service Call Center and was informed that yes, the locked gate stopped working at 9. And we were still inside. The representative told me that it was "possible" she could override it. And if she couldn't? "It opens again at 6 a.m.," she said. "That's not long from now."

Sleeping in the back seat of the car the night before a 500 mile drive? Another vision I'm glad did not have to come to pass.

I slept at my friends' lake cabin that night—the scene of so many joyous gatherings with friends over the years. Come morning, I headed back to the old house to finish preparing it for the buyers' walk-through. I left them a card and a bottle of champagne in the fridge. At noon or so I'd finished the multiple jobs and errands and dumpster searches and went to pick up the dogs. I had taken them to Camp Bow-Wow for two days specifically to tire them out prior to the trip. And off we went.

Midway to Ohio I learned that the closing, conducted in my absence, had gone well.

The drive was exceptionally beautiful—the traffic was stop-and-go from O'Hare to the Indiana border—it took forever and delayed our progress significantly—but I-80 at the top of the state of Indiana is lovely in a lush Summer like this one. At least if you like heartland farm country, which I do. On the way to Cleveland the full moon rose straight in front of us and I composed a hundred photographs in my head, using the gradually brightening moon, the gradually darkening sky, and the ever-changing roadway and roadside scenery.

(I used my imaginary Fuji 50–140mm lens that I don't own yet. Naturally, it worked perfectly.)

Butters, Lulu and I stayed in a Residence Inn by Marriott in Mentor, Ohio, on Friday night. The dogs were great on the trip—well-behaved and docile—but Lulu couldn't help but be protective that night at the hotel, growling at at the muffled noises in the hallway and barking a warning every time she heard a muffled voice. When Lulu is scolded for barking she has a hilarious response—she barks with a soft, repressed "woof" that I swear is the canine equivalent to human whispering.

As soon as Keuka Lake came into view, all my worries vanished. Yesterday was a magnificent day, with bright sun, a fresh breeze, and high, brilliant clouds. The new place looked lovely, and the bank appraiser, whose services are the last thing holding up the closing, was waiting on the steps out front.

Driving around this area, I can tell you one thing for dead sure: I'm about to become a photographer again, in a much more serious way than I've been able to be for quite a few years now. This countryside inspires me, and I resonate to it. I see photographs everywhere.

So we're here, and everything has gone well so far. Now I just have to wait for the closing. In the meantime, we're at a rented lake house in the area for a week's vacation.

The hard part is over!

More anon,

Mike the Ed.

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Thoughts for Your Sunday ~ Making a Left Turn at Albuquerque**

Written by Ctein

First, a Short Public Service Announcement.

By now, all of you who ordered Kate Kirkwood prints should have received them (with the possible exception of a few international orders). If you have not yet received your print order, regardless of where you live, please e-mail me (ctein@pobox.com) so I can pay special attention to the tracking on those orders.

If I don't hear from you, I'm going to assume you received your order and it was in good shape and you are happy with the print.

~~~~~~

So… you know those two black-and-white photographs I posted a few days back? They're not isolated cases. Since the beginning of last year, despite the insanity of my recent life, I've added 50-odd photographs to my portfolio. (No, they are not up on my website; I haven't had enough time to do everything else and update  that. Real Soon Now.)

Two-thirds of those photographs are black and white.

Since the beginning of this year, 80% of what I've printed has been black and white.

I haven't done that much black and white work, relative to the color, in over 40 years. For the past two decades, up until very recently, my work (film and digital) has been between 95% and 100% color. It wasn't part of some strategy, it was simply that whenever I would decide to go out photographing my muse would be strongly, almost universally, inclined to choose color over black-and-white.

Something is different. The numbers have grown to be more than a statistical fluke.  It might be passing fad or fancy. It might be because I find black and white easier and more relaxing to print than color, and I have been overworked and exhausted for too much of the past couple of years. It might be that I am totally infatuated with infrared black and white, but that like most infatuations, it will pass. It might be true love, a  genuine secular change in  artistic direction for me.

Honestly, I don't know.  Mind you, I don't really need to know. I will find out in due time.

 (I do find some modest amusement in the notion that, given the several left turns my life has taken of late, in 10 years people might be saying, “Oh yeah, Ctein. The novelist. He does B&W photography too, you know. … didn't he used to do color or something?”)

 

So, what's new and different in your life, of late?

 

(**Thank You, Bugs Bunny)

Ctein, TOP Technical Editor
(who is posting on-and-off while Mike's nomadic)

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