The Online Photographer

Educate Me?

So since we're on the subject, sort of, who are some photo-artists / photo-illustrators / Photoshop artists that people like?

Photoart by Loretta Lux

I had a vague idea I knew of a bunch of them, but the only name I can actually come up with is Loretta Lux, who does (sorry for the shorthand!) creepy-perfect portraits of children, sort of as if they were midway to being dolls, or otherworldly like the twins in the Stanley Kubrick movie The Shining (who in turn were inspired by the famous Diane Arbus photo).

And help me out here—there's another, also woman, who I've actually featured (or mentioned) on the site before. She does domestic tableaux with carefully arranged arrays of objects throughout the frame. Can anybody help me with the name?

I'd love to see some more. Doesn't have to be someone famous or "known to the art world." Just anyone whose work you like who heavily Photoshops their images. Have any suggestions?

Mike

UPDATE: The person I was thinking of was Julie Blackmon—thanks to all those who supplied the name, and sorry for my "proper noun aphasia." It's pretty obvious that her work is Photoshopped sometimes but it's not always obvious exactly where and how—this example might or might not have been (although I can't quite believe the birds and the plane and the dog were all in their places with the other actors at the same time). The greater part of the deliberate manipulation is the conceptual design and careful staging of her tableaux. She has variously claimed inspiration by Norman Rockwell and Jan Steen, the Dutch painter of raucous, densely populated interior scenes. (Rockwell painted largely from staged photographs, so that inspiration is somewhat circular.)

Julie Blackmon, Olive & Market St.

 

Original contents copyright 2016 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:

Andreas Waldeck: "One of the highest paid photographers in the world, Andreas Gursky, often creates reality with extensive image manipulation. The documentary movie Andreas Gursky—Long Shot Close Up by Jan Schmidt-Garre (2011) gives a great inside into the way Gursky composes his images."

Robert Peterson: "I suggest you look at John Paul Caponigro as a visual artist who works with photographic images and Photoshop. Some of his images are 'simple' artistic photos, but others are constructed. Another artist who starts with photos is Kathy Beal.

Kathy Beal, from "Still Life"

Mike replies: I should have thought of John Paul...(egg on face).

Steve McCurry is Not a Jerk

When arguing about the ethics of "photoinvention"—going past the line of correction and into creation in constructing images—I strongly suspect that peoples' stance on the issue has to do primarily with justifying their own practice. That is, if you clone all kinds of stuff yourself, then you don't see anything wrong with Photoshopping. If you don't even when you're tempted to, then you can be critical of it.

But you see (apropos last Sunday), that's an example of my primary belief system or basic outlook being psychological; I tend to look for internal motivations in the actor/speaker first.  :-)

Funnamennals
Let's go over some basics.

When it's someone's job to give other people a report about what's going on, that person is enjoined, formally and by custom, to try to be honest, impartial, and objective. There are several parts to this. First, they're obligated to do the work of understanding what they're reporting on. There are a number of tried-and-true ways to go about that—go there; spend enough time; take a fresh look and see for yourself; talk to people who are caught up in it, whatever it is, or who are experts in it in whatever way; look into background information; attempt to see conflicting views from both sides; and so on. Most of these methods are well understood and are part of the process, resources permitting.

Next, that person is asked to suppress their own opinions, their partisanship, and their biases, so as not to give a skewed or one-sided report by omission or commission. To do this, they need to be aware of what those biases are. And, usually, they need another outlet to vent that bias and partisan opinion so it doesn't leak into their reporting, which is why editorials and opinion columns exist in traditional newspapers. In their respective opinion and editorial (Op-Ed) pages, the New York Times typically has a liberal and humanist slant, the Wall Street Journal a conservative and business-friendly one, and the Christian Science Monitor a religious and Christian one. But all three papers offer very good reporting outside of their Op-Ed content, because all three take their journalistic responsibilities seriously and try their best not to let their acknowledged biases intrude.

Does this mean that all reporting is perfectly true and objective?

Of course not. But we all realize that. People in the business (or who went to J-school) can cite chapter and verse: much thought and effort has gone into understanding all the ways that reporting can still be inaccurate. If you want a clean windowpane into the ways that current cultural assumptions influence reporting, for instance (just one of the ways in which reporting can be skewed), you have only to go back and read some articles from the 1950s, the 1920s, and the 1880s. The differences will jump out at you. We are of course not immune to the same thing—people will look back on 2016 and "see" our cultural assumptions—good and bad—clearly, in ways we cannot.

Similarly, photographs are (of course) not automatically "true." There are a myriad ways they can distort the report, so to speak. We understand most of those ways. And we understand them both in our roles as creators and as viewers. This is not a big secret.

But primary to good reporting, whether it is done with writing or with pictures, is the crucial matter of the intention to deceive vs. the intention to be honest. Reports have authors. Traditionally, those authors have editors riding herd on them, helping keep them on track and seeing to it that the necessary standards are upheld. When the medium is words, the authors are called reporters, and when it's pictures, they're called photojournalists and editorial photographers (i.e., photographers who illustrate fact-based articles). All the players follow the rules and do their best.

When this system works, which admittedly it does only a small percentage of the time, the results can be superlative. The greatest photo essays and the finest journalistic investigations can, and have, changed the world. But most good journalism doesn't change the world: it just informs us about it and gives us insight into it. Which is good, because you can't look into everything firsthand on your own. In fact, arguably the primary advantage conferred to our species by language and communication is that we can learn things we need to know from other people, such that we're not limited to knowing only what we ourselves can find out about firsthand.

When this is cynically manipulated, it's called "propaganda." Or, at a more basic level, "lies." (And if you're unclear about the distinction between "telling the truth" and "telling a lie," brush up. Go figure it out. It's not that tough.) And this brings up another crucial point: as viewers and readers, if our interest is in gaining insight about reality and furthering our understanding of the world and its affairs, we have a fundamental decision to make: how much to trust our various sources. And in that project—that ongoing, always provisional project—two things help a lot: one, that we understand the basic motives and interests of the authors of the reports we're getting (another important function of the traditional Op/Ed section), and two, that they tell us what they're doing, what set of rules they're adhering to.

Because, of course, not everyone is doing the same thing. Again formally and by custom, we've separated different pursuits into different categories. It's easier to trust an author when we know what they're up to and which category their work falls into. Some "fiction," you'll note, is designed as a way of getting closer to certain truths; inventing characters can sometimes allow an author to explore areas of human thought and behavior that can't be verified (various historians have resorted to novels not to distort history but to more clearly convey their understanding of it). Other fiction doesn't do this—it might be meant only to entertain, or to conjure the "sustained dream" of an alternative reality into which the reader can escape, as if in a reverie of his or her own. Even within specific genres, aims and intentions can be different: science fiction might be purely fantastical, a device for slipping the mundane bounds of the everyday, or it might be seriously speculative, allowing a well-informed author to propose things that might actually plausibly happen in the future.

Own the authorship
Given the recent dust-up, I thought it was an irony to happen across an article on the Web titled "See India Through Steve McCurry's Lens." Ironic because when you add and subtract elements, you're explicitly departing from the view through the lens.

As I see the whole affair from my distant viewpoint here in the hinterlands, the current problem with Mr. McCurry is simply that his background is in photojournalism and editorial photography, and he markets himself using those credentials, and his primary affiliations (National Geographic magazine and Magnum Photos) inhabit those universes, and his current work seems to all appearances to be a seamless continuation of all that earlier work—same look, same subjects, same approach. But, by the clear standards of his now-known-to-be-former profession(s), he got caught cheating. So now he has to engineer a clumsy coverup (really sort of a primer on why not to do a coverup and all the ways it can be done badly), and start mumbling about how, yeah, things really shouldn't be added or subtracted using Photoshop, and I promise to be good from now on, and whimper whimper.

But to heck with all that. If I were Steve McCurry, I'd embrace the new me. Revise the mission statement. I'd say to the world, Hey, you're right, I'm not a photojournalist. I used to be, and I was good at it, but lately I've become a storyteller, and I'm even better at that. My work is a lyrical, romanticized view of the exotic Third World of my imagination—my personal interpretation of how I like to look at the magical, mysterious qualities of distant lands and disappearing peoples. I used to be a reporter but then I discovered what I'm really interested in doing. My work is based on reality, and it starts out being photographic and sometimes stays that way, but I'm first and foremost a photo-illustrator and an artist.

Would anybody have any problem with that? Raise your hand. Anybody here? Anybody anywhere? I doubt it. I wouldn't, even though I'm partial to "straight" photography personally. Like I would have a problem with somebody growing as an artist and evolving thoughtfully and forthrightly into his more authentic self? Not a chance.

Why not just be who you already are? The guy shouldn't Photoshop less, he should Photoshop more. Heck, it's how he sees, even when he doesn't clone a thing. That article title should be, "See India Through Steve McCurry's Eyes." Own the authorship.

Embrace it. Go all in. It's clear that's what he wants to be and what he's best at. 

Just...be clear about it, is all. Don't be one thing while you let on that you're another. As a bonus, when you stand tall and walk straight, all manner of things are forgiven.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2016 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:

Bill Pierce: "In the early and mid 'eighties, when we were all young, a bunch of us were covering the war in Lebanon. Don McCullin was the best among us, but it was a pretty solid group with Dirck Halstead, Robin Moyer, Gene Richards, Bill Foley and a bunch of others who have gone on to do fairly well as old photographers who don’t get shot at any more. Our publications wanted to see war. National Geographic had Steve McCurry shooting the religious leaders. Steve probably had just as much a chance of being somewhere in Beirut that got bombed as we had. We were shooting what our publications thought was important. Steve was shooting what his publication thought was important. Our pictures could never be as moving and life changing as the what we were photographing. Steve’s pictures might have been more dramatic than what he was photographing.

"All of us are shaped by what we did when we were young. The news publications gave some of us amazing educations that went far beyond what we learned in school. I don’t think Steve got the same education. He was unique. Geo sent him into dangerous situations that their other photographers never entered. But, somehow and not surprisingly, what they published always seemed more distanced from the events than what appeared in the news publications. Steve is currently getting criticized for using his computer to clean up his images and make them a little 'prettier.' I think the criticism is valid. But I also think Steve is a good guy who was told early in the game to make his pictures pretty."

Verve: "McCurry is still a great photographer—one of the best. I think he described the problem accurately in his mea culpa. The problem is confusion: people thinking he is still a photojournalist when he isn't. I don't know whether or how much McCurry himself contributed to that confusion. Considering his renown and reputation as a photojournalist, it seems that he should have put a disclaimer somewhere to avoid this confusion."

Bob Rosinsky: "Re 'Just...be clear about it, is all. Don't be one thing while you let on that you're another. As a bonus, when you stand tall and walk straight, all manner of things are forgiven.' The crux of the matter: Interpretative/embellishment is one thing and reportage is another. McCurry failed to acknowledge artistic license. Deceit is unacceptable. It's akin to bait and switch. His Photoshop skills are lacking. And I am glad for that."

Mike adds: Note that Verve and Bob are saying the same things, but Verve sympathetically, Bob less so.

Red Chair Redux

Hard rain squalls yesterday had the creek roaring all night. Today along came glorious weather—cooler, drier air, brilliant clarity, and magnificent skies.

For regular readers who remember "the red chair" from last Winter, I thought you might like to see what it looked like today.

Hope you had a very nice holiday, if you celebrated.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2016 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:

David Zivic: "I try not to get emotionally involved with inanimate objects and things like cameras, boats and cars make that a challenge. This is the first time a chair, and not even a chair, but a photo of a chair has raised my spirits during my morning coffee time. I'm thrilled she(?) is doing so well in that wonderful little spot."

Mike replies:  :-)

Lynn: "Nice RGB, Mike!"

Steve McCurry Defends Himself, Sort Of

You probably remember the discussion about famed photojournalist editorial photographer visual storyteller Steve McCurry's overuse of Photoshop cloning, which provoked heated debate here and elsewhere. Steve McCurry today addressed his critics—well, sort of—in an exclusive article published this morning at TIME magazine's website. 

It's a strange, unsatisfying little article. McCurry vaguely claims it's all a category error: "I’ve always let my pictures do the talking, but now I understand that people want me to describe the category into which I would put myself, and so I would say that today I am a visual storyteller."

Alternated with his comments are comments by National Geographic’s director of photography, Sarah Leen. She first explains how great he is, then says sternly that his manipulations would never be tolerated by National Geographic. He then tells the story of how a National Geographic cover photo of his was doctored, and she says yeah but that was a long time ago and "it would never happen now."

Who's on whose side here?

The article concludes with McCurry saying that he can do anything he wants to do but that "going forward, I am committed to only using the program in a minimal way."

The original PetaPixel story has been shared over 25,000 times, according to Sharkey James's PetaPixel Photography Podcast episode 76, titled "Is Steve McCurry’s Legacy Imploding?" An update to the second of PetaPixel's articles notes that McCurry's entire blog was taken down after a number of manipulated images were discovered on it.

Meanwhile, McCurry himself appears to be hiding—more than one outlet reports that they can't get an answer to repeated emails and requests for comment.

In the podcast, James compares McCurry's fall from grace to Bill Cosby's, given the high stature and wide admiration his work once enjoyed and the dismay and disillusion these revelations have caused. Which seems a bit over the top, unless you concede that the scandal is having wider repercussions across the whole profession. Perhaps most damning, though, are these harsh words from a long article published by the NPPA (National Press Photographers Association), in an article called "ETHICS MATTERS: A commentary from NPPA’s Ethics Committee regarding the photographs of Steve McCurry," written by Steve Raymer, professor emeritus of the Media School at Indiana University and a former NPPA Magazine Photographer of the Year:

NPPA Ethics Committee chairman Sean D. Elliot says that no matter what McCurry calls himself today, “He bears the responsibility to uphold the ethical standards of his peers and the public, who see him as a photojournalist. [...] Any alteration of the journalistic truth of his images, any manipulation of the facts, regardless of how relevant he or others might feel they are to the deeper ‘truth,’ constitutes an ethical lapse.” Elliot also called McCurry’s attempt to blame an assistant “disingenuous” and questions the professional standards of a studio in which a lab assistant “feels they have the authority to radically alter the work of Steve McCurry.”

So was it our fault, for thinking he was a photojournalist and editorial photographer and was following the very clearly delineated and universally accepted rules of ethical practice of those professions? Guess so. In this morning's TIME article he says, "Reflecting on the situation…even though I felt that I could do what I wanted to my own pictures in an aesthetic and compositional sense, I now understand how confusing it must be for people who think I’m still a photojournalist."

Doesn't sound like much of a mea culpa.

The moral of this mess seems to be, if you want to claim you're only tellin' stories, best do it up front.

Mike
(Thanks to Pak WAN)

Original contents copyright 2016 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

TOP's links!

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

Steve Jacob: "Tellin' tales? Sounds about right...."

John Camp (partial comment): "This Sean Elliot quote really annoyed me: 'He bears the responsibility to uphold the ethical standards of his peers and the public, who see him as a photojournalist.' Oh, really? It's now the viewers who determine what the photographer can do? Maybe it's just me, but I haven't really thought of McCurry as a straight-up photojournalist for a while now...years, anyway."

glenn brown: "I do corporate headshots for blue chip companies and now people are asking for no Photoshop instead of lots.

"I also collect photographs, mostly B/W and pre-1980, but I did have a colour McCurry photo in pride of place in the entrance hall of my home. After a week I moved it to bathroom in the rear of my house. Just did not want it to hang with other images by Towell, Bailey and Newman. I feel better now."

Mark: "Let it be known that, while I am a photographer, I am not now, nor have I ever been, nor do I ever plan to be, a photojournalist. Now, back to my Photoshopping. did i get the commas right?"

Mike the Ed. replies: You did. But not the capitals in your final sentence.  :-)

Rich Reusser: "...A more apt comparison than Cosby might be Lance Armstrong. Seems like Lance and Steve both blame the uneducated layman's expectations for their 'rule breaking' or simply doing what needed to be done as they'd have you believe."

Mike replies: The exact same thought occurred to me earlier. Cosby is better known, fell from far higher, meant more to more people, and did real harm.

Andrew Molitor: "It's just another nail in the coffin, another small step toward a world in which everyone assumes everything is 'Shopped.

"We've reached a world in which anyone who's paying attention knows that anything which looks like a photo could be 'Shopped. Anything that looks too good to be true should be viewed with suspicion.

"McCurry, with his venal 'Shopping of trivialities, is showing us that even if it doesn't look too good to be true, even if it looks perfectly possible, even mundane, it still could be 'Shopped, still should be viewed with suspicion.

"On the one hand, it was inevitable. That Pandora's box was opened a while ago, and it was only a matter of time before that particular creature escaped. On the other hand, way to go McCurry (heavy sarcasm)."

Ted: "Back around 15–20 years ago I considered trying to be a photojournalist/travel photographer. I had a lots of encouragement from friends and such and I had traveled extensively taking many photos. However I was always frustrated and discouraged by how my photos would somehow have so many more distracting elements and somehow just did not have the punch and pure style a guy like McCurry had, one of my absolute idols. I was a good photographer, very good, and still am. For a variety of reason I'm glad I did not pursue that direction (not that I would have succeeded but let's just say I found a way to make way more money and still very much enjoy my hobby), now seeing all this it all makes so much more sense now why so much of his work was so 'perfect.' It was a 'created/false perfection.' My impression of him and my awe of his work has shriveled considerably. Frankly I'm very depressed about it."

Photo Essay: Air Force One

Senator Bob Dole, his wife (and Senator-to-be) Elizabeth Dole, and
President Gerald Ford disembark from Marine One in 1976

A random photo essay this time, instead of a single picture. Popular Mechanics has a nice feature called "A Visual History of Air Force One," from a somehow amusing picture of Teddy Roosevelt in a Wright Flyer to President Obama boarding a sleek jet. Pleasant and interesting, and it serves as sort of a summary of what I was talking about the other day when I mentioned our swift progress from Kitty Hawk onward. Might be of interest to you if you like airplanes, politics, history, or all three.

"Air Force One" is not a single aircraft—it's the designation for any plane on which a sitting President of the United States happens to be flying. The designation came about in 1953 when Air Force 8610, with President Dwight D. Eisenhower aboard, coincidentally shared airspace for a while with Eastern Airlines 8610, a commercial flight. The designation Air Force One was devised to prevent such confusion in the future.

Air Force One is better than the nickname for an earlier Presidential aircraft, which was "The Sacred Cow."

Coolest of all the Presidential planes was undoubtedly Harry Truman's "Independence," which was painted to resemble a giant bald eagle! Rad.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2016 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:

John Camp: "Warren Buffett's first name for his private jet was the 'Indefensible.' (He supposedly now refers to it as the Indispensable, but that was after he bought a big share of NetJets.)"

Open Mike: Your Belief System (OT)

(for K.M.)

Everybody has a belief system. It's just sometimes difficult to make out what it is.

The simplest and plainest choice is religion. I don't say that in a denigrating way; it's just that religion offers itself up specifically as a belief system, so it's not surprising when many people use it that way.

Of course "religion" is a sprawling category. We've recently been having a bit of a flareup in the fracas between Christianity and its younger sibling Islam that has been going on more or less since the end of the 11th century. I had a friend recently who was a member of a cult. "Cult" can be defined loosely as "a religion that is new or not yet established." Part of the appeal of her cult seemed to me equal parts unreasonableness and difficulty. Of course it used to be difficult to be a Christian, too. I need to investigate books about the morality of Jesus...the problem is that the subject is so hoary and the literature so vast that it's tough to find clear, well-written primers. Even single religions are sprawling categories, turns out. 

Anti-religion can also be a belief system, which is amusing in a way. A few years back there was a fad for atheism—you remember Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion, the late Christopher Hitchens' God Is Not Great (subtitled, in case the title was too subtle for anyone, "How Religion Poisons Everything"), and Sam Harris's acidic The End of Faith? (Speaking of faith, don't put too much of it in Amazon's new "bestseller" tags—The End of Faith might be a #1 Bestseller, but only in the hoppin' "Rationalist Philosophy" category.) The fad faded a bit when people realized some of the so-called New Atheists were advocating  anti-religion with religious fervor.

It's not uncommon for people to build their belief systems around political principles. Or (speaking of selling) even economic ones. A surprising number of older people still "deify" capitalism, for example (recently, the number of younger American adults who approve of capitalism has fallen into a minority). The defining characteristic of human beings is our tendency to split into two sides, so—just as Superman (b. in Action Comics #1, 1938) required Lex Luthor (b. Action Comics #23, 1940), capitalism had to have communism. That fight has gotten faded and shopworn (Marxism's standard got tattered before capitalism's did). As has Superman's popularity—he's struggled to maintain an audience in recent decades.

I have a good friend who for a long time seemed to claim that everything, even art, rested on the centrality of political ideas. He seemed to relax that years ago, but when I asked him about it, he admitted that his beliefs had gotten so radical that he had to stop talking about them because of other peoples' reactions. I have a few convictions like that too—ideas so far out of the mainstream that they strike people right off the bat as startling, bordering on crazy. A recent essay by a writer I like, Alain de Botton, said that we should all ask potential partners when we first start dating, "and how are you crazy?"

You don't have to look very far to realize that hedonism has a pretty strong sway as a belief system right now—personal pleasure and self-interest as the guiding principle of life. It usually pals around with its friends relativism and narcissism. This is in contrast to past eras when virtue, discipline, and honor had the upper hand in popularity. That sounds like it had to be good, but not necessarily. In the sixteenth century, the French aristocracy literally decimated itself (i.e., one in ten died) by dueling, and in the antebellum South thousands of men died essentially voluntarily, protecting their honor. "Death is not sufficient to deter men who make it their glory to despise it," wrote Joseph Addison, in Vol. II of his Spectator. We, like the Greeks and Romans, have no enthusiasm for dueling whatsoever, and it is absent in modern Western society at any class level. (Virtue and discipline are shaky with us too, though.) George Washington, a thoroughly uninteresting fellow apart from his central role in founding a fledgling nation, evidently spent his life cultivating his virtue and rectitude with great humorlessness.

George Washington was also the Bill Gates or Michael Bloomberg of Colonial America—his net worth was approximately equivalent to $100 million today, and he was the richest American of his era. Today, money alone is the belief system of many. Be rich and then be richer, and never mind anything else. Wealth disparity, which has greatly accelerated since Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980, makes that almost prudent—it's getting better and better to be rich and harder (and more dangerous) to be poor, almost with every passing month.

I have another friend who seems very much to have taken the hippie ethos of the 1960s as his permanent value system—Flower Power, peace, and free love. Even in the '80s I was wondering where that went...that is, when exactly did peace and love get replaced by sex, drugs, and rock'n'roll, and hippies with punks? That was a change that not a lot of people seemed to notice much. I once tried to write a spoof song to the tune of "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?" (Peter, Paul, and Mary, 1962) called "Where Have All the Hippies Gone?" But unfortunately lyrics aren't my métier.

It's really fascinating to me how various beliefs tend to cluster together. It sometimes seems to defy consistency.

Two great minds who thought alike: ethologists (and Nobel laureates) Nikolaas Tinbergen and Konrad Lorenz. Most people do not approve of animal behaviorism being applied to themselves, however.

Science and the scientific method is the core of some peoples' beliefs. This might include people who have specific scientific or academic disciplines as the locus of their belief systems. When I was young I developed in my own head, just for myself, something which I later learned was akin to sociobiology—a discipline so widely reviled that it has had to change its name (it's now more often called evolutionary biology or evolutionary psychology. People might no longer think Earth is the center of the Universe and human beings were magically created whole and entire from the Will of God, but we still dislike to think that primatology says anything about us.) Evolution is part of my core beliefs, though, thanks to Mrs. Sieckman's 8th grade paleontology class! Although science isn't my interest, she was one of the best and most inspiring teachers I ever had. I credit her with teaching me to write—a science teacher, and I was a student who idolized my English teachers. I wrote what amounted to a thesis for her on the topic of evolution vs. religion, for which I interviewed no fewer than 15 priests, pastors, ministers, and rabbis, collectively one of the great educational experiences of my youth, and probably when my interest in what's really goin' on here first took serious traction.

I believe I've known people for whom logic is one of the lights, the light of all lights*.

Space travel and aliens, monsters or superheroes, fantasy worlds, movies and celebrity culture—and probably a whole lot of other things I prefer to not think about—flirt with centrality in the demotic belief systems of the multitude.

A distinguished analyst I know admits that her belief system is psychoanalysis. Sure enough, she has a bank of books by and about Freud in tidy rows in her office, and a diminutive Freud Action Figure stands on an end-table. She thinks Civilization and its Discontents is Freud's best book. The one book by Freud everybody should read.

A belief system is what you filter everything else through first. I think my own core outlook is essentially psychological. I've noticed that politics, economics, world affairs, science, history, even religion all tend to filter through psychology first in my thinking about the world. I could be wrong about that...but then, the reason I say that is because of the essentially psychological perception that it's harder to see ourselves than it is to see others.

The point is that something has to structure your core beliefs, and it's best to try to be aware of what it is. It can't be nothing. An old joke had it that even nihilists passionately believe in one thing—nihilism!

Mike

*Sorry, I'm playin' again—the quote is from Bram Stoker's Dracula. If excessive logicalness isn't vampirish, ya gotta admit it's at least Spockish.

"Open Mike" is the open-topic, anything-goes Editorial Page of TOP. It evolves every Sunday if I can think of a topic.

[UPDATE: I've changed the sentence "The fad faded a bit when people realized some of the so-called New Atheists were advocating anti-religion with religious fervor" about eight times now, based on various comments and criticisms. I just want you to you that I'm moving on with my life now, and leaving that poor put-upon sentence to fend for its forlorn self in the cruel world. —Mike the Ed.]

Original contents copyright 2016 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:

tex andrews: "If I had to distill my belief system into a single word, it would be 'Beauty,' capital B. I also believe in lowercase beauty. I am no longer of one of the Abrahamic faiths, although was once a Christian and still study the Old and New Testaments and their discourses. Lately, I find I'm more animist in my beliefs, and veer towards Shinto, a fairly opaque, highly aestheticized religion with a mysterious dark center somewhere.

"Nevertheless, it's Beauty that captivates me, drives me as a person and artist, and has both enriched my life spiritually and intellectually while at the same time impoverishing me monetarily. And it is in Beauty that I encounter mystery and wonder, and beauty that inspires me to continued life while I simultaneously despair and wonder at the stupidity of much that we all endure." 

Michael Gatton: "Great, another argument for lumping science in with aliens, religion, quackery, climate change denial, ant-vaccination, astrology—it's all just belief systems, pick one. I disagree with you on this and I think it's a harmful position to advocate."

Mike replies: This is a fascinating comment, and it really points out that I didn't adequately define here what a belief system is. I don't think you've quite got it. I said it's "the thing you filter everything else through first." Think of it as the way of looking at things that everything else boils down to for an individual or group.

In a short white paper on the subject, J.L. Usó-Doménech and J. Nescolarde-Selva of the Department of Applied Mathematics at the University of Alicante, Spain (I found the quote on the Internet, of course), said, "Belief systems are the stories we tell ourselves to define our personal sense of Reality." A belief system is a set of mutually supportive core beliefs by which you organize your understanding of everything else. But just because something is believed by someone (or some group), that says nothing about its truth value. We can identify and understand a large variety of belief systems, and some of them might have a great deal of truth to them and some very little.

Wikipedia says "belief's purpose is to guide action and not to indicate truth." You can fully "believe in" science without it being your "belief system" at all.

Is that any more clear? Somehow I fear it isn't....

Michael Gatton responds: "Thanks for trying, Mike. I remain, however, confused. I think of a belief system as more of a moral compass or something that gives your life meaning in a 'spiritual' sense, for those who believe in spiritual matters (I'm entirely uncomfortable with the term, personally, but whatever). I suppose there are individuals for whom science provides these anchors. Carl Sagan for one routinely and poignantly talked of science in spiritual terms. In that case, I can't argue with you—and I may have just talked myself out of confusion if this is what you are getting at...."

Steve Jacob: "I don't have a belief system other than my own experience.

"My experience tells me that if I believe something of a non-trivial nature to be true, a bit of digging around usually proves that it's always 'a bit more complicated than that.'

"That means my belief system is that I don't trust myself to believe anything absolutely, and I don't trust people who do.

"But I will give my qualified trust to those that know a lot more about something than I do and have a good handle on the evidence. A good example would be my doctor.

"It took a lot of self discipline to STFU and listen carefully when confronted with such people, but I found it useful, interesting and even life saving.

"But, I don't expect them to be right all the time. I just expect them to be right much more often than me, or people who know even less than me and thus, on the balance of probabilities, a better course to follow.

"Hunches (and subconscious experience) come in to play when a question arises which has no definite answer, as happens often in politics. We have one such crisis in the UK now, regarding whether we should leave the EU or not.

"My hunch is that walking away from the biggest free-trade area in the world is a dumb idea, economically.

"It would also impact my personal sovereignty as I would no longer be free to live, study or work anywhere in 27 countries, and neither would my hypothetical children for whom it would be a formative experience I would hypothetically treasure.

"Given that I place a higher value on my personal sovereignty than that of my exalted and two faced leaders, whose record is distinctly patchy on that subject, I believe this takes ideological preference.

"Could I be wrong? Certainly! Like all political and economic questions, the answer is 'it depends.' But it depends on factors over which we actually have little or no control which makes me feel decidedly queasy.

"Which leaves politicians as the one group of people who I trust even less than myself."

Ronnie A Nilsen: "Science is not a 'belief system' but a process and methodology for seeking an objective reality. Science is a method of investigation, and not a belief system. Science searches for mechanisms and the answer to 'how' the universe functions, with no appeal to higher purpose, without assuming the existence or non existence of such purpose. If you want to fly an airplane, would you rather it be designed by science, or would you be willing to risk your life in a plane designe by an arbitrary 'belief system'?

Mike replies: No, no, you're not getting the distinction between "something that's believable (has truth value)" and "a belief system." A belief system is your set of core values through which you evaluate everything else. That could be science, but it also might not be even if you are a scientist and fully accept the scientific method.

John Camp responds: "Mike, I think you're misinterpreting what Ronny A Nilsen said. He doesn't believe in Science with a capital S. The belief in Science is Scientism. He believes that a particular technique is a valuable way to approach the world. I agree. I suppose Ctein does too. It is perfectly possible to believe in the technique and be a fervent, active Christian or Muslim.

Unless I'm misinterpreting him, his belief in the technique is like believing in a screwdriver, and even the very deepest belief in the effectiveness of a screwdriver might not have much to say about how you view the world as a whole, about your moral views.

Jesus, I feel like I'm back in the dorm room. (I'm referring here to Hay-Zeus, a Latino friend, and not the Christ.)

Mike replies: Maybe this will help: when you say "Fred's belief system is science," you're not saying anything at all about science. Nothing at all. Everything you're saying is about Fred. See what I'm saying?

I guess I could be wrong, but I think a "belief system" is just "the way you tend to look at the world." What color is the filter? What's your fallback when push comes to shove? What way of looking at things do you think gives you the best leg up on making the best decisions?

If your belief system is science, you might be...just speculating here...uncomfortable with reading Joseph Campbell and Carl Jung. You might not trust "soft" sciences such as sociology. You might pooh-pooh historians when they speculate based on very slim evidence and educated guesses, some of which are indistinguishable from mere hunches, as Mary Beard does frequently in SPQR, her new book about Roman history. You might often find yourself interested in how experiments were designed, rather than just being content to read the conclusions. You might find yourself outraged when you learn that corporations fudged experiments to retain patents on profitable medicines (and hence transgressed good science). You might feel "at sea" when faced with disciplines that are largely based on opinion or intuition, or contemptuous of pursuits that are pointless fun or that depend on popular fads, like fashion design.

Do you see the difference? It's not a question of "believing" in science or not believing in it. It's what you value most. It's what you think is important. It's the way you yourself turn the prism to look at things. The vantage point from which you prefer to look at the world. It's a question of how you tend to reduce questions to their essence. What's the essence? That's the question.

Scotto: "I am one who holds markets as a belief system. The simple laws of supply and demand rule everything in nature and by nature. It's the mechanism for explaining evolution and the ever present force that keeps the Universe in its otherwise precarious balance. But don't confuse this with capitalism, communism, feudalism or any other -ism. Markets persist without regard for the political systems that societies (human or animal) organize themselves around. What sort of belief system would it be otherwise?"

Fred: "Hey! Leave me out of this."

Michael McKee: "As someone who switched careers from hard science, geochemistry, to a soft one, psychology, I've pondered this question often. I enjoy the discussion and am in substantial agreement with Mike.

"There's one distinction that hasn't been brought up, namely fundamentalism. There are flexible belief systems that allow the possibility that a different viewpoint may have something to inform one's own beliefs. There are inflexible belief systems that deny that possibility. I would categorize anybody who categorically rules out an opposing belief system a fundamentalist, whether that belief relates to religious beliefs or that the scientific method can answer all questions.

"As a recovering therapist, I hold the opinion that many emotional problems arise from unexamined belief systems that don't serve the person holding them—belief systems that have elements of unconscious fundamentalism."

[A different] Mike: "Hi Mike. I've been through this one before, and it's sometimes hard for scientifically-minded people to accept that they have a belief system.
Maybe it's because we usually take 'belief' to mean 'belief in xxx,' and science doesn't like to believe, it likes to observe and prove.

"However, a moment's look at the history of science will, I think, perhaps explain this better.

"The fact is that over the centuries, including recent times, great scientific discoveries have been ignored, held up, and generally attacked by establishment science because they did not fit into the then current theories that the establishment believed was settled science. Even out-and-out experimental fact gets questioned. The experiment was done wrong, the machinery is not accurate. etc.

"Exactly as I think you are trying to point out, belief is what happens in each of us first, front, and center. It's a filter through which 'facts' become known to our consciousness. And, if the facts don't conform to the filter, it's very hard sometimes to see it as being potentially correct.

"It's hard to see a filter, and it's even harder to recognize that a filter is indeed a filter, and then it's even harder again to be willing to adjust one's filter.

"The greats of the world, in all works of life, science, arts, philosophy, business, and just plain living, are the ones who can change their belief system so radically that all our older belief systems can get swept away and replaced."

Geoff Wittig: "One fascinating thing about this issue appears blindingly obvious to me, but most people I talk to are completely unaware of this aspect. Specifically, there is frequently a blatant disconnect between an individual's professed belief system (often but not always religion-based) and their objectively observable behavior. For example, the nominal Christian who has contempt for poor beggars; the nominal atheist who prays as the plane is going down.

"As a family physician for more than 30 years my psychology and philosophy credentials are limited, but I've been an avid student of human behavior 'in the wild' as it were. And it's plain to me that the belief system many (or most) people claim to embrace, and (not the same thing) the one they believe they embrace, is not, at the end of the day, what truly drives their decisions.

"We harbor a compelling and understandable illusion that our conscious thoughts are, well, us. But it's far more complicated than that. Our consciousness is just the tip of the iceberg, and is powerfully influenced (and often driven) by deeper, more protean, reflexive, emotional and primitive mechanisms. We construct elaborate rationalizations for our behavior based on a belief system, and such a system can definitely influence our behavior. But it's not the only actor in our heads."

Animesh Ray: "'Belief' in logic systems is often considered the only safe-heaven left, but it is not the last word either. There is no self-consistent logic system whose fundamental assumptions (a.k.a. 'beliefs') are provable from within the system—a result 'proved' long ago by Gödel. So where do we stand with respect to 'belief'? Nowhere. We need to keep an open mind for the possible falsification all beliefs given evidence. The latter itself is falsifiable, because the strength of evidence is not absolute, and requires logic, physical error limits of the measuring instruments, and human interpretation to evaluate the evidence. My belief therefore is in the absence of a foundation in belief. (There is no contradiction here: Since a null set is also a set, this view is a belief after all!)"

Next Book Sale Starts Next Thursday at 11 am ET

Our next book sale in cooperation with the Nelson-Atkins Museum will begin Thursday, June 2, at 11 am Eastern U.S. Time.

We will be offering four brand new photography books that are "new old stock" (NOS) and have been in storage at the Museum. The price for all four is $48.

The first 325 orders will receive an extra book (i.e., different title) for free. This is the only way we could handle the fact that we have fewer copies of that book, while still offering the whole package for one price.

Speaking of the "package," responding to concerns last time about the packaging, this time the books will be wrapped in bubble wrap inside a stout box.

Two of the other books exist in varying proportions of hardcover/softcover. We will fulfill the orders with hardcover books until they run out, then switch to softcover.

International shipping will be possible, but very expensive. There's no help for this: photo books are big and heavy and the Museum does not do a lot of international shipping generally and thus doesn't enjoy economies of scale for that shipping. So the books won't be such a "deal" for our international readers but at least the books will be available to you if you really want them. Even with international shipping, the price will still be below what the Museum normally charges for these books and below the cumulative original selling prices.

The sale will run for one month or while supplies last. We have fewer copies than last time, but still enough that you won't miss out entirely if you don't order immediately.

A small portion of the each sale goes to TOP, so you're helping support this site with your purchase.

More information next Thursday at 11—please check back then!

(And hope you have a nice Saturday.)

Mike

Original contents copyright 2016 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

TOP's links!

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

No featured comments yet—please check back soon!

Time for Change

All things considered, human culture has adapted with remarkable swiftness to vast technological change in a short period of time. I still think that the single most remarkable fact of human history from a technological standpoint is that there were only 65 years, seven months, and four days between the Wright Brothers' first flight at Kitty Hawk and human beings first walking on the moon. It's not that humankind got that far, which is astounding enough. It's that we did it in such a short span of time...well within a single human lifetime.

Speaking of changes in a single human lifetime, my great-aunt Frances "Dicky" Schirmer, who died a handful of years ago aged 101 years and 10 months, was alive when the first "remote" electric light switch was installed in her parents' summer home in Michigan. Electricity was still exotic then and the infrastructure for it sparse, and small groups of local children would shyly come to the door and ask to see it. They had seen electric light bulbs before, but they'd never seen one there you could push a button on the wall by the door and have the light way up on the ceiling turn on and off. That "remote control" aspect of it was magic to them, and they'd stand in line taking turns switching the light on and off. That was in about 1915. Dicky lived to see the World Wide Web—which I thought was magic the first time I experienced it!

Friend o' TOP Mike Plews, a television news cameraman in Nebraska, sent me this by email:

"While loading up a news unit this morning," Mike writes, "I got into a nostalgic mood. I’m just about the last working TV news photographer in the Omaha market who shot film. If you look at the attached picture you can see my career pretty much bookended by technology.

"The 400-foot reel of film is a standard load on my old CP16 camera. It could shoot 11 minutes of film at one time. In 1974, a 400-foot load cost $40 and another $5 or so to process it if you had your own ME4 line (we did, and running it was my first TV job).

"The 32GB card on the end of my finger can shoot 120 minutes of XDCAM 35Mbps 1080i as many times as you like, and costs less in 2016 money."

Big changes.

Copper cables
My son Xander and his girlfriend Abby are visiting from Wisconsin. Yesterday we paid a repeat visit to the Corning Museum of Glass (second time for them, fifth time for me), and thanks to Abby's interest we attended the Optical Fiber Demo for the first time. I wasn't expecting much, but it absolutely blew my mind. On the wall is a cross-section of a huge copper cable more than six feet in diameter, made up of hundreds of smaller bundles of wire (it's not a model, either—it's a section of a real cable). With appropriate technology on both ends, a cable like that would be capable of transmitting 50 million telephone calls. The presenter then held up a tiny strand of optical fiber cable twice the thickness of a human hair, saying that it could transmit one billion telephone calls simultaneously, in both directions. Twenty times as much data.

I remember as a schoolkid learning that optical fiber information transfer existed, as well as the reasons why it wasn't practical yet. I recall learning that "they" were working on improving the transmission of glass to make it practical for real-world applications. "They" turned out to be Robert D. Maurer, Donald Keck, and Peter C. Schultz, the three Corning scientists who first breached the critical attenuation limit of 20 dB/km in 1970 with a borosilicate glass using titanium as a dopant—effectively opening the door to the era of modern optical fiber communications. I remember hearing the news; I was 13.

We all rely on optical fiber technology every day now—these words are coming to you thanks in part to optical fibers—but we will see tremendous advancements in this field within the next decade or two, as the final shackles are removed from the potential of the technology.

And just what are those limits? Well, it turns out that Robert Maurer, Donald Keck, and Peter Schultz are all still alive, and all three of them live in the hills that surround Corning—and one day, our presenter for the Optical Fiber Demo, whose name is Vince Desparrois, found none other than Donald Keck sitting in the audience for his talk at the Museum. Vince said he could barely stop his heart from pounding (there's no celebrity like a celebrity in your own field)—but once he'd gotten through his presentation, the normal situation was reversed and he had some questions for a member of the audience instead of the other way around. One thing he asked Donald Keck was what the theoretical limits are for the amount of information that can be transferred through a single optical fiber cable. Dr. Keck replied that given the requisite hardware at both ends—which we're nowhere close to having—the limit is about four zettabytes (ZB) per second.

And what is a zettabyte? Well, the entire amount of information on the Internet right now is estimated to be about 1.3 ZB.

And if that doesn't blow your mind....

Mike
(Thanks to Mike Plews, Vince Desparrois, and CMoG)

Original contents copyright 2016 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:

Wes Cosand:

"Ahh! The unadulterated exhilaration of discovery before you do the first controls.... 'Whopee!!' But in this case the exhilaration withstood the control experiments.

"Here is Donald Keck's lab book from August 7, 1970 on display at the Smithsonian Institution. A recently-minted Ph.D. in physics, he had been hired by Richard Maurer at Corning to work on glass waveguides for possible use in communications. At that time glass had an attenuation of about 1,000 db/km. On August 7 Keck measured the attenuation of some fiber they had doped with titanium dioxide and got a figure of 10log(40/35.5) for a 29 meter piece of fiber or 17 db/km. Within two years they had substituted germanium for titanium and had an attenuation of 4 db. I'm sorry the image is poor. Last figure I can find says 1.6 billion km of optical fiber cable has been installed."

Joe: "My grandmother remembered when her family took her on a trip—I think it was down to North Carolina—to see one of the Wright Brother's flights, when they were getting pretty famous. She told me this shortly after she had watched Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon on TV. Mind boggling indeed."

Bill Tyler: "In my own field, computing, my personal experience spans from the Bendix G-15, a computer designed in the early 1950s that used vacuum tubes, not transistors, and had a the equivalent of a few thousand bytes of memory (stored on a rotating magnetic drum, not core or RAM) up to today's large data centers, with thousands of computers cooperating to run the Internet services we all use. Meanwhile, my shirt pocket holds a computing device more powerful than the supercomputers of not that many years back, and it takes pictures, too."

mike plews (partial comment): "A story about change from a friend. Many years ago his family chipped in and had indoor plumbing installed in his grandfather's house. Grandpa was appalled and said 'you want me to do that INSIDE MY HOUSE!?' He found the whole idea disgusting and refused to use the new 'appliance'—until the dead of Winter when he underwent a sea change regarding the concept."

Jim Metzger: "About 20 years ago I sat in New York city at a small music venue listening to members of the Harmonic Choir performing overtone singing. While the performance was transcendent, it was the technology that was in the forefront that night. For what I believe was the first time, the audio feed from the microphones onstage was being transmitted via fiber optic cable to speakers located in an ancient Abbey in France. What we were hearing was the audio from the Abbey being transmitted back to NYC. At the speed of light. There was no discernible delay and the echo and resonance was astounding."

Scott Campbell (partial comment): "I think that the biggest generation to see technology upheaval was my grandfather's. He went from root-cellar to refrigerator, horse to automobile, steam locomotive to diesel, the first airplane, the moonwalk, indoor plumbing (hence outhouse to indoor loo), wood stove to electric stove, Kerosene lamp to electric light, telegraph to telephone to cell phone (he was still alive when they first came out), radio to TV, the computer, and more. The impact on the quality of life of these changes was truly profound. Truly."

Stephen Scharf: "I've been fortunate (perhaps blessed) as a molecular biologist to have happened to be in the right place and right time as one of the inventors of the technology known as Polymerase Chain Reaction aka PCR. PCR is literally to molecular biology what the development of the transistor was to electronics: a simple and affordable way to literally amplify a specific genetic signal against the background noise of the genome. PCR was conceived by my collegue at the time, Dr. Kary Mullis, who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1993. But, ideation alone is not invention, and I was part of a small but very effective team of scientists at Cetus Corpatation that reduced PCR to practice (required to become 'patentable').

"From the very first few experiments that I did just getting PCR to work (which at the time was very analagous to the Wright Bros.), to seeing it grow literally exponentially into the one most important methodologies of molecular biology of the 20th Century (and now the 21st Century), was truly something to behold. Like going from the Wright Bros. to astronauts on the moon, it was very gratifying to something so important come so very far so very fast.

"PCR is now the molecuar biology engine that powers almost everything in molecular biology: from next-gen sequencing to molecular and cancer diagnostics to infectious disease detection to the determination of human identity in DNA forensic casework, and much, much more.  What an amazing journey it has been."

Jim: "I'm only 70 but...I learned about fiber optics 38 years ago from the guys at Bell Labs who were developing it into telecommunications systems. I founded a company in the business before there were any large-scale installations and sold the company 20 years later during a boom time as the Internet was going crazy. Today, 15 years later, I run the international professional society for fiber optics. I can attest to the astronomical growth of the industry and its impact on today's communications. But I also learned computer programming 54 years ago from IBM on computers that had tubes—before transistors—not integrated circuits, transistors—and I can also attest to the incredible growth in that technology also. However, my grandmother who was born in 1897 and lived 97 years used to brag that she grew up riding horses and lived to fly in jet airplanes."

Marcelo Guarini: "When I was doing my Ph.D., back in 1984, I had to build a few logic gates chips, with a few transistors in each one, as a requirement to pass the Microelectronic Lab class. The lab itself was donated to the University of Arizona by Motorola and was originally used by the company to cook the first Motorola 6800 microprocessors, with a count of approximately 4,100 transistors. At that time the industry was already doing much better than that; Intel had the 80286 and Motorola the 68020, both around 150 thousand to 200 thousand transistors. In 2014 the A8 chip in the iPhone 6 has around two billion transistors, and today the largest chips are surpassing the 10 billion count. The transistor size has shrink from around 2,000 nanometers back in 1984 to 14 nanometers today. Although I have been designing chips along all my career, special purpose chips for research mainly, the story of this short time incredible development is mind-boggling to me."

A Comprehensive Warranty / Repair Database?

Regarding warranties, repairs, and relocation issues with cameras, it would be great if somebody would build a comprehensive database synopsizing all the policies of the various camera- and lensmakers. It would help people make buying decisions based on their own situations and the very real differences between different companies.

That somebody is not going to be me, though, so don't ask! That would be too much like work.  :-)

...And it would be a lot of work; there are huge numbers of variables.

One problem is that corporate policies aren't very transparent. Note that the Nikon Authorized Repair Station manager I talked to yesterday said that he didn't know Nikon's exact policies on servicing gray market merchandise. And if anybody outside of Nikon would know, you'd think he would.

The biggest problem might be something else he said: "things can change at any time." What he meant was that you can buy your equipment when one set of policies is in place, but those policies might change before you need service. (I remember an occasion when I was paging through back issues of the magazine I used to edit, in the warehouse where the old overstock was kept. I came across an advertisement that trumpeted "GUARANTEED FOR LIFE!"—from a company that had long before gone out of business. Their life, I guess was what that old promise meant—not the product's, or yours. Come to think of it, there was a mail-in card in one of those old issues promising a free somethingerother, and the Circulation Department would occasionally receive one of those yellowed old cards in the mail even though the offer had been made fifteen years prior and we had long since run out of whatever the freebie was.)

So even if you collected all the relevant information in one place, it would still only be a snapshot of one moment in time. No guarantee the data would still all be good in one year or three. You'd need to hire someone full time to keep it constantly updated.

The ARS manager noted that very new products—the D500 and the D5 in Nikon's case right now—have to be sent to Nikon for out-of-box problems when the products are very new, because the Authorized Repair Stations don't yet have what they need to service just-introduced cameras. So where you are in any given model's lifespan is another variable.

Different products have different "graphs" for their service needs, too. In the 1990s, a camera repair shop owner told me that 5% of a certain company's point-and-shoots were DOA right out of the box, but that the company had decided that that was an acceptable level. He recommended that customers get the camera store counterman to open the box, put batteries and a roll of film in the camera, and shoot a few shots before they even paid for the camera! He said "if you get one that works, it will probably keep working."

At the other end of the scale, I recall that until fairly recently, Leica had an assurance guarantee called "Passport." The company would repair or replace certain cameras for up to three years even if they were lost, stolen, or damaged in use, situations most warranties exclude. I'm not sure, but I think it might even have been actual camera insurance. I don't know if that program is still active—a search for "passport" and "warranty" on Leica's website just now came up empty. Anyway, when the program was still newish, I believe in the '90s, someone in the industry—I can't remember now who it was—confided to me that most Leica buyers baby their cameras sufficiently that the cameras are still essentially "like new" after three years, but that a certain very small percentage of Leica buyers would use the hell out of their cameras for just short of three years, run them over with a car or beat them to perdition with a sledgehammer, and send in for a new one. Leica apparently decided to tolerate this as an acceptable part of the cost of the program. But I doubt very much that there was ever one single mechanical Leica M that was completely DOA right out of the box.

Anyway I'm sure the repair and warranty issues for a D5300 are different than for a D5.

Companies change, too. For example, when I bought my Konica-Minolta 7D of sainted memory, K-M was still in business. When my 7D needed repair, K-M had exited the field and Sony had taken over its DSLR assets and was handling legacy repairs by replacing the still-warranted K-M products with equivalent Sony models, new. That wasn't what I wanted; I liked my 7D, and just wanted it to work. But nobody could repair it. My broken 7D was essentially unsalvageable, a victim of its maker disappearing out from underneath it. 

The biggest variable, though, is probably that you never know if any of these policies will ever affect you. Many people buy a camera and use it for years without ever having any issues. Other people buy the exact same camera at the same time in the same country and have to return it multiple times for service. They might have long, detailed tales of woe to recount...but what has that got to do with you? No way to predict, really.

With automobiles we call the bad samples "lemons." There's a term for the opposite, but it's not nearly as commonplace and I can't remember what it is. Best car I ever had was a Ford ZX2—the thing ran like a top for 100k miles never needing anything but gas and oil. The big repair was a new tie rod after I hit a particularly nasty pothole. But I talked to other ZX2 owners and some of them were not nearly so lucky. I often wonder how long I would have used that K-M 7D if its electronics hadn't gotten senile. I liked that camera.

Well, you get the point. A data center for warranty and support policies and issues would be very tough to build and maintain (unless maybe it was crowd-sourced? Angie's List for camera repairs and warranty issues? Could work, but who would pay for it?) If you're mainly invested in one company, though, you might want to look into their warranty conditions and do a little research on how warranty problems are handled. It might be less stressful to at least minimize unpleasant surprises down the road.

You could optimize all the variables for your own protection...but if you conclude that life's kinda too short for that I wouldn't necessarily blame you.

Still, I think buying expensive products with full official warranties from authorized dealers is just good sense—whether a local bricks-'n'-mortar authorized dealer or an online authorized dealer like B&H Photo (my personal choice for my own purchases) is up to you. It makes no difference from a personal protection standpoint. It's just sensible to have that "insurance"; It doesn't cost that much more.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2016 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:

Eamon Hickey: "I agree that a database like this would be a helpful service to the photographic world.

"But the idea prompts me to say that in my extremely extensive experience with camera consumers, manufacturers' after-sales service and support is pretty low on the list of factors that influence buying decisions.

"And the somewhat lamentable dilemma for camera manufacturers is that by far the most important factor that influences camera buying decisions is price. It's a dilemma because the two—selling price and after sales service and support—are in direct conflict with each other. Providing exceptional after sales service and support costs much more money, and you have to collect that money by charging a higher initial sales price for your products.

"I'm over-simplifying a bit here, but this is why really good after sales service and support is so hard to find across so much of the consumer landscape. People say they want it, but most are not willing to pay for it, for most of the things they buy."

Mike replies: Hey, you're good. Have you ever considered writing about photography?  ;-)

I attended a lecture by Zeiss that featured a handout listing all the design constraints faced by lens designers, from most to least important. No. 1 with a bullet was the targeted selling price. Everything else has to fit that. (No. 2 was size. Zeiss sometimes doesn't let itself be much constrained by either one!) 

Oren Grad: "The best—or at least longest—warranty ever was offered was for Gitzo tripods by Karl Heitz, their long-time U.S. distributor: 'YOU ARE COVERED BY THE FULL GITZO WARRANTY BUYER PROTECTION FOR LIFE—PLUS REINCARNATIONS.'"

Michael Perini: "As Eamon Hickey pointed out, it costs real money to provide real support, and the increasing average resolution of sensors requires more precision in manufacture, which also costs money.

"Yet some manufacturers do a better job than others. We use both Nikon and Canon equipment in our business. Both produce beautiful results. Both have proven to be durable in hard professional use. But things occasionally break, and when they do the difference is stark. Nikon is slow, does not communicate well, and often do not fix it right the first time. A recent example sent a 70–200mm lens in for major repair. It took over a month, cost $600 (which was fair) but when it came back it didn't work. It couldn't focus. Sent it back, waited another 3–4 weeks. Finally fixed right. If we get a camera or lens to Canon on Tuesday it is back in our hands by Thursday or Friday. Canon offers Professional Courtesy repairs at three levels: free with a certain amount of equipment purchase, and two paid levels (which is basically like insurance, but provides Free FedEx return, Discounts on repairs, loaner equipment, etc.). That is a big deal to us."

robert e: "After reading this whole post, I think something far more useful than a database would be an actuarial table—something that takes into account all these variable risks, rather than simply taking a snapshot of policies (which aren't wholly accurate anyway as predictors of actual service). In fact, a couple of your anecdotes suggest that this is the manufacturers' approach to warranty service anyway, so we'd be fighting apples with apples rather than oranges (feel free to substitute a less mangled metaphor; I just happen to be hungry).

"Eamon Hickey's comment reminds me again that different cameras from the same manufacturer can have different warranty terms. e.g., a 1Dx body gets very different protection than a Rebel. It may be obvious to some, but it's very important for the inexperienced shopper to be aware of. Just because that pro wedding photog buddy-of-a-buddy raves about Canon service doesn't mean you'll get that service for your consumer kit. (Same goes for reliability and toughness, by the way.) That would all be accounted for in the actuarial table."

Moose (partial comment): "Might this all be a tempest in a teapot, at least for most of us? My late brother did some statistical analysis on the Consumer Reports frequency of repair data for cars. He said the the data, while accurate, had no meaning. The rates of failure were so low, that the differences between them weren't significant. He advised ignoring them."

Dennis Huteson: "I note that it's been mentioned that one rarely sees the servicing of a camera as a decision point when buying new gear. Au contraire...I was a Nikon user for 40 years and after two horrendous servicing incidents with a D5300 and Nikon UK I switched to Fuji."

Mark L. Power: "Thinking about the subject of this informative piece I astonished myself by realizing that in a lifetime of owning cameras, film and digital, some new, some antiques, a few regarded as classics but most, including those, in various stages of decrepitude as I have never been particularly kind to equipment (lenscaps were invariably lost within weeks of ownership and never replaced). I have never once had the need of a camera repair. No moral to this story; simply surprise. Now of course I have jinxed myself because my latest machine ( Sony RX10) will show only a black screen the next time I start it up."

Next Book Sale Alert

We're getting close to the announcement of the next book sale. Early orders will receive an extra title for free, and with two of the titles we will fulfill the orders with hardcovers first and softcovers when the hardcovers run out. So there are several good reasons to order early.

Just a heads up if you've been waiting for it. I expect we'll be ready to go in the next few days.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2016 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

TOP's links!

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

No featured comments yet—please check back soon!

More on the Gray Market and Protecting Yourself

In the Comments to the previous post, Arg asked:

"So are you with this article trying to discourage all your overseas readers from using your affiliate links? If I, here in Australia, buy from B&H, it is a grey import, yes?"

No.

Here's the story:

• What actually makes an item gray market is not how you buy it, but how the retailer buys it from the manufacturer. If B&H Photo buys a camera from Canon USA, for instance, it's not gray market no matter who they sell it to or where they ship it to. It's still warranted by Canon USA.

The question then becomes, with a camera or lens you bought from the U.S. and had shipped to Australia or elsewhere, will your local authorized distributor and its warranty service providers honor your U.S. warranty? With so many companies out there, and a variety of  distributors in numerous countries, it's impossible to give a blanket answer. The answer is, they should, but the original retailer can't necessarily guarantee that they will in all possible cases.

With Nikon, the situation is a little clearer, because Nikon is a bit more Draconian about its policies. Nikon prohibits authorized U.S. retailers from selling new digital SLRs and AF lenses outside the USA. So B&H Photo (and other U.S. authorized retailers) may not ship a non-import, U.S.-warranty Nikon or Nikon lens to any address outside the USA in the first place.

• Another question that came up in the Comments is, what happens if you a) move to a different country, or b) come visit the U.S. and buy a camera or lens while you're here, or c) need warranty service while you're on vacation in another country? Again, the theoretical answer is clear: as long as you bought a non-gray-market product in the first place, and can prove it (meaning, you should carry photocopies of your receipts with you*), you should enjoy reciprocity—that is, the manufacturer and its representatives should treat you the same as if you bought your camera or lens in the country that you're visiting, or that you came home to, or that you moved to.

As to whether every single customer will have that sort of seamless friction-free experience is where it gets a tad more dicey. Most will. A few might run into snags and SNAFUs. (And many of the latter will let the Internet know about it loud and clear, potentially exaggerating public perception of risks.)

Canon takes a notably lenient, customer-centric view of warranty repairs.

• Next, as we can glean from the Comments as a whole, different companies are quite different. Looking just at Canon and Nikon as examples, Nikon again seems to take a hard line—it has long been adamant that it will not perform any service, in warranty or out, on a product that was originally bought gray market. You'll send your camera to Nikon USA and if they decide your serial number is not kosher, they'll return the item to you untouched.

This causes a potential problem with equipment bought used. The status of the serial number depends on its original sale. So if you buy a used camera that the original owner bought with a full warranty, Nikon will service it. If you bought a used camera that was originally gray market, they will decline. Unless you bothered to ask the seller which it was—and trust that you got an honest answer—you might not know whether your used camera is eligible for service or not.

Canon USA, by contrast, has a longstanding tendency to lean the other way—it will treat a gray market item pretty much the same as U.S.-warranted item as long as you have a dated store receipt. Same goes for servicing an out-of-warranty product—Canon USA will charge you for parts and labor, but it will perform the servicing for you.

• Lastly, there's this little issue: as was widely reported (for instance at dpreview, nikonrumors, and PetaPixel), in 2012 Nikon stopped supplying parts to independent repair shops that do not become certified as Authorized Repair Stations. Nikon on one side and the repair shops on the other had explanations for this that were naturally at odds, and I won't get into the issues again here (it's a thorny thicket). But the upshot is that once your warranty expires, getting Nikon equipment serviced anywhere other than at a Nikon Authorized Repair Station might be problematic, depending on what needs doing.

Back around to the original point: I recommend staying away from gray market purchases. In my opinion you're better off buying equipment with full warranties from authorized retailers. It's what I do myself.

Mike
(Information provided by B&H Photo Video was used in this post; thanks also to Eamon Hickey)

UPDATE Wednesday evening: Following up on what Eamon wrote in the Comments, I spoke just now to a manager at a Nikon ARS (Authorized Repair Station), who allowed as how gray market issues with Nikon repair is (well, naturally) "a gray area." In-warranty repairs are either done by them or sent along to Nikon, but the customer needs to present a receipt and sometimes the warranty card that comes in the box. When out-of-warranty equipment comes in to them for repair, they don't make any attempt to evaluate whether it was purchased gray market or not—they repair the item for the customer if they can, and (because they are an ARS) Nikon supplies any part they order. However, he said there are some situations where the item, for any of a variety of possible reasons, can't be repaired by them and has to be sent back to Nikon. He emphasized that he does not know Nikon's policy and that he does not speak for Nikon, so he can't speak to exactly what standards Nikon applies or why, but he did say that sometimes things are sent along to Nikon and are returned without anything being done, presumably because Nikon determines that the item was originally purchased as gray market.

So to the question as to whether out-of-warranty repairs on gray-market products can be done, the answer is "sometimes." —Mike

*Which you should do anyway to avoid possible problems with Customs.

Original contents copyright 2016 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:

Darlene: "The thought of buying used Nikon gear now frightens me. Lighten up Nikon!"

Mike replies: As Eamon noted, these policies go back a long way. Nothing's really changed.

Eamon Hickey (partial comment): "Just in the interests of trying to paint a full picture: Nikon USA's gray market policies are not driven by the Japanese—i.e. Nikon Japan, or Nikon Corp, as it is officially known. I don't know for sure that the policies go back to Joe Ehrenreich himself [the original importer of Nikon in the U.S. —Ed.], but I do know for a 100% certainty that they were created by Ehrenreich's people. When I joined Nikon USA in 1989, every senior executive in the company was still an inherited Ehrenreich executive, and the policies were already old by then.

"Nikon's Japanese parent company was not a big fan of Nikon USA's gray market stance when I was at Nikon USA. The gray market itself was a significant point of contention and conflict between the two entities. Why doesn't Nikon Japan just order Nikon USA to change its policy? They could. But one of the major functions of a regional subsidiary is to handle region-specific decision-making. So there's always a give-and-take—more so when the parent is a Japanese company that does not like to give explicit orders that it knows will anger the subsidiary and may hurt it financially.

"All that said (and now I'm stepping into opinion territory), both branches of Nikon have, together, inadvertently danced themselves into a very customer-unfriendly corner. It's stupid, and they should find another solution. That they have not, even after 40 years, is a significant black mark against them both. But they are not really alone—thousands of companies in hundreds of industries have big problems handling gray market issues in a smart and customer-friendly way. If this were a blog about cars, or luxury watches, or even tractors (yes, tractors!), it would have similar gray market discussions from time to time."

Why Buying Gray Market Cameras Is Like Driving Drunk

It's really not a good idea to buy gray market (grey is the British and Canadian spelling)—i.e., unofficially imported—cameras. You can sometimes "save" a few dozen to a few hundred dollars by buying the "International" or "Import" version. But you're not really saving—you're just getting less. Part of what you're buying when you buy a camera is the support structure behind it, provided by the authorized importer and accessed by you through the authorized dealer—warranty repairs and replacements mainly, but other kinds of support too. And often, out-of-warranty repairs as well. There's a cost to maintaining those services which the official importer builds into the initial cost of the equipment.

You might think you could just take a malfunctioning body to an independent repair shop if it breaks. That used to be truer than it is today. When cameras were all or mostly mechanical, repair wizards could work wonders right in their shops. Now that cameras are more like computers or consumer electronics devices, the shops often have to send them back to the manufacturer anyway—and the manufacturer might refuse to service yours if you have a gray market serial number.

Gray market lenses are a somewhat safer bet than gray market camera bodies, because there's less that can go wrong (and QC has gotten so good). This is reflected in the fact that B&H Photo does sell "import" (gray market) versions of lenses (with store warranty) but does not sell "import" camera bodies.

As far as store warranties are concerned, generally the bigger the store the safer you are. B&H Photo is large enough that they can afford to replace a defective lens as a store warranty. And they will...which is an important point! If you buy the same gray market lens at a tiny fly-by-night discounter that upsells you a "store warranty," it might be effectively useless despite the store's promises. You'll never know unless you need it that what that extra $160 (or whatever) bought for you was the right to be told, "that's not covered under the store warranty." Buyer beware.

Many "new" products on eBay are gray market. If the seller assures you they're Authorized Dealers, don't take their word for it. Check with the manufacturer.

Generally, the steeper the discount, the more cautious you should be. Here's what can happen as a worst case: You buy an expensive camera for $2,000 that normally sells for $2,600. You send the store a check or money order because "they can't give you that price if you pay with a credit card." (This is to prevent you from appealing to Visa or Mastercard for a refund.) After they have your money, they call you and inform you that the product you're buying is an inferior version with poorer-quality parts and construction. (This is always a lie, by the way. The camera companies don't make inferior versions of any of their products.) The store offers to sell you the "real" camera for $600 more. If you refuse, suddenly you find you can't get your $2,000 back. At least not easily. Eventually you'll probably succeed in extracting your imperiled cash from danger—they're not outright highwaymen, after all—but they try to make you anxious enough about it that you'll just give in and pay the extra amount just so you won't lose the money you've already spent.

And at that point, you've bought a camera without a manufacturer's warranty from a vendor you now know you can't trust for the same price you would have paid for the same camera with a warranty. Congratulations, Mr. or Ms. Smart Shopper.

I've written for photo magazines and on the Web since 1988. I haven't seen it all. But I've seen a lot. My advice is, make sure you're buying from an Authorized Dealer (again, contact the manufacturer if you're unsure), and make sure the product you're buying has an official warranty that covers the country you live in.

Doing anything else is like the decision to drive drunk in one way: even if you get away with it and come out unscathed—even more than once—it still doesn't mean what you did was wise or safe.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2016 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

TOP's links!

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

Michael: "Having lost a good friend to a drunk driver, I can assure you that buying gray market cameras is nothing like driving drunk. I thoroughly enjoy this blog but I just can't let this poorly chosen analogy go by without expressing my disagreement."

Mike replies: Very sorry to hear of your friend, and sorry to have brought that up for you. Really the only parallel I was trying to make is that "getting away with it" doesn't make anything a good idea—an argument I have had numerous times with people who boast about driving drunk. That it is never okay is always my point. One guy I used to work with would say, "I do it all the time and I've never had a problem with it," which drove me crazy....

Stephen Gilbert: "Bought a pretty expensive camera from B&H. There was a problem with the viewfinder, so I called them (B&H has people answering phone calls!) to explain the problem. They emailed me a return UPS label, I sent the camera back, and got a credit posted to my VISA card as soon at it arrived in NY. What's that worth?"

Robert Hudyma: "In my long-gone grandiose days as a Fortune 500 executive one of our deal-making merchant bankers proffered the following advice: 'If you pay peanuts you get monkeys.' Sounds like that advice works for cameras too."

Dan MacDonald: "I work at an independent repair shop and thought I could add a on a bit here. A surprising amount of digital camera problems can be solved without parts. We find a good two-thirds of DSLR problems are caused by a bad connection between circuits rather than failed components. Cleaning these and fixing the problem requires no software or reprogramming, and if you have a reputable local repair shop you will likely get your equipment back faster than sending it in.

"I will also back up what Mike is saying here overall. The initial discount may seem hard to pass up, but all too often we have seen customers with equipment that we cannot repair (usually due to parts unavailability, an increasing problem) and the manufacturers won't fix it due to it being gray market. Also, not only is the warranty on gray market items dubious to non-existent, but out-of-warranty service down the road will also be refused by the camera makers' repair facilities. On higher-end equipment, servicing it if/when it has a problem can greatly extend its useable life, and with gray market that's often no longer an option. Having to pitch a $1,500 lens you paid $1,200 for gray market because it needs a minor $100–$200 service will erode a lot of that initial feel-good on saving a few hundred bucks on the initial purchase."

Bruno: "I have bought several new 'official' lenses, secondhand lenses, and also one single grey market lens. All of the same Japanese brand. Would you like to guess which one breaks all the time (oil spills on the aperture blades and they stick)? The first time I sent it back to the dealer because it was still under warranty and they took almost six months to repair it. The second time it was out of warranty and I brought it to the manufacturer. They repaired it in a couple of weeks for a reasonable price. It seems that I didn't get away with it."

Len Salem: "One point I have yet to see mentioned (unless I missed it) is that an authorised dealer purchased item retains a better resale value. Here in UK there are several dealers who will only buy your camera, or take it in part-exchange, if you can prove purchase source from an authorised dealer with an authentic invoice/receipt from them. I find that the prices these dealers offer for your equipment to be very close to what you would be left with from an eBay sale after the eBay/Paypal selling costs, without the uncertainty of an eBay sale. This is a really important reason for buying from an authorised dealer, at a somewhat higher price initially, as many of us want to at some stage sell what we have and buy something different.

"As with car owning, it is not only the initial price which is important, but the resale value as well."

Thom Hogan: "With Nikon, in particular, one issue with gray market is whether parts, training, and testing equipment is available to third parties. For the most recent cameras, it's not generally available, though it does tend to come available over time. And this applies to lenses: simple primes generally aren't going to be a problem. It's VR and E apertures, and the very most modern additions that will be the problem with lenses: Nikon doesn't make those parts, training, or test rigs available generally."

[Thom, of ByThom.com, is the leading independent Nikon expert on the Internet. —Ed.]

OG: "B&H does sell imported cameras, albeit selectively."

wts (partial comment): "Back in the early days of personal computers before IBM changed that world, I worked for a company that couldn't get authorized for the prominent brand that everyone wanted. We got gray market PC's from authorized dealers who couldn't make their quotas. They helped us with warranty problems, parts, etc. until they got investigated by the manufacturer. Then we had problems servicing our customers until we could dig up other sources since there were certain essential non-standard parts we couldn't get elsewhere. That's why I never bought gray market anything for myself since—I know what even conscientious non-authorized resellers go through."

Best Cameras

Rounding up a few significant recent releases:

Nikon D500
The Nikon D500 is a milestone. The biggie camera companies' commitment to the smaller sensor has been less than inspiring overall—as is often noted, neither Canon nor Nikon have ever bothered to build even adequate offerings of APS-C-specific prime lenses, and, after a desultory hodgepodge of offerings, Sony backed away from providing a full lens lineup for its former NEX cameras. ("Get an adapter, sonnyboy"?) The central signal of this lack of interest was that after first committing to APS-C for its pro offerings, Nikon reversed itself and went to FF ("full-frame," 35mm size...which used to be called "miniature" when it was a film format, but never mind). The 300S was its last pro-level APS-C camera, and that came out almost seven years ago now. Users waited, and waited. The professional-grade APS-C DSLR became Nikon's lost child, wandering in the wilderness.

The D500 is the Prodigal Son coming home again. It can of course be used as a main camera for general shooting, but as a $2,000 body with no IBIS its main brief for actual professionals is to serve as a specialty camera for sports-and-action photography and for those who shoot telephotos and need the reach—bird photographers for instance should love the D500. It has a high frame rate, very fast AF using an array of focus points the width of the entire frame, and an AF-point selection joystick. And with an XQD card (that stands for eXtra Quick Damn card...no it doesn't, but that's how I manage to remember it) it can gobble captures impressively before pausing to burp.

It will also have a very good viewfinder. Why is that important? Because most APS-C DSLRs for amateurs don't. And it's nice to have that option.

The D500 is worthy of the great 17–55mm ƒ/2.8.

D300s fans who have been wandering in the desert for 40 digital years are back to the land of milk and honey.

Pentax K-1
One downside of the new Nikon D500? It's no smaller, and only slightly (150g) lighter, than the Pentax K-1, the long-awaited, do-everything FF body from Ricoh. (That is, without the battery grip shown here.)

Maybe I've been in this business too long, but the K-1 puts me in mind, a little, of the Minolta Maxxum 9, Minolta's 1998 swan song pro body. That Maxxum (called Dynax overseas) addressed longstanding gadfly complaints that Minolta didn't have a professional body (although it had tried back in '93 with the 9xi, a different camera than the 9). So Minolta finally gave in and produced one, and it was terrific...but it didn't have a pro system around it, its competitors were already well entrenched, and the market was shriveling because digital was on the way. So it kind of fizzled. Cut to 2016, and Pentax has endured longstanding gadfly complaints about its lack of a full-frame body. But its competitors are already well entrenched, and the market is, if not shriveling, at least contracting...

...And the all-new K-1 also looks to be terrific. In this day and age when multinational giants are competing fiercely with traditional cameramaking companies, Pentax is perhaps the only marque that is both: a fine old name (Pentax was the top consumer SLR in the 1960s) with the resources of a multinational giant, Ricoh, standing behind it. Can the K-1 compete, or is it too little, too late? Helping it along is a very nice price indeed for a camera packed with this much technology, especially at introduction—less than $1,800. I'll see one on my next visit to B&H Photo in New York City, in the meantime we'll hope it meets a better fate than the old Maxxum 9. But then this is manna from heaven for long-suffering Pentax fans, and Pentax fans are among the most loyal of all. The K-1 is currently back-ordered.

The very best thing about the K-1? Back to native angle of view for the wonderful Pentax Limited 31mm, 43mm, and 77mm lenses*.

Fuji X-Pro2
It's kinda funny that everybody has migrated to FF just as APS-C gets surpassingly good. The story of Fujifilm has been one of the great success stories of the past ten years, growing from next to nothing. What was Fuji in 2006 but a maker of a modified Nikon with a funky sensor (the S3) and a bunch of point-and-shoots like the cute little Z1? The X100 created a bonafide international sensation in late 2010 when it first appeared, and speculation that was half rumor and half hopeful fantasy flew in all directions about an interchangeable-lens version. Fujifilm very promptly fulfilled expectations with the X-Pro1, which, when it came out in early 2012, was one of the most hotly discussed and widely desired cameras of the whole digital era.

Did Fujifilm then either rest on its laurels or reinvent its own camera? It did not. Thanks to David Hobby we got an inside look at how Fujifilm went about exhaustively refining every aspect of the older camera to make it better in every way—while not changing its basic character, shape, operation, advantages, or "gestalt."

They fixed the battery slot; diopter correction is now built-in; there's a joystick for focus-point placement (double press it and focus resets to the center of the frame); there are two card slots (one UHS-II, if that matters to you); and about the only way that speed has not improved is in startup time...which is faster, just not enough to be really noticeable.

The unique viewfinder, denied even to Leica, was the original camera's most distinctive feature. But it's strongest point was its image quality. That has been significantly improved, and is the leading edge of the wedge as the Fujifilm X-Pro2 garners glowing praise from all over the world.

A unique camera that used to be good and is now superlative. Buy it with the new XF 35mm ƒ/2 normal, a lens that was made for it.

Sony A6300
I like refinement: it's a sound idea. Take a good design and make it better by getting feedback, improving weaknesses, and building on strengths.

Sony's A6300 is the furthest development yet of its NEX concept, which began in 2010 with the NEX-5 and NEX-3, Sony's first "mirrorless" cameras (although it took a while for the world to settle on that term). In 2010 it was a formidable combination of a super-tiny camera and a sensor as large as most DSLRs had at the time. All that is not quite as special any more as it was then, and Sony's interests have moved on to greener (think FF, and "green" as in $$) pastures, but meanwhile the concept has benefited from six years of steady refinement and steady improvement over multiple models. The current iteration isn't so wee, because really, it's better to size a camera to fit the hands of humans. But it's been refined into a highly usable and very user-friendly camera.

The A6000 was evidently a huge bestseller, surprising even Sony. It just seemed to hit that magic sweet spot of high performance, small size and convenience, and low cost. The A6300 is a "no, we meant this" type of refinement—"better" in numerous small ways, including, notably, construction quality. (Cynics might say it's a way to come in on top of the A6000 in price-point for customers who are less price-sensitive, but we're not cynics.) It does have a claim to fame: fastest autofocus in the world. Asterisk, among ILC's with APS-C sensors. But still, super-quick.

The A6000 is still in the lineup, and continues to be the better choice for those conserving precious shekels. Fast, light, cheap, and not too hard to learn to use, I'd say it's the number one recommendation for parents taking pictures of kids.

Lenses? It doesn't make a huge amount of sense, because it's too big and too costly, but if for the dedicated enthusiast, the Zeiss 24mm ƒ/1.8, a lens I owned and still miss, remains a particular recommendation. It would be a shame to own an A6300 without also owning the Zeiss 24mm. I'd say it's worth shooting Sony's ex-NEX cam just to use that beautiful lens....

-

[To be continued next Monday...]

Mike

*There's no way for me to segregate the named lenses from the other Limited lenses at the link. Check FF coverage compatibility for the lenses you're interested in.

Original contents copyright 2016 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

TOP's links!

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

Michael Murphy (partial comment): "For the best lens for the Nikon D500, get the Sigma 17–50mm ƒ/2.8 OS instead of the much more expensive Nikon. DxO rated the Sigma as the sharpest standard zoom on the D7100. I have both the Nikon and Canon versions. [...] Now I just wish I could find an equally low priced, good quality 70–200mm ƒ/2.8 or equivalent to match! Even Thom Hogan recommend the Sigma over the Nikon, when the Sigma cost $600+. At $419 it is a steal."

Richard: "Speaking of miniature cameras, did you know that the Manhattan Miniature Camera Club is still in existence? You should pay them a visit the next time you're in town, it might be worth a story." 

Mike adds: From the Club's welcome page:

"Why 'miniature?' When our Club was founded, back in 1933, 'miniature,' or 35mm, photography was new and exciting. In fact, the Leica, the first successful 35mm camera, had been introduced only eight years earlier. The term 'miniature,' meaning the smallest standard format, was much used until the 1950s, and though the word no longer applies to 35mm cameras, we proudly keep it in the official name of our Club, both because it indicates that it is one of the oldest clubs in the metropolitan area and because it is the name by which the Club is widely known."

Jim R: "While it's not a flood, the number of people 'dabbling' in the K-1 is quite impressive. Source data = new member welcome page at pentaxforums, a USA user site. I never thought I'd see such a thing—multiple users of other brands coming to Pentax each day...and not just lurking!"

Open Mike: Theory of Dogs

Dogs: I have a theory about dogs; see what you think. "Dogs make life better." That's all of it. Make sense to you? I seldom mind caring for my dogs—they give back to me more than I ever give them.

Cars: I have a couple of money questions this week. A flyer from Road & Track landed in my inbox, touting an article entitled, "The 13 Best Cars Under $100,000." The subtitle was, "Over the last few years, $100,000 has become an increasingly interesting price point." My immediate thought was, "yeah, for houses." Maybe I was a photographer for too long.

I was going to throw a question out there and ask what's the most you'd ever spend on a car, but then I thought that might be a little...intrusive. It's not anybody's business what you earn. Although by driving it around, people do kind of advertise how much money they've spent on at least one car. (I have a photograph of a Rolls-Royce sporting a bumper sticker that reads, "My Other Car Is a Rolls-Royce!")

Still, I was a bit shocked by R&T's airy attitude toward such a large heap of dough. I am nearing late middle age now, and I've spent north of $20k on a car not once, not twice, but three times in my entire life. None of these three profligate rides broke the $25k barrier, but I consider myself a spendthrift on that account if not a wastrel. A veritable squanderer, Terwilliger.

Cameras: Put the question back on topic. Assuming you would buy a new camera in the next three years, what's the most you'd spend? I think for me the number is around $1,200. I've spent more in the past, but generally I don't feel I got rewarded for it. I'm still getting my money's worth out of my Fuji, though, so no new camera for me.

If you ask me, the 13 best cars under $100,000 are all under $40,000.

Books: The best book I ever read on money was The Millionaire Next Door. It might be out of date now, but I found it fascinating. (And according to the authors, most authentically rich Americans buy used cars.)

A couple of photographic readings: I've been immersed in Photography and the Art of Chance by Robin Kelsey, which I've been loving, probably because I agree with so much of it. And I've been enjoying a quirky but surprisingly good historical book, When I Was a Photographer by Nadar (Gaspard-Félix Tournachon, 1820–1910). I was going to recommend it by writing a profile of Nadar, but Roger Cicala already outdid us all on that score.

Both those books were recommended to me by TOP readers.

Still recommended: Hold Still: A Memoir With Photographs by Sally Mann. Sally can write.

Back to dogs: Here's my favorite-ever photograph of Lulu, taken the day we got her when she was six months old:

She's just about to turn 10. To give you an idea how much old age has set in: she can no longer hear me at all when I yell "Lulu, come." Acts as if there has been no sound at all. And once she does get the idea she needs to come to me, she ambles my way with painful slowness.

Strangely, however, she still comes bounding immediately when I yell "Lulu, treat."

Selective hearing like that has to be a mark of old age!

Mike

"Open Mike" is the Editorial page of TOP. It appears on Sundays, but not every week.

Original contents copyright 2016 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:

Fred: "I have nothing but used cars on my 'if I hit the lottery' list. 1934 Bugatti, 1957 Chevy, 1963 Corvette Split Window Coupe, 1981 DeLorean DMC-12...."

Manuel: "Mike, you should have cloned Lulu's leash out.  ;-)  Seriously now, I just loved Roger Cicala's article on Nadar. Thanks for linking to it."

Bill Duncan: "I agree about dogs, have three now. As a bonus, they are always willing to be photographed which is not always the case with our two-legged friends.. (Not always 'easy' to photograph however.) Cars...I just bought my fourth Miata. I've had a '90, '95, '03 and now, I love the new 2016! All well below the $100k mark, but a joy to drive (if you like driving)."

Mike replies: After last Friday driving my old '01 with Larry I am seriously jonesing for a Miata again...there's a "Splash Green" '03 for sale only 43 miles from here that I am not going to go look at...I am not...I am not....

Andy Kochanowski (partial comment): "Money and cars, yes a subject near and dear. First of course, having a cars itch makes cameras seem inexpensive. It's all relative, of course, because boat people laugh at car people, and airplane people laugh at boat people, except really rich boat people who laugh right back. But back to cars...."

[For the full text of partial comments, please see the Comments Section. —Ed.]

Trecen: "If the boat-like 13-year-old sedan I'm currently driving dies, I'll probably buy the cheapest coupe GM makes, if they still make those. I really liked the Pontiac Sunfire, but that whole brand is gone now. I'll be careful to never buy a Miata; my car curse has spelled the doom of AMC, the classic Beetle, Datsun, Saturn, and Pontiac. Seriously, after riding in, liking, and attempting to buy or buying each of these marques, within 24 months they disappear."

Mike replies: Please buy a Harley, willya? If they make those damn things any louder I'm going to have to move to Antarctica.

Jim: "In 60 years of driving I have had 35 cars, mostly sport cars, and six motor bikes. The most expensive was a van which I bought 17 years ago as a camper and tow vehicle. Paid $27,000 for it but plan to have it for another 17 years at least. When that Miata Targa comes out next year it could bust the limit as it will be hard to wait a few years for a used one.

"The most spent on a camera was over 2000 for a Nikon D750 which I bought new. It was worth it. Have many medium and large format film cameras which were all bought used. All are in good working order but don't use film much anymore.

"The Millionaire Next Door is one of the best money books. Should be required in schools."

Jim [a different Jim —Ed.]: "In the 54 years I have had a driving license, I have owned exactly 50 cars, costing from $0 (several given to me) to $53,000 (BMW M3). Most I have owned at one time: four, including two Alfa Romeo racecars, a Miata for the street and an SUV for towing the racecars.

"When it comes to cameras, the ~$1,800 I spent for Nikon D100/200/300s was no more than the $250 I paid for a used Leica M2 50 years ago, adjusted for inflation. Now I prefer to wait a year and buy Olympus Micro 4/3 at half the original asking price."

Thomas Paul McCann: "Strange, do no TOP readers drive 'expensive' cars or are they too reticent to admit to it?"

Mike replies: What, you don't think the two Jims qualify as guys who've spent a lot of money on cars, with 85 cars (and six motorcycles) between the two of them?

Bob Rosinsky: "Given the choice, I'd opt for a super nice dog (mixed breed) over a $100k auto."

Old and New Friends

Larry G. with my old friend

TOP reader Larry Gebhardt (not Gephardt like the former Majority leader), a software programmer from New Hampshire, came by to visit today. I'd never met him before but I knew who he is—he's the guy who bought my well-used and much-loved '01 Miata roadster two years ago. His father lives in nearby Rochester and his eldest child is a student at the U. of R., so he'd been visiting. He was driving from Rochester back home and stopped here for lunch.

Larry has revitalized his interest in printing recently. He had an Epson 3800 that had been broken for five years, so he bought a new P800. Then he figured out how to fix the 3800, so he got that working again and dedicated it to black-and-white. Then he was having so much fun with the P800 that he shopped online till he found an older large-format 7000-series Epson printer for not much money. He says he never frames and hangs large prints, but he likes to look at them. So within a short space of time he went from having no working printers to having three.

He's making good use of them. He showed me some great prints. Hopefully he'll send me a few JPEGs in a few days so I can share the images with you. The images I liked best are Reichmann-esque.

Meanwhile, how would you like to be able to drive, one more time, your favorite car from the past that you no longer own? We drove to Bully Hill Vineyards, high above Keuka Lake, for lunch, and I got to reacquaint with my formerly-beloved '01 Mazda. What a blast!

Three observations: flower pictures are much better in prints than as online JPEGs (Larry had brought a few flower pictures along because his stepmother loves them); the answer to every automotive question really is "Miata"; and, as I'm frequently reminded, all TOP readers truly are well above average.

If you're ever in the area, please do stop by.

Mike
(Thanks to Larry)

UPDATE Monday morning: Here are a couple of Larry's images he showed me:

It's surprising to me just how much better the prints looked than the JPEGs here...it's one of the few times recently when I saw the prints first and the JPEGs later. These pictures look a little nondescript as small JPEGs, but the prints were luscious, luminous, and lovely. —Mike

Original contents copyright 2016 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:

Graham Byrnes: "Actually, the photo question is: given he already had a P800, which by all accounts does a very nice B&W, how much did he gain by having a dedicated B&W printer? Or was he just yielding to that particular disease of 'it must be better because it's fiddly and difficult and I invested 1,000 hours getting to work'?

"On the other hand, I admire his straightforward justification: '...he likes looking at them.' More people should be so simple about their photography."

Larry Gebhardt replies: "Graham, I got the P800 because the 3880 died and Epson was having their good year end rebates. But I have a hard time throwing away things that probably can be fixed. So I decided to try to fix the 3880, figuring if I succeeded it would only cost me $140 (what the ink assembly cost shipped from China) and I had at least $300 in ink left in the printer. Once I fixed it I set about printing a large backlog of pictures. I think in two months I probably printed more with it than in the previous two years. Once the ink was mostly gone it didn't make sense to keep feeding two 17" color printers, so I decided to try out the Piezography system since I do print a lot of black and white. I didn't know what to expect, but its turned out to be excellent, and not too fiddly. As to how much I gained, I admit it's minimal compared to using QuadTone RIP for black and white printing. Slightly smoother highlights, gloss overcoat eliminates bronzing and gloss differential on glossy papers. You lose the ability to vary the tone since the ink is fixed. Piezography ink might be cheaper, but not enough to worry about.

"The 7900 was bought because it was cheap (broken orange head), had mostly full inks, and was local. It was supposed to be just for larger black and white, but turns out it works with the 7890 driver for color too. Too bad I didn't really think through the framing and hanging of large prints through. I have a little wall space for a few 16x20s, but the larger prints live in a box for now. Someday I'll make room on the walls for a few of them. Still it's very satisfying to finally see larger prints from large format film."

Michael Reichmann R.I.P.

I'm extremely sorry to have to pass along the news of the death of a friend of us all.

Michael Reichmann, known all across the sprawling Internet photography community simply as "MR," has passed away after a long battle with cancer. Michael was the founder of The Luminous-Landscape, an influential enthusiast website that played a big part in reporting on, and influencing, the rise of digital photography during the digital transition.

A fine photographer in his own right both before and after his enthusiastic embrace of digital imaging, Michael's photographic interests were aptly reflected in the name of his site. Although he photographed other things, his primary passion was for beautiful and, indeed, luminous landscapes. He traveled the world looking for them.

I first met Michael in the 1990s when the energetic and enthusiastic Canadian and his soft-spoken English friend Chris Sanderson, an experienced professional videographer and filmmaker, came to Niles, Illinois, in the Chicago exurbs, to pitch an idea to myself and the Publisher of Photo Techniques magazine. Michael and Chris had in mind a video photography magazine delivered on DVD, and they wanted to pair up with PT to get their product on the newsstands. I thought it was manna from heaven for us, but the Publisher and his Director of Marketing Services turned Michael and Chris down. The idea later became The Video Journal, which was sold for a number of years by mail-order subscription. Michael did write a number of articles for me at PT, and he became one of our earliest digital print offer artists—we sold prints Michael had made with the 3-megapixel Canon D30. Those were the days when "uprezzing apps" were hotly discussed! The sale did very well, not because of the techniques involved but because of Michael's lyrical photographs.

When I left Photo Techniques, I wanted to keep writing about photography, and Michael and I switched places—I became the writer and he became my editor for many weekly columns on The Luminous-Landscape. The column was eventually called "The Sunday Morning Photographer." Although I only met him in person that one times in Niles, he and I spoke often by phone during that time, covering business and of course all manner of topics photographic.

MR interviewing Ctein in 2013

Just as my SMP column eventually morphed into The Online Photographer, so did The Video Journal eventually give way to both free and subscription videos on Michael's L-L site. But that was the tip of the iceberg in terms of Michael's protean activities in the field he so loved. He did many interviews (one of my favorites featured jazz great Oscar Peterson), guided travel workshops and photography trips, published many different writers, and of course reviewed hundreds of cameras.

Several years ago, knowing he had cancer, he founded The Luminous Endowment to help photographers of all kinds fund their projects and further their work.

Michael earned for himself a place in the history of photography with his early championing of digital and his longtime influence on the public discussion. His loss is truly a hard one for the photography community. Deep condolences to MR's family and loved ones.

This is often said but seldom so true: he will be missed. Michael had many friends, even among people he never met. He was 71.

Mike
(Thanks to David Smigelskis)

Original contents copyright 2016 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

TOP's links!

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

Steve Rosenblum: "I am deeply saddened to hear this. I carried on an intermittent email conversation with Michael through the years, have read L-L since its inception, and had the pleasure of publishing an article on his site as part of the Sunday Morning Photographer column in 2004. I always admired his ability to turn his passion into something that the rest of us could learn from and enjoy—and that will continue after his death. Not such an easy thing to do. I few of his photographs hang in my home. I will miss him."

Michael Cytrynowicz: "Oh no! I am so sad. Always a reader of his, learned so much with him along the years, always enjoying his gentle canuckness, especially across the literally dozens of videos I watched with him and Jeff Schewe, Ctein, Ken Raber and many others. When they decided to open up all LuLa contents for $1 a month, I was exhilarated—what a cool, generous move. That was how Michael was. And I enjoyed as well his musings about re-discovering film. Will be sorely missed—my condolences to his wife and family—he was a real mensch."

Al Jaugelis: "I've appreciated his articles and opinions, but much, much more, his photographs. Many of them stop me and hold my gaze. Masterfully composed, color that takes my breath away. I never knew him apart from the LuLa site, but truly feel we have lost a very special man, and a great photographer. One who still inspires me."

Michel Filion: "I am so grateful that I once wrote Mr. Reichmann to tell him how beautiful his photos were! He was very touched with my email and thanked me for it. I am leaving for Iceland Tuesday and will think about him everytime I see a luminous landscape. Thank you, Sir."

Response from Kevin Raber: Everyone, thank you so much. Your comments mean the world to Michael's family and me. Michael was just about the best friend one could have and I am proud and honored to be carrying on the tradition of Luminous-Landscape. Both of us share the same passions and while I may never be crafty with words as Michael was I will speak my piece. It's my hope and dream that we continue Luminous-Landscape to be better than ever and serve as a great resource for photographers around the world.

—Kevin Raber, Publisher, Luminous-Landscape

A Different Afghan Girl

Well, it was fun to make that little academic excursion into terminology yesterday, although today I have a bit of a hangover from it. I like words and write reasonably well, but I have no gift for names and naming.

I concede I didn't think of the problem with "correction" implying that a mistake had been made in the first place—one that needed "correcting"—which might make you look bad to clients. Acknowledging that none of these terms are going to catch on in any event, I think as a result I would prefer the word "finishing" instead of "correction." FER?

  Sir John Herschel drawn by Margaret Louisa Herschel, his daughter,
possibly with the aid of a camera obscura

And here's a fascinating twist. The king of the name-givers in our field was Sir John Herschel, who probably wouldn't be pleased to know that he is now mostly remembered in Julia Margaret Cameron's photograph of him in old age, in costume (left). He made protean contributions to the invention of photography, including the discovery of fixer and the words "positive," "negative," and "snapshot" (a term imported from hunting, as when a bird is flushed and the hunter makes a quick reactive shot). His greatest contribution to the lexicography, of course, was the word "photography," which, quoting Wikipedia, was "created from the Greek roots φωτός (phōtos), genitive of φῶς (phōs), 'light,' and γραφή (graphé) 'representation by means of lines' or 'drawing,' together meaning 'drawing with light.'"

So instead of "reworking" (a word which Ctein supplied to CER, incidentally), shouldn't that be redrawing? (Or rewriting, if you prefer the translation "writing with light" for photos and graphe.

Because no matter how you feel about reworking or modifying or retouching or "photoshopping" a digital image file, all I know is that if you replace 40% of the honest pixels with different ones, the result was no longer "drawn with light." Not entirely. It was drawn by light and the retoucher. And, since there's no way to tell which was which, the viewer coming to it cold can no longer take anything in the picture as honest.

...But we're back in my personal value system, which (of course!) you are under no compulsion to adopt for yourself unless you want to. In any event, my advice to younger and beginning photographers regarding reworking or "photoshopping" is the same as photographer Frank DiPerna's advice on cropping. Frank once said, "I absolutely never, ever crop...except when I want to." Which is part good joke and part deep truth. I think it's generally good advice for reworking as well. My guiding principle is: I absolutely never, ever rework a photo...except when I want to. In other words, when it's really necessary and there's a very good reason to do it, then go ahead, but apply sparingly and use it a crutch. Of course your photography belongs to you, and you should do any tomfool thing you want to.

As the great photojournalist Bruce Haley said to me in a private e-mail (I received his permission to quote him here, but bear in mind he wasn't speaking for public consumption):

If I spell out my personal "rules" of photography then I risk sounding like a sanctimonious pr*ck. However, it's more just a matter of simplicity, of avoiding "tangled web" territory...I have always just used the KISS principle for my photography: I either got it or I didn't...if I got it, I might use/release it; if I didn't get it, it gets tossed in the rubbish bin, never to be seen by anyone else. I don't crop—I either got it right at the moment of the shutter's release or I didn't. If there is a pole or a tree growing out of someone's head, the image gets tossed. If my shadow is in the frame, it gets tossed. If someone is looking at me and smiling (like the now-vanished fellow on McCurry's rickshaw image), that photo gets tossed. Really simple: I "fix" things like that during my edit, by throwing the image out....

This is just how I want to work—I have absolutely no desire to set expectations or guidelines for others.

This is the same sentiment, phrased differently, as my long-held idea that a photograph is either a "yes" or a "no." If it doesn't work 100% for you, then it didn't work; and if it didn't work then it didn't work. It doesn't matter if it came close, or how much you wished it had worked, or how hard you worked to get it, or if you were just positive there was a great photograph somewhere in the vicinity when you shot it. (We all get our heads turned by those things occasionally, I think.) It just either works, and it's a yes, or it's a no. An addiction to reworking/retouching/"photoshopping," to me (we're still in my personal value system, remember), is like an addiction to plastic surgery: the more you try to correct, the more of an unnatural mess you make, until you've created a grotesque. Or perhaps I should choose words that are a little less loaded (!) and simply say that you're no longer drawing with light, so what you've got no longer quite fits John Herschel's fine old 19th-century word.

Bruce Haley's unretouched, unphotoshopped photograph of a wounded Afghan girl in a Médecins Sans Frontières clinic in Pakistan in 1986. Bruce took three photographs and then sat with her for a while until the doctors could see her. A photograph like this one either works or it doesn't, and its
connection to the real is where its power lies.

Of course, the meaning and uses of photography and its culture will change. New ways of understanding it and using it will emerge in the wake of new technologies and peoples' changed experiences, assumptions, and expectations. Our children won't have the same conceptual framework in place that we had. We're all taught to deal with a world that has already changed by the time we're living in it.

At least it's always interesting to watch those changes happen.

Mike
(Thanks to Bruce)

P.S. I still have more than 60 comments to add to yesterday's post, so please come back soon to check some of those out.

Original contents copyright 2016 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:

Len Kowitz: "Mike, I understand where you're going with this thought and I think you're on the right track but why bother? You reminded me of an exhibition I saw at the Ransom Center in Austin. If my feeble memory serves it was an exhibition in conjunction with the Magnum symposium in 2013. One of the prints in the show was a 'work print' with the photographer's notes indicating the 'adjustments' he wanted in the final print. My first reaction to the picture was this is a piece that MoMA would fall all over itself to hang in a show of 'New Masters.' Dodge this 5%, burn this area 10%, all over the image. Photoshop just gives us a new tool (one that's easier to use) to do what photographers have always done with their prints. Thank you for making me think a little deeper about what I'm doing with my camera."

Mike replies: You answered your own question. Why bother? To make people think a little deeper about they're doing with a camera. Works for me. That is really the whole point of a post like "C-E-R": the goal isn't to change global terminology, it's to encourage thinking about what our own values and principles are and should be. Engaging with such questions helps clarify thinking, and clear thinking makes decisions easier and our practices more forthright.

It doesn't really matter where you fall on the actual issues—whether you conclude that you love photo-illustration and are going to stop looking at straight photography (i.e., disagree with me), or whether you want to stop at enhancement and keep wholesale reworking mostly off limits (agree with me). It's all good. The point is to become more clear about what we're doing and what our own values are.

Michael Perini: "Re Photographs are either a 'yes' or a 'no'...very appropriate for digital...either a 1 or a 0....

"I've always felt that getting it right in the camera (for me) was a very good discipline, and a worthy goal that helped me get more 'keepers.' But I do straighten horizons, and occasionally crop a picture within the 'picture' as I Correct-Enhance-Finish the work. I also tend to take far fewer frames than most others I know. It works for me. When I shot film, I developed and contact printed the roll and never excised bad frames, I just ignored them. I've been going through old negatives and scanning them and have found more than a few overlooked gems—so I'm glad I saved them. I do the same with digital, and occasionally find the same thing. All this is also effected by the kinds of work we do, and who we do it for.

"As you often say, it's a big house with many rooms. However there is value for each of us in deciding where we stand on these issues and then being true to that. Because the trouble always arises when our Implied Disciplines differ from our Actual Disciplines."

C-E-R

Why we shouldn't say "post" or
"Photoshopping" any more.

-

By Michael C. Johnston
all rights reserved

Ctein hates the term "post-processing." It's one of those (unfortunately all too common) terms that grew up twisted and parasitic, like an invasive species in the forest. "It's clinical and has a disparaging connotation," Ctein wrote. "It implies that 'getting it right in the camera' is somehow inherently superior, like the snobbishness one used to get from the Kodachrome users—'we get it right the first time.' What a load of B.S...." (He went on to point out that slide-film shooters were just making a virtue of a necessity—okay, "putting lipstick on the pig" was how he actually phrased it—because with slides you really were stuck with what you got out of the camera. Maybe they got it right the first time—there was some virtue in that, actually—but it was because they had no choice.)

He said "we really need a better term than 'post-processing.' It's off-putting and unnecessarily divisive. Mind you, I've got my individual answer which is, I don't post-process, I print. But that doesn't solve the larger language problem."

He asked me to think on it. Bad terminology is a particular bugbear of mine, because language can't keep up with technology—it needs more time to evolve. Ctein said he prints, but don't get me started on print and its modifiers—print being both a verb and a noun, and a printer being both a person and a machine! Yikes. A word so nice we have to slather it all over everything like pesticide on a potato field.

I ran across an analogous situation in psychology recently. Adult attachment, a relatively recent field, divides people into "secure attachment styles" and "insecure attachment styles." The insecure types are further divided into "anxious attachment style" and "avoidant attachment style." Nice examples of exceptionally poor terminology—all those terms are too long, all use words that have different meanings and other commonsense connotations and are frequently used in other contexts, and none go from the collective to the individual case easily. E.g., what do you call an individual person with an anxious attachment style? An "anxious"? Thanks, that's helpful.

The only term making inroads on "post processing" is "editing," based on the fact that some image-modifying software programs are being called "editors." Again, totally hopeless, since "editor" is a staff member at a publication and "editing"—in photography—more commonly means selecting shots to use from a larger amount of shooting. (At least "sequencing" is a separate word for that separate task. Be thankful for small felicities.)

If I could correct any of this I would, but I appear to have neither a gift for neologisms nor any influence in getting new terms to stick. Well, apart from bokeh. (Michael Reichmann got pixel-peeper to stick, which was impressive.)

But Ctein is right—"post-processing" (often abbreviated just to "post") is hopeless. It's even potentially misleading, not only for the reason he mentioned but because it implies it's what you do after the processing...which in film days meant the onerous chore of developing exposed film into negatives. We don't do "processing" at all any more; we just import (or send) and open the files. Right now, we use "post" to mean anything from clicking an Instagram filter that puts clown makeup on a face, to spotting a film scan, to wholesale computer-generated imagery like constructing a background that never existed for a catalog product shot. It's hopelessly vague, an "umbrella" term that covers everything, and that keeps its meaning well hidden—wholly unhelpful except as an arbitrary label. A nonsense word would work as well. We might as well call it brillig (in the slithy toves).

"Thinking on it," as Ctein asked me to do, I'm aware that I can't change accepted convention. But if I could, I think I'd change "post-processing" to "C-E-R." Pronounced "see-ee-are," as in the letters of the alphabet.

• "C" for correction, meaning the continuation of all the choices you made before and during shooting. You chose what camera (sensor) and lens to use, you chose where to where to look from and what to include and exclude. You chose, or could have chosen, white balance and exposure level and aperture and focus point and a number of other variables. "Correction" after the fact, once the image is imported to software, just continues those choices, to include minor cropping (or the cropping you visualized when you shot if it's major), cast correction (if the camera's automation made the picture too cool—too blue—you can change that), exposure range correction (slight "HDR" to retain highlight detail and reveal shadow detail for instance). Color balancing. Minor cleanup when something went wrong, for instance if your sensor has a hot pixel or a dust spot that creates a blemish in a sky. This is the sort of thing we all do even to snapshots and record shots and is pretty mild and habitual for a lot of us.

• "E" for enhancement, the addition of visual effects that you think might heighten the impression somehow. Changes in what's now called "clarity" (because that's what Adobe labeled it in Lightroom—better than "reverse unsharp mask" which is what the same thing used to be called before there was a slider for it), heightened saturation, local contrast for effect, sharpness past what human eyes can see, rebalancing of the tonal properties, HDR effects, vignetting, or selective lightening and darkening of areas to call attention to certain things and make others less obvious. "Structure" in B&W, because that's what hyping the local contrast and creating pseudo edge-effects is called in Nik Silver Efex.

• "R" for reworking, meaning the wholesale adding, subtracting, or changing of elements and/or meaning. Take another look at the "before and after" GIF that reader chris_scl supplied the other day of Steve McCurry's rickshaw picture:

It becomes obvious how extensively the picture has been reworked. As several readers pointed out, the changes are many, and the extent of the reworking has changed the very meaning and feeling of the picture. How hard the driver is working, the busy-ness of the street, the mood of the passengers, and the signifiers of the presence of the photographer have all been altered. "Reworking" is currently called "Photoshopping," (or 'shopping or potato-chopping or any number of slang variants) which, again, as terminology, has so many things wrong with it I don't even have time to list them all.

"CER" as a term implies a progressive hierarchy of alteration to images in software, from very light correction to very heavy reworking, but you'll note that none of these three terms imply value judgements. Yes, formal photojournalism has restrictions in place against reworking, but photojournalists sometimes get away with enhancements that are pretty extreme—if this were a longer essay I could specify several examples. The other day I referred to reworked photographs as being "faked up," but that's really only a comment on my own personal value system—as a general descriptive term it's not helpful at all; for some artists and some enthusiasts, reworking is an indivisible part of their project and of the way they make their work or have their fun with imagemaking, and it can in some cases be planned or intended from before the moment of exposure. All three of the terms comprising CER are value-neutral.

And the three words, correction, enhancement, and reworking, are adaptable and have sensical* meanings. And they adapt to speech well, because you can just use the individual terms—"I have to do correction before I send the files." "She's an enhancer but she isn't into reworking."

And Ctein is right—there is utterly no intrinsic value in not doing CER. There's no such thing as "purism" in digital imaging (although each person or organization can choose their or its own principles.) It's taken for granted in digital imaging, and it should be (however you do it), because it continues the sequence of creative decision-making that characterizes the whole chain of image-making from initial idea to finished product. That whole chain is the "process," really. No part of it is "post" (i.e., preposition meaning after).

You'll never encounter the term CER again outside of this one single post about it by me. (See, there's that all-purpose word again, post.) Language settles where it settles, and like it or not we're stuck with the stinky little misshapen bastard term "post" for the software phase of digital imaging, and "Photoshopping" as a wholly unfair word for altering or reworking a digital image. C'est la vie.

Mike
(Thanks to Ctein)

*This is a made-up word that's a back-formation from nonsensical and commonsensical. It means something that has internal logic. I encountered it reading philosophy. It's not officially a real word, but I like it anyway.

P.S. I put my byline on this because some guy on Facebook ripped off my post from Sunday! He later apologized and posted a link, though, when Carl nudged him about it, so all is forgiven. But really, you can't steal stuff from the Internet just because it's on the Internet.

Original contents copyright 2016 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:

Wes: "I prefer the term 'adjustments' to 'corrections.' I feel the latter has too much of a negative connotation in most people's minds, implying mistakes were made and need to be fixed. 'Adjustments'—while not perfect—is a much less negative, and still accurate, word."

Joe Boris: "File 'optimization' is how I describe post-capture workflow (charges) in my estimates and invoices. This seems to cover whatever final medium the image is being prepared for, whether for 'print' or 'electronic' display."

Keith B.: "The term 'post processing' to describe processing makes no sense. Just like 'micro contrast' (very tiny contrast??). I suspect, but have not determined with certainty, that the terms 'post' and 'post processing' are misappropriated adaptations of the terms 'post' and 'post production' used in motion picture work. In movie work, 'production' is the actual shooting of the film. Actors, sets, lighting, crew...and photography. 'Pre-production' is the work that precedes this: Hiring actors and crew, planning the logistics, designing and building the sets. 'Post production' is all the work that follows the shooting of the film: assembling the pieces (editing), mixing and dubbing sound, special photographic or computer-generated effects, recording music, etc. What we do with digital still photography after we shoot is analogous to, but obviously not exactly the same as, movie post production work. How 'bout we just call it 'processing?'"

Richard Newman: "I can't agree with Ctein and you on this. 'Post-processing' is accurate and appropriate. Every image coming from a digital camera has been processed, in varying degrees, through the camera's on-board computer. Even with raw images. And of course, most cameras today offer in-camera processing options of great variety. As for CER, its a nice concept whose definitions open a whole truckload of worms. Is HDR C or E or R? Many will beg to differ, no matter which choice is made. Ditto many less complex modifications to the initial image file. And what about files from the variable focus cameras? If you change point of focus, is that C or E or R? Or....?? I think of it as post-camera processing. And the term 'photoshoping' as become generic, much as xerox did for photocopying. It may not be aesthetic, but it isn't inaccurate."

Andrea Blum: "So from now on I'll be 'corrhancing' my photo files because as awkward as that neologism is, the word better describes what I do who does not print much and who mostly avoids any rework unless it involves a stray electric wire. I never could figure out what I was supposed to do after processing a photo! Whatever term may eventually catch on, thank you for this article. I had begun to think I was the only one who hated the term 'post processing.' It is nice to find that I'm in such good company!"

David Cope: "As an ex slide shooter I can tell you there was nothing snobbish about being told to shoot an assignment for production where it was expected you would get 'get it right the first time'! Mildly terrifying actually. Whilst there was pride in ones work when one did get it right the first time, the reality had more to do with copious bracketing and the occasional rescue attempt with the slide duplicator! CER (assuming the rights for this are now in the public domain otherwise my agent will need to contact yours to sort out a deal!)—I like where this is heading and will adopt for my work if I may. I'm definitely a C type person, with a bit of E as needed and never any R. (Well, so far!)"

John Sparks: "I used to post my film at the Post Office to the photo shop for printing by the printer on their printer so they could post the processed film and prints back to me so I could edit the prints. Now I just Photoshop my images in post and then post them on the Internet."

Mike replies: Exactly.

John Denniston: "I always thought this was simple. Processing is colour correction, cropping, straightening, HDR if needed, and cleaning up dust spots. Post-processing is adjusting the picture for specific output such as converting it to CMYK, checking for highlight dot, maximum ink limits, USM, and cropping to size. Or, it can be re-sizing for the web, changing the profile to SRGB, etc. Softproofing is also post-processing as you're making adjustments for a specific paper on a specific ink jet printer."

Joe (partial comment): "In the days of film, it was called darkroom work. In the days of digital, maybe it should be called 'screen' work since you are looking at a computer screen most of the time."

William Furniss: "My quotations have line items for 'processing' and 'retouching.' If necessary I explain that processing is adjusting raw files for colour and contrast. My clients seem happy with that. Retouching is apparently well understood at this stage and it sounds more serious than Photoshopping which I think infers a hacks fix of something gone wrong."

Mike replies: That seems like the best practical distillation of the issues to me. As a practical matter no one's ever going to use "CER" as a term; but "retouching" is a well-established word that makes a (fairly) value-neutral acknowledgement of what, for instance, McCurry's people did to the rickshaw photo. Also, this should please the people who insist that there's no difference between the darkroom and Photoshop, because you could retouch and change the look of the picture in both media.

Victor Bloomfield: "Edward Weston's take on post-processing, from his Daybook on 4-29-30 as quoted in My Camera on Point Lobos, p. 74: 'In my work the final form of presentation is seen on the ground glass, the finished print previsioned complete in every detail of texture, movement, proportion, before exposure. The shutter's release automatically and finally fixes my conception. The first fresh emotion is captured complete and for all time at the very moment it is seen and felt. Feeling and recording are simultaneous, hence the great vitality in such pure photography and its loss in manipulated photography. The nearest thing to it is a quick line sketch, done usually as a note for further elaboration. And how much finer, stronger, more vivid these sketches are than the finished painting.'"

The Sony A9 Omigod! (Nextmania)

I'm not sure I'm the best person to talk to about rumors. I just seem to lack the gene that gets all tweaked out for upcoming things. Where is the world headed to?!? What's going to happen to it? Like, it's been spinning on its axis rilly rilly fast while traveling in this giant arc around this rilly close star! Where's it going? Where's it gonna end up? What's going to happen to the world?!?

Chill. It's just going around and around like an idiot kid who won't get out of the revolving door is all.

I mean, I like new products. I just don't quite see the point in getting too lathered about them before they're real.

Of course I understand that many people really do enjoy rumors. I hung out on the ND section of Miata.net for about two years before the 2016 Miata was unveiled, and I'm pretty convinced there are still some guys out there who won't get out of bed or pull the covers off their heads because they miss their favorite form of argumentation and disputation so much and are still grieving. That car was discussed so much before anyone knew anything that just the rumormongering had became a lifestyle for some guys. A bunch of middle-aged motorheads arguing heatedly over speculative beliefs that couldn't be confirmed or debunked—there's fun for ya.

So I'm not one to rain on anyone else's parade. Clearly, people love camera rumors. Call it...nextmania. The craze for whatever's coming next.

So anyway—I started off track here and am now going to take a crowbar and wrench myself back on course—there's a rumor that's been going around, that started apparently on sonyalpharumors.com, that Sony will release a full-frame mirrorless camera in the Fall positioned above the A7 series. The "A9"—not an official name—will have either 72 or 80 megapixels, and continuous capture (without a buffer limit), writing to dual high-capacity, superfast XQD cards. (In related news, my mental hard drive for things known by three initials is almost full, and nothing will delete—but never mind.) Fantastic! So you'll be able not only to record pictures that are too big, but you'll be able to get too many of them too fast, too.

Sorry, I'm just trying to be funny. I don't mean that.

...Meanwhile, we just couldn't have IBIS in the A6300, could we. Grump.

We could either discuss the "A9," or just wait till it happens. I suppose I'll be ready to write about it after it's been out for a year. I guess I'm more of a classicist. When I was young I was more interested in old things than new things.

Mike

P.S. Every time someone in the Comments uses the phrase "game changer" it's going to hurt me like a bee sting, as I'm allergic to it. Do as you like, but take it easy on me please.  :-)

Original contents copyright 2016 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:

Dennis: "I think we need to stop measuring camera companies on big flashy numbers like 72 MP. Take a lesson from sports and their assists and turnovers, earned run averages and more stats than you can shake the proverbial stick at.

"How about measuring each camera company's LBR (lens to body ratio) each year? Or it's FFC (full frame to crop)? What's their average FU (firmware updates per body)? We can talk which company has an aging lineup and which one is in (or should be in!) a rebuilding season. Just think how much easier it would be to argue over who's best if you had access to stats like these (and 20 or 30 others).

"Of course, to settle it once and for all, we'd need a fantasy camera league. That would undoubtedly be more fun than taking pictures for some."

Film and LF News

It's been reported that the high-end, full-line Japanese view camera maker Ebony, founded in 1981 by Hiromi Sakanashi, will be going out of business at the end of June. Our friend Oren Grad sent an inquiry in Japanese to Sakanashi-san and, sadly, received confirmation that this is true. Jeff Taugner at Badger Graphic Sales is still taking orders, but recommends that you order very soon if you wish to buy an Ebony camera new.

No word yet on the reasons for the closing.

Bad film
Meanwhile, photographer John Sexton's latest newsletter has information about some bad Kodak film stock. Apparently photographers have been seeing pictures with uniform areas of tone disfigured by faint letters and numbers. John shows an example and reports his investigations into the matter. Here are the possibly affected emulsion numbers according to Kodak:

Emulsion numbers that may exhibit the above problem only in Kodak 120 format roll film:
(Emulsion numbers can be found on the film box, the foil wrapper, and printed on the clear edge of processed film near frame number 11.)

Kodak T-Max 400
Emulsion 0148 004 through 0152

Kodak T-Max 100
Emulsion 0961 through 0981

Kodak Tri-X
Emulsion 0871 though 0931

Check your stock if you're shooting rollfilm. Here's a link to John's newsletter archive if you'd like to read more (he has a nice special-edition print for sale in this newsletter, too).

Mike
(Thanks to Oren Grad and John Sexton)

Original contents copyright 2016 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:

Sal Santamaura: "Re 'No word yet on the reasons for the closing.' There may be no word yet, but I'm willing to speculate.

1. Digital has almost completely replaced film as a capture medium. In 'the old days,' professional photographers used expensive view cameras from Linhof, Sinar, etc. to do their work. In Japan, Ebony cameras were among those choices.
2. Compounding declining sales volume is competition from China. The 'Wal-martification' of buying attitudes means that, even among those amateurs still using large format film, there's very little willingness to pay for the highest quality cameras when less expensive knockoffs are available.

"Personally, I'm thrilled to have purchased and still regularly use my Ebony SV Wholeplate. The image of that specific sample (first one produced) from Ebony's website is what you've illustrated this post with. It will soon join my Phillips cameras' status, namely, great products no longer available new."

Mike replies: I was about to rise to the defense of Chinese cameras such as my beautiful former Chamonix, but then I remembered, oh yeah, they really are knock-offs. They used Dick Phillips's design without permission and didn't compensate him. Q.E.D. your point.

I did recall that it's your camera in that illustration.  :-)  Oren has its twin, I believe.

David L.: "Wow, I had two recent rolls of 120 T-Max 400 film ruined with the faint letters and numbers. They are obvious on first inspection. I tried and tried to find out how that happened; a broken camera, bad processing or handling, etc. So where is the notification from Kodak? What are they going to do about it? Why did it take an individual to spill the news?"

tex andrews: "This is sad news, I think. Irrespective of what the Chinese are doing/have done/will do. The loss of a venerable hand crafted camera manufacturer is a 'bell tolls for thee' moment."