The Online Photographer

Dennis Huff Photographs the Eclipse

[The following is the text of a private email Dennis sent to some friends. I thought it did a great job of conveying the combination of excitement and stress involved in a complicated shoot of a fast-changing one-time-only event, so I asked Dennis if I could publish it more or less as written. He agreed and here you are. —Ed.]

Words and pictures by Dennis Huff

We're home now and I can start processing a few images. Here's what I have so far.

For the eclipse, I had two cameras set up; The Sony A7RII with the Rokinon 12mm lens, shooting one image every five minutes which will be composited to show the path of the sun during the eclipse [last photo].

 The second camera was the Canon 5D Mark IV with the 600mm + 1.4 teleconverter, all mounted on a guided telescope mount. I would have manually guided the camera but the exposures during totality were calculated to be 1–2 seconds, and I feared at 840mm the sun would be blurred.

I framed the Sony using a phone app which calculated the sun's position during the eclipse.

The guided mount with the Canon has go-to so it found the sun and followed it nicely. I also had a 7" monitor mounted on the Canon to check focus and framing.

Everything went well early on but after a few minutes clouds rolled in and at times the sun was not visible, and I was constantly racking exposure to compensate for cloud cover. Even so, I was thrilled that I was getting mostly good shots.

As totality approaches one must be ready to remove the solar filter and change camera settings (on both cameras!). I had C1, C2 and C3 programmed to various settings on the Canon and with the Sony, went to aperture priority during totality. Sounded easy enough...

So now we are in totality (one minute and 50 seconds), and I have finished shooting the Canon for totality and now move to the Sony, remove the filter and before I can change settings and fire, the group I'm with begin oohing and aahing and crying out so much I looked up at the sun. Oh boy, totality. Magnificent! Astounding! Soul-stirring! Oh crap we're now starting into the diamond ring effect as the sun is uncovering...

...and I haven't shot the Sony yet and I'm so discombobulated, I don't know what to do next. I jump back to the Canon to shoot and, oh no the filter! So now the filter is on and I'm shooting the diamond ring and, oh no the filter for the Sony. Whew, I didn't melt anything! The Sony image will need some Photoshopping to make it right though.

We are now out of totality and things are proceeding well. Suddenly, the mount has stopped tracking. I futzed with it for a bit but just tracked the rest of the eclipse manually.

So that was my eclipse experience. I'm thankful the group was so vocal during totality or I probably would never have looked away from my cameras! Next total eclipse across the US is in seven years from Texas to Vermont; mark your calendars!

Dennis

Big thanks to Dennis. I could just feel the stress and "discombobulation" from his words! —MJ.

©2017 by Dennis Huff, all rights reserved

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.

Always in totality
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Featured Comments from:

Geoff Wittig: "Wow! Beautiful photographs of the eclipse. I've screwed up more than a few potentially good wildlife photos by getting discombobulated and fumbling with camera controls I should be able to manage in my sleep. The relentless 'gotta get it right now' pressure of shooting the eclipse is a whole 'nuther level. The only thing I've done that's remotely comparable was photographing a massive controlled blast at a limestone quarry using a pair of tripod mounted D-SLR's. Everything had to be set well in advance for max frame rate JPEG captures, with exposure and focus pre-set, holding down the cable release starting a second before the blast. The whole thing was over in 5 seconds, without the option of asking 'Hey, can you do that again?'"

Ed Rosch: "Above is my eclipse picture taken with my Olympus Pen F with a 15mm lens. It’s a composite of two shots taken a few seconds apart and was at the Feather River Winery in North Platte NE."

Mike replies: Your shot makes a very interesting contrast to Dennis's pictures. You're recording the experience; he's recording the object/event. Philosophically speaking, I'd say those are different subjects. And offer a clue toward understanding different approaches to the practice of photography.

I could go on about this—but please don't consider that a threat.  :-)

Ed: "You hit the nail square on the head with your comment about my picture. I indeed was attempting to capture the feeling of experiencing the eclipse. I figured that there would be plenty of pictures of the eclipse itself and most of them would be better than anything I’d be able to do. As you point out, very different subjects neither 'superior' to the other. I’d suggest that a viewer engaging with Dennis's images and then looking at mine would have a better vicarious eclipse experience than viewing either alone.

"Delving deeper into the differing ways that photographic subjects and photography itself might be approached is hardly a threat but a very useful topic to be explored. Might I assume you’re familiar with the book Photography Changes Everything?"

Mike: I'm not, but I will add it to the list....

Elton Pinto: "Haha! I love the sense of excitement! That picture of totality is amazing. Thanks for sharing your experience. I also cannot help but think of how photographers sometimes miss experiencing the event in the process of documenting the event."

John Masters: "I felt a lesser amount of Dennis's stress on eclipse day.

"My health hasn't been great lately and I wasn't even going to attempt photographing the eclipse here in Palm Bay, Florida. We were expecting 84% sun coverage.

"I perked up about a week and a half before the eclipse and ordered a sheet of Solar Film, the stuff that knocks down the sun's brightness 100,000 times. After receiving the solar film, I had four days to make some filters for my camera lens and binoculars. I used cardboard, tape, black magic marker, etc., to create filters similar to a bajillion DIY ones on the Internet.

"I ended up sitting out in my back yard from 1 p.m. to 4:20 p.m. that day, and got the best shots of the eclipse I could personally do. I used a Fujifilm X-T20 with a Nikon AI lens adapter, a Nikon 300mm ƒ/4.5 lens, a Nikon TC-14 teleconverter, and my semi-homemade filter built into a 72mm to 77mm step up ring. All this on my trusty tripod. My wife and daughters came outside every little while and used the binoculars and the rear screen of my X-T20 to watch the changes and see our peak coverage.

"So, without the bazooka lenses many photographers have, my shots aren't going to be in National Geographic. But with careful work in Lightroom and Photoshop, I ended up with this souvenir shot of the whole eclipse as seen from the back yard of chez Masters, Palm Bay, Florida.

"Works for me."

Mike adds: Many TOP readers have sent me accounts of their eclipse experiences or links to their own posts about it or photos of it, including Gary Sutto, Mark Berman, and Gary K. Froehlich, and many others. I'm sorry I can't publish them all!

A reminder—if you want to publish a picture in a comment, the picture has to be on the Internet (with a URL) and be no more than 470 pixels wide, and the code to use is:

Of course, you need to replace "image.jpg" in that string with the URL of your image.

Sorry this isn't easier, but TypePad isn't set up to easily allow images in comments.

David: "My wife, my son, and I went to Oregon to see the eclipse. It was to be the first total eclipse any of us had ever seen. On the advice of an acquaintance I just set the camera to make a video recording of us watching it, starting a few minutes before totality. That was the best advice I ever received. The video captures the feelings that the eclipse evoked in us far better than any picture I could ever have produced."

ADDENDUM: I mentioned above that Gary K. Froehlich (who comments as GKFroehlich) was one of those who sent additional material about photographing the eclipse. I have urgent things to do this weekend, but I felt I'd be remiss if I didn't add a couple of Gary's remarkable photos to this post. For one thing, he was one of a very few photographers who managed (not at all by luck—the documentation of his methods he sent me was very involved, and his preparations were exacting) to photograph the transit of the International Space Station across the sun as the eclipse was happening. Here's a time lapse composite of the transit:

Really remarkable. Another thing Gary did was, in one of many fascinating pictures, was to superimpose a scale image of Earth on an image of the totality and the solar prominences:

Just awe-inspiring. This is just a detail of the much larger image he sent me, to allow you to see it in spite of our limitations on image size. Here's Gary and Ann:

Many thanks to Gary for sharing these with us!

Random Excellence: Ruth Orkin

Ruth Orkin, Couple in MG, Florence, 1951

Of course there's no one standard of the "excellent" in photography. In aesthetic appreciation there is general rough agreement but also a wide range of opinion. And no sort of unanimity. We all like what we like. I'm reminded of the late comedian Mitch Hedberg talking about the heavy metal band he and his friends had when they were teenagers: "People either loved us or they hated us. Or they thought we were OK."

I laughed as soon as I saw this. In the words of the "Stefon" character on SNL, "It has everything":

1. It's classic 35mm B&W photography, which I love above all the other wonderful forms and formats of photography;
2. I'm mildly fascinated with the style of the period lately becoming known as "Midcentury Modern";
3. I have a thing for roadsters, even though, tragically, I don't own one...and an MG with a fold-down windscreen* just pushes that button;
4. That wonderful hand gesture (gesture in photography, understood better by an earlier generation of critics, is underappreciated these days); and, let's face it,
5. ...Funny hats and/or surreal eyewear never hurts!

This print—sorry, the print of this JPEG—is currently being auctioned by Artnet Auctions. The opening bid is $3,600, and it has an estimate of $4,000–$6,000. It's an estate print, "printed later" and signed not by the photographer but by her daughter, the "estate executrix."

Ruth Orkin took one extremely famous photograph of a type not currently in fashion that has graced countless frame-shop posters. It was called "An American Girl in Italy" and it was taken the same year this was. Contrary to rumor (and appearances) it was not staged. The photographer was following the subject around photographing her for an editorial feature about women traveling alone in Europe.

Ruth Orkin, self portrait

I got to know Ruth's work from a book called A Photo Journal that was in the library at my art school (I knew every single book in that library). She had a lively career that moved between photojournalism, editorial illustration, and Hollywood portraits, and spanned still photography, filmmaking, and teaching (she taught at the influential School of Visual Arts in New York City in the late 1970s). I've always had a bit of a soft spot for her work—there's usually humor, beauty and a certain light-heartedness to be found in it.

The funny goggles and hats are a bonus.

Mike

*Mark Sampson says it's an MG TD which was a current model in 1951 and available in both left-hand and right-hand drive.

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.

A little of everything
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Featured Comments from:

Aashish: "I absolutely love the first picture. I like everything about it. To me it simply says 'joy' or 'happiness' or—insert your preferred synonym—. Absolutely delightful!"

David Boyce: "I have a thing for roadsters as well. And also Ruth Orkin's work. I was introduced to her work sometime in the late '70s and it was a slow burn. I initially dismissed it as 'not serious enough.' I was an angsty young punk and thought grit was everything. But her work kept reappearing, and people who I respected kept mentioning her. It took a while for me to see the subtle use of humour often conveyed other subtexts. She is one of the people who I considered for my From the Shoulders of Giants series a while back. I need to go and look at her work again. Thanks for the memory jolt."

Ernie Van Veen: "I've always been torn between believing "An American Girl in Italy" was staged or spontaneous. The stares and gestures of the men made it seem staged, too outrageous; however, the look on the woman's face, and her body language, made it seem very real. Perhaps a better title would have been 'Lamb Among the Wolves.'"

hugh crawford: "An MG like that was our family car until my little sister and I grew to be larger than that suitcase in the photo.

"Ruth Orkin and her husband Morris Engel also pretty much invented modern cinema with their movie 'Little Fugitive,' at least according to François Truffaut who credited them with inspiring the French New Wave as well as John Cassavetes and Martin Scorsese. Morris Engel build his own 35mm handheld hidden cine camera with Charlie Woodruff (shout out to photographers who build their own cameras, yay!) that was later borrowed by Stanley Kubrick and Jean-Luc Godard. I met Mary Engel, the executrix of which you speak, when my wife and I started an outdoor film screening series in Brooklyn in 2006 and I picked 'Little Fugitive' as the first film. It's one of my favorite films of all time, and is as Brooklyn as you can get (little boy runs away to Coney Island). Mary introduced the film that her parents made and it was a wonderful evening and it turned out that she lived a few blocks away. I love Ruth Orkin's work. That 'American Girl in Italy'? Well you have to see this. Mary Engel is great, and worked on a book about 'Little Fugitive.'"

John W.: "Cool image. Some years ago I had the extraordinary pleasure of taking a workshop with Jay Maisel, who talked at some length about 'gesture' in photography...even inanimate objects can have gestural value. I've never forgotten that and years later it keeps turning up in my images.

"A few years ago I started a print group called Photo Friday (we meet the last Friday of the month). Initially most of the members strove to eliminate people from their images. Over the years that has steadily changed; now they strive to incorporate not just people but gesture...animate and inanimate."

Ken Tanaka: "Excellent choice, Mike! Some years back the Art Institute had a show of mid-century New York street documentary work which naturally included Morris Engel and his wife, Ruth Orkin. That was my first introduction to Orkin and I've been a fan ever since. I had the opportunity to meet and become acquainted with Mary Engel (daughter), a lovely person who has been devoted to maintaining her parents' legacies. Speaking of which, Mary has a wonderful archive site of Ruth's work. Also, I recently came across a site that features the contact sheet from Orkin's most famous 'American Girl in Italy' image, as well as a great current-day snap of its subject, 'Jinx.'"

Dan Gordon: "Prompted by this article, I browsed through other photos in the American Girl series. I contemplated 'Jinx at Cafe,' noting in art-student-style how her eyes draw the viewer in, then direct it to the young man across, whose sloping shoulder and arm lead to the Coke bottle on the table, which in turn points us back to her hand and then her eyes. After a few cycles of this I realized my 2017 brain was interpreting the object in her hand as a smartphone. After all, doesn't everybody seated at an outdoor cafe brandish a smartphone? Is there a lesson here about how we see pictures with our own contemporary attitudes and expectations? I wish I could, for a moment, grasp what this photo would have meant to a viewer in 1951."

A Platinum Print from an iPhone?

Written by Carl Weese

Photo: Michael McWeeney. Instagram account @havana1933.
Co-Founder and Creative Director at the Reggae Math Foundation.

Recently I taught a weekend “Digital Platinum” workshop at Penumbra Foundation in Manhattan. The basic point of the workshop is to teach participants how to make platinum/palladium prints from digital negatives prepared specifically for printing in the process.

Setup
The first two hours are taken up with a lecture to explain what we have to do to trick a photo-quality inkjet printer and transparency media into producing a negative with sufficient UV-blocking density range to match the extremely long scale of the Pt/Pd print. This includes learning how to vary some of the tricks in order to calibrate for a specific paper, sensitizer coating mixture, UV light exposure unit, and general lab conditions. Then we test the calibration using a negative that combines a complex step tablet file with a real-world picture. Printing these tests lets me demonstrate the hand coating of the paper, preparation of the sheet for printing, then exposure, development, and finishing.

After that, the workshop goes free-form as I work with each participant to prepare picture files in Photoshop the way I think will work best for the process, then send them into the semi-automated “black box” of the calibrated procedure. A Photoshop Batch Action prepares the negative file, then a print driver Preset instructs the printer what to do to enhance the UV-blocking density range of the output on transparent media. While the freshly output negative cures (outgasses), the participant coats and preps a sheet of paper, then exposes it and heads into the wet darkroom area for processing, where my teaching assistant (thanks, Lizzy!) keeps everything running smoothly. By the end of Saturday each student had made negs/prints of one or two of their own pictures.

Image sources
The two most obvious advantages of working with digital internegatives are that you can enlarge a small original (platinum prints must be made in direct contact with the negative under intense UV light), and that you can make a Pt/Pd print from a picture that didn’t start out as a film negative.

There’s much more versatility than that, however. By the end of Sunday our five participants had made 30+ negs/prints from a wide range of original sources. Most were from captures with good digital cameras, but we also had: scans from medium format film; scans of negatives from a 4x5 view camera; scans from 35mm transparency film; scans of negatives from a handmade 4x5 pinhole camera; non-photographic images from Adobe Illustrator renderings; and copy captures of historical wet plate photographs more than a hundred years old. This is almost typical of these workshops and a very real part of the fun.

Sunday surprise
One participant, Michael McWeeney, had brought his MacBook Pro to the workshop, and after working up one or two pictures with me on mine, began to do the workups on his own. Late Sunday, he had a surprise for me. “Just to see if he could,” he chose a picture on his iPhone 6, and worked it up entirely on the phone. Then sent it to his computer to run the “black box” operations for a digital negative. The resulting print was entirely presentable, and had all of us at the workshop amazed/amused that he’d pulled it off.

I asked Mike to detail the apps and steps he used to do this, so here’s his lightly edited explanation:

iPhone Pt/Pd workflow

1. Shoot a raw file with the Moment camera app.
2. Send the Raw file to Google Snapseed.
3. Adjust basic highlight, shadow, and color temperature as Structure in the Snapseed RAW processor.
4. Convert to B+W in Snapseed’s filter tools, BLACK & WHITE tool, using color filters, grain, contrast and brightness adjustments.
5. In the Tools section, use DETAILS to add sharpness and structure if needed [Note: Only add structure one time, either in the Details tool or RAW editor].
6. Use SELECTIVE to create masks to edit specific areas.
7. The lens blur tool added a selective focus look and some lens fall off/vignetting to the image. [This concentrated emphasis on the flowers and helped the hosta leaves recede visually.]
8. Save image.
9. Send image to computer via Airdrop or email.
10. Run the Batch and print driver Preset to make the negative.

As you can see, it worked!

An equivalent workup could be done in the Lightroom Mobile App, and I’m sure there are others, while of course specific steps will vary.

I’m happy to see this blending of the 19th and 21st centuries!

Carl
(Thanks to Mike McWeeney)

Text © 2017 by Carl Weese, image © 2017 by Michael McWeeney, all rights reserved

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.

New and old
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He's Baaaaa-ack

Hi, my name is Mike, and I'm back. Big thanks to friend Gordon for keeping the lights burning here at TOP while I was away.

I went to Cambridge, where my mother and stepfather live.

It is neither fitting nor fair that my dear Mom should suffer the depredations of dementia. For most of her life she was a woman who loved to be organized, in touch, and in control—the master, or should I say mistress, of events, households, schedules, and the warp and woof of full and active lives—her own and others. If you wanted to know some detail of family history or the latest news about any family member or friend, she's who you would ask; she had the orbits and activities of a large cast of characters catalogued in her mind. Now she struggles sometimes to place the names of her own grandchildren. Last Summer at this time, she would repeat, "this damned dementia! I hate it!" This visit, she would look at me curiously and say, "Now wait—tell me, what is 'dementia'?" She is heartbreakingly still herself, and tragically not.

iPhone portrait of Pearl, my mother's daytime caregiver. An entrepreneur with a growing business, Pearl was born in Ghana and grew up in the Netherlands.

I was supposed to stay with her while my stepfather, her main caregiver, went to Italy to visit his daughter in Rome. But my stepfather collapsed just prior to his departure with a heart irregularity, and spent the week in the hospital instead. Not at all what he had planned or wanted. I traveled to Cambridge anyway, to lend support. It's a challenging time for all concerned, with too many things up in the air.

A new Fuji you've never seen
While there, however, I got to have lunch with sagacious and wise Oren Grad, who lives in nearby Wellesley, which, for your information, is between Natick and Needham. You might recall that Not-So-Stately Oren Manor in Wellesley is the location of the Large-Format Camera Museum and Graveyard. Oren is the holder of thirteen scholarly degrees and an M.D. (I exaggerate, but only ever so slightly). He speaks or reads Hebrew, English, French, and Japanese, and has lately embarked on acquiring Finnish (all true—here, I do not exaggerate). My father once admiringly described a scientist colleague at NASA by saying "he thinks thoughts all the time you and I never think"—which I could say of Oren.

To give you a brief idea of Oren's mental horsepower, on Saturday I gifted him an e-book—a full-length book about nutrition written by a doctor and researcher that spans 354 pages in the print version. Amazon reported that the gift had been accepted a little after one in the afternoon. Early the next morning, at six-something, I had in my inbox Oren's long, detailed analysis of the book, complete with citations. He had read it between loads of laundry the previous afternoon, and composed and written his astute and articulate response before the poor Earth had struggled to complete one full revolution. Imagine the intensity of the man's intellectual focus when he actually tries.

Oren in action with the RodenFuji InstaxStock (?)

...But he's a photo-dawg, just like the rest of us. At lunch, he promised to show me a brand new Fujifilm camera I had never seen before—and he delivered! He pulled from his bag a Fuji Instax Wide 300 ($87.75 new) modified by having its lens removed and replaced with a 100mm Rodenstock Sironar-N view camera lens. Although the film is inherently low-resolution, he says the better lens makes a quite noticeable difference when the exposure is just right.

Yr. Hmbl. Ed. slowly emerging from blankness, which is a good way to summarize today, too

Which might be beside the main point, which is that the hybrid is quirky, fun, and unique.

Butterrrrrs!
Next stop, Rochester, to pick up the doggies—and then I'll have one more post to put up this afternoon tomorrow [sorry], a lovely piece from Carl Weese, who happens to be one of Oren's oldest friends. (We all met on the old CompuServe Photo Forum, which dates us in Internet eras.)

Check back for more later!

It's good to be back.

Mike
(Thanks to Gordon and Oren)

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.

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

hugh crawford: "Ohh! want one! The Lomo Instax Wide backs seem to be permanently out of stock. They seemed like the best way to build a Frankinstax but they are apparently just too dead."

Richard Szmyd: "Hi Mike, Can you let us know what the nutrition book was? It's a subject I am very interested in. Thanks."

Mike replies: Hi Rich, it was Whole: Rethinking the Science of Nutrition, by T. Colin Campbell and Howard Jacobson. Oren was critical to the point of scorn (I dutifully report) but I find a lot of value in some of the ideas and I find it courageous that Campbell attempts to articulate his thinking while knowing it's neither conventional nor easy to defend. My own feeling is that nutrition science is currently in a primitive state, similar to, say, anatomy before William Harvey or epidemiology before John Snow. Despite that, we must eat!

Illkka: "I wonder if you really need to say 'iPhone portrait of Pearl...'. I know this is a photography website, but still. Would you say 'Hasselblad portrait'? Maybe you would. But is it really necessary? Nice portrait, by the way."

Mike replies: Thanks, and the iPhone question probably worth a whole post. But I think that, as you guessed, I would indeed say "Hasselblad portrait" if I thought the information was pertinent. I guess it depends on my seat-o'-the-pants sense of what the typical reader is likely to be interested to know, nothing more rigorous than that. 

Dave Levingston (partial comment): "Oh...and welcome back. Missed you, but Gordon did well while you were away."

Mike replies: Indeed.

Dave Karp: "I have never met Oren, but he is a darn nice guy. He has been very generous in his assistance and advice to me (just another photographer who sometimes uses a sort-of resurrected large format film size). Always very appreciated."

Mike replies: He has been invaluable to TOP over the years, too, mostly behind the scenes. He is indeed an extremely helpful person by nature and you're right, very appreciated.

It's worth mentioning that Oren is a big part of the reason that TOP exists at all. In 2005 I was putting together a website to collate my various photo-related activities, and I had an extra tab in the template I was using. Oren suggested, "Why not start a blog?" and I answered, "What's a blog?" Blogs were hot at the time and Oren was reading something like 150 of them every day (as my story above suggests, he's a natural speed reader) and was getting most of his news, collectively, from them. So he educated me about blogs, I decided to shift The 37th Frame from paper-by-subscription (itself modeled on David Vestal's GRUMP) to online-and-free, and the rest is history. (The website I was building back then was never made public, by the way.)

I Know It's Here Somewhere....

written by Gordon Lewis

I shot this photo of my niece Maya at a family get-together eight years ago. Had I tagged it "Maya," I would have found it instantly. Instead I tagged it "Mom's birthday." It took almost an hour to find browsing folder-by-folder.

As photographers go, I’d say I’m pretty well organized. Practically all of my digital and digitized photos dating back to 2000 are in master folders, one folder per year. Every yearly folder has a sub-folder for every month, such as 01_2017, 02_2017, 03_2017 and so on. Every monthly folder has a folder labeled with the month, day, year, and a memorable main event. So, for example, a folder might be labeled 04072016_New Orleans if that’s the day I uploaded the photos and most of the photos inside are from a trip to New Orleans. I also apply tags to my photos. All I have to do is search for the tag in Adobe Lightroom, my cataloging and raw processing software of choice, and every photo with that tag will show up as a collection.

And yet, from time to time, I still can’t find a specific photo I’m looking for. I have a crystal-clear picture in my mind of what it looks like; I just can’t remember exactly where I filed it or how I tagged it. Can anyone relate?

No doubt a large part of the problem is that I have over 29,000 photos in my Lightroom catalog. That doesn’t even count my pre-digital catalog of negs, prints, and slides. Now maybe you have 29,000 top-quality photos on your hard drive, but I don’t; I’m just not that good. Clearly I need to edit this number down to a more manageable size, but that’s a story for another day.

I went for the obvious tag with this one: Jesus. At present, this tag is unique in my catalog, so I found it instantly. Had I simply tagged it "street," it would have been one of over 500.

It also wouldn’t hurt to have a more foolproof way of tagging my photos. Unfortunately, I’m much too clever a fool for that to work. If I have trouble finding a photo it’s almost aways because I either didn’t tag the photo at all, I accidentally gave it the wrong tag, or the tag I used is less obvious to me now than it seemed then.

The solution I’ve come up with is this: I immediately export a JPEG version of my “keepers” to a separate folder labeled as such. Even if there are eventually 500 photos in this folder it’s still a lot easier to browse through than one that contains 60 times as many photos. This may not be the best way, but it works for me until a better approach comes along. I’m open to suggestions, or even simple commiseration.

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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:

toto: "I'm curious as to why you don't use more than one tag."

Gordon replies: As obvious as that might sound after the fact, when one is faced with the prospect of assigning multiple tags to more than 50 different images and having limited time to do it, it often doesn't get done. What I've learned from the accompanying comments (thanks to all for your contributions, by the way) is that the more ways you have to find the images that are special to you and the easier it is to apply them, the better. If you are archiving photos for family members, it's also a good idea to make it as easy as possible for them to find things as well. Tags, flags, collections, and stars may be great for the person who assigns them, but a simple folder labeled "Family Photos 2008" that's filled with JPEGs rather than RAW files is about as simple as it gets.

Is There a Creative Link Between Sight and Sound?

written by Gordon Lewis

Although I wouldn't go so far as to call it "My Precious," I do love my Fender Lite Ash Telecaster with Seymour Duncan Broadcaster pickups. I shot it with one of my other beloveds, an Olympus OMD E-M10 Mark II. Natural light through mini-blinds added the visual flavor.

Ansel Adams was a classically trained concert pianist. So was Paul Caponigro. Wynn Bullock sang opera. Ralph Gibson is a skilled electric guitarist who composes soundtracks for some of his exhibitions.

Shift perspective one-hundred eighty degrees and you’ll discover that musicians like Andy Summers (guitarist with The Police), Bryan Adams (singer-songwriter), and Graham Nash (singer and guitarist with Crosby, Stills, and Nash), are gifted photographers as well. At one time Nash even owned a printmaking studio (Nash Editions) and was instrumental – pardon the pun – in advancing the art of Iris photo inkjet printing.

These are just a few examples. There are many more; so many that I can’t help but wonder whether it’s more common than most photographers realize. If you have a passion for one type of creative expression, why wouldn’t you have an equal passion for another? If photography helps you open your eyes, wouldn’t music help you open your ears?

In case you’re wondering, I’ve played a variety of instruments over my lifetime. Guitar, however, is the one I’ve been most faithful to. My reasons for playing guitar are as much practical as creative. Musical instruments are much simpler and obsolescence-proof devices than cameras. My 24 year-old Martin 000-18 acoustic guitar is physically identical to a new model, yet because of how the wood has seasoned over time, it sounds better now than the day I bought it. I can’t say that about any of my cameras of equal age. I have changed pickups, electronics, strings, tuners, nuts, and bridges on my Fender Telecasters and Stratocasters with ease. All I feel capable of changing on my cameras is the lens and maybe the focusing screen. Another thing I love about playing a musical instrument is that it’s just as fun playing in group as it is playing solo. A gang of photographers shooting the same subject is just a gang of individuals.

Clearly, there are lots of differences, but one of the most important things these two disciplines have in common is that whether it’s a musical instrument or a camera, either one is only a tool for expression. Even the most humble camera or instrument can produce amazing results in the hands of a master. Even the very best cameras and instruments produce disappointing results in the hands of someone who lacks skill or has nothing to say.

So, what about you? How many of you reading this own as many guitars, pianos, flutes, or banjos as you do cameras? And would you characterize the relationship between them as symbiotic or antagonistic? An inquiring mind wants to know.

Black Holes & Bright Lights, by Jim Hughes

A number of years ago, at an estate sale, probably (I can't remember exactly where or when, or even what), I came into possession of a leather-bound, gilt-edged album of what appeared to be late 19th Century albumen prints documenting the travels, I now conjecture, of an unnamed man, himself an evidently well-heeled amateur photographer. He seemed to be enjoying, perhaps accompanied by his family, an extended Grand Tour, by rail I assume, that stretched from Central America and Mexico through the western U.S., across Canada, then down to New York City and over to Chicago. Prints seem to have been purchased along the way from the studios of accomplished local photographers. While the street scenes and landscapes were fascinating, for me the most astonishing image is the one reproduced below. 

 

On the heavy but discolored album page, below the photograph, hand-written in pencil, is the following legend: "Eclipse of the Sun, 1st January 1889. Taken at Cloverdale, California."

 

There was indeed a full, and fully visible, solar eclipse that day on the western edge of Sonoma County, and it was documented by many photographers and observatories in its path, not always successfully. As I have subsequently determined after some research, the photographer in this instance, one W. H. Lowden, was part of the Pacific Coast Amateur Photographic Association, which had traveled to Cloverdale and had to overcome such obstacles as a large cloud obscuring the sun almost up to the very instant of exposure and a farmer who had decided that day to burn a field in a valley below the perfect vantage point the group's advance scouts had chosen earlier. A member of the party was dispatched that morning, by horse, to convince the farmer to douse his fires, which he willingly did; the heavy smoke was dissipated by a cooperative breeze — just in the nick of time, apparently. The cloud drifted past of its own accord.

 

Here is Mr. Lowden's description of how he made his two exposures, from the files of the Lick Observatory, where a full report of the expedition was preserved:

 

"Taking an ordinary 11x14 camera, I enclosed it in a wooden box open at each end. This box was hinged at one end to a stout plank which rested (when in position) on two wooden trestles. Under the other end of the box, and between it and the plank, was placed a screw [a kind of jack] which, when operated, raised or lowered the end. At one side of this end was placed another screw which, when operated, moved the box in azimuth. On top of the box I mounted a telescope, carefully adjusted, so that when an image was seen in the centre of the cross wires, it was at the same time projected on the photographic plate of the camera, exactly in the centre.

 

"I used a rapid rectilinear lens, made by R. & J. Beck, of 24 inches equivalent focus. In this I used a 3-inch diaphragm, thus reducing the aperture to F/8. The plates were [coated with] a special emulsion prepared by Dr. S. C. Passavant, of San Francisco, and registered 12 on Warnecke's sensitometer. At the beginning of the first count by the assistant, which I learned was some 52 seconds before totality, I brought the Moon's image [and its shadow] into the centre of the cross wires in the telescope, and by aid of the screws, above mentioned, kept it there. The wires were placed in the form of an 'L," and enabled me to see the slightest movement much more readily than if the wires were crossed in the usual way. When 'time' was called for totality, I occupied the first 15 or 16 seconds in looking at the Corona with the naked eye, and again getting the image fairly centered. At 19 seconds after totality, my assistant, Mr. J. W. Stafford, removed the cap from the lens and at 60 [seconds] replaced it, thus giving an exposure of 41 seconds. During this time we kept the Moon's [shadow] image as steadily as possible in the centre of the wires of the telescope.

 

"After reversing the plate holder and allowing the camera to cease vibrating, the lens cap was [again] removed, at 76 seconds after totality, and replaced as 'time' was called at 104 seconds. This plate had, therefore, a 28 second exposure....The plates were of course very much over-exposed. I used the ordinary pyrogallic acid and carbonate of potash developer, modifying it, however, by using three times the usual quantity of water. A normal developer would have produced a thin foggy image, while restraining the action either by the use of bromide or by reducing the volume of potash would result in clogging up the inner Corona hopelessly. As development proceeded, I was compelled to add more water, the action being exceedingly rapid. The image on the 41 second plate made its appearance in 7 seconds, and was fully developed in 6 minutes. I did not observe any difference between this and the second plate worthy of note. [The emulsion was doubtless orthochromatic, allowing open-tray development by visual inspection under dim red safelight conditions.]

 

"An examination of the negatives shows the inner Corona a mass of light without detail, while the extreme ends are developed into the light of the sky. This would seem to prove that the limit of the photographic image had been reached in both cases, and while the eye may have been able to discern the contrast between the faint light of the Corona and the sky for a greater distance than the negatives show, the photographic value of these faint rays seem to have been no greater than that of the sky at the same point." 

 

The negatives were used to make positive prints, which were available to the public. One of them made its way into the travel album.

 

Making pictures of an eclipse back then was an even trickier task than it is today. The photographer clearly approached this as a scientific experiment, exploring, in addition to a celestial wonder, the boundaries of the still-pubescent craft of photography. I, on the other hand, see a significant historical moment documented in a nearly 130-year old print whose aging beauty is only enhanced by its border of oxidating and blue-tinged silvering.

 

And earthbound though I may be, I do tend to see art most everywhere I look.

 

But it turns out that the year 1889 also holds great significance for me personally:

Mounted contact print found among my father's family effects.

 

The woman pictured on the porch above is my grandmother, the former Mary Jane "Jenny" Fitzroy, whom I know only from this photograph made in the very same year as the eclipse discussed above. Jenny was the second wife of my grandfather, John Henry Hughes, who was born in 1845 and as a teenager walked from Cos Cob, Connecticut, to lower Manhattan in New York to enlist as a drummer boy for the Union forces in the Civil War. Henry, as he was called, grew up to become a locally well-known builder-architect. He designed and constructed this house himself for his new bride in 1889, the year of their marriage, as one can see proudly displayed on the portico, above the front door. My father was born in this house on Orchard Street in 1892. As I would be 45 years later, in 1937. I would own this house still today if my father, beset by alcohol and the Depression, had not lost it shortly thereafter for non payment of years worth of  long-overdue property taxes.

 

I've always thought that my grandfather took this photograph himself. Otherwise, logic tells me, he would have been in the picture with Jenny as well. Along with being a skilled craftsman, he was, according to family lore,  an inveterate tinkerer and a sometime inventor. As I was growing up in our "new" and much smaller and more modest home not far from this one, I used to play with a contraption in our basement that my father said his father had conceived and built but never patented: an incubator for baby chicks that utilized for its heat source some clear glass cabonized-bamboo filament bulbs of the sort that had been introduced by Thomas Edison in the 1880s. Indeed, it was said that while observing another, earlier eclipse, in 1878, that the idea for the electric light bulb first lit up Tom's fertile mind. 

 

My grandfather's device, of only slightly later vintage, was made not out of wood, but hand-formed galvanized sheetmetal, and had perforated trays and a small venting chimney at the top. It survived into my childhood only because it was, in fact, metal. One particularly cold winter during World War II, coal became so scarce that all the wooden heirlooms that had come from the Orchard Street homestead when we moved, such as a beautiful cherry breakfront and two oaken rockers, had been chopped up and tossed by my father into the belching black furnace that heated our little bungalow. I remember his running up the cellar stairs, yelling that he'd just cut off the tip of his profusely bleeding thumb with his hatchet. 

 

I never did find my grandfather's camera. I would eventually have to find one of my own. At which point, a corner of the cellar would become my darkroom.

 

Another Eclipse, Another Wedding:

July 20, 1963. Photographer unknown.

 

 This faded, color-shifted print was taken by a stranger, a man with a 35mm camera and potato masher flashgun who had been asked by Evelyn's mother to photograph her daughter's wedding. New mother-in-law instructed the man to place us behind an elaborate, frilly, and of course overexposed cake, underneath a chandelier in her Fifth Avenue apartment that the cake was evidently intended to emulate in an upside down way. For her part, Evelyn, who worked in fashion retailing, had chosen to wear a tailored outfit that was anything but frilly, a stunning look completed by what she called a pill-box hat (more on that later!). The ceremony itself had happened earlier, in the lliving room, facing white-lace curtained window looking out on Central Park. The stranger with the camera arrived late, and missed our vows. Too bad. It was quite the momentous event. As the judge, a neighbor we had met near our East Village apartment on St. Marks Place who agreed to conduct the ceremony, began reciting the required incantations, a commotion seemed to erupt among the gathered friends and family standing behind us. My "best man" and Evelyn's "maid of honor," who had introduced us for a blind date a few months earlier, both rushed past us to peer intently out the window. They were followed by most everyone else, leaving the betrothed to wonder what the hell was going on. It was mid-day, but, unnaccountably, darkness seemed to be falling.

 

Seems we had scheduled our wedding to happen at precisely the moment of "totality" on July 20, 1963. That's the day another famous Solar Eclipse occurred, this time passing directly above Fifth Avenue in New York City. Evelyn and I had been so busy planning this joyous event that we had failed to keep up with the news. Hadn't watched television in days. Not only that, we almost didn't make it to our own wedding. That morning, as she got dressed, Evelyn suddenly exclaimed, "Where's my hat?" We searched everywhere. No hat. Her outfit could not be complete without that hat. "When did you last see it?" I asked. She described a small brown paper bag that she had kept it in, the very bag the saleswoman put it in when Evelyn bought it. We looked for the bag. No bag. After what seemed like hours, and skipping breakfast, I went downstairs and pounded on the Super's steel door. "Evelyn can't find her hat," I pleaded. "Maybe you could check the incinerator?" 

 

"No way," he said. "But I'll open the door for you." He handed me a scorched steel rake as I climbed through the fireproof hatch. Fortunately, no trash had been burned that day (incinerators were still legal in New York back then!). So I raked through what seemed to be a ton of stinking garbage, as more kept falling noisily down the chute and hurtling toward my head. It seemed like hours, but it was probably closer to 45 minutes, when I found a small, crumpled, brown paper bag. Inside was the hat, miraculously no worse for wear. I crawled out, ran upstairs, showered, then we both got dressed for a wedding and uptown we went on the subway. Invited guests were already there when we arrived, breathless.

 

It was an auspicious beginning to a memorable day. Last month, we celebrated our 54th anniversary. Evelyn remains my best friend.

 

A Light in the Dark:

"Seeing" a Sculpted Woman. (Digital copy of original print; still looking for the negative.) Photograph © 1965 by Jim Hughes

 

 On November 9, 1965, as a workday was waning and daylight was beginning to fade, I was in the courtyard of a classic old church in Brooklyn photographing an outdoor sculpture exhibit. Evelyn and I had just moved to Brooklyn from Manhattan, having found a duplex in a brownstone for $125 a month, and I had taken the day off from a job I didn't much like as an associate editor of a trade magazine. I had recently purchased a fast f/1.9 85mm pre-set lens from Spiratone for my Miranda, and wanted to try it out in low light. I saw a man with a white cane using his free hand to "see" an almost life-size torso of a female nude. The lens gave me some distance, and threw the background nicely out of focus. I shot a few frames before the blind man moved on.

 

Shortly after 5 p.m. as rush-hour traffic was beginning and subways were filling with commuters, a power transformer tripped in Ontario, near Niagara Falls. Before long, like dominoes, other transformers tripped. The Power grid became overloaded and, to protect itself, started to shut down. Thus began the Great Blackout of 1965. Most of New York City went dark, and some areas stayed dark for as long as 13 hours. Since there was still some daylight, I walked the half-block back to our new apartment. Evelyn was in Manhattan, on her way home. I didn't know it, but she'd been in a subway station waiting for a train when everything went dark and the trains just stopped running. She finally made her way back up to the street and found a payphone that still worked. She said the streets in the City were mobbed, but everyone seemed polite and helpful. Regular citizens had begun directing traffic, and restaurants opened their doors to the public and were handing out refreshments. She told me where she was. I said stay right there, I'll come and get you. After a couple hours and with no light in sight save the occasional bobbing flashlight, I had found a young man with a car who was itching to take a drive through the maelstrom. It took a while, but he inched across the Brooklyn Bridge, and we finally found my wife and drove back home. Half a day later, the power had mostly returned. But 800,000 people had been stranded on stalled subway trains in New York City, and in the northeast region more than 30 million people across 80,000 square miles had been left without electricity during the ordeal.

 

When I first moved to New York, I had found a job working for a business magazine providing advice to corporate executives. Then I signed on to write for a graphic arts and design publication. Finally, from a co-worker, I heard that the editor of my favorite photography journal at the time, Camera 35, was leaving to become editor of Modern Photography. I called and applied for the job. Besides editing magazines I didn't really like, I'd been writing unfinished plays and photographing panhandlers on the Lower East Side, not to mention one blind art lover in Brooklyn. In fact, I'd just added an appropriately dark print of the sculpted woman being "seen" in a new light to my portfolio, and it was the first picture I  showed.  A few days after the interview, I received a telephone call from the editor of the company's principle publication, U.S. Camera. I was informed, politely, that I wasn't qualified. Of course, I knew I was, although I had yet to join his exclusive club. That night, I initiated a long conversation with an artist friend and Brooklyn neighbor who told me she knew that editor's boss: the legendary Tom Maloney, owner and publisher of U.S Camera Publishing. The next day, I received a phone call. "I'd like to know just who this fellow is that our former baby sitter says is so damned good," Tom Maloney said in an offhanded and good humored mumble that I would get to know well over the next few years. I returned to the magazine's offices and showed him my writing samples, and that print. Two weeks later, he was my boss, as well.

 

Tom gave me the freedom to bring new ideas and thinking to photo magazine publishing. Camera 35 represented my dream job (actually, the first of several I would hold over the years). The famous Blackout, the one that had informed my portfolio print of two men, a blind subject and his sighted observer, both chasing shadows on that singular day, had actually gone a long way toward changing the course of one of our lives — mine. 

 

As Flannery O'Connor once wrote, "Everything That Rises Must Converge."

 

---

Weather permitting, a total solar eclipse will be visible across much of the continental United States on August 21st of this year. Check your local newspapers, or just Google it.

 

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.

Heeeeere's Gordon

...And that's it for me for the coming week. As I mentioned, I'm going on my usual August vacation, and Gordon Lewis will be here on Monday, guest-hosting TOP from Sunday though Friday. I hope you'll make him feel welcome.

Next week, I get to come read TOP to see what's new! Hope you will too.

Have a very nice weekend.

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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New Old New Lens

Logic eludes me—I honestly don't know if this is a new old new lens, a new new old lens, or a new old new old lens, or what.

I've been having fun with the hairshirt Exakta 66 I wrote about a week or two back. Life has definitely interfered recently, but I managed to get some 120 Ilford XP2 and have been happily shooting it, using the iPhone as a light meter. It's a bit strange the way muscle memory is coming into play—I used this camera intensively back in the '80s, carrying it with me all day every day, and the feeling of familiarity is curiously strong.

Seller's photo

And now I've gotten a new lens for it. Or a new new old lens, or whatever it is. It's an Ivanichek Petzvar 120mm ƒ/3.8, and it's a modern reincarnation of an antique lens type called a Petzval. The new version of the old lens came into being as a successful Kickstarter project from a guy named Denys (or Dennis) Ivanichek, who reproduced the classic four-element Petzval as a new product in several different lensmounts—including the Pentacon Six "P6" breechlock mount that fits my Exacta 66.

Denys's newest Kickstarter is for the lens in Hasselblad 500-series leaf-shutter mount. The Kickstarter campaign has already greatly exceeded its goal.

The Petzval, sometimes nicknamed the "swirly bokeh monster" for its peculiar "swirly" out-of-focus characteristics at open apertures, has had quite a resurgence of late—there are several modern versions of it available, including, most notably, a 58mm and an 85mm from Lomography. This after the original antique Petzval lenses for view cameras got scarce (or, I should say, even scarcer than they already were) due to demand.

The Petzval Objektif dates way back to 1840, when it was developed by a Viennese math professor named Josef Maximilian Petzval, with some help from Peter Wilhelm Friedrich von Voigtländer's eponymous optical and cameramaking company, which also produced the first commercial Petzval objective. Not to be confused with the modern Japanese Voigtländer company owned by Cosina, which licenses the old name. The original company, which began in 1756, went defunct in 1972, when the rights to the old name was acquired by its Braunschweig neighbor Rollei. Not surprisingly, the Petzval objective was originally famous because it represented a high-speed design at the time.

I'm not generally a fan of special-effects lenses, but neither am I necessarily a fan of high-resolution lenses for portraiture. The latter is a look, and the look is popular right now, but I don't care for it, mostly. I'm a sucker for history, though, and it will be fun to experiment with the Petzvar to see if I can find an aperture I like (the effects tend to be aperture-dependent). It's more the subtle soft-focus (or let's call it "not high resolution") effect that I'm after, rather than the extravagant bokeh.

You'll probably be hearing more from me in the future about this particular rabbit-hole. In the meantime, check out Dennis Ivanichek's Kickstarter page for more about this ancient lens design.

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.

Swirly and maybe a little squirrelly
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Cliff: "Back in the early '80s I worked for a local small town photo studio. The owner had some small renown in the VPPA for his exquisite portraits, women in particular. One of his 'secrets' was an old brass bodied Petzval lens. I printed hundreds of portraits from that lens (not easy to focus small prints from big negatives shot with that lens). One of the things I noticed about the softness of the lens is that unlike modern soft focus lenses, which seem to add flare and bleed the highlights into other areas of the image, the Petzval seemed to blend the shadows into the rest of the image. It always seemed to add a sense of mystery to the portraits. I hope your lens does the same for you, and I'd love to see some low key portraits shot with it. It was beautiful in color work and absolutely ethereal in black and white."

Moose: I seem to have inadvertently stumbled across a 'swirly bokeh monster' for Micro 4/3:

"I have ambivalent feelings about swirly bokeh images. Some are quite attractive, but, like anything hot, it's been overdone—'if swirl is good here, with this subject, it's good for everything.'

"All the 'officially' swirly lenses are designed for FF or larger film/sensor sizes. For good or ill, much of the effect is lost on crop sensors. They are also rather long focal lengths for smaller sensors.

"Although bought with other ideas, this no-name CCTV 25mm ƒ/1.4 lens swirls with the best when wide open. That does require an ND filter in direct sun [try searching 'Cokin 30mm ND8 neutral density' on eBay —Ed.]. Best of all is the price. Rather than trolling for myself, I bought a Fotasy package from of lens and C-mount to Micro 4/3 adapter for the princely sum of $28, with Prime free two-day shipping and no tax. [It's now $31.99. —Ed.]

"Swirl away, Micro Four-Thirders!"

Antony Shepherd: "I've got a 25mm CCTV lens and C-mount to Micro 4/3 adapter which I picked up years ago. Had a couple of friends tell me they couldn't look at those pictures because the swirly effect makes them feel sick!"

Fresh Produce (OT)

Another OT post, but I gotta tell you this story. (I love living here.)

It's always difficult to get fresh produce. I fixed a very simple lunch yesterday of broccoli and green beans over a cup or two of white rice, lightly spiced. The broccoli I ate at two o'clock was picked that morning.

On the way back from getting the broccoli I stopped at a Mennonite farm stand looking for green beans, and I didn't see any displayed on the front counter of their little wooden shed. It looked like they were out of them. But I spied something else interesting: yellow raspberries. I had to try those. How can you not try yellow raspberries?

I did notice two quart boxes of green beans along with some other produce on the table inside the shed, in the back. I assumed they had been set aside for another customer.

Then a young woman came out, in her long dress and bonnet (no pictures), and here's the conversation we had:

Me: No green beans today?

She: I could go pick you some.

Me: Really? That would be wonderful.

She: How much would you like?

Me: About half a quart box.

She: It will take a little while. I will hurry.

Me: Oh, that's okay. No need to hurry. I need to make one more stop, so I could come back.

She (turning to the back table and hesitantly taking up one of the boxes of green beans I assumed were set aside): If you don't want to wait, these don't look too bad.

Me: Are those for sale?

She: Well, they're yesterday's.

Me: You mean they were picked yesterday.

She: Yes. I don't mind picking fresh ones for you. It will take a little while but I will hurry.

Me: Those look fine. I think those will do.

Isn't that great? That just tickles me. Do you suppose she knows that most produce in supermarkets in America is up to twenty days old by the time we buy it? And the freshest of the fresh in the produce aisle is three or four days old. And then we take it home and often wait several more days before eating it. (That's if we don't hide it from ourselves in the Rotter, which is what my brother Scott calls the drawer in the fridge.) And she's worried the green beans are not fresh enough because it had been one day since they came off the vine. I think she gave me a dollar or two off.

Anyway, I somehow made do with the day-old green beans to go with my five-hour-old broccoli. Not too surprisingly, the broccoli and the beans were delicious, tender and flavorful. Extremely fresh broccoli is especially good.

Oh, and the yellow raspberries were heavenly—they have a little less raspberry flavor and they're a little sweeter. The ones I tried, anyway—no doubt fresh-picked! Today, I'll have the rest of the broccoli for lunch. Of course it will be a day old. I'm thinking I'll live.

I love it here.  :-)

Mike

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Stan B.: "Twenty days old?"

Mike replies: There's an organic heirloom apple orchard just up the hill from me, and it's the season. I need to wait a few more days while my tooth heals, though.

Sophia: "Re 'There's an organic heirloom apple orchard just up the hill from me....' Oh, please go! Find out what kinds of apples they have. Take some photos for us. Pick and eat a Jonathan or two. Or three. Make some apple butter, apple sauce, a couple pies and galettes. Maybe some cider. Please, let me live vicariously—I am so craving a Fall trip to an upstate New York heirloom apple orchard!"

Mike replies: When I get back from vacation I will pay them a visit for you.

Luke Smith: "When I was a kid, my neighbor grew corn in her garden. She explained how to cook it: Boil water. Pick an ear of corn in the garden. Run with it back to the house, and shuck it as you go. If you accidentally drop it, forget it, and go pick a fresh one. Her tomatoes were good, too: still warm from the sun on the vine."

Music Notes: Single (OT)

One of my outré opinions: you shouldn't always pick your own music.

There are now, incredibly, 164 mixes posted at our C60Crew site on Mixcloud, by far the lion's share done by Kim. They're collectively sort of the soundtrack I write TOP by. You never know what you're going to hear next. The latest, called "Single," arrived this morning. It's described as "The Wolfhounds, 9 Lazy 9, Neil Young, Wooden Shjips, Anberlin and more," and your DJ says simply, "enjoy, share." Here I am doing both.

The only mix of mine still on the site is called "Aggressively Humble." If you happen to listen to it, last through the opening noisy bit before judging—it gets all the way to a coda of do-wop (the Sapphires). I'm pleased it's still allowed to share space on the site; the 164 mixes is a curated collection.

The covers are great too:

...This is the cover for a mix called "Friend vs. Friend." That one features "Toshimaru Nakamura, David Behrman, Junior Kimbrough, Mississippi Fred McDowell, Bedhead and more."

Listening to "Aggressively Humble" again reminds me how much I like "Voodoo" by John Zorn's Sonny Clark Memorial Quartet—Zorn, Wayne Horvitz on keyboards, Ray Drummond on bass and Bobby Previte on drums. I always say my two favorite musicians are Hank Jones and Coleman Hawkins, but Sonny Clark is way up there—I have everything he recorded as a leader in his short, sad life, and lots of what he did as a sideman—so to have Zorn and his rapier-sharp crew pay such a lively tribute is a treat (AllMusic called the album an "unlikely success" and gave it four and a half out of five stars). If Zorn is too out there for you in his own music, it will be fairly astonishing that he has such slick hard-bop chops. Word is that he practiced intensely to come up to speed for the project. (Zorn, intense?)

It's on iTunes; search "Voodoo Sonny Clark Memorial Quartet." I paid way too much for the vinyl album, but it's one I prize.

Enjoy "Single"; share.

Mike
(Thanks to KK/BB)

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.

Tones
Buy music

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Eric Peterson: "Signed up for Mixcloud, also had to go to Japan for the John Zorn disc—another fine rabbit hole you've sent me down!"

Mike replies: If I ever start another blog, maybe I should title it "Another Fine Rabbit Hole."

Patrick Dodds: "Lordy I'm getting old. I'm listening to the music at the link, enjoying it, but I have no idea what your post even means.  :-(  "

Mike replies: And yet you understood perfectly.

Stanleyk: "'Voodoo' is an incredible record!!! I am also a huge Sunny Clark fan. Normally I don't like piano/guitar recordings but the Sonny Clark and Grant Green sessions are amazing. The other exception being the Bill Evans/Jim Hall duos.

"As for Zorn you should try one of his Gnostic Trio records. This one is particularly beautiful."

Open Mike: A Touch of Shutterfinger

Photo by Gordon Lewis, from the almost-last post
of Shutterfinger, December 2013

I'm about to take some time off for my usual August vacation, and this year our friend Gordon Lewis has offered to act as Guest Host of TOP while I'm a-chillaxin'.

Gordon wrote the popular photography blog "Shutterfinger" from April 2008 to December 2013, so he's well versed in how to pilot such a ship. Those of you who remember Shutterfinger will no doubt be happy about this "slight return," as Jimi Hendrix once called a reprise—I've always found Gordon to be a steady, measured note of sanity in the sometimes tumultuous stew of online photo talk.

He's one of them Harvard grads, and made his bones writing sitcoms in Hollywood before migrating to the corporate world for more regular paychecks and (ironically) less drama. Really, he's the master of many talents, including cooking (he owns a small paleo granola company) and martial arts. He's a musician, too, so you might get a few words about music, or even guitars, as well.

He'll be here all next week.

Mike

P.S. Oh, and by the way, in case you missed the update, our test of the waters a few days back was very positive—thank you for your enthusiasm—so we will reprise our offer of a fine print of Gordon's "Precipitation," 11x14 size, for a reasonable price, in time for delivery before the holidays.

'Open Mike' is the grab-bag editorial page of TOP. It appears on Wednesdays, except when it appears on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, or Friday.

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Wayne Levin on Lenscratch

"When I descend into this wonderland I want to make images not to explain
or clarify that world, but to deepen the mystery" —Wayne Levin

There's a fine new interview by Tara Cronin with B&W underwater photographer Wayne Levin on Lenscratch today. A very well-done presentation throughout. Nice, and worth your while.

A brief sample, from Wayne, related to the quotation above: "I don’t feel that I am able to live my life in realization of the mystery. In my day to day life, I’m a bundle of uncertainties, hopes, anxieties, anger, joy, tension, and relaxation, just like most humans. I do however often have a strong philosophical bent, and a drive that borders on obsession with my photography. I do feel that often I learn and get new ideas or concepts from my photographs. They teach me and open up new possibilities."

At the very least, head on over and look at the photographs. Not like anyone else's.

Mike

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Jack: "Whoa, thanks, Mike, that was a treat. Sometimes I see photos and think, I can do that too. In this case I say I'm glad Wayne can do that, because I can't, but really like his work.

The Mysterious "Legs" Phenomenon

An Aussie reader, Mim, found a link I couldn't find yesterday, to the picture I labeled "Hands" in an old post. Mim also said this about it:

I went looking because I remembered it, but I also remembered that it didn't grab me the first time. And yet it does this time around. Is it my mood is different? or the white border? I don't know but I really like it now!

Therein lies a mystery...one of the bigger mysteries about how photographs work, in my opinion. It's that some photographs—I think we can widen that outward and say "artworks," of any kind—elicit an enduring response, whereas others don't.

Again, I think a musical analogy is helpful. The way pop songs grab me has always interested me. Why do I like certain songs instantly, whereas others require repeated hearings over time before I start to like them? And a slightly different question: given two songs I like more or less equally well at a certain point, why might my liking for one of them intensify and deepen into love through time and repeated hearings, whereas the appeal of the other fades until I no longer even care for it or want to listen to it again? The analogy to photography is pretty easy.

Way back in art school, hanging around the Photo Department, I was musing about the fact that I liked a certain famous picture more and more as time passed, and an influential teacher of mine, Frank DiPerna, overheard me and said, "Yeah. That one's got legs."

Why this has relevance for photographers is that it's crucial to editing. You at least need to try to understand which pictures have superficial appeal but no depth, and which ones don't grab you right away but might have legs.

The term comes from footraces, I guess. When runners tire at the end of a grueling race they're said to have "no legs left." An athlete with legs still has strength and ability after being depleted.

We learn early on that some photographs are designed to have immediate appeal. Their "grab quotient" is high, you might say. They're meant to immediately arrest your attention as you're turning the pages of a magazine for example. But hang one of those pictures on the wall, and very soon it has nothing further to offer. It's easily depleted. Other pictures might be invisible to you at first—no grab quotient—but could grow on you over time.

Others just get into your heart and stay there, never losing their richness. They might be slow to yield their gifts, but then they give and keep giving.

Doglegs. Another of my lasting favorites.

Those aren't the only options. There's an infinite number of shadings in the way we could dissect how pictures appeal to us, and the "arc" of that appeal plotted against time and familiarity. But it's not easy. It's complicated. And of course it's not the same for everybody, as I mentioned yesterday.

I would guess that the ways people in the broader culture these days mostly share digital pictures tends to strongly emphasize a superficial level of appeal, much like the classic advertising photograph. With the audience's attention atomized and elusive, you can't count on people making much of an effort to understand your work, so it's tough to put yourself out there with work that isn't slick and shiny and immediately appealing...

...Even if a few of the pictures that aren't such grabbers are the ones that will prove to have "legs."

Mike
(Thanks to Mim)

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Sean: "I've just started reading The Art of Loving, by Erich Fromm. It begins with this quote. 'He who knows nothing, loves nothing. He who can do nothing understands nothing. He who understands nothing is worthless. But he who understands also loves, notices, sees…. The more knowledge is inherent in a thing, the greater the love.… Anyone who imagines that all fruits ripen at the same time as the strawberries knows nothing about grapes.' —Paracelsus. There's an art to loving pictures.

Blog Note (Brief Indulgent Mike Update) (OT)

Totally off topic so skip if you want to!

The tooth extraction went well. It's not so bad. There's some pain getting numbed—needles in the gums aren't generally pleasant—and then the experience is mainly one of pressure being exerted on your head, loud cracking noises that sound like they are coming from inside your skull (because they are), and extremely loud noise from the drill. And for me there was a high level of tenseness and stress—as with most dental procedures, I kept having to remind myself to breathe and to relax, and then I would tense right up again.

But nothing that could really be called pain. So it's another one of those weird medical experiences that is at the same time extremely uncomfortable yet not very painful. All in all I'd rather have that than the other way around. It's all over pretty quickly. Later, at home, you have to manage the bleeding. There's some pain when the Procaine wears off, but nothing bad. There's quite a long list of post-op instructions you need to follow (soft diet only, no spitting, no drinking with straws, etc.), all aimed at not disturbing the sutures or irritating the affected area.

My usual vegan soup that the Soup Maestro at the sandwich shop in Penn Yan makes for me had lots of vegetable chunks in it, and I'm not supposed to chew for a few days, so I just pureed it with the Vitamix. As an aside, there's a curious side effect when you do that—the soup gets much more spicy. Apparently when you whirl spices to bits it increases the surface area and their effect is intensified. Today I plan to add some cooked potatoes and a can of beans to the puree to tone it down a bit. That'll be my diet for a few days!

Today, somewhat in defiance of logic, I'm extremely tired. The procedure took it out of me, somehow. Yesterday afternoon and this morning all I've wanted to do is sleep.

A big thanks while I'm on this subject to longtime dentist Roz Rosenblum, wife of reader and old friend Steve, who took some time on the phone the night before last to lay out my options and allay my fears. I'm sure that sharing her workday expertise with a non-patient was not the very first thing she would have chosen to do while relaxing after dinner in the evening, but she was wonderful and made me feel a lot better.

Mike

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Love It / Don't Get It

I had another visitor yesterday—longtime reader and not-infrequent commenter Nikhil Ramkarran came all the way from Georgetown, Guyana. Via New York City, where he was visiting old friends in Queens. He's a lawyer in Guyana, the only country in South America where English is the native language. His name is culturally Indian, but his family has been in Guyana for generations.

He wouldn't admit how many cameras he owns, but I asked him to send me a picture of his camera shelves. Plural. (Now if we could just get a picture of Ken Tanaka's.) He made me laugh because he admitted he has a thing for Mamiya TLRs and keeps buying more because each one he buys isn't quite right. I did that with several kinds of old cameras back in the '90s when eBay first got going. I soon had an embarrassing number of old cameras around the house. I wonder how many camera fans enjoy the hunt, not just for used cameras, but for just the right used camera?

Mike and Nikhil at lunch. (Do you like my hat?*)
That's a Rollei 35 Nikhil is clutching in his left hand.

Nikhil is erudite and philosophical about many things, insightful about photography, and great fun to talk to. One of his many observations touched a spark: we were talking about TOP print sale prints, and he mentioned that he has my print "Hands" hanging in his office and that it gets a lot of comments. It's one of my all-time favorite pictures, so I asked him what they think, and he said, "Many people love it. And some people don't get it at all."

That seemed very familiar, and I wonder if it isn't true of a lot of work by many photographers. Photography is a lot like music, and that's one more way it is—it seems to me that with a lot of excellent, well-known music—songs, entire genres, artists—there will be people who love them unreservedly, yet also those who don't get it. Over the years, I've noticed that when I put up a specific picture for discussion, no matter how many people love it, there will usually be one or two who just aren't touched by it at all. In recent days this has been true of Gordon's "Precipitation," Boubat's "Lella," and "The Stewart Sisters" by Judith Joy Ross.

I would expound on this at greater length, but I am having a tooth pulled in about an hour and although I am fine, it seems my inner big baby is just a tiny bit freaked out. Wish me luck, and if I do not return, send a search party.

Mike

*The only proper answer is "I do not like that hat."

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.

Oh, crap.
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JF: "Embarrassed to say but I need a link to 'Hands.' I searched the site but could not find it. Thanks."

Mike replies: I don't blame you, because I searched and searched using every keyword I could think of and I couldn't find it either. Here it is:

 

Aravind Nair: "Guyana! A place I had always wanted to visit, but beyond my means. May I cheekily recommend a book to you that made me want to visit the place after reading it during my school days? Three Singles to Adventure by Gerald Durrell."

Mike replies: Thank you for the recommendation! Reading it now. I can't believe I had never heard of Gerald Durrell. What a character.

Deal o' the Day: This Really Sucks! (OT)

Hardly photo-related by any stretch, but I pass along Amazon's "Deal of the Day" deals when I think they might be relevant to you—or used to, I should say, back when cameras were more often featured.

However, this is personally relevant and TOP-related. I own and use this thing, and it's fantastic. Lulu doesn't shed (or smell), but Butters sheds approximately his weight in dog hair annually (by rough estimate). I even wrote about the Dyson back when I got it, in an article that starts out "this is going to make me look really bad." My test was worthy of Consumer Reports for its fanatical attention to experimental rigor, I think you'll agree.

That was back in 2013, and today my Dyson Animal is still sucking schmutzy dust and dusty schmutz like the animal it is. And now—today only—you can get a refurbished one for $262, down from $560. I paid $560 for mine and I'd do it again. My current house gleams and sparkles.

Recommended. They really suck. Get yours before they're gone.

Mike

P.S. I should add that vacuuming—"hoovering" in British—is a five-alarm emergency to the dogs, who bark frantically and will lunge and snap at the Dyson if I let them—the handheld version too. I have to cordon them off in various parts of the house where I'm not working to be able to use the Dysons at all. They even come running aggressively whenever I open the door of the closet where it is kept.

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.

What's next to godliness?
Buy yourself clean

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Juan Flores: "I beg to differ. This is very much photo-related, as dust is the number one enemy of the digital photographer. Okay, maybe that's an exaggeration, but it's useful to have as dust-free an environment as possible for things such as close-up product shots, cleaning sensors and lenses, and even installing screen protectors.

"By the way, I can vouch for this product as well. My brother went through many vacuum cleaners, including a number of Dyson clones, before finally breaking down and buying a real Dyson. So as with so many things, he wound up spending a lot more money than he would have if he'd just started with the one he really wanted from the beginning."

Mark Kinsman: "This is a great deal. We have an older model 07 that is 14 years old and still going strong. The only thing that's happened is a few cracked Lexan parts from the kids misusing it. Nothing that affects its function. This vacuum really does suck!"

Patrick Perez (partial comment): "My next dog will be named Nature, for as we all know, Nature abhors a vacuum."

Tom (partial comment): "We British are even known to refer to a Dyson Hoover."

Testing the Waters (Street Photograph)

Gordon Lewis, Precipitation, 2009

I have Gordon Lewis's "Precipitation" hanging in my downstairs powder room and it gets more comments and compliments than any other picture in my house. It's a lovely and luminous print, better on paper than onscreen.

One friend, a poet, admitted at the end of his stay with me that he had repeatedly gone into the powder room just to contemplate the picture, over and over again.

The print was taken for a camera review of the Pentax K-7 DSLR that Gordon wrote for TOP in 2009. So many readers liked it that we staged an essentially impromptu print sale. It did well, selling 77 prints.

Since then, however, the acclaim has continued...at least in my powder room! I swear I've heard at least ten people say some version of this: "I remember that. I should have bought one when I had the chance."

Scott Kirkpatrick, the TOP reader who flew in from Boston on Wednesday, was only the latest to say it, as I was giving him a quick tour of the house.

So I finally asked Gordon if he'd like to reprise the sale and offer a Second Edition of the print. He said he wouldn't mind, but that he wanted me to test the waters before we went through all the work involved. Which I am hereby doing.

The picture has had quite a career. It was later featured in the book Why Photographs Work by George Barr.

Gordon, of course, is the author of Street Photography from Rocky Nook. Which is apropos, because my portrait of him in action in New York City, above, is one of my favorite street photographs of my own! (Or does that count?)

Here's one in which you can actually tell what he looks like. Those are Larry Fink photos behind Gordon (thanks to JM for pointing that out).

So what do you say? Would you like us to offer "Precipitation" again? The price would be between one and two hundred dollars. You might also mention if you would be willing to help publicize the sale on other sites and forums you visit.

Thanks!

Mike
(Thanks to Gordon)

UPDATE from Gordon: Thanks to all who answered that they would want a second chance to buy Precipitation. The reason I asked Mike to test the waters in the first place was that neither of us saw any point in putting time and energy into something you have little interest in, and might even find off-putting. Enough people have said, 'Yes, I'd buy a print or two,' that Mike and I have agreed to go set up a sale for some time before the end of the year. We'll keep you posted.

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.

Raining tastiness down into your day
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Open Mike: Yowzuh! (And a Word of Advice for Under-40s)

Wednesday and Thursday of this week were hard for me. I was completely unprepared for how bad the pain of an untreatable nasty toothache can be. The pain was really kicking my ass! The whole side of my head hurt, and around the afflicted tooth, an area about the size of a ripe plum, was a fierce steady burning pain. It really derailed me from my usual groove—it was tiring, distracting, tough to endure. Almost disorienting. So when I heard that the local oral surgeon doesn't have an opening until September 8th, that was not good news. It's the constant, unrelenting aspect of such pain that makes it so hard. I had a difficult time just getting through the one night between Wednesday and Thursday, and a whole month of the same thing was an appalling prospect.

I've got the pain under control now thanks to a wonderful wise doctor in the nearby town of Canandaigua. The trick is to take the proper dosage of ibuprophen like clockwork. She suggested that 600mg (a prescription-strength dose, exactly replicable, of course, by taking three over-the-counter tablets instead of two) was better than 400, but that 800 wasn't much better than 600. And then, take it every six hours on the dot so the prostaglandins can't get fired up and the pain can't get started again. She said if you wait until the pain takes hold again, it will take up to two hours for the ibuprophen to have its effect—which was exactly my experience. She even suggested I set my alarm for the middle of the night so I could take a dose on schedule. (I did that last night.) Thank you Doctor ma'am!

Twenty-four hundred milligrams of ibruprophen a day is far more than you'd ever want to take on anything but a temporary, emergency basis—it has its own risks, and they're serious—but it's still less than the 3200mg per day upper limit. And it works! Like magic, actually. My toothache pain is not just more bearable, it's more or less gone. Whew! I'm on a waiting list for next week to have the tooth extracted, and I should be able to cruise along fine till then. Or even till September 8th, if I have to.

The relief is somewhat exhilarating. Like that old joke about when you stop banging your head against the wall. Really illustrates the contrast between feeling afflicted and being your old self again.

A word of advice for anyone in any stage of life that could be described as "young"—take good care of your teeth. Dental problems are a significant issue for many people in later life. There's no upside—such problems are thorny and troublesome to deal with, physically painful, and they can be very expensive—never welcome for people on fixed incomes or whose incomes are declining. So a.) find a dentist you like, b.) see your dentist annually or twice a year*, c.) be scrupulous about daily care and watch the amount and timing** of your sugar intake, and d.)—perhaps most importantly—take care of any problems immediately, or at the earliest possible opportunity. When you reach your seventh decade, or even earlier, it could make a big difference in your quality of life. And quality of life, not just the literal length of it, looms large in our later years.

Finally, a sympathetic shout out to anyone within the reach of these words who's dealing with chronic pain. I have always known that chronic pain is a special torture that requires real fortitude to endure (I remember a school friend's mother, whose back never stopped hurting), but I have a renewed respect for it this morning, having taken only a brief dip into that particular hell. Sincere condolences to all those who have to put up with it.

Mike

*The dentist I trusted the most told me that two visits a year is ideal but that they seldom try to recommend that because of patient compliance—people won't do it. So the common "once a year" recommendation is a compromise in hopes of getting people to actually schedule a regular checkup.

**Eat or drink sugar only after meals and brush your teeth shortly afterwards.

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Ouch!
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TOP Readers in Penn Yan

Scott Kirkpatrick showed up driving this very strange-looking rental car.

I've had several very nice visits from TOP readers this Summer. Yesterday, longtime email correspondent Scott Kirkpatrick flew a rented Piper Arrow all the way from Boston to have lunch with me...

...And I stood him up!

Wait, don't judge. It was unavoidable, unfortunately. I woke up with a toothache yesterday, and not till I tried to eat did I realize it was serious. Sitting in the dentist's chair when I should have been sitting having lunch with Scott, I heard some words you don't want to hear from your dentist—"we can't fix that, and there's nothing we can do for the pain." Turns out I've cracked the root of a molar, of all things. And the offender is a tooth that has already absorbed thousands of dollars of my meagre resources. This might impact the blog a bit in months to come—apparently I need a couple of rounds of oral surgery. And it's going to be frightfully expensive. Frowny face. (Number Three is the tooth that keeps on taking.)

But Scott and I got to drive to Canandaigua together—it's a long drive through fine rural countryside—and he visited TOP HQ for a brief hour to chat further, see the red chair, and check cloud altitudes for the flight back to Boston. Less immediately, Scott comes from even farther away—he's a Professor in the School of Engineering and Computer Science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He put up a few pictures taken during his visit here.

Recent breakfast visitors have included Kevin Willoughby and Rob Spring. (If you stay a night or three at La Belle Vie in Penn Yan with my friends Laurel and Llewellyn, they'll give you a discount if you mention TOP and they'll invite me for a breakfast, and those are always a treat, both for the food and for the company. Please make reservations directly though their website.) That's Rob, who came with his wife Helen, in the inset picture.

Kevin says he has been a "Mike reader" for a very long time, but inexplicably I did not snap his visage! My apologies to Kevin and his S.O. Julie McCoy for that lapse. For many decades I have cherished the aspiration to be more thorough and organized one day, and that plan for the bright if hazy future should incorporate an ambition to be more thoroughgoing about reporting and recording visitors.

Which reminds me, I forgot to have Scott sign the Guest Book when he was here at the house! Rats. Tooth pain must be affecting my brain. Yeah, yeah, that's it.

It's really nice to have faces, voices and personalities to attach to familiar names. Thanks to Kevin and Julie, Rob and Helen, and Scott for coming by.

Mike

[Ed. Note: A few readers have reported that the link to Scott's pictures doesn't work for them. However the link is properly configured and works for me, so I don't know what's amiss. Here's the URL if you want to try it that way:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/133969392@N05/sets/72157687409573585/ ]

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Dew Drop Inn
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Ron Himebaugh: "Cracked root—the very worst pain I ever suffered, so my sympathies. Tooth pulled, implant, crown, around $5k or so as I recall, plus the endodontist, to find out it was cracked in the first place. Part of aging, my dentist said. I often marvel at our forbears who endured these sorts of miseries without benefit of drugs and technology. Stay strong...."

Kevin Willoughby: "Our 'breakfast with Mike' was one of several highlights of our Finger Lakes vacation. Given that Llewellyn is a fine photographer and I'm at a point in my life where I'm trying to decide on my next camera, I expected a lot of photo talk. Except for a little gossip about photographers, we talked about everything but. Mike gave us a bit of local history. Since both Mike and Julie are editors, we talked a lot about good books. Llewellyn and I chatted a bit about audio topics. A genuinely wonderful breakfast. Laurel's breakfasts are world class, delicious and beautiful. A first course: Cantaloupe with blueberries, strawberries, kiwi, ginger curd, and lavender scones. I'm an aviation buff, so after breakfast, Julie and I visited the Glenn Curtiss museum. We were met with a flock of motorcycles in the parking lot. I had forgotten that Curtiss invented the motorcycle. Synchronicity: while we were at the museum, Mike published a post about Harley-Davidsons! Our thanks to Mike, Laurel, and Llewellyn for making our vacation so much fun!"