The Online Photographer

Looking Glass

I went down a little rabbit hole on the Internet this morning, as has been known to happen on occasion. (A-hem. Cough! Cough!)

Wikipedia featured this image on its home page today:

View from the Artist's Window by Martinus Rørbye (Source)

I had to look into it because paintings like this have a tendency to annoy me—painted in 1825, it's clearly a fastidious copy of the image in a camera obscura. It even reproduces, somewhat, the tonal qualities and slightly faded colors of a lens image on a groundglass. Although that must have been a sensational and cutting edge technique at the time, presaging the shock of reality that representational photography was soon to make on the consciousness of the world, it's just another example of photorealism now. Albeit a pleasant and historically significant one, particularly if you are Danish. Isn't it beautiful?

But it's not how people see; it's how a lens sees.

Compare it to this work by Eugene Delacroix painted in the same year, 1825, "A Mortally Wounded Brigand Quenches His Thirst":

That's not lens vision, although we can possibly imagine a model striking that pose in the studio as the painter paints by eye.

Schjeldal and Rørbye
However, from there, one thing led to another, and soon enough I came across "Lonely Men of the Nineteenth Century" by the critic Peter Schjeldahl, from the May 2, 2011 issue of The New Yorker. He mentions Rørbye, but basically the article is about Caspar David Friedrich, the greatest painter of the movement to which Rørbye belonged. First, Schjeldahl calls Romanticism "the first distinctly modern movement and, it seems to me, the default setting of Western sensibilities ever since," which is a great line. Then, in passing, we are treated to this:

Friedrich proves that an experience of the capital-“S” Sublime—the idea of malign beauty, then in vogue—doesn’t require a storm in the Alps. It needs only a sense of external reality that is not other to the self but, rather, otherizing. Variants of the effect abound in the arts of the past two centuries. It is cranked up to a steady state of panic in Kafka. It is becalmed but ubiquitous in Edward Hopper. Most of all, it has engaged innumerable photographers and filmmakers. Take Robert Frank’s classic, devastating shot of gauzy curtains blowing in a window that overlooks a grimy mining town: the good news of beauty laced with the bad news of being stuck in Butte, Montana. Come to think of it, any camera might function as an inanimate avatar of Friedrich—analogous to a brain being invaded wholly, exclusive of thought, by the uncanniness of the not-oneself.

Isn't that great? Cranked up to a steady state of panic in Kafka, becalmed but ubiquitous in Edward Hopper. Nailed that. Makes me want to go immerse myself in Caspar David Friedrich's work, for one thing. Might be appropriate as I soldier on with Melville!

Mike

Original contents copyright 2017 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Featured Comments from:

Chris Y: "All that, and gotta love the lucidity of Peter Schjeldahl—this from a review of Richard Prince’s Instagrams in 2014—'Possible cogent responses to the show include naughty delight and sincere abhorrence. My own was something like a wish to be dead—which, say what you want about it, is the surest defense against assaults of postmodernist attitude.' You can’t really forget a line like that…."

David Dyer-Bennet: "I kind of love the idea of a color photo from 1825! We don't get to see the objective photographic view of what happened that long ago very often. Of course, we don't know that the painter didn't in fact alter things. It was pre-Photoshop, but not pre-Artist, and artists are always suspect  :-)  ."

Heinz:

"Just a few weeks back I stumbled into a Caspar David Friedrich moment on an outing and couldn't resist this selfie called 'Was nun, Caspar?' [What now, Caspar?]"

Andrew Molitor: "When I see a reference to Frank's picture of Butte, I always check to see if the writer has really looked at the picture. Nobody ever seems to mention that the mine headframe in the distance appears to be engulfed in flame.

"Well, it's probably steam, but it's still dramatic as hell. That photo has always struck me as a guy seeing something dramatic out his window, and shooting it with the far-to-wide lens he has mounted. The white-engulfed headframe in the distance is the beating heart of the picture, even so small. It's graphically important, as well as, to my eye, the obvious 'subject.' But people always drone on about the dreary town and the curtains."

Cheap As Chips Flash: $28

By Kevin Purcell

Cheap as chips, as they say in the UK.

There is now an AmazonBasics Electronic Flash for DSLR Cameras. It's a manual hot shoe flash so it's not limited to DSLRs or even just on-camera use, despite the name.

Supports (optical) slave mode, and even slave mode 2: firing on the second master flash so you can use two slave flashes together. Tilts up to 90 degrees; rotates up to 270 degrees. Eight levels of flash-brightness control; automatic saving function retains current flash settings. Hot shoe stand and carrying bag included.

No guide number specified. But....

It's a Chinese flash identical to the $32 Neewer VT560. It even has VT560 printed on the power control panel) which has a Guide Number of 38 (ISO 100).

Takes four AA size batteries, NiMH or Alkaline.

I wonder if Amazon will venture into the TTL flash market in the future. A rebadged Neewer VK750 II i-TTL for under $50, perhaps?

Kevin

©2017 by Kevin Purcell, all rights reserved

Kevin Purcell is a Fedora-wearing street photographer in Seattle. Here's his Flickr page.

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Andre Y: "Something about lights at last! I like talking about cameras and lenses as much as the next photographer, but lights are a really underserved topic here, and they have far larger and more important effects on the final photo than the latest benchmark-busting camera or lens. Camera and lens differences are pretty trivial in light of what you can do with lights and their associated modifiers, yet we balk at paying anything for lights approaching what we paid for our cameras and lenses. A Profoto B1 and a couple of modifiers are about the same price as a Canon 5D Mark IV, and that's splurging on the lights as capable lights and mods are available for much less money. But used properly, they'll make any camera and lens shine their brightest, now and in the future. Which reminds me of tripods, but that's another discussion for another time...."

Peter: "Wow, that is cheap. I thought my Yongnuos were a steal at $68. I set up a three-light system with shoot-through umbrellas in my basement. I was amazed how much I learned about light so quickly. I agree that more posts about lighting would be a good thing."

Mike replies: So do you guys know of someone who could write those posts?

Random Excellence: Vik Muniz

I encountered this amazing thing at the George Eastman Museum. Brazilian artist / photographer Vik Muniz, born 1961, in his series "Album," assembles pieces of snapshots into mosaics that themselves resemble snapshots. This one is called "Wedding."

Here's a detail of the groom's left hand:

The placard at the Museum noted that family photographs are "the most opaque to nonrelatives and the most susceptible to emotional enrichment." The artist cites the mosaics in a church in Ravenna, Italy among his influences.

Another interesting passage from his bio: "At the age of 18, Muniz worked in advertising in Brazil, redesigning billboards for higher readability. While on the way to his first black-tie gala, Muniz witnessed and attempted to break up a street fight, where he was accidentally shot in the leg by one of the brawlers. He was paid by the shooter to not press charges, and used the money to travel to New York." "Wedding, Album, 2014" was on loan from the artist and his gallery in New York City. Vik Muniz was born in São Paulo and now lives and works in NYC and Rio de Janeiro.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2017 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Barry Reid: "Thanks for this. Muniz is new to me and I love the central idea here and will certainly be seeking out more of his work over the coming days."

Wednesday Open Mike: Five Future Cameras They COULD Make

The Golden Age of Digital Cameras, underway since 2011 or so, is going strong yet. Not as strong as before; growth and development is slowing down as the market reaches maturity, as older cameras remain "sufficient" longer, and as that Swiss Army Knife of cosmic proportions, the smartphone, continues to lay waste to the mass market for point-and-shoots.

One major possibility that's currently being fulfilled (and that I'm delighted to see) is small mirrorless cameras with large sensors. First it was the Sony A7 series (a runaway success on any terms) and the inimitably Leica-like Leica derivative of them, the SL; and now we're going to get two mirrorless "FF+" sensor cameras with compact, RF-like form-factors, the Hasselblad X1D and the Fuji GFX systems.

Fuji's bold GFX move echoes profoundly a letter I wrote to the Presidents of Kodak and Minolta and the other consortium members way back before the introduction of the original film APS in 1996—I argued that to kill 35mm film and let APS succeed on the consumer end of things, they needed to also provide a redesigned, cassette-loaded ~645 film (I proposed a 30x40mm image area) on the other side of 35mm...for those who wanted more quality than APS provided. I still think I was right—but only if digital had never happened. I didn't know in 1995 that APS vs. 35mm was a moot point anyway because consumer digital was hull-down on the horizon. But I'm delighted that Fuji has done essentially the same thing...leapfrogging FF (which is, obviously, already pervasive) to an even larger sensor-size that will ideally complement its APS-C-sensor offerings. I don't know who the guiding genius of the Fujifilm camera program is, but whoever it is really has his head together. (It could be a number of people acting together, I suppose, but the Fuji product lineup as a whole is so sensible, and conveys such a strong, characterful vision, that it just doesn't look like the work of a committee. It's a horse, not a camel.)

While there's nothing at all wrong with the choices the Golden Age provides to us—or the excellence of those choices—there are still a lot of possibilities going unfulfilled. Herewith, a few modest proposals for imaginary cameras we could see in the future.

• A truly modular camera. The situation here is almost funny; it's a bit like what was happening just after CD-Rs arrived in the computer world for data storage but just before the public noticed that you could, oh yeah, record music on that. For a short interval in there it was as if the record companies were praying no one would notice. Of course, we not only noticed, eventually we skipped over having a music carrier altogether. Similarly, the camera companies now continue to pray that the public—its market, that would be—remains sweetly ignorant and undemanding of cameras that would be truly modular and thus, selectively user-upgradable.

Imagine if you will (yes, my Rod Serling voice): A range of cameras with a detachable sensor-processor-lensmount module. You pick the body style and viewfinder style you want, and you pick the sensor you want from a range of possibilities—just like you pick your lenses now. In the future, if you want an new, updated sensor, you don't have to buy a new camera and you don't have to give up the camera body you've developed the muscle-memory to operate comfortably: you just buy whatever sensor you want.

You say it couldn't be done? Ah, but it already has been done. Ricoh's GXR was a system with a separate "shell" for the grip and controls, a separate VF, and slide-on modules that combined the sensor and a fixed lens. The fixed lenses on each sensor made the idea an obvious non-starter—interchangeable, model-independent lenses are a bedrock of system camera design, and for a good reason—but there was one sensor, the A12 M-Mount, that just had a sensor, a shutter, and a lensmount.

Any big camera company could do something similar from the top down. The advantages for users would be numerous: you could find a "shell" you liked and had developed muscle-memory for operating, and stick to it while you upgraded sensors to newer-tech options; you could own several sensors and interchange them for specific tasks; you could customize your own camera (imagine, say, a dozen different body shells, a half a dozen different viewfinders, a dozen and a half sensor modules, and the usual assortment of lens options—the number of possible cameras you could "build" proliferates rapidly); and it would enable you to buy a new camera one part at a time, one year upgrading your "shell," the next, your sensor.

So...possible? Of course. But shhh, the camera companies don't want to invest in the engineering, and it's more profitable for them if you throw away your whole camera and buy a whole new one each time you want to update your sensor or processor or AF.

But the market contracting might be good news for this particular idea in the long run. When some big company with the resources to do it finally gets desperate enough to actually market such a system, it will be a big success and everybody will say "why didn't somebody do this before?"

• A square-format box camera with a hood. The generation that is currently "aging out," as they say, has memories of using TLRs and medium-format modular SLRs such as the traditional Hasselblad, that had upward-facing focusing screens and pop-open focusing hoods to shade the screen from impinging light. To use it, you rest the camera comfortably on your stomach and look down into it.

And of course it wouldn't really be a square format, but rather square natively and multi-format in practice. I envisage a simple switch by the handle that would enable you to switch from a vertical to a horizontal rectangle.

There's no reason to make a digital camera like this from a technical standpoint, but there is from a usability standpoint—actual working photographers are aware of the big difference between putting a camera up to your eye, which draws attention to the fact that you're observing something, and looking down at a camera in your hands, which does the opposite. The design freedom that modern camera technology would afford to such a format would enable the creation of a very nice camera indeed.

• A computational camera. This is already in its early stages—Ctein explained it to us back in 2011. The Light L16 is an early tentative step (Light is the worst camera company name in all of history, by the way), and the iPhone 7's camera is another modest early step in this direction. Ctein envisaged a camera with an array of 12 or 16 phone-camera modules linked in software to provide all manner of selectable effects after the fact—telephoto or wide angle, high resolution or high-sensitivity with pixel-binning, even selective plane of focus in post like the Lytro.

I've talked myself into believing that this is inevitable, but the wild card that still exists is whether the market will reach sufficiency before the technology gets very far. Remember, it's smartphones that need to drive this technology. The camera companies are pretty hidebound when it comes to the software side of things. And who knows how much camera smartphone buyers really want or, more importantly, will buy?

• An Apple camera. Given my recent complaints about Apple's recent shortcomings in its core-legacy product line—desktop computers—it might seem like madness to wish that Apple would build a dedicated camera with greater capability than an iPhone's camera has. And The Wall Street Journal in a recent article noted that when Steve Jobs returned in the '90s, he famously pared the company's products down to a minimum. That article (it's called "Why Apple's Critics Are Right This Time") blamed Apple's current product woes on the fact that it's trying to make too many product lines and not paying enough attention to either the details of each product or the needs of that specific product's user group. Seems fair, given that the company chose yet another reduction in size over battery life, proper cooling, and configurability in its latest, supposedly "professional" laptops. Adding yet another product category might be the last thing Apple needs. But bear with me. Yes, Steve is gone, and with him, his genius for simplicity and intuitive operation and customer appeal; a camera he would approve is the reason I used to wish Apple would market a camera.

Now, the reason I wish it would is because Apple, being a phone company, has connectivity advantages that are denied even to giants like Nikon and Canon, and I for one would love to see what they would do with it in a serious camera.

But why would Apple build a standalone camera at all? Well, because it could be a test-bed for advances in smartphone camera technology, enlisting the help of the photographic world's impassioned and deeply involved enthusiast base to help it test ideas and work through various options. Given the weaknesses that are clearly beginning to show around the edges of the Steveless Apple, though, this "future camera" would probably be the least practical idea on my list, and the least likely ever to become real, were it not for...

• A black-and-white-only camera. Yeah, I know...I've been talking about this for a long, long time. And yeah, I know, I said I'd buy the first one that anyone made. But who knew that Leica, the one company in the camera universe that happens to make Veblen Goods for the carriage trade, would be the one to make it—putting me between a rock and a hard place. I can't afford Leicas like I can't afford Ferraris, and, even within the Leica range, the M, a kludgy copy of a great film camera, is probably my least favorite product of all products they make. Wouldn't you know that would be the one and only small camera to intersect with a B&W-only sensor? I mean, bless Dr. Kaufmann and all, but I'm still on the outside of the locked door.

No one else will make a B&W-only camera either, so long as it technically easy to convert color files to B&W files. Of course, I approach things not from the technical side but from the operator side...from, that is, a holistic understanding of how photographers work and what makes a difference when actual photographers are actually out shooting. Some sizeable subset of us don't mind making conversions; another subset of us naturally see like the camera sees regardless of what camera we're using. That includes me.

At least I can console myself (if that's what you'd call it) with the almost certain knowledge that, if anyone did make a reasonably-priced B&W digital camera, they'd almost certainly screw it up. Tonality is tough to get right, and not everyone has the same taste in tonality anyway. What I'd like to see (but, as I'm acknowledging, never will) would be a mid- or low-level variant of an existing mirrorless or DSLR camera, with a sensor with no color filters, which would enable it to simultaneously have a lower pixel count and higher DR and resolution. Give it the proper tonal qualities, i.e., the spectral response and characteristic curve of...oh, hell, since I'm fantasizing anyway, Verichrome Pan on Kodak Medalist paper....

Back to reality. The percentage of photographers who like B&W better than color puts us in the minority, and we probably just need to accept that B&W's day is done; black and white are no longer "the colors of photography" as Robert Frank famously said. It had its run. Digital B&W sucks, or 90% of it does, and maybe that's too bad, but then, few people can ride horseback any more either. Maybe that's just the way it is and will remain.

I'll continue to hope, though.

Combinating!
Of course, something I've touched on but haven't really explored is that various aspects of these five ideas could be combined. A digital box camera with a top-mounted viewing screen with a fold-out hood would make an ideal carrier for exchangeable sensors; they did it with classic Bronica and Hasselblad 6x6 cameras and they do it with medium-format backs, after all. An Apple camera would be a perfect test-bed for a computational camera using an array of miniature sensors. And an interchangeable-sensor camera would be the ideal system in which to include optional B&W-only sensor modules.

But this post is long enough already!

Mike

P.S. Try to keep comments short.

"Open Mike" is the editorial page of TOP. Often off-topic, it's not this week.

Original contents copyright 2017 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.

So TOP can have a future
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B. Collinson: "In regards to the 'Modular Camera,' they already exist in the world of cinematography. The Red family of digital cinema cameras are the best example, as they were envisioned from the outset as a truly modular camera system."

Ranjit Grover: "I hope one day the camera makers will come together decide on one battery type that will go into all cameras, small and big. I have four cameras from the same manufacturer and all of them use different batteries (of the same voltage) and different chargers. To me none of those wishes of yours are nearly as important as common standard batteries and data cables. Surely that is not asking for too much. If they can settle for common data storage (SD cards), they can settle on batteries and cables too. Asking for a common lens mount may be a bit too much."

hugh crawford: "Re 'Light' being the worst camera company name in all of history: When I was visiting China in 1988, in order to get a visa you had to state your occupation and employer. I put down photographer as occupation and was always introduced as Mr. Hugh, the photographer, since in Chinese the family name is first. Polite giggles would often follow. It turns out that the transliteration of Hugh in Chinese was something along the lines of light or brilliant or flash, and was also the brand of a popular camera. It was sort of like being introduced as Mr. Camera the photographer. Of course I tried to buy one of these Hugh cameras, but could never track one down.

"Later I was spending a lot of time in video editing suites and the joke that never got old was 'could we tweak the hue?' followed by whatever interpretation of tweaking seemed most amusing at the moment." 

Color Correction

I got a marvelous comment yesterday from Peter Conway that deserves its own post, about the color-correction of aging eyesight (he and I are the same age):

Towards the end of 2016, I got a couple of new lenses, but they weren't Nikon or Sigma Art—they were from Abbott Labs, and replaced the "factory-issued" lenses which had cataracts (I'm 60 in two weeks).

After the first eye was done, I was shocked at how blue the world looked through that eye—until it occurred to me that the issue was likely that the world looked unusually yellow through the other eye. My ophthalmologist assured me that the Abbott lens had the truer colors. The three weeks between surgeries was an interesting period, with each eye vigorously disagreeing with the other on how things looked.

Now that both eyes are done, the world does look different, but more subtly than I would have thought after the first eye. It turns out that "Carolina blue" is actually blue to me now. And the green pill I was taking, which the pharmacy said was blue—well, it turns out the pharmacy was right.

I've started looking at some of the color prints I've made, and am pleasantly surprised that some actually look better than before—less muted than I had been seeing them. Others, though, are a bit over the top and will need some re-work.

So my question to you is, given all the color management technology available—profiles for our monitors, profiles for our printers, profiles for all sorts of different papers—is there any way to color manage our eyes? That's a lot bigger variable than I'd realized even two months ago.

I can't begin to answer his question, although I have what I believe is an example of older eyes leading a photographer astray—at the end of Ansel Adams's life, the art dealer who had made him rich, Harry Lunn, prevailed upon him to make "The Museum Set," a master edition of his greatest masterpieces, destined for museums. Which he did. Unfortunately, Ansel was very dissatisfied with then-current photo papers, and he also appeared to be having vision issues—the "Museum Set" prints are among his least satisfactory from a printmaking standpoint, nowhere near the spectacular balancing act of his best prints.

Basic color correction
By the way, to learn color correction, it's necessary first to simply memorize the major RGB complements (the three pairs of two opposites per pair), then teach yourself to see what color a picture has too much of. At that point, you know what to add.

RGB color wheel

Blue is the opposite of yellow, red is the opposite of cyan, and green is the opposite of magenta. So if you see just a little too much green in a picture, you know to add a little magenta. See too much cyan, add red. Thinking of it in terms of what color to add will gets you out of all sorts of trouble. And it's much easier to detect what's there than what's missing.

I've mentioned before that many experienced color printers have a "color cast preference"—a color they favor just slightly. I favor prints that skew just a skosh red; Ctein told me he favors cyan (which I believe is unusual—he's the only person I know with a cyan bias). Knowing your color bias preference helps you to keep it in check, for one thing! I'm always cautious about whether I might be adding too much red.

A little secret
Another issue with color correction is that most people have wildly varying tolerances for casts, and here's a little secret. While most people don't like even a little bit too much of certain casts like cyan and magenta, human beings in general have a huge liking for yellow, AKA "warmth." Whereas you might not even be able to get away with two or three points too much green or cyan, you can add five or ten points too much yellow and you might still be all right. (The theory is that "golden hour" sunlight is yellow and inherently pleasant to us.)

That's why the "color temperature" slider (blue-yellow) is so central to most editing programs. And it's also why yellow gets newbie color printers / post-processors into trouble they sometimes can't get out of. Why? Because judgement with yellow is tougher to "feel" correctly—everything from neutral to way too yellow might look subjectively equally good, just different. So which way do you go? Without experience, it's easier to get confused.

My preference was to teach people to always to get the color temperature, the yellow-blue pair, as neutral as possible first—with reference to your memory of the original scene—which in turn allows you to see other color casts more easily. Correct those, and only then add a bit of yellow back in to see if more warmth is preferable to you.

For practice, go to any photo site, the more amateurish the better, and start looking for pictures with color that looks "wrong." Figure out what it has too much of, and thus, what you would need to add. There's nothing stopping you from actually doing it, either—that is, nothing stopping you from downloading strangers' pictures and color-correcting them for your own practice. As long as you toss your copy out afterwards and don't actually nick their work.

Color correction is fun, and, as any experienced color printer will tell you, helps you see color in pictures much more readily* and accurately, too—and enjoy it more when you see photographs with color that "sings."

Mike
(Thanks to Peter Conway)

*To me, for example, the second picture in the "Two-Hat Weather" post, of the frozen waterfall, is a riot of colors!  :-)  Look at it again and notice the rust browns in the rocks and the cerulean in the ice.

Original contents copyright 2017 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.

We like green
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Featured Comments from:

Ben Rosengart: "Very interesting, Mike. I just forwarded this to my dad. He claims he's no good at color correction, but I maintain he just hasn't put in enough hours."

Stephen Cowdery: "Looking at the color graphic, I thought that my green perception was faulty—the green and chartreuse triangles appeared to be exactly the same. I opened the graphic in Photoshop and checked the info reading: R-0, G-255, B-1, for both segments!"

Mike replies: Sorry. I start with a Wiki graphic of unknown provenance, convert it to sRGB, and then submit it to the mercies of the TypePad blog software (which does change things). By that time it's far from calibrated—really just a rough illustration of what it's supposed to represent.

Here's another, possibly easier way of visualizing additive color:

Each primary color (R, G, or B) is the opposite of the smaller overlap opposite it. (Top image courtesy Wikipedia.)

The colors still aren't quite right but if you accept that these are just illustrations you'll be all right. The key thing to emphasize is just that you have to memorize the three pairs of opposites. Then, whatever color you see too much of in a picture, add more of its opposite.

Ranjit Grover: "The 'factory-issued' lens turns yellow, opaque and rigid with age. That is the reason it has to be replaced. The automatic white balance in our brain does a good job and we do not see the effect of the yellow lens as long as both of them are of the same color depth. But once one of them is replaced with a plastic lens we see the difference. The plastic lenses too are slightly yellow, but not as much as the 'factory supplied lens' with cataract. What one person sees as yellow may not the same as another one sees. There is no way one person can tell another person exactly what he sees or hears or tastes or feels. Neuro scientists call this problem 'qualia.' Qualia comes alive when we have two different lenses in our eyes. Or when one ear is defective. Probably qualia is what causes our individual color preferences."

Herman: "I'll stick to black and white."

Mike replies: That's even harder! But no worries, you're good at it. :-)

Ken N: "I use reference pictures to 'calibrate' my eyesight as I work. It was a trick I learned many years ago with audio editing."

Mike replies: That is indeed a very good trick. It helps a lot with B&W, too (apropos Herman). I used to keep a manilla folder of reference B&W's in the darkroom—eight to 12 examples of "perfect" tonality—and if I felt my perception getting a little off-kilter, I'd just look through them. Naturally I still remember some of those pictures!

MarkR: "I'm reminded of Claude Monet, who redid some of his water lily paintings after he had cataract surgery. He was reportedly upset that he had painted them too red."

Mike replies: The story of Monet's struggles with his vision in later life is very involved and complicated; one thing that stuck with me is that he apparently wanted to convey in his paintings how he saw, because it was very lovely, but he couldn't see well enough to paint it properly. At this point I'm not sure if that's some species of fact or just my interpretation....

Stephen F Faust: "Re 'The key thing to emphasize is just that you have to memorize the three pairs of opposites. Then, whatever color you see too much of in a picture, add more of its opposite.' ...Which explains why Lightroom has a blue/yellow slider and a green/magenta slider, but why doesn't it have a cyan/red slider?"

Mike replies: Because technically you can do everything you might need to do with just the blue-yellow and green-magenta sliders in ACR. Increasing both blue and yellow at the same time (moving both sliders to the left) is the same as adding cyan, and increasing both yellow and magenta at the same time (moving both sliders to the right) is the same thing as adding red. Try it. The problem with that is that it's not as intuitive as having three sliders in terms of looking at the picture, evaluating it, and knowing what to do, which is why in Photoshop I would suggest doing color correction in Image > Adjustments > Color Balance, which has three sliders.

Presumably Lightroom has the same three sliders somewhere too? (Or is it more automated in LR?)

John Krumm answers Mike: "To answer your question, Lightroom doesn't have that color balance tool. Lightroom adjustment options mirror ACR. I'll have to try it; it will give my neglected Photoshop CC something to do."

Mike replies: That's weird. I reviewed the correction options in LR using Adobe's online instructional videos, and looks to me like Develop > HSL falls into the classic trap of automated tech: it makes color correction—better make that "color enhancement"—easier to carry out, but more difficult to understand. 

Richard: "Color management of your eyes is really just knowing about their shortcomings and working within them. The biggest enemy, according to my research, is your own brain. That's why it's best to only look at something you want to color correct for a few seconds at a time. After that your auto color correction kicks in and you won't be able to see what's wrong anymore. And eat your carrots, of course. The normal caveats apply as well, paint your walls a non-pigmented grey, keep light levels low, and don't work when you're tired because your brain just won't be up to the job. The one other thing I would say is that there is no shame in using a ColorChecker to create a custom profile—especially when you shoot in weird mixed lighting conditions. Using a color checker or a calibrated grey card is like sharpening up your saw and planing your boards before you start a woodworking project. It frees you up to be more creative because you're starting from a neutral place."

Ni Hao, Hasselblad!

(Nǐ hǎo is the romanization of 你好, which is Mandarin for "hello." I learned this recently from Tommy and Yuki at a sushi restaurant I sometimes go to in Geneva (New York, not Switzerland). It's dubious whether my Mandarin is going to progress much further than this, sadly.)

Anyway, two tidbits of news...

• First, the Hasselblad X1D is at long last showing up in the wild! Here's a post at GetDPI from "ddanois" that shows his.

• Second, Hasselblad is now Chinese.

Well, not really. But the Chinese drone king DJI has apparently bought a majority stake. TechCrunch asks, "Will DJI leave the business of Hasselblad to operate like an independent subsidiary, but continue to ensure its cameras are easily integrated with DJI’s drone rigs? Or will DJI use Hasselblad technology to entirely replace the cameras used in their consumer-level drones like the Phantom and Mavic?"

Pentax 645D and Hasselblad X1D. Illustration courtesy camerasize.com.

The answer isn't known, but when DJI took a minority stake (along with a seat on the Board of Directors) in Hasselblad in 2015, both companies said they would keep their operations independent.

(By the way, I have a lot of respect for people like Tommy and Yuki, who as far as I know are just co-workers. He's from "The South" of China and she's from Beijing. It's been hard enough for me migrating from Wisconsin to New York, never mind what they've done. Tommy's been here for ten years but speaks poor English, and says he "prays" to be able to take ESL classes. Yuki has a small child, Leo, with whom I had quite an involved and serious conversation last week about whether you need to be afraid of ghosts. That Leo was there at the restaurant seems to indicate that Yuki has no one to watch him while she's waiting tables. And the sushi restaurant is closing, so they and their other co-workers will be out of work soon. I got the picture that this is very serious indeed for all of them. I wish them well. My earliest American ancestors might have been Pilgrims, venerated now, but they were immigrants, and they also had a hard time at first.)

Mike
(Thanks to Oren Grad, Bryan Signorelli, Aaron Greenman, Jeffrey Schimberg, and others)

UPDATE Tuesday morning: Ming Thein puts the whole Hasselblad thing into perspective with intelligent guesses and his two cents' worth. If you're interested. (There's a summary TL;DR version at the end.)

Original contents copyright 2017 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.

Droning onward!
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Struan (partial comment): "I think it's a mistake to see this tie-in in terms of putting Hasselblads into consumer toys.

"Drones are already taking over professional aerial and mast-based photography, and new uses for top-down and oblique imagery are under vigourous development everywhere. Mapping cameras and photogrammetry have always used the highest resolution possible, because even the very best photographic tools and analyses are a small part of the overall financial and opportunity cost of getting into the air. National mapping and reconnaissance agencies won't be dumping their Leica Geosystems kit, but there plenty of civilian applications where savings on, say, helicopter time are so dramatic that what hobbyists think of as the high price of a medium-format camera is actually a drop in the bucket.

"There are already companies here in Europe here offering farmers remote sensing-style analysis of drone footage of their crops.  The results used to program and control GPS-aware fertiliser spreaders and harvesters. In this kind of application, medium-format imagers don't just provide better spatial resolution, their better spectral resolution aids image analysis too.

"So to me, the DJI tie-in makes perfect sense. Hasselblad get a cash-rich owner/investor that is actually interested in cameras. DJI brings in-house the products, expertise and technology it needs for developing non-commodity drone applications. Win-win. I'm just hoping the some of the crumbs from the table fall into my lap."

Jay: "I know it wasn't the main subject of this post but thank you for acknowledging the struggles immigrants face every day. It is unfortunate that so few people make an effort to understand what the true lives of immigrants are like."

Two-Hat Weather

It's been two-hat weather here...I have to pull on one wool cap over the other. It's only been about 14 degrees or so (that's –10 if you live in Celsius-land), but it's also been windy. It's the wind that gets you.

By the way, did you know that you lose about 15 degrees of temperature tolerance over an average lifespan? Old people really do get cold more easily, because our metabolisms lose adaptability, or responsiveness, and can't adjust as easily. Just like getting more presbyopic. (I'm fascinated by aging. It's really interesting, and I'm enjoying observing the effects.)

A week or so ago we had some rain and snowmelt, and there was a constant roaring coming from over by the creek. Now, after a handful of days sub-freezing temperatures, suddenly the creek is quiet. 

The waterfall's frozen. There's still water running, but it's mostly underneath thick encrustations of ice. Sound insulation!

These pictures were taken with my new-to-me used Fujifilm XF 18–55mm lens, by the way. Both pics started out soft, but reducing them to blog size hides that fact. And I'm not sure yet why they were soft. I'm not sure I got a good copy of the lens; but downloading the latest lens firmware helped a lot more than I imagined it would. It's a very sharp lens when everything goes right, but it's going to be a while before I know it well enough to trust it. There's so much to test with these dang zooms! And so much more that can be going wrong. I always worry about buying used lenses. It's too easy for me to imagine that I got a lens that some other photographer tested and found to be a bad sample.

Off to the backyard to fling the ball for the white dog, and Brrrrr.

Mike

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Don't be cold
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Scott DeMello: "I also shoot with Fuji. Over the past year I have slowly converted to shooting mostly with primes, but I do have the 10–24mm, 18–55mm and the 55–200mm. My memory is that with the 18–55mm you should not have the IS on all the time. I remember that this was my first Fuji Lens after I switched from Canon. With my Canon IS lenses, unless I was mounted on a tripod, I could leave the IS on. With the Fuji 18–55mm though, I found you should only have it on in situations when it is needed, otherwise my images were soft."

Mike replies: Thanks Scott. Carl found that some of the early Pentax DSLRs that had SR were that way too.

David Miller: "Being parsimonious by nature, my outerwear tends to last for decades, giving me objective evidence of diminishing temperature tolerance. As a young fellow of 50 I wore a lightly insulated jacket until the temperature dropped below –10° (here in Celsius-land to the north of you), a short well insulated jacket to –20°, and a real parka below that. Now that I'm standing on the doorstep of 70, the well insulated jacket goes on at 0° (freezing point), the down parka at –10°, and to cope with anything below –20° I just bought a serious, heavy-weight, knee length, down-filled parka that's rated for 'Arctic Wear.'

"Oh, and a note on presbyopia—in our mid-forties my wife and I founded a Lilliputian publishing house named Byopia Press. (Our optometrist was among the few people who got the joke.)"

'Beautiful Bokeh' Print Offer Is Ending at Noon

Our current print sale ends in just a few hours.

I'd like to thank those who have ordered the print; given that you liked the picture well enough to order it from seeing the measly JPEG, you're going to love it once you see the print. The print is five times better. If not ten times. Let's say 11.27 times to be precise.

Maybe it's mainly that I like it so much. In the print it has a quiet, otherworldly presence. I love the pearly, ethereal, otherworldly light that seems to come from the center of it, and those wonderful spots of color emerging from the depths of the background: the wash of violet in the center and the wash of that wonderful blue in the lower right-hand corner. Maybe it's the purity of the colors that I find so seductive.

Meanwhile, John just got word that three of his prints have been chosen for the Boston Athenaeum's spring exhibition, "New England on Paper: Contemporary Art in the Boston Athenaeum's Prints & Photographs Collection" (April 6–September 10, 2017). The exhibition opening is on Wednesday April 5, 5:30–7:30. So if you'll be in or near the Boston area the Spring or Summer you can see a few more of John's originals.

There's still time to order, but at noon the price goes from from our sale price of $160 back to the usual $475. If you have no preference of your own (note that "if") between the two papers, my pick would be (well, is, since it's the one I bought) the Canson Etching. I'm not saying it's "better," but just in case you don't know which to choose.

Thanks again! Grateful thanks also to John.

Mike

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The 'Bokina'

Written by John Lehet*

My picture for the current TOP sale, the morning glory bud, was made on the Sony A7rII with a Tokina AT-X 90mm ƒ/2.5 Macro wide open at ƒ/2.5.

The lens is manual focus and between 20 and 30 years old. It's nicknamed the "Bokina" (not just by me)—for its beautiful bokeh, of course. I got the Bokina (I'll forego the quote marks for the rest of this post) last summer, and fell in love with it.

The Bokina was made for about 10 years starting in 1986. While I have another contemporaneous lens that can match or beat the Bokina's bokeh (the Olympus OM Zuiko 90mm ƒ/2 Macro, at over three times the price), no modern lens I have used does so. The Bokina is sturdy, with good mechanics. At 530 grams without the adapter, it's a bit lighter than my Sony 90mm ƒ/2.8 OSS. While less flare resistant than its modern counterparts, and lacking autofocus, the only reason I see not to carry it everywhere would be its weight—which is still not too bad. To quibble just a bit, when stopped down the aperture shape may show in "bokeh balls," and especially at ƒ/4 this turns out to be not a good shape. Often the aperture shape can be pleasing and not distracting.

Now an eBay treasure, the manual-focus 1986–96 Tokina AT-X 90mm ƒ/2.5 Macro, AKA the "Bokina," was sold in many different lensmounts and now sells in the $200–400 range with or without its dedicated 1:1 extender.

The Bokina is as sharp as you would ever want a lens to be, even on the unforgiving sensor of the A7rII, and the bokeh is creamy and beautiful at any aperture up to ƒ/11. (I never stop down past that.)

Formerly normal
It was a precipitous and slippery slope that led me into buying the Sony and using weird old lenses. Less than a year ago, I was "normal"—a modern photographer using modern autofocus lenses. Buying the Sony A7rII, and then the exploration of manual focus lenses that followed, was definitely Mike's fault, because he gave it the Camera of the Year award. At the time I posted in the comments something like, "OK, a good camera maybe, but what about lenses?!" Like many looking at the Sony E-mount lens selection at that point, I was both puzzled and sticker-shocked. Zeiss had some good lenses for the system, quite expensive of course. Sony or Sony/Zeiss had a few primes, also relatively expensive. Sony had some zooms, also expensive and heavy, and not particularly stellar in tests.

Previously I had been using two Micro 4/3 cameras (one of them infrared) and a Nikon D800E. I never really made friends with the D800E despite working with it a lot, but I enjoyed exploring the broader range of possibilities that the larger sensor made available in terms of bokeh. The lenses for both systems were pretty good: sharp and lightweight, with good if not flawless bokeh. All I could imagine was that by comparison, I would be in for a world of financial pain in the Sony system.

Before springing for the A7rII I went through all the lens options several times. I'd look at all the lens options again and again and gasp at the prices. Along with another autofocus prime, I bought both the autofocus Sony 55mm ƒ/1.8 FE and the manual-focus Zeiss Loxia 50mm ƒ/2 so I could compare them and decide which one to keep. Overall, I liked the feel of the manual-focus Loxia. I tested the two lenses against each other every possible way, and I actually found that I was hitting better focus manually than if I let the Sony lens autofocus. I found I was reaching for the Loxia if I had both in the bag. Hmm. Maybe manual focus isn't actually so bad? In the end I preferred the Loxia's sharpness stopped down, and also, in scrutinizing the pictures, I determined it had a more pleasing character. This was new for me, to pick one lens over another for something so subjective.

With magnification in the high-res EVF, the Sony made manual focus easy. I felt a little hampered and slow sometimes at first, while other times focusing manually was a clear advantage. This past Christmas I photographed with the Loxia 50mm and I found manual focus to be far more enjoyable and workable than autofocus, my most enjoyable Christmas photography ever. In the end I came to prefer manual focus.

On to eBay
The Loxia set the stage; it taught me I could live without AF, and that I liked manual aperture rings. Pretty soon I was on eBay.

It turns out that there is not a dearth of lenses for the Sony A7 system, as I had thought, but a dizzying array of amazingly excellent options. Some are quite inexpensive, and some are off the charts. Almost all of these vintage options don't have autofocus.
I've now bought a large handful of manual focus lenses for the system—mostly older, often inexpensive, sometimes really good. Certain vintages of the Olympus OM Zuiko 50mm ƒ/1.4 MC, for example, are as good as can be—really nice bokeh and super-sharp at most apertures—for under $140. I'm just as happy to have this inexpensive lens in my bag as any other 50mm I can think of.

The current rogue's gallery of non-EXIF non-native lenses

With the vintage lenses I have no idea of modern test results. The Sony sensor is unforgiving, and I started testing hard myself. I had already started this with the Loxia 50mm vs. Sony 55mm comparisons. I wasn't just looking at the sharpness; I started looking at all these lenses in terms I had not particularly appreciated in my modern lens purchases: character. And indeed, many of my modern lenses didn't show much character except in their flaws. I was finding a different kind of character—the style of rendering—crafted into these optics by masters of old.

Really looking at the effects of aperture
With the old lenses I didn't have EXIF, so to capture the aperture info I started indexing: going through all reasonable stops starting wide open. I record those f-stops as keywords in Lightroom, which means a greater degree of scrutiny and awareness of aperture as I review each image on screen. For each composition in the field I would start with ƒ/1.4 on a fast lens even if I knew ƒ/1.4 wasn't particularly good on that lens and that I might throw that exposure away: ƒ/1.4, ƒ/2, ƒ/2.8, and on down.

In doing this, I became much more in tune with lenses/focal lengths/apertures, and just generally how optics behave. Thirty years as a serious photographer, and it took this to get me here: the combination of digital capture ease with old lenses and manual apertures. (I could never afford the time and film to do this kind of thing in my old view camera days!). But now I have a lot of image data, and it has taken a lot of time to evaluate. I have to sift through my vintage lens collection, but I will probably end up with more as I sell some.

The only thing I can remember that has improved my photography as much as exploring all these old lenses aperture by aperture was when I got my Pentax Spot V light meter way back in 1980.

All in all, buying, testing, and trying old lenses on the Sony A7rII has been a very fun, eye-opening adventure.

And the Bokina is definitely a keeper.

John

*John says various members of his family pronounce their last name in different ways. He, like his father, prefers "LEE-ut"; his children are more apt to say "luh-HET." He's given up on trying to correct strangers and just accepts whatever they say—although I doubt he'd be okay with what Siri says when I ask my iPhone to call him—"Calling John Lennet!" —MJ

©2016 by John Lehet, all rights reserved

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Rob de Loe: "I went down the legacy lens rabbit hole in 2015. There's lots of wonderful old glass out there. Many Canon FD lenses are excellent; I'm not using that line anymore because I needed to adapt them to a Canon EF mount, and the one person who had a good system for changing over the mounts got sick. I'm now using SMC Pentax-A 645 lenses with a pair of Mirex tilt-shift adapters on a Sony A7r. It works a treat.

"One tip for anyone using adapted lenses and Lightroom: Dirk Essl's fantastic little plugin "Lens Tagger" is an excellent way to add the missing EXIF information (model, aperture, focal length, etc.) You have to keep notes, which won't work for everyone, but if you do it's a small extra step in your workflow. I like to know at least what lens it was, and most lenses on my A7r are primes so it's not difficult.

"I put my phone to work to help out. Google's 'Keep' app lets you take a picture of what you're shooting, and then record some text notes. It also picks up the GPS coordinates (something else I like to track).

"In part because of Mike's enthusiasm, I've now introduced a Fuji X-T1 into my bag. It scratches a different photographic itch. I actually like to carry both cameras with me to cover all the bases.

"One last tip: as of January 5th 2017 Iridient X Developer is now available and it does a brilliant job of developing Fuji X-Trans files. It turns them into DNGs which you can then bring into Lightroom. The difference has to be seen to be believed (lots of examples are popping up in a thread on Fredmiranda.com)."

Barry Reid: "I don't really test lenses but I can very much relate to John's comments on the Sony/Zeiss 55mm ƒ/1.8. Arguably this lens typifies all that is bad in modern lens design—it is just too perfect with knockout sharpness, bags of contrast and minimal CA, it has no obvious flaws and immediately impresses when first used. Yet like a sugar hit it faded over time and I gradually started leaving it at home in favour of its 35mm ƒ/2.8 sibling or some of my old Contax/Yashica glass because, while it may get great DxO scores, it lacks an intangible character which some of my other lenses deliver."

Paul Racicot: "I have been using the 'Bokina' lens since the early '90s. Still in my camera bag along with the 1:1 extension. Never entered my mind to ever let it go even after buying several Nikon AF infinity to 1:1 lenses. I think I'll keep it a while longer."

Arend Vermazaren: "Reference should be made to Philip Reeve and his website on using manual focus lenses on the Sony A7. He also tested the Bokina back in 2014."

Mike adds: People can find a lot on the Internet about this lens, by Googling either "bokina" or "Tokina 90mm ƒ/2.5" or both. Philip Reeve's article might be the best single thing.

This Vs. That and That Vs. This

I've had a bit of a difficult time moderating the comments to the Ektachrome post. Seems some feathers are getting ruffled, going both ways. On that score, just a reminder: I ask that comments respond to the post, not to other commenters, unless you're being helpful. Our Comments Section is like the "Letters to the Editor" section in a newspaper. It's not a forum.

My own [personal, individual, you don't have to agree with it] opinion, echoing a comment Carl Weese made long ago:

Black-and-white was already perfect in the film era. Digital was the coming of age of color.

...And, at least for home and enthusiast use, digital color surpasses anything the film era had to offer, with the possible exception of projected Kodachrome.

But look, we're all different, eh? There's no point in getting upset one way or the other about it. Everybody has their own preferences and opinions. Some people love film, some people love digital, some people love both. Some people have strong opinions about many different aspects of technique within analog or digital. One person's opinions about materials and ways of working don't have to affect another's.

Can strong opinions be consistent with tolerance? I think so, as long as the strong opinions don't cross the line into "true believer" territory—which is more of a psychological affliction, if you ask me—and as long as we're not talking about core beliefs like politics or religion.

Or PCs vs. Macs—if I may quote Kurtz in Heart of Darkness, "Windows! The horror! The horror!"

That might not be quite the exact quote.

Personally, for example, I never gave a fig about Ektachrome, but that doesn't mean I don't respect someone who worked with it for years, loved it, has warm memories of it, and is delighted it's coming back. I'm happy for them. Why wouldn't I be? All good if you ask me. I would never look at great work and say, "it's no good because it was shot on Ektachrome." That would never happen.

Other people might not give a fig about Plus-X and Tri-X, which I shot thousands of rolls of prior to A.D. 2000 and loved dearly. That's all right with me—they don't have to like what I liked. Well, as long as they're willing to remain open-minded about the work itself, I guess. There's that need for tolerance again.

We all tend to like what we need (or needed) for our work, I think, and whatever "nourishes our enthusiasm" in Ansel's words*. What that is can be different for different individuals. All that's needed is to remember—oh yeah—to be tolerant.

Mike

* I love that phrase—a mild, careful verbal formulation that nevertheless acknowledges the depths of photo-geekery, to which Ansel was not immune.

Original contents copyright 2017 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.

Settle this dispute
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Al DaValle: "Thank God we all like different things!!! Think how boring the world would be if our desires, preferences and choices were the same!!!"

Tyler Monson: "'To have to despise something in order to respect something else is a sign of impotence' (Paul Strand, 1917)."

Speed: "I wonder...did anyone ever complain to Paul Simon that he hadn't written a song called 'Ektachrome'?"

Mike replies: It's little known, but that was the original title of the song. "Ektachroh-oh-ome / You give me those aaaac-curate colors." However, he couldn't find anything to rhyme with the line "All the world's a sunny day...as long as you use a Wratten 81A warming filter...."

hugh crawford: "I hadn't even heard that Ektachrome had gone away, but looking through all my 30-year-old Ektachromes and Kodachromes I really am not too interested in using Ektachrome ever again. In fact I wish I hadn't used it then. It was the abundance of labs that would clip test, push- and pull-process and do one-hour processing and have a guy on a bicycle hand-deliver it to you that made E-6 worthwhile. Kodachrome I would be interested in. Verichrome Pan would tempt me back into the darkroom."

Mike replies: You and me both, but only if they re-introduced Medalist along with it!

Ektachrome Returns

On account of a perceived reversal in demand (geddit? Reversal? I'm on a roll [geddit? Roll?]), Kodak Alaris, the 2013 spinoff of the old Kodak that makes film, will re-introduce Ektachrome slide film.

Generally speaking, assuming it served them reliably and didn't cause problems, older photographers have more or less affection for old films depending on how much of it they shot and how well they knew it. Since Ektachrome was Kodak's bread-and-butter, middle-o'-the-road slide film and lots of people shot lots of it, you can read cries of approval all over the Internet. Well and good!

Me, I never shot much slide film; didn't have to for clients, and slide film didn't have any DR (exposure range), and all us arty guys shot VPS and made prints anyway.

As the rest of the Internet suddenly extols the virtues of Ektachrome (I live in the future and the future is strange), I probably shouldn't remind people that it was the the slightly cold neutrality and subdued, "accurate" colors of Ektachrome, a film that Kodak was complacent about and saw fit to improve only sluggishly, that allowed Fujifilm to eat Kodak's lunch in the '90s with its zippier, more saturated Fujichrome films.

But never mind; Ektachrome's back, and that's good news for many. Power to 'em, all of 'em. Choice is good. Ektachrome is a 100-speed, E-6 process film that was previously discontinued in 2012. Kodak no longer makes slide projectors.

Mike
(Thanks to more tipsters than I can shake a stick at)

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Shiny chrome
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marcin wuu: "Introducing, or reintroducing actually, any film is good news these days, 'cause it's so rare. You keep hearing about new films popping up here and there, but it always turns out it's a rebadged existing product. So, while I don't shoot reversal, this bit of news made me happy, which is a rare thing lately. We're at the end of digital transition, and film's still not dead it seems. Like Punk, kinda."

Doug Thacker: "Good luck getting it processed. There was a new lab that opened in Hawaii circa 2003 that spent seven figures for its E-6 processing gear (I heard the amount was $2 million). Fujifilm's Hawaii division farmed its local E-6 processing out to them, so I know they made a lot of money, but when the lab shut down six or seven years later due to lack of business, they couldn't find anyone to purchase their E-6 processor, and my understanding is they ended up leaving it in a dumpster. Hopefully they'd made their money back on it. Since Ilfochrome/Cibachrome chemistry is no longer available—not to mention slide projectors—it's going to be pretty difficult to justify shooting slide film. But I suppose it will be a nice novelty for young people."

Peter: "You didn't mention the huge market (relatively speaking) for cross-processed, i.e., C-41 processed, Ektachrome. That's what I used for my Cuba montage series, with the idea that cross-processed Ektachrome, with a few simple tweaks of color balance and color-specific saturation in Photoshop, is evocative of old magazine photos that have been gathering dust for the past 50 years. Unlike other cross-processed slide film, Ektachrome E100VS (I wonder whether the new stuff is more like the standard G or the more vivid VS) was not irretrievably color-cast in greens or yellows or purples. It was a bit more subtle. Hoping the same for the new stuff."

Tom: "This pleases me. For 11 years of my career I shot 10 rolls of Ektachrome a day, sometimes at base, often at 'plus one.' You found a way to do it and pictures from that period seem somehow to have more character for so often straining at the limits of suitable shutter speeds and apertures and if the light was inadequate or unsuitable you lit the scene rather than bumping the ISO.

"The need for post production is one of the things that pains me most about digital. To this day I can't accept that it's just no longer possible to get it right in camera every time."

Trecento: "Ah! I might have to get my older rangefinders serviced. I'd been wanting to visit the late 'fifties and early 'sixties again. Maybe do some re-photography. I do recall that my grandfather and dad were kinda down on Ektachrome, because fading was much more noticeable to them than it was on Kodachrome. (R.I.P. K64.)"

Speed: "My camera has a slot for a CF card and one for an SD card. I don't see an Ektachrome slot. Will they be selling an adapter?"

Mike replies: I don't think there is one. You might have to develop it yourself. [*Rimshot*]

Taking CES By Storm

[Ed. Note: Our Winter Print Sale is in Day 2 of 5.
Here's the post about it and here's the order page.]

SA

As everyone knows, all of the talk at CES has been about one innovative, breakthrough product: the new Nikon D5600. Lines are deep at the Nikon booth, while crickets chirp everywhere else in the hall. It's all anyone is talking about, all anyone wants to see.

As one excited showgoer cried out, "I wanted something just exactly like my D5500, but just enough better to be noticeable, and this is it!" Another said he had come "a very long way" to reassure himself about what the new camera felt like to hold. "At first it was disorienting," he admitted, "but I stood there motionless, gripping the camera in my hand and keeping anyone else from looking at it, and it began to feel like a budget Nikon DSLR to me. And I said to myself, yes...yes...this feels right."

We were able to catch up with D. Functionary Minion, Nikon's Associate Assistant Head of Blatherskite and Salespatter, by rescuing her from the press of humanity at the Nikon booth and treating her to a triangle of cold pizza-like substance and fizzless sugary-water at a dirty table near the grimy, dispiriting concessions stand here at Tech North-by-Northwest.

TOP: Greetings, Functionary—may I call you Functionary?—first of all, please explain to us all the fresh thinking and innovation that went into this new camera.

D. Functionary Minion: Actually, my friends all call me "D. Funct." You're welcome to call me "Ms. Minion." And for starters, this new camera replaces our long established and much-loved D5500 model, which was a worldwide success. Right here, if you'll look closely, you can see what's probably the biggest outward sign of all the changes inside.

TOP: You're pointing to the "D5600" badge.

Ms. Minion: Exactly! Very perceptive.

TOP: So what's the significance there?

Ms. Minion: Well, which is more, 5600 or 5500?

TOP: You're actually waiting for me to answer? Fifty-six hundred is a higher number.

Ms. Minion: Exactly. How much more, would you say?

TOP: One hundred more?

Ms. Minion [laughing]: I can see why they let you blog from your mother's basement! That was the overarching "deep principle" of our Nikon engineers in Japan—the new camera must accord with the ancient samurai principle of jumanji, which means "give them at least one hundred more."

TOP: Not all bloggers actually work in their mother's basements, you know. I work on my front porch. And I don't think jumanji means...

Ms. Minion: ...No, there's nothing much else new on the camera...that can be seen on the outside. But inside is a completely different story! A very different story.

TOP: Why don't you tell me that story.

Ms. Minion: Basically, we have sprinkled what is known inside the company as "magic eye-eye dust" all over the camera.

TOP: And what is "eye-eye" dust?

Ms. Minion: It stands for "incremental improvement."

TOP: Got it. And what incremental improvements are there?

Ms. Minion. Oh, a bunch of them. There are lots. All sorts of them.

TOP: Such as, specifically?

Ms. Minion: Are you ready? This camera can communicate wirelessly...through the air.

TOP: Do you mean it's got Wi-Fi?

Ms. Minion: It's magic, blogger. Something never before known.

TOP: Well, I agree it seems miraculous, but actually it's been around for...

Ms. Minion: Our marketing tagline is "Connected. Just Like a Smartphone. Only Not Quite As Convenient."

TOP: Speaking as a wordsmith, that's not a very compelling tagline.

Ms. Minion: The D5600 is an extremely capable little camera!

TOP: Agreed. But wasn't the D5500 an extremely capable little camera?

Ms. Minion: No.

TOP: No? Why not?

Ms. Minion: Because we don't need it to be.

TOP: Your predecessor seemed to think pretty highly of it two years ago.

Ms. Minion: We needed it to be then. We're not on that cycle any more. We're on this cycle. Marketing doesn't target all corporate products, you know, only the products that are in the selling cycle. The D5600 is the absolute latest thing. It's bleeding-edge new.

TOP: Well, actually it's been around since last November in the rest of the world.

Ms. Minion: I only handle North America. May I have another piece of pizza?

TOP: You liked that? I thought it was pretty close to the worst pizza I ever let past my lips. It was cold and old. The crust was soggy and the cheese was congealed.

Ms. Minion: Yes, it tasted like wet carpet. May I have another piece? Please don't make me go back to the booth.

TOP: Given that it was nine dollars a slice, I'm afraid you're going to have to buy your own this time.

Ms. Minion: Deal, sad blogger-boy.

TOP: Boy? I'm almost sixty years old!

Ms. Minion [puts her hand on my shoulder]: Aww. There there. I know. Last year at this time I was working in a knit shop in the desert south of town. Would you like another piece?

TOP: Can't you see I haven't even eaten this piece?

Ms. Minion: Oh, but I'm sure that old one is gone. They've probably put out a whole new pie by now. It's probably just out of the oven and it's sizzling fresh and steaming hot. Oooh—ooh—yum! I can just about smell it from here.

TOP: Right as you said that, I imagined I smelled the aroma of hot pizza.

Ms. Minion: It's just what you want. Picture it in your head. Exactly like you like it. The latest thing, new and beautiful and as good as they can make it! Oh so good! It'll be delicious! Fresh, tasty and satisfying!

TOP: You're good at this.

Ms. Minion: Thanks.

TOP: Here's nine dollars. Don't buy it unless it's actually better.

[After several minutes, Ms. Minion returns with two more slices of pizza on paper plates.

TOP: Hey! This looks just like the first slice.

Ms. Minion: Nope! This time there are mushrooms. See? It's better.

TOP: Let me guess: one hundred better?

Ms. Minion: [laughs] You're seeing how this works. Eat up, fat sad old blogger! We all need our strength this week.

Mike
(SA = Satire Alert)

P.S. Joking aside, the D5600 costs only $697 and offers very good image quality for the price. Here is the list of all the new products from CES '17 in Las Vegas.

Original contents copyright 2017 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.

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

Roger Cicala: "First, thank you for the laughs. Second, thank you for reminding me why I don't go to CES anymore. A great read to start my day."

Juha Haataja: "What a nice start to the day to read this in the morning, well done indeed. Well, what can a marketeer do if the engineers keep on turning out the same product again and again? Given that, I'm quite happy that there hasn't been an announcement of an upgrade to the Panasonic LX100, thank you very much. And if there is, please don't mention it. (Even though 'LX200' would be exactly one hundred more.)"

kirk tuck: "Can't buy the D5600. Am saving money for their 'Key Mission' camera. According to their advertising 92% of Americans want one now. I don't know what the hell it is but if 92% of Americans want one how can I go wrong? But I have a question I was hoping someone here could answer...is it just a Go-Pro with a different logo slapped on the front? Did they just rush out some rebadged Nikon Go-Pros?

"Is the Key Mission some sort of routine to keep track of one's car keys? Is that the whole mission or is part of it to record 'intimacy' as suggested in their survey of American buyers? Some 15% indicated they desired a 'Key Mission' to record their hanky panky. That's a lot of Americans!

"But then I read the (almost invisible) fine print and found out that the math genii at Nikon marketing were able to extrapolate all these percentages and numbers from a survey group of a little over a thousand self-selected poll takers.

"New math. Now that it's socially okay to lie about...anything I guess camera advertising is going to become exciting again. Go Nikon!!!"

hugh crawford: "When I read that I thought you were just making up the word blatherskite. But it turns out that it is not only a real word but is just as scatological as I imagined. Not only that, but I learned 'cheapskate' has nothing to do with skating! It seems our Scottish ancestors not only wore kilts but knew their s***."

$2000 is the New $1600

First of all, here's the GH5 link at B&H. There's been an avalanche of new Panasonic stuff introduced at CES.

Note the price. Carl sent me the announcement about with the wry comment, "maybe two grand is the new normal."

I suspect $2,000 is just the new $1,600.

Oren's reply was to the effect that the GH5 is in reality a semi-professional video camera that will also do stills, and as such is appropriately priced for its target market. My question is, if the GH5 does stills as well as the E-M1 Mark II but runs circles around the Olympus's video capability, does Panasonic's flagship then steal sales from Olympus's flagship?

Fuji announced the X-T2 Graphite Silver for $1,800. That's $200 more than the regular X-T2, but I've read about the Fuji's "graphite silver" plating process, and it's pretty involved. It's conceivable that it's worth $200.

And check out the Fuji X-Pro2 Graphite (no "silver" in the name—it's a chic, darker gray) announced along with it...for a cool $2,300, you get not only the special-edition camera, but a matching Graphite 23mm ƒ/2 lens.

Mmm, mmm, good.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2017 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Featured Comments from:

hugh crawford: "That Panasonic GH5 sure looks like a Leica R9. The Leica R9 is about as nice to hold a shape as ever took pictures, but it is huge. If this is typical Micro 4/3 size I wonder if it will be like driving a car with a six-inch steering wheel. It seems the knobs akimbo look is definitely a trend."

Armond Perretta: "Why would a person pay more for a camera with a different colo(u)r? give me more time with this."

Mike replies: Believe it or not, historically the more desirable finish is just the rarer one, regardless of what it is. If black is more common, then chrome is more desirable; if chrome is more common, then black is more desirable. Black-paint film Leicas were a cheap option, cutting the cost of the chrome plating; guess what's prized now?

Of course the jury is still out (and deadlocked) on digital cameras as collectables, so whether this matters any more is very much anyone's guess.

Wednesday Open Mike: I Just Need It For Work, Mr. Cook Sir

Here's my problem: Tim's Apple doesn't seem to make the desktop computer I need. Seems strange to say.

Here's my concern: that maybe Apple has cast itself as a "lifestyle" company to such an extent that it has forgotten that some of us need computers for, um, work. (Sounds so grubby, doesn't it?)

To some degree, computers are appliances. Lifestyle is well and good, but I still need a computer. I worry that Apple is gradually losing the basic mission.

If you want to pick your own monitor (I chose an NEC PA272W which I love, by the way), you have to pick the high road or the low road—a half-crippled Mac Mini marketed for "switchers" with everything soldered in (the resellers are still trading upgraded 2012 models back and forth), or the svelte, design-y overkill of the current stratospherically-priced Pro (you know, the one that is too small, that came after the one that was too big).

I don't need twelve cores, but four would be nice. Could the amount of memory and a separate graphics card possibly be my decision? A box big enough to fit a proper fan into would work well for me. A bunch of ports just because, ach, well, I need 'em (sorry, I'm so ashamed) is probably too much to ask for. Could I have a card reader? Could I put in the memory myself, you know, like I did the '90s and the aughts? Can I have my SuperDrive back? (I can actually hear Jony Ive thundering, "'E wants whot?!?")

"Please Sir, can I have my SD card reader on the front,
where I can actually reach it?"

If you ask me, Apple should ditch the Mini, ditch the Pro, and put out a lineup of three medium-sized desktops, good better and best, all user-configurable, all reasonably sized, all non-crippled, all user-upgradeable. It's not beyond the limits of the technically feasible.

I'll take the middle one. (You know, the one there isn't one of right now without leaving the Apple universe.) Some people just need a computer for their work, is all. In addition to all the stuff for their lifestyle...stuff that I have also bought, mind you.

Quadra 605 of 1993. 2.9" H x 12.2" W x 15.3" D. 8.8 lbs.
Like that.

Can't I get a medium-sized box (maybe the same size as the old Quadra 605 of sainted memory), with user-replaceable memory and space for more than one user-replaceable hard drive? I don't need it to occupy the least possible amount of space. (In fact it would be great if I could set the monitor on top of it.) I'd like it to not overheat. It would be nice if it were more or less affordable. If it could be quiet that would be fabulous, because...I'm listening to music. At home. Where I work.

Please?

I promise I won't flash it around in public. I just need it for work.

Mike

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Does not compute?
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Featured Comments from:

B. Collinson: "Your plea to Jony and Tim's Apple is part of a growing chorus of voices. I love my Macs (we have four of them in the house), but increasingly find the road ahead to be foggy and concerning. I have previous generation 13" MacBook Pro, and I cannot even begin to fathom replacing it with the new MacBook Pro (touch strip aside, I want my ports back thank you). The total consolidation of connectivity for a 'rofessional' laptop into a single USB-C connector is simply ridiculous. That, and the fact that my Mac Minis need surgery to give them SSDs (which they desperately need) leaves me feeling much the way you do. Sigh."

Frank Petronio: "I haven't followed all of your Mac posts but the 27" iMac 5K is the best computer I've had in a lifetime of digital imaging (well since 1989). And a small MacBook Air or larger iPad (with a Bluetooth keyboard) would be perfect travel companions. Buy it once, max out the RAM, replace in 5–8 years. Well made, reliable and long-lived. Very secure unless you're a politician. I don't see what the issue is?"

Mike replies: You're right, I probably should have just bought another iMac (I bought the earliest one and have used them ever since—I'm smack dab in the middle of the target market for iMacs). But the way my new home is configured, I wanted a way to either lock up the main computer or take it along with me when I travel, for security reasons.

Peter Wright: "I think just about every serious photographer, or person who uses Macs for work will sympathize. I have a fully specified Mac mini (with the NEC PA 272W), a MacBook Air, an iPad Pro, iPhone, Apple TV and router. Everything works well for the most part, and if I have any problems Apple service is good at sorting things out. However...I have no issues with the 'lifestyle' products, as you call them, but the Mac Mini and Air are not exactly what I want, and nothing on offer at Apple seems to be a reasonable replacement.

"If the PC universe can get its act together with respect to reliability and usability, I may take a serious look at their offerings, especially for the desktop.

"My parish priest (who is definitely not a techie) decided recently to donate, with my help, one of his computers to a Syrian family who have recently arrived in town. (He mostly uses an old MacBook Pro for office work, and an iPad.) He decided to donate his PC (with a quad-core i7, 1TB SSD, and 16GB RAM), but it was a close call. He explained to me in a tone of voice that he would normally reserve for someone drifting into heresy, that he thinks Apple may be beginning to lose its way. If even my priest can see the problem then, perhaps its time to think of the Bible: Book of Daniel, chapter 5, where the writing appears on the wall, and recall what happens next!"

'Beautiful Bokeh' Print Offer

[JPEG of] photo by John Lehet

During 2017 TOP will be offering four single prints, one per season, all from experienced master printmakers, all reasonably priced. I'm happy to announce our Winter season print sale, the first of 2017. [UPDATE: Sale ended 1/9/17 at noon.]

For John Lehet it's not about the JPEG; it's about the print. A perfectionist photographic printmaker, he studied under John Sexton and transitioned from large- and medium-format darkroom printing to digital printmaking many years ago now. He's a very serious, engaged printmaker with a large body of work and many exhibitions to his credit.

The picture is "Morning Glory Bud In Rain, 2016." It is large for a small print, 13.5 by 20 inches on 17x22-inch paper. The print will be signed on the the front at the lower right; no signature on request.

The cost is only $160, shipping inclusive for domestic U.S. orders and $35 extra for non-U.S. orders. Vermonters will need to pay sales tax. It was pretty nice of John to "go low" on the price for us; helps make a purchase pain-free. This is really not much more than you might pay for a poster of the same size.

Same picture, two different papers

A new wrinkle for TOP: you can choose the same picture on your choice of two different papers, Canson Edition Etching Rag or Canson Baryta Photographique. The differences are subtle yet significant: Etching, a textured matte paper with less tooth than watercolor paper, emphasizes the smooth areas of the photograph, with the paper texture coming forward subtly in the soft washes of bokeh color. At first we were only going to offer the print on this paper. However, John decided to also offer a version on Baryta Photographique, a paper that faithfully echoes the feel of fiber-based black-and-white darkroom prints of old but without the curl. On Baryta Photographique some of the detailed areas of the print render a little more assertively, shifting the emphasis a little more toward the texture of the wet leaf above the bud. Both papers show the pop of detail against the smooth bokeh equally well, and produce clear and real color.

John has recently been obsessed (if that's not too strong a word) with exploring bokeh with his high-end full-frame mirrorless camera, using a variety of older lenses famous among deep connoisseurs. We'll have more information about the equipment used, as well as a fascinating post about meditation and its relationship to photography, as the week progresses.

As always with our sales, we take orders for five days and then close the ordering period so the photographer can get to work on fulfillment. We do not take any more orders once the ordering period has closed. No exceptions (but not to worry—if you miss the sale, you can still order the print from John at any time at the regular price of $475). The "Beautiful Bokeh" sale ends next Monday at noon, Eastern U.S. Time.

I hope you will love this! It really is exceptionally pretty. (Very safe to give as a gift, I might add.) And thanks much for looking.

Mike
(Thanks to J.L.)

Original contents copyright 2017 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Featured Comments from:

Michael Kellough: "Re 'Both papers show the pop of detail against the smooth bokeh equally well, and produce clear and real color.'

"Echoing Dave, in his comment, all we can tell from the photo of both prints side by side is that the color saturation is different in each print. The texture you discuss in describing the difference is not visible in the photo so how about some other clue to distinguish the two papers?"

Mike replies: Actually you can't quite tell that, because you can't see prints in JPEGs of prints. Especially iPhone snap JPEGs that have been reduced to 800 pixels in width and mushed and squished by the blog software. Just sayin'.

My clear favorite between the two papers is the Etching. It's John's preference too. This picture is gorgeous on it. John created an array of tests on a number of papers of various softness and a variety of textures, looking for the perfect match for the image. He tried some papers that were even more matte and had more texture than the Etching paper, but liked them less. He arrived at Canson Etching as having the ideal balance.

We're also offering the Baryta because we know some people have a strong affection for those types of papers (I love them too), and feel "allergic" to papers that are more matte. My experience over many years is that a small minority of people just really don't care for matte papers. The Baryta paper has more gloss and looks more conventional. The picture looks beautiful on that paper too, and, honestly, the differences are pretty slight (and will probably be more so once they're under glass). But if you lack any strong allegiance to traditional Baryta "air dried F surface" type papers, and you're in doubt as to which to get, I'd say go for the Etching. It's amazing.

And finally, if you receive the print on the Etching paper and don't care for it, you can return it to John and he'll send you the more standard Baryta print. (Or your money back, your choice.)

Does this help at all?

Solving Problems

A few brief followups:

• Re "Things Go Wrong," the washing machine repair cost $397.48, more than half the price of a new one; the water heater, replaced under warranty, cost $468.83. My butt hurts like somebody gave me a swift kick in the wallet. Hence....
• B&H sends me a holiday gift card every year to thank me for being an affiliate (thanks B&H!), so I solved my problem of needing IBIS because of my "yips" by putting this year's gift card toward a used Fuji XF 18–55mm OIS lens. Not IBIS, but rather in-lens IS, but I can't afford a new camera right now. (My X-T1 is not even three years old yet and works fine.) 
• Re "The 2017 Novel," I finished Heart of Darkness in 2016 with a little over two hours to spare! However I did not enjoy it. Have decided I do not actually like Conrad, much as I would like to. Went to the attic of the barn and, until my hands got stiff with cold, rummaged through boxes. Found one of my two editions of Moby-Dick; ordered two more...despite the fact that I'm reading an online version (cf. Mrs. Wittig, "all you book collectors are insane").
• To solve the computer problem, I'm using my 13" 2014 MacBook Air as my main computer. I may have already mentioned this. Seems to be working okay, except that not infrequently it makes a giant industrious whooshing noise like it's hot and its fan is blowing, despite the fact that there is no detectable inlets or outlets for air to pass and, if it actually has a fan, I have no idea where they put it. This bears more discussion, but I'm not going to post my thoughts about Apple right now because the new Print Offer starts in the morning and I don't want the Comments to be inundated with talk about computers.

Did I mention the Print Offer starts in the morning? It does. This one is going to be special; I adore this print. I've already found a frame shop in Canandaigua and I've been Scotch-taping John's proof up to the wall here and there in the house to help me decide where to hang it.

More in the morning. Noon actually, to be precise.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2017 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Featured Comments from:

Jim in Denver: "Earlier this year my mother had to replace her GE clothes dryer, which she bought new in 1967. To say that 'they don't make 'em like they used to' seems accurate in this case."

Rob L.: "The 18–55mm ƒ/2.8–4 is a great lens, that I don't use often simply because the 16mm is so amazing. It's not as great as the Nikon 17–55mm ƒ/2.8, but close, and in fairness about 45 lbs. lighter.  :-)  "

Manuel: "Curiously, I felt a strange lack of attachment when I tried to read Heart of Darkness. It just didn't grip me. When a book doesn't rivet me by page 28, I usually give it up, but I made an extra effort with this one. It didn't work. It's weird that, while being quite straightforward and short, the narrative is boring. I read behemoths like Magic Mountain, with its thorough character and environment depictions—I could actually see Hans Castorp in my head!—and I never felt tired as I did with Heart of Darkness. At least now I know it it's not a translation issue, nor a lack of comprehension."

Mike replies: It might be one of those programmatic novels that's supposed to be one big extended metaphor, so maybe it's gripping to those who know all about the subtext. A novel like that is Andre Dubus III's House of Sand and Fog—supposedly the story of the Middle East conflicts recast as an epic real-estate squabble. I mean the characters are contending over a house. That novel, which I read all the way to the end, infuriated me—the whole programmatic premise seems utterly disreputable to me. I felt betrayed that the author wasn't true to the humanity of his characters, but had made them into straw dogs in his programmatic agenda. This I suppose is a matter of taste. Or ethics, or something.

Kev Ford: "The MacBook Air vents out of the gap between the main body and the screen. There is a fan that pushes air out that is a little like a water-wheel. It's normal for the fan to come on occasionally; the fan will lower the temperature quite far below where it needs to be before turning off and allowing the heat to build up again."

Camera Style: The Downside of Retro

Don't get me wrong: I love retro style. I like the X100 and the Pen F; I think the X-T10 is just about the prettiest little camera made. I have nothing against retro...

...In principle.

It has a downside, though. I think you can make the argument that it distorts a clear view of practicality. Why put the little front knob on the front of the Pen F except that it looks like the slow shutter-speed dial on the front of a Leica III?

Similarly, the on/off switch of the Olympus E-M1 Mark II is where it is because it's mimicking the OM-1 of 1971.

I'm not necessarily criticizing either of these features specifically, or saying that functionality decisions made for the sake of retro style are necessarily bad decisions. My own camera, the Fuji X-T1, is pretty heavily influenced by retro style (what's called "knobs 'n' dials"), and I like that about it—I prefer that style of control configuration. The late Michael Reichmann, whom we all miss, felt differently—he felt knobs 'n' dials just slowed him down.

It can't be denied that retro features are a burden in a sense. They're backward-looking by definition. While there's nothing wrong with them, they do prevent a clean-sheet rethink of how the camera should operate. Retro styling cues are nice in some ways, but in other ways they represent the weight of tradition creating a sort of distortion, a limitation on fresh thinking in design. Were it not for retro, I doubt very much the OM-D E-M1 Mark II's on/off switch would be where it is. It might be traditional, but it's neither logical nor ergonomic.

Recently it has seemed to me that the Kaufmann-era Leica cameras are taking on a certain character, a house style, typified by elegance, simplicity, and excellence. The S, SL, and TL seem "of a piece"—they embody a similar design aesthetic and gestalt. All three of these cameras must have been all, or nearly, clean-sheet design exercises, unfettered by the dictates of tradition. As time goes on, on the other hand, the M seems more and more out of sync with the rest of the lineup. I'm sure Leica will never abandon the M—the company will protect its customers who are invested in M lenses, if for no other reason—but the fact that the M is so heavily influenced by retro styling cues and design makes it seem more and more like an odd bird in the flock. It seems more and more out of place.

Maybe this is one reason why Sony and Panasonic cameras appeal to us. They aren't beholden to any particular "heritage" style. While this might make their products more anodyne or bloodless in some ways, in other ways it gives their designers a certain freedom. It leaves them free of the burden of retro.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2017 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.

Redesign!
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Featured Comments from:

Jim: "It's arguable that the retro craze can be traced to J Mays (just J—no period) who designed the New Beetle at VW then at Ford the new Thunderbird, the Ford GT update and the last generation Mustang among many other cars. Likewise the modern streamline cameras can be traced to Luigi Colani with his designs for Canon in the early '80s. Interesting that so few people know these guys!"

Gordon Cahill (partial comment): "Or maybe it's because they had it right and the last 20 years have just been an attempt to reinvent the wheel. I like my Leica SL a lot but I can't set my aperture and shutter before I turn it on. Nor can I check my settings while the power is off. The power switch is in the wrong spot. It should, like the M, or a Nikon/Sony/Fuji be around the shutter button. To me it makes complete sense to have the aperture dial on the lens. My right hand is already doing so much yet my left seems to be doing nothing except holding the camera off the ground.

"I do think some things are a step back. I'm not keen on the ISO dial on the X-Pro2. But in general, simple tactile controls, even electronically driven, are more satisfying in use than a button with 11 independent functions."

A C Eckert: "I had a somewhat similar thought yesterday while out for an evening walk. It was quite cold and windy, and I had neglected to bring gloves. My hands rapidly numbed, and switching between my D810 and X-T1 revealed a handling difference that I hadn’t really noticed before. The retro dials on the X-T1 became sharp, fiddly, and annoying to operate, whereas the smooth buttons and rubberized dials on the D810 remained comfortable and easy to use. It’s differences like this that make actual camera reviews so valuable to prospective purchasers. A lot of the stuff that’s practically important to photographers just can’t be easily presented or compared in spec sheet form."

Michael Wall: "I am an industrial designer, trained in England and practicing here in Canada for the last 35 years. My first SLR, back in the '80s, was an Olympus OM-1n. As a designer I appreciated the beauty and functionality of Yoshihisa Maitani's design of the OMs and the Pens. When I started shooting digital I bought Olympus 4/3 cameras, partly out of loyalty, partly to utilize my OM lenses which I am fond of. The 4/3 cameras were quite well designed, but overly large, and I yearned for a digital version of my OM-1. Then came the OMD E-M5 which looked very much like the OM-1, was small and light and ergonomically good. It was retro, but seemed to keep it under control—I was very pleased and hoped the E-M1 would follow that restraint. I have been meaning to write a critique of the E-M1, with illustrations, or even redesign it using the same spatial envelope and legacy but with more elegance.

"What has happened at Olympus is that, in the absence of a charismatic designer like Maitani, the designers have been captured by the superficial style of the OMs and have lost the essence of the simplicity and elegance with which Maitani imbued his designs. If he were working at Olympus now, the OMDs would not look the way they do, they would look and feel radical in the same way that the Olympus technology is radical, but they would retain Maitani's personal design ethos.

"I love using my new E-M1 Mark II, and I'm getting some good results, but I can't help redesigning it in my mind every time I pick it up—something I never did with the OM-1."

Ben Rosengart: "What a lot of 'retro' design gets right is, it communicates physical states—a car's speed, an aperture's width—by visual or tactile metaphors rather than by figures. In the case of a speedometer, for example, the angle of the needle corresponds to the speed of the car. Analog controls can be even more powerful than analog displays, because muscle memory gets involved. You could even say that to some extent you're allowed to pretend that you're operating a machine, not sending commands to a computer. I appreciate computers, but with a camera, I want to be thinking visually, not analytically. If I'm aware that the camera's a computer, I feel let down by it. I think this is why Sony cameras don't appeal to me."

Dave Levingston: "Years ago I worked with an Olympus OM-1 (provided by an employer). It was a fine camera. But the worst feature on it was the on/off switch. Many times I'd pick it up and find that it had somehow been left turned on and now had a dead battery. I don't know how it happened. I don't really think I forgot to turn it off all that often. Maybe it was working the rewind knob that somehow moved the switch. I seem to remember that the switch was much complained about at the time. That's not the kind of retro I enjoy."

Dave Karp (partial comment): "A nice thing about the E-M1 and its on/off switch is that it is out of the way. I automatically turn it on with my left hand when I lift up the camera or take it out of the bag. Then I never go anywhere near the on/off switch until I purposely turn the camera off. That was not the case with another camera I owned that had the on/off switch placed around the shutter release button."

Gaspar Heurtley: "There's nothing more retro styled than a modern Nikon DSLR. The latest digital cameras look exactly like their old film counterparts. Apart from some cosmetics (like the vertical/horizontal red line on the grip) and a few buttons, the F100 is pretty much the same as a D500. But yet, everyone points at poor Oly for the placement of the on/off switch. Oh, well...."

Restoring My Faith in Photos

Drone photograph of Hong Kong, from "The Best Drone
Photographs of 2016." Photo by "Cliechti."

I get in hot water for recommending features in The New York Times, because not everyone subscribes, and sometimes, some of those people have already used up their ten free articles for the month. But it's January Second, and if you've used up all your free access for this month already, well, that's on you.

So I get to mention that the Times' beautiful "The Year in Pictures 2016" has restored my faith in photography. It demonstrates that the point we have arrived at, photographically speaking, is wonderful indeed—photographers are doing better work now, able to capture more situations more effectively, than ever before. It takes quite a long time to digest the entire presentation, and it's by far the best on a large screen. Well worth the trouble.

Old and droning on
If there's anything that makes me feel old, it's drones. Not a part of photography when I was comin' up, not remotely. (Y'see what I did there...remotely? Drones? Oh, never mind.) It's not actually an age thing exactly—an older cousin of mine who loves toys already owns one, and is doubtless happily disturbing the peace and dive-bombing the neighbors. But thinking about learning drone photography just makes me want to go lie down. Like spelunking, I hope to die before I have to try it. I'll gratefully leave that trick to the younger dogs to learn.

But I love pictures, and here's a lovely set not behind any paywall: TIME magazine's "The Best Drone Photographs of 2016." Marvelous stuff. Check it out and prepare to be amazed at the graphic intensity of the unusual perspectives. The JPEGs are a bit too small, but oh well.

Wonderful.

Mike
(Thanks to John Camp and John Hogg)

Original contents copyright 2017 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.

The view from on high
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Featured Comments from:

Benjamin Marks: "That was truly an amazing range of issues presented. I don't often react this emotionally to a collection of pictures, but I found I had to stop in the middle and collect myself. There is just so much to see there and much of the subject matter is waaay beyond my comfort zone for news. I confess that since November, I have withdrawn from news consumption somewhat, as the state of things was mainly making me depressed. I guess an end-of-year collection is the opposite of an overture in music, but that was the effect.  

Stephen Gilbert: "Great photos, horrible year."

Mike Mundy: "Drones: I experienced one being operated last summer in the Sierra Nevada's Hoover Wilderness. Extremely annoying."

Steve Caddy (partial comment): " It's not that you have to learn drones. It's that you don't need to hire helicopters. I wonder if chopper pilots are lamenting drones the same way photographers sometimes lament smartphone cameras."

Innovation of the Year 2016

My pick for the Innovation of the Year in 2016 goes to Panasonic, for the GX8's viewfinder.

The quality of a car's steering (bear with me here) is the major determinant of the character of any particular car. (Best steering in my limited experience, going only by memory: 1975–85 Peugeot 604. Second best, my former 2001 NB Mazda Miata.) In a similar way, one of the biggest influences on a camera's character—its gestalt, the feel of the experience of using it—is its viewfinder.

I love camera viewfinders. There's not a big explanation or a tortured rationale following this; I just love camera viewfinders. They have always made a big difference to my buying decisions and always been a major determinant of how much I enjoy using various cameras.

I love to see, you see, and the VF is how you see with a camera. A VF can be anything from a crude and approximate pointing device to a beautiful way of engaging more intimately with the visual world.

I've used all sorts of viewfinders over many years, from a fine fresnel intensifier on a view camera groundglass, to the Albada viewfinder on various Pentax 645's, to a simple wire frame on a Graflex Crown Graphic press camera and various unadorned tunnel finders, to tiny simple prisms attached to antique folders, to the laterally reversed groundglass images on TLRs, to some lovely Leica and Zeiss clip-on OVFs for rangefinders (and rangefinder camera VFs too, naturally), to, of course, many different SLR finders on cameras big and small. So much so that I became something of a savant of various viewfinder properties for a while. Some of my favorites over the years include the Contax RTSIII, the Olympus OM-4T, and the original Sony A900...not to mention the neat swiveling viewing screens on the early Nikon Coolpix 950 and Sony F-707.

A few abbreviations:

VF = viewfinder
OVF = optical viewfinder
EVF = electronic viewfinder

Those refer to the eye-level or eyepiece finders. The little monitor on the back of your camera (as I once got in trouble for pointing out to David Pogue) is called the viewing screen.

It wasn't until the Fuji X-T1 that my allegiances finally tilted over to the eye-level EVF. Not that I think EVFs are better at everything in all cases, just that the balance of advantages and drawbacks finally shifted subtly in the EVF's direction. I decided that, with the X-T1, I appreciated the EVF's strengths more than I missed the OVF's strengths.

And of course I've used a variety of cameras that had hinged or tilting viewfinders like the GX8's too, including the clip-on EVF of the quirky Ricoh GXR (which led to my discovery that I like tilting VFs), to the one on the Panasonic GX7, which I owned.

Of everything I've ever owned or seen, though, the GX8's viewfinder is among the best implementations ever. The team that worked on it did an outstanding job. It's not as flat-out amazing and wonderfully different as the dual OVF/EVF on the Fuji X100[x] and X-Pro1 and X-Pro2 (I've used the X-Pro1 and X100S, thanks to Art E. and Ken T.), but I enjoy using it even more than those.

Visually and in terms of optical size, the GX8 VF is even a little bit better than the X-T1's, and the X-T1's is outstanding too. The tilting GX8 EVF is well masked so that you can block out extraneous light, has good eye relief, is adjustable, and the tilting feature is wonderful, allowing for great flexibility and, with the finder at about 45°, a camera-holding position that I find very comfortable.

Of course, the GX8 is marred by having a flip-out viewing screen, which is more of a video feature, rather than the easier-to-use flip-up screen such as the X-T1 has.

Can't have everything.

Okay, okay...TOP doesn't actually give out an "innovation of the year" award. But the GX8 eye-level finder is the coolest camera feature I experienced in 2016, anyway, and it deserves all the praise I can heap on it. I truly hope this feature survives to make its way into future Panasonic cameras.

Kudos to Panasonic, and keep it up.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2017 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Featured Comments from:

D Evans6: "I completely agree. I love my GX8, and keep the viewing screen closed most of the time. Otherwise, being left-eyed, I would be continually smudging it with my nose."

Dave_lumb: "Flip-up screens are fine when using the camera horizontally, but hopeless when using it vertically. In that instance flip-out screens definitely have the edge."

Henry Richardson: "The Minolta Dimage 7i I bought in 2002 had a tilting EVF too. I sure liked that feature. You can see a photo of it here."

s.wolters (partial comment): "I did not try it yet, but the best innovation of 2016 seems to me the improvement of the stabilization on the OM-D E-M1 Mark II. Five seconds handheld exposures!"

Ring in the New

 

Amish roofers on the Baptist Church, Summer '16

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HAPPY NEW YEAR 2017!

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—May you enjoy good health, good cheer,
and good light in the coming year—

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Mike J.
Keuka Lake, near Penn Yan, New York