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David Turnley, The Bolshoi Ballet

David Turnley, Muhammad Ali

• Today is the LAST DAY of the David Turnley Print Sale for this year. Prices go back to normal (i.e., up, up, and away) tomorrow.

• B&H Photo just announced FREE NEXT DAY SHIPPING until the 23rd.

• Happy to say that Keith Davis, the curator responsible for Multitude, Solitude: The Photographs of Dave Heath, has agreed to do an interview with us about the book (and you noticed, I hope, that we heard from Dave Heath himself the other day). We will get to work on that.

• Friend o' TOP Ailsa McWhinnie, founding editor emeritus of the British Black & White Photography magazine, for which I wrote more than 80 monthly columns, has posted on YouTube a fine video visit with Scottish landscape photographer Colin Prior. It's the first of what I hope will be a series of photographer interviews for Lee Filters. It's not often that editors step out in front of the camera! We tend to be behind-the-scenes sorts of people.

• It's also the last day to order Peter Turnley’s books Cuba: A Grace of Spirit and French Kiss: A Love Letter to Paris for delivery in time for Christmas. (At the links, scroll down for a two-book special.) (Both Turnley brothers kindly share a split with TOP.)

• Last but not least, LensRentals, one of my favorite companies—due mainly to the presence of amiable genius Roger Cicala in the wheelhouse—has kindly agreed to provide equipment to TOP for review. The first box of goodies has already arrived, but more about that later.

(Although I have to laugh—yesterday I wrote that "me renting equipment is a ruthlessly effective rain dance," and the box arrived just before darkfall last night...and this morning it is heavily overcast and, yes, raining. Three people will now tell me that they love to photograph in the rain—okay, but it greatly hampers equipment tryouts.) To quote photographer Paul Kennedy: "You know what they say: Oh well."

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.

TOP's links!

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

Victor Bloomfield: "I got the Dave Heath book yesterday and spent most of the day going through it. It lives up to Mike's plaudits. The photos from the '50s and '60s are an intriguing blend—to my eye at least—of Robert Frank's The Americans and Harry Callahan's Chicago street photos, but at the same time very much his own. Heath was a really wonderful printer, and Yale University Press has done the prints full justice. The lengthy catalog essay by Keith Davis is informative, readable, and not burdened by excessive artspeak. And the book itself, as a physical object, is solid, well designed and produced; one of the most impressive photo books I've seen."

Richard: "Mike, when you lived in Wisconsin, my weather was a day behind yours. Now you live in New York, and my weather is a day before yours. When you wrote that quip yesterday about the weather, I looked out the window, and chuckled, cause I knew what you were in for."

Comments

[jim woodard]

Mike,
Talk about walking into the lions den, you do realize that if you start reviewing more cameras and lenses you will soon find new ones you just HAVE to own!

[Del]

Or as Vonnegut would say "So it goes."

[Bryce Lee]

Photograph in the rain and fog, yes.
However thankfully Mike is not all wet!
Enjoy the "sample" boxes from LensRentals!

[Peter Williams]

Rain be damned, Sigma 24/1.4 Art on a horrible windy and rainy day.
https://flic.kr/p/A9Xhj4
Get out there :-)

[Steve G, Mendocino]

Yep, the rain gods are in cahoots with the demons in charge of mocking those afflicted by GAS, for sure. When I rented an RX-10 from Lens rentals before deciding to buy one, it rained the entire period of the rental.

And I got my new A6000 last week - thanks again for the heads up on the pricing - only to face a week of rain and wind.

I am pairing the A6000 with a 19mm Sigma, and I'm very, very pleased with the performance of the combination. That is quality in absolute terms, setting aside 'bang for the buck', which is off the charts.

[Bill Poole]

Ok, so the Prior film answers my question: does anyone use color correction and graduated filters on digital cameras--and how? I guess with high luminance differences, grad filters might provide some advantage to using digital filtration in LR or PS. I imagine this is Lee's goal with this series of film: to make the case that they are still needed. But if so, they should take this question on directly and have one of their photographers say: I use digital filtration, but there are times that I can't do without glass.

[David Dyer-Bennet]

I'm unhappy and uncomfortable photographing in rain (and cold, and snow, and...), certainly. Partly because I'm somewhat too protective of my equipment, I suppose. I've seen many excellent photos taken under those various conditions (got some fairly nice snow shots of my own even). But it's an added challenge, and borrowed gear does need extra care, too.