The Online Photographer

Happy Halloween!

From our house to your house (if you celebrate it).

Mike

P.S. Of course, being a sharp-eyed photographer, you detected the one ghost and three goblins reflected in the car windshield.

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.

B&H Photo • Amazon US • Amazon UK
Amazon Germany • Amazon Canada • Adorama

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

No featured comments yet—please check back soon!

There is No Such Thing as Image Quality

There is no such thing as "image quality" in expressive photography. There are only properties.

This might seem counter-intuitive, or argumentative, or even subversive. Many people who are happily engaged in the discussion about technical properties have fully integrated the term "image quality" and know what they mean by it.

But quality is subjective. Only by first agreeing which properties to value can something be said to have quality. Even if that agreement is implicit or assumed...as it very often is.

Quality is easier to assign when the task at hand is merely technical: to use an example John B. Williams used in his 1989 book (which he titled Image Clarity, not "image quality"), if a surveillance camera needs to resolve the numbers on a license plate at a great distance, then resolution is a desirable property. The more specific the task, the easier it is to reach agreement as to which properties are important. By common agreement, the photography world has come to assume that things like extreme clarity, high resolution, vivid colors, and "corner sharpness" represent "quality."

But who says so? These are just conventions. And such conventions change all the time: for example, Group ƒ/64, formed in 1932 in opposition to Pictorialism (Willard Van Dyke's 683 vs. Alfred Stieglitz's 291, San Francisco vs. New York)  had as one of its aesthetic principles "pan focus," or sharp focus front to back within the represented scene; they liked their pictures sharp. Pictorialists such as Alvin Langdon Coburn and Gertrude Käsebier insisted on exaggerated blur everywhere; they liked their pictures soft. Recently, forum denizens routinely extol greater amounts of out-of-D.o.F. blur as a "quality" rationale for owning larger sensors and expensive faster lenses. Apparently they like their pictures extremely sharp and extremely soft. But that's not always best either. Macro photographers are finding that tiny sensors work well because they give more D.o.F. for tiny subjects.

In expressive photography, all bets are off, because any property can potentially be a "quality" if it's sensitively and appropriately applied—and any property can be a detriment to certain pictures, no matter how universally those properties are conventionally agreed to constitute "good" image quality. Forensic, analytical hyper-resolution might work for some pictures; but other pictures it might work against. Vivid color might be appealing in some pictures; other pictures are better served by soft, muted colors. Some people love to search for the very "best" lens (again, a subjective term), meaning the clearest, the sharpest—even when they can't visually distinguish the results in pictures from the next-best lens...but many people do great work with ancient Petzvals, toy cameras, Holgas and Lensbabies.

As a lens fanatic, lens aficionado, and recovering lens addict, I learned long ago that "all lenses yield their gifts." No matter how "bad" the lens, you can take a good picture with it. No matter how "good" the lens, it's certainly easy to take bad pictures with it.

All properties have their gifts to give, too, in expressive photography. That is, all properties have the potential to become qualities.

So it's meaningless to say things like "One-inch sensor cameras are as good as medium-format film cameras" as I said yesterday. They're different. Each one has its gifts to give. Use it wisely and well and you stand a chance of creating a few pictures that truly do have image quality.

I got a bit addicted to the look of the new 20-MP Micro 4/3 sensor because it has properties I particularly like. Used with the Panasonic 12–35mm, it often had the look of high lens contrast, coupled with a certain coarseness, that looks vivid to me without actually having what I'd call "too much" resolution. The typical D.o.F. looked right to me. It didn't look too smooth or too "gassy." It had a bit of tooth.

...Highly subjective terms! Sorry. But maybe you can sense what I'm saying. The important point is merely that, personally, just for myself, I liked its properties better than cameras and lenses that are conventionally thought to have "better" image quality. I enjoyed making pictures with it just because I enjoyed the look.

I'm hardly alone. I know many people who use equipment that offers supposedly less than the "best image quality" precisely because they prefer its image quality. It suits their expressive purposes better.

When we look at this old advertising photograph, we just look at the picture—we don't care how much Rudolph Hermann spent for the lens he used.

Whatever we choose to think of as "quality" tends to be status-related, and it also tends to disappear over time. I've been in this game long enough that I've witnessed many people who take the search for "image quality" to extremes—and I've heard about many others who did the same before my time. What does that matter now? Almost nothing. "PhotoDes" said yesterday: "Many of the famous Baroque era artists experimented extensively with different pigments for their paintings—Prussian Blue, zinc white, etc. were valued for their intensity and were regarded as a characteristic of high-quality work." Does anyone but art experts even recognize that when looking at Baroque paintings today? I'd say not. We just look at the paintings. We're not aware that the shade of the blue is a status-marker, or that Piet van der Flooj (I just made that name up) was cooler than the rest of the kids because he used it. Similarly, let's hypothesize about a photographer who went to the greatest extreme to make the absolute best quality digital image—spent huge sums of money for the best equipment, exhaustively compared editing software, etc., etc., optimized everything...but did it in, say, 2003.

Who cares now? No one, probably, except as an historical curiosity. And that's assuming we even know how that old image was made. That former "ultimate perfection" has long since been eclipsed by ordinary equipment and materials.

It takes courage these days to stand up to the conventional wisdom and not care about conventionally agreed-upon "image quality," but to go with what you like and what suits your work. And you're justified in doing that. Because strange as it is to say, there really is no such thing as image quality. There are only image properties—and almost all properties potentially have their gifts to give. It's up to us to impart the quality.

Mike
(Thanks to many of the commenters from yesterday)

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.

B&H Photo • Amazon US • Amazon UK
Amazon Germany • Amazon Canada • Adorama

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

Bahi: "Beautifully expressed and insightful. It’s still a hard lesson to really take to heart, though."

Michael: "Thanks for that, Mike. Right on! I've just met a really telling example of your argument by a landscape photographer, Thomas Heaton, who lives near me in the Northeast of England. He had received a comment on YouTube sympathizing/complaining about some blobs of water on the lens when taking a photo on the Northern Irish coast as Hurricane Ophelia hit. This is Thomas's rejoinder, with vivid illustrations of image quality, not picture quality."

Wes Pittman: "I wish you had published this about $20,000 ago."

hugh crawford: "I'm generally in the choir you are preaching to, but...painters obsess over paint in a way that photographers can't even imagine. Paint is complicated. Paint is expensive. Blue paint particularly so.

"Who's Rudolph Hermann? looks like Paul Wolff, but kind of faded. I love his automobile photos but I've lusted after his Zeppelin photos for years. Also Dr. Wolff was rather obsessed with the technical details of photography and wrote several fine books on the subject, which is where I recognized the photo from. Too bad about the whole Nazi thing but his photos are beautiful."

Mike replies: I found it on a blog post about Paul Wolff, who is the person I was searching for. Sorry but I cannot locate the page again. It was a good blog, I thought, from what I scanned there. The author thought the photo was by Rudolph Hermann, so I repeated that...that's the kind of secondary detail that Mike Johnston of the Fact-Checking Department doesn't quite have enough pep to drill down on.

Gary Nylander: "This is a great blog post and thought provoking. Coincidentally, just before I read this article I was looking through some 35mm color negatives that I had just got back from the lab. I made the pictures with a 1936 Leica III with a 50mm Summar ƒ/2 lens—uncoated. Yes it has bad lens flare when pointed toward the sun, but even though the flare might be considered undesirable for some photographers, it has its own unique kind of beauty that could not be achieved otherwise. With the sun behind me and illuminating the subject straight on, I doubt if anyone would be able see that much difference between a modern day lens of the same focal length. So as you say 'all lenses yield their gifts.'"

s. wolters: "Elementary my dear Johnston! During the three decades that I worked as a designer I presented all kinds of artwork to clients, almost on a daily basis. Image quality was hardly ever an issue in the discussions. Words like quality, taste and beauty should effectively be avoided anyway. As soon as they come up you probably made a bad proposal. That does not mean that they are unimportant. It's semantics, and English is not my mother's tongue, but I would use 'image quality' internally during the product development a lot, in many different ways:

1. How good or bad an image is, especially in relation to the function of it, the condition: ‘This image quality is bad, you cannot even recognize who is who.’
2. Good characteristics: ‘This image has a lot of qualities, but color genuineness [i.e., accuracy —Ed.] isn’t one of them.’
3. Representing value, dignity, worth: ‘This image looks cheap, we need more quality, more grandeur.’
4. When comparing the impact of images: ‘We will lose quality when we replace image X by image Y.’

"Measuring things has become very important these days. However, quality is very hard to measure. Maybe that is why there is such a strong focus on quantitative values. More, faster, cheaper, more profitable and so on. Most of the times this means: Money! That’s why managing processes sometimes become more important than the end result. Quantity has become the new quality."

Mike replies: ...Which is funny because look at the comment that happened to come in immediately after yours:

Colin Work: "The way it is generally bandied about, IQ makes more sense if you think of it as meaning 'Image Quantity.'"

Quote o' the Day: Andrew Molitor

"Photographers, culturally, seem to have a terrible problem with looking for technical solutions to creative problems."

—Andrew Molitor
in the Comments to the previous post

-

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

PDLanum: "The quote I try to remember every day: 'The truth is that anybody can make a photograph. The trouble is not that photographs are hard to make. The trouble is that they are hard to make intelligent and interesting.' John Szarkowski, b. 1925, d. 2007, from 2000."

1" Sensors as Good as Medium-Format Film

Shopping is fun but....
Right. I shouldn't be saying this. Things used to be easier; now, competition has gotten fierce—even The Huffington Post (fer Pete's sake!) is publishing camera reviews and posting affiliate links to Amazon and B&H Photo. It's getting a lot tougher out there for cool old dudes who actually like to write words down such as, um, moi. And who at least sometimes provide content that goes more than just a little way past exactly what the marketing departments of the corporations we serve that serve us want us to say to shift product.

This is my competition now too. (The link is to the pretty young woman above vlogging* about the Sony RX100V as a vlogging camera. She doesn't write; but then, I don't shoot video.)

I shouldn't be discouraging anyone from shopping, is what I'm trying to say.

But I just want you to look at something amazing, and take a second, placidly amid the noise and the haste**, to fully appreciate where we are and what is happening.

Just look at this. It's a photograph. The photograph is of an unidentified woman, and it was taken by a photographer I've never heard of before named Andreas Jordan (to whom thanks, at a couple of removes). Enlarge it by clicking on it, then contemplate it, and then evaluate it visually from a holistic standpoint, i.e., without drilling down into picayune specifics.

Given that most photographers now look at most photographs on screens now***, ain't that good enough? I'm just sayin'.

Granted, it's not the ultimate in detail, by today's standard, but doesn't it give you pretty much all the detail—all the information—your actual human eyes could, at a distance where you'd be seeing that woman, the subject, in about the same way? Doesn't it get the idea across about as well as anybody needs?

And that's a picture from a one-inch sensor. It was taken with a Sony RX100V, the fifth iteration of a tiny digicam that has a 1" (8.8x13.2mm) sensor. The sensor in the V iteration has a BSI (back side illuminated) sensor that gives it 315 focus points and the ability to capture AF in .05 seconds. Phil Hall at TechRadar (no link because the page imposes sound on you unwillingly, a new trend I happen to detest): "Using the same stacked Exmor R back-illuminated CMOS sensor technology that we first saw in the RX100IV, Sony says it has tweaked the chip, while the clever stacked sensor design means it has memory chips built right onto the back of the sensor. This means data doesn't have to flood out to the edge of the sensor, and, coupled with a new LSI chip, it means the sensor can deliver incredibly fast readout speeds."

My readout, from my brain I mean, is that while there are differences, 1" sensors are now virtually as good as medium-format film was in 1991.

Back then, my friend Jim Sherwood, an art photographer who did a lot of shooting of major storm damage in 6x7, switched from a ISO 100 speed film (Kodak Vericolor 100, I think it was, a low-contrast negative film beloved of 1980s art photographers who shot in color) to an ISO 400 speed film, which had just gotten good enough. While RX100V captures might not be quite as enlargeable in prints as Jim's 6x7 cm negatives were, it certainly beats the pants off it for color correctability and low light sensitivity, and for detail and image quality as long as you're looking at it on a screen. Of course, it does cost $998—but then, that was about $560 in 1991.

It's da bomb, as people who were that vlogger's age ten years ago used to say.

Where I'm going with all this...
...Is a question. At what point are we going to learn to stop worrying and love da bomb?**** At what point are we just going to start making pictures again?

When digital cameras came along for most of us in the late '90s and early 2000s, digital just wasn't good enough. But we all wanted to use it anyway because it was so liberating and so much fun. The first one I used, an Agfa—there's a name not everyone knows now—was not even close to one megapixel, and I remember thinking: too bad you can't get decent images from this thing, because using it is like being a kid let loose in a candy shop. Wheee.

So we started this endless roundel of trying, comparing, shooting "test shots," making the most fanatically minute comparisons, and of course upgrading, always interested in the latest and the next. "Neomania," I called it back then. We became maniacs for the newest thing.

But at some point, I just assumed, things would settle down and we'd go back to just...well, making, and looking at, pictures. You know, without caring how the pictures were made. Are we there yet?

That still hasn't quite happened, I don't think. And now I'm wondering if maybe it never will.

Oh, and speaking of 1" sensors...
...If image quality is all you're after, and not that wicked new processor and the last soupçon of AF speed, you can get the same image quality from the RX100IV for $100 less. Or, for that matter, from your iPhone, as long as you attach a DxO One to it.

The iPhone as a 1" camera

(Oh, right, right: DxO One: B&H, Amazon.)

One-inch digicam / 8.8x13.2mm sensor = MF of only 26 years ago = who'd a' thunk?

Mike

*Vlog, n., video log, a weblog in which most of the postings are in video form.

**The reference of course is to the "Desiderata" (desired things), a 1927 prose poem by American writer Max Ehrmann. Largely unknown in its author's lifetime, it became popular through several spoken-word recordings in the 1970s. It was not written in 1692, a fatuous but oft-repeated claim based on the fact that the rector of St. Paul's Church in Batimore, Maryland, included it in a compilation of devotional readings for his congregation, which is apparently where the creators of the spoken-word recordings found it—and the church was founded in 1692. "Editors needed everywhere," as Yr. Hmbl. Ed. always says.

Here's a book jacket photo of Max Ehrmann, who was born of Bavarian immigrant parents in Terre Haute, Indiana, in 1872, and died in 1945 before his poem became famous. He was educated at DePauw University in Greencastle and later received an honorary Doctor of Letters from the University.

And here's the poem, just to cover the faint possibility that you've never encountered it before—

DESIDERATA

Go placidly amid the noise and the haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence. As far as possible, without surrender, be on good terms with all persons.

Speak your truth quietly and clearly; and listen to others, even to the dull and the ignorant; they too have their story.

Avoid loud and aggressive persons; they are vexatious to the spirit. If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain or bitter, for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.

Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans. Keep interested in your own career, however humble; it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time.

Exercise caution in your business affairs, for the world is full of trickery. But let this not blind you to what virtue there is; many persons strive for high ideals, and everywhere life is full of heroism.

Be yourself. Especially, do not feign affection. Neither be cynical about love; for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment it is as perennial as the grass.

Take kindly the counsel of the years, gracefully surrendering the things of youth.

Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune. But do not distress yourself with dark imaginings. Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness.

Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself. You are a child of the universe no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here. And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should. Therefore be at peace with God, whatever you conceive Him to be. And whatever your labors and aspirations, in the noisy confusion of life, keep peace in your soul. With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world. Be cheerful. Strive to be happy.

It's contained in a largely unread compilation of his poems, and there are various letterpress and calligraphic presentations of the poem available intended for framing.

Some of the poem's ideas might have been "in the air" in the 1920s. I hear strains in it of the ideas espoused by the Oxford Group (founded 1921 as "A First Century Christian Fellowship"); of Schweitzer, whose The Mysticism of Paul the Apostle was published in 1931; and of the founders of Alcoholics Anonymous (1935) as represented in "The Big Book."

Although it may be sappy, and beloved of sappy sorts, and thus easy to dismiss, the poem's advice, one must admit, is uncommonly sound, not to mention beautiful.

There...now, you're not gonna get all that in a vlog, are ya? (Quiet, you in the back.)

***Even though more people are printing more photographs now than ever before, it's still a small fraction of the photographs viewed on screens. I can't substantiate any of that, but I believe it's true.

****The reference is to the subtitle of Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove, a black comedic farce about how deranged leaders could needlessly trigger nuclear war—which obviously can't happen because our leaders are so sagacious, cautious, probitious, contemplative, policy-savvy, humane, empathic, steeped in culture, and wise.

...On second thought, better re-watch Dr. Strangelove.

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.

B&H Photo • Amazon US • Amazon UK
Amazon Germany • Amazon Canada • Adorama

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

Dave Wilson: "Among far too many others, I have both (all three? iPhone as well) modern devices you mention above. Frankly, for 90% of use cases, they're all you need: but this approach does mean that, when I pick up my FF camera, the reasons I still own it come flooding back. But I'm not going to chuck it in my work bag and take it to London daily, something I don't need to think about with either the DxO or RX100V."

Mike replies: You'll note that our vlogger astutely says at one point that the smaller the camera, the more she'll use it. Struck me as both true and also honest.

Andrew Molitor: "I dunno, hasn't there been a 'nerd' community for a long time? I distinctly recall in the 1980s spending a lot of time dorking around with lenses and films and testing this and that. Photographers, culturally, seem to have a terrible problem with looking for technical solutions to creative problems. I don't know how far back in time this goes, but I assume there were fistfights about how what percentage of silver nitrate to use in this solution or that. Or maybe it really arose with the internet forum? I don't know. But it's been around as long as I have been aware of these things, which is a few decades now."

Mike replies: I've read enough in the old literature to suspect that distracting disputations about image quality have been going on at least since the Daguerreotype went away. Maybe it's essentially social—part of how we keep each other's company—given that the creative side of photography is so solitary? As I've lived only half of my photographic life in the age of the Internet, I can say with some confidence that the Internet did supercharge the tendency, no question.

Bill Tyler: Along with the other footnotes, you might want to include the definition of 'probitious.' The most recent uses I've found are both 18th century, one in Congreve's Judgement of Paris, and one in 'An ESSAY On The Scheme and Conduct, Procedure and Extent of MAN's [typography sic(!) —Ed.] REDEMPTION. Wherein is shewn from the Holy Scriptures, that This great Work is to be accomplished....' Title pages in the 1700s did tend to run a little long. Anyhow, a definition, please!"

Mike replies: Found that....

Love the scrawled owner's commentary. And the library stamp, which to a book collector would amount to vandalism.

I think I did read around in the 18th century too heavily when I was but a lad, although I never encountered the worthy William Worthington. Re "probitous," which is what I originally wrote, I think I made it up, on account of I have always wanted there to be an adjectival form of the noun "probity."

When I started writing for magazines I fetched up against the uncomfortable fact that I had made up a lot of words and was in the habit of using them. I had to stop that.

I guess I should go change it...probably to "upright," which to my ear doesn't have the same brawn or antique burnish or Latinate depth, alas. Or maybe I shall leave it as it is, and count on our exchange here to redress the error.

cdembrey: "With the rapid decline of the middle class's discretionary funds, expect more competition for those few remaining dollars. Small bloggers will be squeezed just like small brick-and-mortar stores were in the past. Unique products will become more important. In many cases podcasts are both easier to consume (politics, literary criticism) and videos are more understandable (technical subjects—don't tell me, show me). For me, I'm listening to more podcasts, and have cut back to only TOP and Eric Kim's blog. Speaking of Eric Kim, he said in his Review of the Pentax 645Z and Digital Medium Format Photography: 'My idea of the future of photography: either buy a digital medium format camera, or just use your phone.' I'm not impressed with gear-geekish-gobbledygook, so g-g-g goes in-one-ear...."

Mike replies: Funnily enough (is "funnily" a real adverb? If it is, then "probity" should have an adjectival form, dang it. I'm going to stick my head in the sand on funnily), about half a year ago I decided to use my iPhone as one of my two main cameras, and since then have been trying to decide what the other one should be. And the logical answer keeps coming up, "go medium format." But I can't, because I can't afford it. So, one for Eric Kim.

Life is full of frustrations! ...But I'm learning to look on the bright side, which is that I'm being geeky and I don't actually "need" any particular camera or kind of camera. I'll keep working on actually believing that.

Michael Kay: "I agree with your comments about 1" sensors. I have the original Mark I version of the RX100 and it is remarkably good. But they are not cheap. Here is a cheap camera which produces a surprisingly high level of detail with its 86x56mm sensor. It only cost £15.49 (about $20). Read the text and click the link for the enlargement. You will be surprised."

David Dyer-Bennet (partial comment): "'Deteriorata' may almost justify the existence of 'Desiderata.' Maybe." [Link added, and thanks to Steve for it. —Ed.]

Jim: "I have an RX100, and plenty of medium format cameras. The RX100 does not even come close to 35mm film, to say nothing of medium format. If your standards are that low that you cannot tell the difference, it might be time to reevaluate your sensibilities. Digital is still not good enough."

Mike replies: This post twisted the tails of several medium-format film photographers—among which, Jim's comment was the mildest. One old friend came close to removing TOP from his RSS feed. All I can say is, wait till tomorrow.

PhotoDes: "'Twas ever so. Many of the famous Baroque era artists experimented extensively with different pigments for their paintings—Prussian Blue, zinc white, etc. were valued for their intensity and were regarded as a characteristic of high-quality work."

A Baker's Dozen: Large-Format Contact Prints

Up first is an image that isn't even a contact print, but might go one better. It's a unique image made directly in-camera on Ilford Harman Direct Positive Paper. Reader Johan Verhulst, 58, who lives in Lebbeke, a small village in the Flanders region of Belgium, uses a brass Suter Petzval lens from the 1800s on his Sinar P 8x10 camera. Because he rates the paper at ISO 2, he says "my poor models suffer a very high dose of flash light."

Denise Ross, Summer Sweet Corn, whole plate camera. Denise writes, "Age: not quite Medicare yet; location: home, by way of the Newport, Oregon, Farmers Market."  :-)  A beautifully simple photograph that I'll bet is considerably nicer "in person" as a contact print.

John Wyke writes from the North of Spain: "Here's me with one of my recent contact prints. I use the Intrepid Cameras 4x5 camera and I'm quite happy with the way it's going. I've always loved contact printing, and I'm happy to have a plate camera now rather than just medium format. I do my darkroom stuff at the La Puerta Verde photography school in Oviedo, Spain, which is run by my friend Ricardo Moreno (La Puerta Verde—Escuela de Fotografía). Although he offers courses in digital photography by necessity, his first love is analog and there are about fifteen of us who use various analog cameras, from Holgas to Hasselblads.

"I'm in the process of working on dual exposures contact prints like the one in this picture. I'm not quite there yet, but the joy is in the journey, not the destination. I'm also looking at Tintype style images. I do like the idea of a one shot, no copies, just a single object that you produce."

Stephen Schafer, Santa Monica Post Office, California (HABS index card)

Although the call was for contact prints, this is too interesting to leave out. Reader Stephen "Schaf" Schafer, who works all over California and Nevada, makes his living with 4x5 and 5x7 sheet film documenting heritage for the HABS/HAER/HALS collections. This is a sample of the so-called "digital contact prints" he submits along with his original negatives to the Library of Congress, where the work is in the public domain.

HABS = Historic American Buildings Survey; HAER = Historic American Engineering Record; HALS = Historic American Landscape Survey. This is true documentary work, and it's a great way to get out in the world with a camera.

William F. Whitaker, Three Vanities, 2004

Will Whitaker, 61, from Salisbury, North Carolina, says that most of the tools, processes and techniques he uses date back to the early 20th century, a period he especially admires in art, photography and design. "This image was taken with an 8 3/4" Wollensak Verito at approximately ƒ/6.3 (which is important because of the nature of the Verito lens whose character changes as it is stopped down). The Verito dates from 100 years ago, so fits right in with the aesthetic I admire so much."

At first I thought these 8x10 contact prints from reader Thom Bennett's website might be the same young lady at different ages, but it turns out they're sisters. Thom is 58 and lives in New Orleans, Louisiana. Currently he works in 8x10 but he says he will soon be acquiring a 7x17, which sounds like something he'll have fun with.

Although an in-camera original and not a contact print, I also couldn't resist including an example of the Tintypes people sent me, and this one's a whopper. Literally. In fact it sounds like Monty McCutchen is "all in": he shoots in 10x12, 7x17, 16x20, and 20x24 and, for the most part, contact prints his work with platinum/palladium, Pt/Pd gumovers, and Ambrotypes/Tintypes. (He did send me several JPEGs of actual contact prints.) He says he uses a lot of Lodima paper from our friends Michael A. Smith and Paula Chamlee, who you remember from our large format contact print sale a few years back. He writes that he resides in Asheville, North Carolina, "and within the confines of my own photographic geekery."

As they say in New Hampshire, eeyup. One measure of how deep Monty's geekery goes? One of his many ultra-large-format cameras is a 20x24 Ebony with a 16x20 reducing back! Ya gotta love that. He says of it, "I am acutely aware of how silly that sounds. At one time getting a 16x20 reducing back seemed to make sense. As the years have progressed I am having a hard time remembering the conditions in my life that would have constituted that decision being of sound mind and body."

Why "whopper"? The original of the JPEG shown above is a 20x24 (!) Tintype, which must have gobs of presence in the flesh—or, er, tin.

Of all the images readers sent in, this might have been the only Kallitype (an iron-silver alt process similar to Van Dyke brown). Although not his main way of working, Steve Wolfe of Columbus, Ohio, says he still occasionally shoots 4x5" black and white film, usually Ilford HP5+, with his Graflex Crown Graphic. He contact prints them and tones the prints with platinum/palladium.

By the way, if you're wanting to dip a toe into large format (LF) and contact printing, a Crown is a good place to start. I loved playing with those cameras. Vulch on eBay for a good one, and take your time looking. Great ones at reasonable prices are still being passed around among photography enthusiasts. Use yours for a few years then pass it back.

A lot of LF photographers I know make digital snaps of their setups when they work. (As well of promising scenes when they're scouting for locations.) Although the top picture above is from a scan and thus a bit outside the call, reader Gary Nylander, 59, of Kelowna, British Columbia, Canada, was kind enough to include just such a documentary record shot, taken with his phone:

With large format, you really do engage in a deep way with your subject—it's usually a relaxed, contemplative, engaged, take-your-time-and-get-it-the-way-you-want-it process. Nothing rushed or lucky about it, usually.

The picture in the picture is called Living the Dream: Stuff, and More Stuff

Since we're stretching the boundaries here (lots of readers sent things other than JPEGs of "purist," or straight, all-analog contact prints), I can't resist including this "selfie" by reader Mike Rosiak. "The print in my right hand was contact-printed from the negative in my left hand, Van Dyke brown process, on paper I hand-coated. The negative is on 8.5x11" Pictorico OHP film, printed from my Epson P600. Original image taken with a Lumix GF1, IR conversion by LifePixel, and using the Olympus body cap lens. Silver Efex Pro to make into B&W, then channels reversed to make the negative. So, the whole thing is pretty much a hybrid.

"The print behind me is another contact print, a Cyanotype. What looks like a print in the big red clip is my first 'negative,' which is positive! Early learning curve.

"Both Van Dyke brown and Cyanotype processes were in existence about a hundred years before I was born. (I'm 75). The Cyanotype print got a second place in a local (Southeast Pennsylvania, Northwest of Philadelphia) art group's Spring show, while the other print was accepted as a finalist in Pennsylvania's annual Art of the State event, and hung in the Harrisburg State Museum from June until September.

"I mostly shoot digital (99+%), haven't had a darkroom in maybe 20 years, but this stuff is fun to fool around with, and requires only a 'mostly dim' room."

Mike has two 4x5 cameras, a Crown Graphic and a (Kickstarter) Wanderlust Travelwide.

And here's Michael Boudreaux, 33, from Austin, Texas. "I shoot primarily a Hasselblad, a 4x5 Chamonix, and an 8x10 Deardorff recently purchased from Blue Moon Camera in Portland," Mike writes. "I'm holding my first contact print out of this (rugged) beauty, shot on Ilford HP5+, developed in Pyrocat HD and printed on Ilford MG Classic FB.

"I sit at a computer all day at work, so I gravitate towards vintage machines like goofy old cameras and quirky British roadsters." I get that.

You've met photography teacher Jeff Dionesotes before—he's the guy who bought my once-beloved SaltHill (made by my late friend Joe Saltzer, RIP) print washer when I moved away from Wisconsin. (Actually, I gave it to him—it was originally a review sample that I ended up paying nothing for, and thus it would have been unethical for me to profit from its sale.) This is a contact print of some of his students made with a Zone VI "Ultralight" 8x10.

...And, for good measure, one more:

Reader Chris Fazio, 61, of Chicago, Illinois took this dignified portrait of his 92-year-old mother this past September, on her birthday. He writes, "I started to get serious about photography in 2005, at the end of the film era! I love making contact prints using the Lodima paper Michael Smith makes." He has recently begun a project photographing people in profile.

•

That's it for this, the inaugural "Baker's Dozen." As I've mentioned, I'm going to try to repeat this feature at two-week intervals—at least for a little while. The next call for work is for smartphone pictures that you wouldn't have made but for the fact that you had your smartphone with you...but please read the call for work before submitting. I'm already awash in submissions (really fun to see them) so it's going to be important for you to follow protocol if you want your submission to be considered. (The amount of email I get is an organizational headache. An assistant, an assistant, my kingdom for an assistant!)

I had about three times as many submissions for this week's feature as I had space for, which is surprising given that traditional LF is such a small niche. It was excruciating to have to leave some of them out. I went for variety and "ancillary interest," you might say, and no judgement of quality is implied for those who didn't get chosen! I really enjoyed hearing from everyone and seeing your work—especially all of those who appended nice personal notes to their emails. Really good to hear from you. Sorry I don't have time to personally reply to anyone. (I really barely have time for email correspondences these days, if you're wondering why you never got an answer to an email. I do read everything that comes in.)

If you'd like to add an image in the comments, TypePad isn't really set up for that, but there's a workaround. First, the image must be on the Web and have a URL; and second, it can't be more than 470 pixels wide or it will get truncated. With those two conditions met, you can use this code in the comment box:

...Where the bit between the quote marks is the URL of your image. Leave the quote marks there.

That it for us for this week—I'm off to work on my book for the weekend. Hope you had as much fun with today's post as I did. We'll be back on Monday, and next week on Friday we'll take another trip Around the Web—I've already gotten started on that.

Mike
(Thanks to everyone who submitted work)

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.

B&H Photo • Amazon US • Amazon UK
Amazon Germany • Amazon Canada • Adorama

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

No featured comments yet—please check back soon!

The Diptych (But Not Really)

Image pair. iPhone 7 Plus, taken last Tuesday. This one's still in progress, no pun intended.

Although it masquerades as being altrusitic and exalted, the Art World (cap-cap) is a lot about status. That's why we call pictures "images" now—because photo-based artworks that were not strictly straight photographs were called images to differentiate them, and the practice spread from there to all photographs presented as art in museums, and then soon, because it was clearly a marker of status, to all photographs. (I personally still prefer picture, a more specific and actually more dignified word. It will come back into fashion someday.)

Image pair. Pictures in the frame taken with a Contax 139Q and Carl Zeiss 35mm ƒ/2.8 lens on Kodak Plus-X and printed on Ilford Galerie, 1980s.

"Diptych" (dip-tick) simply means any two flat surfaces hinged in the middle. In the medieval world the format was common for many things, including decorated screens, wax writing tablets, and ecclesiastical devotional paintings. Because the word (and less frequently triptych, meaning three hinged panels) was frequently seen in museums, it came to be applied, for status-indicating purposes, to any discrete pair of, yes, images presented side by side. Unfortunately for the status-mongers, the proper word for two separate pictures presented together is really just the plain, unadorned word "pair."

I've always liked working with image pairs, I think because I love photobooks so much. I know Ralph Gibson works very hard to find the right image pairs for facing pages, and one of the reasons I love Paul Caponigro's The Wise Silence so much is the way pictures on facing pages in that book work together—something Paul and his then-wife, the distinguished book designer Eleanor Morris Caponigro, worked on very deliberately.

Mike Johnston, Berkeley, 2015. Fuji X-T1 and XF 14mm ƒ/2.8.

It's both an easier and a more difficult way to work—easier because sometimes pictures which aren't quite enough alone can inform and enrich each other and become more than the sum of the two, and more difficult because sometimes the proper pairing can be elusive.

One thing I've found over the years is that it's visual work. That is, you might have an idea about which two pictures will work together as a pair, but it's not until you simply see them together that you really know. And then, as with all pictures, it takes living with them for a few days to know if you've got something or not. So it's best to work with small workprints. You could also work out a way of doing it on the computer, of course. However you do it, don't do it in your head—the work is done with the eyes.

John Paul Caponigro, Uyuni, Bolivia, 2012, an iPhone image, and Paul Caponigro, Frosted Window, Revere, Massachusetts, 1957, a view camera film photograph, printed together on one 17x22" sheet. A TOP Print Offer from 2013. (Pairing by Paul.)

As with all editing, sometimes things you really want to work just don't, and sometimes visual combinations you don't suspect will work, do. It's fun. And very satisfying, when it works.

Try it!

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.

B&H Photo • Amazon US • Amazon UK
Amazon Germany • Amazon Canada • Adorama

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

hugh crawford: "I once bought a half frame camera specifically to make diptychs.

"Currently I'm on a nonatych binge (if that's Greek to you it just means nine images or whatever). Since I'm laying out over 750 of them for the Jamie Livingston book.

"This one just blows me away."

Call for Work: Smartphone Snaps (Baker's Dozen)

Butters sniffing a purple onion skin.
Your shot need not include a dog.

Do you shoot with a smartphone regularly, especially a late model one, especially one you bought specifically for its camera?

My theory is that regardless of what you shoot with, sometimes you get a shot that works for you. Have you gotten a "hit" recently with your smartphone? Doesn't have to be art, just something you like. Show us something quirky or personal, something you wouldn't have shot if it weren't for your phone.

Send it to m c j o h n s t o n a t m a c d o t c o m with the subject line "bakersdozenphone" and I'll pick 13 of the most interesting ones and post them on Nov. 10th. The JPEGs should be saved in sRGB and 800 pixels wide, and please include them in the body of the email.

Let me know your name, age, and where you live, too. Any other comments welcome too, of course. Please don't forget the subject line, or I might lose it in the email stack.

Amish cauliflowers. Your shot need not be colorful.

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.

B&H Photo • Amazon US • Amazon UK
Amazon Germany • Amazon Canada • Adorama

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

No featured comments yet—please check back soon!

Mike's Back (Blog Notes and Baker's Dozen)

Hi y'all, it's me in the present moment. Back again.

Coupla things: this Friday we'll publish the "Baker's Dozen." (if you've never heard the expression, a baker's dozen is 13 of something—from an old practice whereby if you bought a dozen of something, an extra was added for good measure. The term dates from the late 16th century and various origins are claimed for it. You can Google it and poke around in the various stories if you feel like learning more.)

This week our Baker's Dozen will be 13 JPEG representations of contact prints from 4x5-inch or larger sheet film, which I put out the call for on Monday the 16th. I'll just edit the ones that were sent to me and present 13 that I thought were interesting. (No judgement implied—so if yours doesn't appear, please don't think I'm saying it's not "good." As with the Featured Comments, I'll be picking representative submissions, not necessarily the "best" ones. But if you want yours picked, note that the quality of the illustration[s] is paramount.) This time I'll be giving precedence to people who make contact prints, since that was what was called for. If you scan your film, we'll get around to calling for that at some point as well, if we keep this up.

When I post the Baker's Dozen I'll include instructions as to how to put your own image into a Comment. So even if yours wasn't chosen you'll be able to contribute it to the discussion if you feel like it.

'Around the Web' every two weeks
Re "Around the Web": People seemed to like those. It might not look like it, but those are a lot of work to put together—it takes me all week to do it. So what I'll try this Fall is to publish an "Around the Web" post every other week on Friday, instead of every week. Having two weeks to build each of those posts will be easier and should make it possible to continue the practice regularly. Having been away, for instance, I haven't started on the next one yet, and there's no way I could pull a good one together between now and Friday.

Then, on the alternate Fridays, I'll present the Baker's Dozen—submissions from readers of a particular kind of work. I'll put out the call two weeks in advance to give you a chance to submit. I'll put out the next call for work in the post after this one.

I'll be trying my best to think up quirky categories. (I was going to list some samples, but I don't want people to jump the gun and send me things early.) I think I can come up with some quirky categories! Heh.

I think I'll also try to post a "Classic" older post or article on the weekend days. People seemed to like those, and a number of you suggested I do so.

All these plans are only that—plans. Everything on the Web is an experiment, spaghetti thrown at the wall to see what sticks. We'll try it; if it works, we'll keep going; if it doesn't, we'll move on. Never take anything as a promise. Well, until I become a mighty corporation with dozens of employees, that is, as a stepping stone to World Dominion.

Don't hold your breath on that.   :-)

Sincerely,

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

B&H Photo • Amazon US • Amazon UK
Amazon Germany • Amazon Canada • Adorama

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

No featured comments yet—please check back soon!

Classic Mike: The Love of Books

[TOP is closed for a few days, so I've taken the liberty of posting a few old articles you might not have seen before, or might not mind seeing again. This piece is Mike-juvenalia, practially—I must have written this when I was in my 20s. Under the influence of both Twain and beer, probably. Neither of which were terribly good for me.

These days I read about sixty books a year, and although this was written 40+ years ago, I still have read only two of Jane Austen's!

If, like me, you love books, I recommend A Gentle Madness by Nicholas Basbanes, which is to the love of books what The Omnivore's Dilemma is to books about food—the one book on the subject everyone should read if they read only one.

It's funny, though, that the attitude expressed here is my approach to buying photobooks—I tend to be the opposite of a completist, desiring just the right sampling of a photographer's work and then, rather than piling on more books by the same person, moving on to someone else. Goes to personality, I guess. Everyone's different, and to thine own self be true.

Hope you enjoy. —Mike]

- -

“What! Another damned, thick, square book!
Always scribble, scribble, scribble, eh, Mr. Gibbon?”

—William Henry, Duke of Gloucester,
on being presented with a volume of
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

From the time I was a small child, my brain got soaked with books. My mother read to me most every day, and a great many of my childhood memories are wrapped up in books: I can still recall my wide-eyed, frightened thrill to the old woman tossed in a basket, seventeen times as high as the moon, and I wanted Mike Mulligan and his Steam-Shovel (my earliest encounter with my Luddite tendencies) read to me over and over again. As an older child of six I pored over books about sailing ships, imperiously directing Mom to take notes.

But I have never been a fast or a good reader. In my early grade school years I never could keep track of which direction j’s and k’s and b’s and d’s were supposed to face (a mild form of what we now call dyslexia, although then no one ever gave it a name), and words with similar numbers of the same types of letters, such as except and expect, might as well have been identical twins dressed in matching outfits for all I could tell them apart; even words that are only second cousins visually, such as opinion and onion, could sometimes send my conceptions veering abruptly off down the wrong path. (He stood on the floor of Congress and proclaimed his onion? What?) On a large page of small type with few breaks, it was not a rare event for me simply to get confused, like a man dog-paddling in choppy gray waves at night might become discombobulated and lose track momentarily of which half of creation is water and which half air—sometimes I just had to strike out for the landmark of the previous paragraph indentation, and wade in again from there.

Age and experience have mitigated some of those difficulties, but exacerbated another. One of the less pleasant landmarks in my life as a reader was when a maxim I first saw on a needlepoint pillow hit home. I had seen the pillow in a shop window in the boutique town of Harbor Springs, Michigan, one hot summer day when I was a teenager. Surrounded by filigrees of pixelated needlepointed ribbon and flowers, the motto was, “So many books, so little time.”

Naturally, I immediately dismissed this as merely quaint and cute, as words rendered in needlepoint are intended to be. But I remembered it, and eventually I felt overcome by a strange fascination, and the unsettling profundity behind the homily began to fill me with dread. I realized that the future was not a limitless prospect, that my time on this earth really will be brutishly short, and that, no matter what I do, I must perforce depart this coil with books left unread. Many of them. A great many, in fact. This is obvious, of course; but when I first realized the truth of it in my heart, it oppressed me.

Every writer’s first duty, I have therefore concluded, ought to be to not write so damned much. There are already far too many books. They have been piling up for five centuries now, and although great books have been written in every age, quality, on average, is not improving. These days, especially, there seem to be as many people writing books as reading them, and those who write books write far too many. Have you ever taken a look at the Stephen King shelves at your bookstore? That fellow needs to haul in the reins and take a deep breath, if you ask me. He is in need of a good hobby, such as gardening, or watching NASCAR races on TV. Margaret Mitchell had a better idea: spend a long time writing one really good book, and then get out of the business.

As a reader, I prefer slender books to fat ones, and fewer books in a writer’s output to more. I am grateful for Graham Greene, who put no more into most of his books than a steady reader can get back out of them again in a short stint of effort. I appreciate Jane Austen, who spent her entire life fussing over a mere six books—none of ’em too fat—because six books is not too many for me to read before I die. Where Jane Austen is concerned, I have two down, four to go, and high hopes.

Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield is a great book—I have read the whole damned thing, from one cover to the other, I am eager for you to know—yet the man himself drives me to despair. I guess by definition his life was long enough for him to write all he wrote, but this amazes me, because my life cannot be long enough for me to read it all. Dickens must have kept quill and ink-pot handy at every moment of every day—at the breakfast table, in the bathtub, and while strolling in the garden. Geese must have trembled at his appearance, afraid their plumage soon would be pillaged to supply him with pens. Ink manufacturers must have beamed at their children in self-satisfaction at the rightness of the world, thinking of Dickens. He surely wrote faster than some men can talk, not to mention better; and, at that, he must have lived a long and energetic life to write all he did and still have had time for things like meals, haircuts, and going to weddings.

Nowadays there is an additional criterion by which books are made and sold, besides poundage. Poundage still counts, however. A man named Dumas Malone, for example, wrote a biography of Thomas Jefferson that initially I felt would be good for me to read. It might in fact be a fine biography, not that I’d know: I later discovered that it would have taken me about as long to read about Jefferson’s life as it took Jefferson to live it in the first place. The one fat, thick, square book this Malone fellow scribbled was daunting enough, but when I had got a third of the way into it, and noticed that life seemed to be progressing very slowly for old Tom, I discovered, to my dismay, that there was a second volume as thick and square as the first, and then another one after that, and then more, stretching all the way into the distance. Six or eight books in all, or perhaps ten…it’s all the same.

I gave up without finishing volume one, glad that I hadn’t invested several seasons of my spare time accompanying Tom Jefferson down the many miles of his trail, the author and I stopping together to examine every twig at Tom’s feet.

I would like to read biographies of my betters, and can see the sense in doing it. But only if the authors would summarize.

The second criterion by which books are sold nowadays is that to all appearances, it seems that the less actual labor an author has logged, the better. The fashion seems to be to ensure that editors remain underemployed, their wallets thin, their wan children drabbed out in secondhand clothes. Let an author earn a lot of money with one book, and the next one is sure to be gassy and long, suspiciously resembling a first draft, with writers’ darlings in it that any less parental an eye would have struck dead. The principle seems to be that a long line of words blurted out piecemeal is more desirable than a shorter line that is better considered, I suppose relying on the belief that genius has to well up and spill over, like an artesian well, and that water that must be drilled for cannot taste sweet.

Another cause behind this fashion—my guess is—is that nearly everyone goes to college now, never mind how illiterate or hostile toward learning he or she may be, and college English professors are in a position to command students to work hard doing things while reading that authors ought to have done while writing. This lulls authors into believing that clarity and purpose are not worth toiling for, since professors will drive their poor put-upon students to great labors hunting out the meagerest of authorial meanings in the densest of verbal thickets.

It seems to me a grave mistake to count on this, from the author’s side. Have you ever been in one of that endangered species of used bookstore in which sheer quantity is the only organizing principle? There are not very many such warehouse stores left, the advantage being that you will know it when you are in one. I got lost once in the old Powell’s, in Portland, Oregon. I can still remember how the place smelled. If you have gone to the vast musty half-dark mazes where the old fiction is warehoused, where shelves stretch down row after row into the darkness and rank upon rank until you have to lift your head up now and then to remember the points of the compass and the way out, then perhaps you have realized that you are in a graveyard, and that most of those old books have gone there to die. As in real graveyards, hordes of murmuring spirits from times past cluster there, thousands and thousands of them—young girls with their hearts set on a man and young men with their hearts set on glory; stock-company characters; travelers and stay-at-homes; the residents of towns, cities, and prairies; comedians, tragedians, ghosts, villains cruel and cunning to be o’ercome, discoverers and poets and inventors and matronly aunts and stern fathers and funny friends and sisters and brothers and schoolmates and neighborhood bullies and pets of every stripe—the repositories of ten thousand authors’ conjurings. And with many of those old books, it is possible that not a single person will ever read them again. How many of these neglected dusty books have people now even heard of? One in ten? One in a thousand? Five thousand? Think of that.

So if anyone is going to spend the hard effort it takes to write words, he or she, it seems to me, ought to ride the whole way into town instead of just four-fifths the way there, and finish up by polishing, taking out the words that don’t belong, lightening up on the reader’s load, and going as far as can be gone to help his or her tales make the long reach to posterity. Most books, after the first flush of interest they provoke has ebbed, are forgotten. Novels especially. Why tempt such a fate?

But then who am I to say? I never did graduate from college. The professors flogged me to extract deep subterranean symbolism from the books we read, and wanted everything related to serious political ideas despite the fact that I was not interested in politics at the time. Well, at least not the politics that consumed Turgenev, or Stendahl, or Richard Wright at the John Reed Club in 1936. Most of what I could decipher were the stories up at the surface, and stories, the truer the better, have generally been enough for me. I take it for granted that I should try to imagine the people in books as if they were, or had been, real. It seemed an obvious part of the compact the author and I had made—she by writing the story, I by picking up her book to read it.

But my real problem may be that I make headway against the tide too slowly. There are just too many great books. I do try. But I imagine that in the moment I meet my death, I will be halfway through a great book, feeling sorry that I could not reach the end.

Mike

© 2017 Michael C. Johnston, all right reserved.

Note: No comments are Featured on Classic posts. See the Comments Section for all the comments.

TOP Classic: Why 40mm?

[TOP is off for a few days, so I'm posting some  "classic" articles to tide you over. Comments are welcome, but won't be posted right away. This essay was originally written in 2005 for The Luminous-Landscape, but hey, 40mm-e lenses never go out of style!  :-) 

Thanks again to Richard Sintchak for his illustrations. —Mike]

Forty millimeters has long been my favorite focal length for 35mm cameras. I got "turned on" to the focal length when I interviewed Sally Mann (right, by Molly Roberts) for Camera & Darkroom magazine in the 1980s. She told me she had supported her artwork in the early days by doing lots of small freelance jobs, including many for the local military academy. She used Olympus OM cameras, and she said that if she were going to do any artwork in 35mm she would use the 40mm ƒ/2 Zuiko. We talked about the focal length for a while, but all I remember now is Sally saying that 40mm is "about right." That's what started my interest in 40mms.

A few years later, looking for a "Leica with AE," I became aware of the Minolta CLE. It, too, had a 40mm normal lens—the Minolta 40mm ƒ/2 M-Rokkor. This turned out to be one of the best lenses I've ever used, fantastically sharp and smooth. My friend John Kennerdell, a photographer who lived in Bangkok at the time, told me that one Japanese connoisseur had dubbed it "the Water Lens." Curiously, it was one of the only lenses I've ever used that consistently drew positive comments about sharpness and clarity from non-photographers looking at my prints.

The latest addition to the short list is of course the Cosina/Voigtländer 40mm ƒ/1.4 Nokton, the first lens of its specification ever. It can be extremely sharp and contrasty when shown off at its best, and for a fast lens it has pretty good bokeh—a term that just refers to the appearance of the out-of-d.o.f. blur, whatever you may have read elsewhere!

I've found as a general rule that bokeh gets progressively more problematic: a) the larger the aperture, b) the closer the focus, c) the more distant the background, and d) the more contrasty the background. With any lens, we discover our own limits for what we'll tolerate, and then shoot within those limits. For instance, with the 4th-version 35mm Summicron (pre-ASPH), I would never shoot wide open because the contrast was just too low for me (and sometimes the vignetting was objectionable, too). Overall, the more shots I've seen taken with the 40mm Nokton Classic, the more serviceable it seems. If you keep the plane of focus reasonably distant and watch the background, even ƒ/1.4 seems usable in point of vignetting, contrast, and center sharpness. Not a bad result at all for a small, fast lens.

Richard Sintchak, Ben and Amy at the Counter, 40mm Nokton S.C. (single-coated)

Of course, no focal length is magic. Many photographers have different favorites. As long as they're in the right hands, most common focal lengths can be used to make pictures that are excellent. So why 40mm? I'd say that the 40mm focal length is special precisely because it's not special. Purely by convention, 50mm has long been considered the "normal" focal length for 35mm photography. Early WA's were 35mm. Many photographers have made a choice between these two focal lengths as their own "normals." Many, like myself, have switched back and forth. The truth is, neither of these common focal lengths are quite "normal" for 35mm. 50mm is just a touch long, and 35mm is just a touch wide. Using the diagonal of the format as the standard, the true normal would be about 42mm (curiously, that's about exactly a 28mm lens on an APS-C digital sensor, although no cameramakers who mainly make APS-C cameras have come out with dedicated 28mm normals for the format). The various oddball "intermediate" focal lengths (38mm, 40mm, 43mm, and 45mm), although much less common, are actually closer to a true normal for the 35mm format.

Why would you want a lens to be "normal," anyway? So what's so special about not being special? Glad you asked.

Taken by Richard Sintchak with a Voigtländer Bessa R3A and 40mm Nokton S.C. on Tri-X.

Getting Past It
These days, we're witnessing an intense interest in digital cameras in online forums. The nexus of this interest, however, is almost always technological, not visual. People want to know about pixel count, bit depth, noise at high ISOs, turn-on time, how many microns each photosite measures, what the buffer speed is, and so forth. This is actually quite typical. Photography has always had a technological side that is endlessly fascinating, and this is as true of digital as it is of traditional photography. What it means is that we photographers often approach photography as if its main interest were technical and technological. We don't look so much at the visual content and the visual effects of pictures as we do their technical properties.

But many of the greatest photographers have "gotten past" the technical aspect of the craft. What I mean by that is that they choose a particular mode of operation, a way of working, and then they concentrate on the visual aspect of the pictures. Think of it. The late Henri Cartier-Bresson was indelibly associated with Leicas and the 50mm lens. Edward Weston made 8x10 contact prints. Eugene Atget and August Sander used more or less the same techniques for most of their important work. Nicholas Nixon and Shelby Lee Adams use large-format cameras with wide-angle lenses to photograph people. We associate Ernst Haas with 35mm Kodachrome, Eliot Porter with the dye transfer process. The point is, these photographers and many other like them don't want you to look at their pictures from a technical perspective. They've chosen the technical properties they like, granted, but they understand that those technical properties are not what make any particular picture good or not-so-good. You don't look at a Cartier-Bresson picture and say, "Gee, look at how sharp that Leica 50mm lens is." You don't look at a Weston and say, "Wow, 8x10 gives you such smooth tonality." The reason you don't is that all Cartier-Bressons were taken with sharp 50s, and all Westons have smooth tonality. It's not that these photographs don't have technical properties, it's that the artists want you to get past that, and look at the subject, the visual content, and the meaning of their photographs.

Illustrations © 2005 by Richard Sintchak

Focal lengths, too, impart specialized properties to pictures. You can zoom way in on something that's far off, get so close to something that it looks almost abstract, or use a lens so wide that distortion is part of the "visual toolkit" you're working with. And there's nothing at all wrong with any of this! I'm not arguing against technical experimentation or wildly unusual focal lengths. What I'm saying is that if you're concerned with extremist focal lengths, then your pictures will display certain properties associated with those focal lengths, and people are more likely to see those properties when they come to your pictures. I came across a delightful set of pictures recently by a young Japanese photographer who had bought himself a Bessa R2 and a 15mm Voigtländer lens. He was clearly having an enormous amount of fun experimenting with what the lens could do—you could just sense his enthusiasm and playfulness from his pictures. But of course many of the pictures deliberately exhibited the properties not so much of the real world as seen by the photographer, but of the real world as seen by the lens.

Moderate focal lengths, to my eye at least, serve in part to remove this sort of "specialness" from pictures. They make the angle-of-view and the type of distortion nondescript. And what this allows, in turn, is a concentration on the visual content of pictures. That's what's so special about not being special.

As the tribe of photographers has gotten much larger, it's become more popular to say things like "40mm is the most boring focal length." But turn that around. Isn't that person saying that the pictures he makes with that focal length are boring? Meaning, he can't make an interesting picture without a more extreme focal length lens? Careful with those epithets, pardner.

So is a 40mm "better" than a 35mm or a 50mm, or any other focal length you like? Of course not. Good artists can "normalize" any way (or many ways) of seeing. Ernst Haas used the very slow (ASA 10) speed of early Kodachrome to explore motion blur. Ralph Gibson uses high contrast to make pictures less atmospheric and more graphic. But if you care to remove obvious focal-length effects from your pictures, and "get past" those properties, so that you and the viewers of your pictures concentrate on what you're looking at, how you see as opposed to how the lens sees, then the 40mm true normal might be, as Sally Mann said to me, about right.

Mike

Originally published on The Luminous Landscape. Copyright 2005, 2008, 2017 by Michael C. Johnston, All Rights Reserved.

Note: No comments are Featured on Classic posts. See the Comments Section for all the comments.

TOP Classic: The Coen Brothers' 'True Grit'

[Originally published January 2011. The movie is no longer in theaters; the DVD is $8.99 or can be rented for $3.99 from Amazon Video.

TOP is off for two days, hence this "Classic" post. Comments will be posted late, but are welcome. —Yr. Hmbl. Ed.]

I saw the new version of True Grit in the theater the other night—Waukesha has a new and very luxurious multiplex cinema called the Majestic, which is lovely—and it's just a terrific western. Very entertaining.

The celebrated Coen brothers, accomplished as they are, suffer from a touch of the universal tendency toward bombast even when they're not being indulgent. The less said about this the better, but maybe I could just mention that I plan to have a T-shirt made for wearing out to the movie theater: it's going to say "NO MORE SNAKEPITS!"

The very best critical exegesis of the modern cinema I've ever seen came in an episode of the TV show "The Office," of all things. Michael Scott, the earnest but bumbling boss played by Steve Carrell, is taking an improv class, and despite being browbeaten to follow the sanction against introducing guns into his improv, he does it again and again, obstreperously and unregenerately. That's modern TV and Hollywood for you in a nutshell.

Despite the incessant gunplay and the usual exaggerated video-game carnage, though, the film is fully characterological, and beautifully cast and acted. No actor strikes a wrong note, and at least five performances are way above average. Jeff Bridges' Rooster Cogburn is even better than John Wayne's, although he makes it into an entirely different role and a different, more naturalistic character. Matt Damon does a good job, possibly because this is one movie in which he is not allowed to wear a fedora.

But how, may I ask, could a female actress possibly have more of a leading role than Hailee Steinfeld playing Mattie Ross (left)? And yet she's nominated for Best Supporting Actress? Come on. If that's a supporting role, you can throw me in a snakepit. Limiting actors to supporting nominations just because of their age is yet another mannered Hollywood convention detached from reality. She deserves to be nominated for Best Actress, and there's an end on it.

Best line from a review: Richard Corliss in TIME, who says, "To those who have fond or foul memories of the Wayne True Grit, the Coens might be saying: You've seen the movie, now see the book." The book's theme, like this movie's, is that Mattie is the one with the truest grit. (Feminist sympathizers, take your daughters.)

Of course, despite being a good plot, it's still a conventional one. That is, you're in no doubt that LaBoeuf is going to hit Ned Pepper and save Rooster, and when Mattie heads to the crick for water you know full well that's not all she's going to find there. All the surprises are in the details. The guy in the bear suit, for instance, or the way that corpse hits the ground—classic Coens.

The book, by the way, is terrific too, a short, fast, tasty read. And the new movie is much truer to the book than the John Wayne version, which is a good movie in its own right but entirely different in tone and mode. The Coen brothers version matches the book better in detail, motivation, locale, even pacing. They make the story back into a real anti-Western, in the best spirit of the times in which the book was written (1968). Their True Grit is worthy of standing alongside any of the other great anti-westerns, even the best one ever made, Robert Altman's McCabe and Mrs. Miller. (Others might argue with that, but McCabe is a perfect movie.) Even the stilted dialogue is true to the book, and meshes nicely with the Coens' symbolist and surrealist impulses, which you can easily detect even though they're mostly held in check.

To sum up: conventional, but fundamentally different from the original film version and a much better movie than any remake has a right to be. My verdict: A, and it would have been A+ but for the snakepit. Don't miss seeing it in the theater.

Mike

Please help support TOP by patronizing our sponsors B&H Photo and Amazon

Note: Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. More...
Original contents copyright 2011 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

Featured Comment [from 2011] by JBerardi: "Todd Alcott is the ultimate arbiter of all things Coen. I cannot recommend his analysis enough. Regarding the snake pit: 'Once she puts on her father’s clothes, she takes some apples from a fruit bowl and rides out of town reciting the 23rd Psalm. The symbolism here is obvious: the red apples represent Knowledge, which Mattie will acquire on her journey, before butting up against the apple’s companion, the Snake. (For those keeping score, the snake is in the novel, the Coens brought in the apples.)'"

Mike replies [2017]: The symbolism would not have been served by a perilous encounter with one snake? I think the snake in Eden was Satan, and hence singular, no?

Note: No new comments are Featured on Classic posts. See the Comments Section for all the comments.

TOP Classic: Helen Levitt

[Originally published in Camera & Darkroom magazine (U.S.) in 1992. TOP is off for two days, so I've queued up a few older posts and articles for these days.You're welcome to comment, but the comments won't be posted until later this week.

Here's Helen's best book currently available new. She hated this one, for some reason, but I think it's beautiful, and I treasure mine.

There will be a movie review this evening and more "classic" articles tomorrow. —Yr. Hmbl. Ed.]

Recently I’ve been fielding objections from Camera & Darkroom subscribers who feel that the whole enterprise of criticism is despicable and disreputable and—what’s worse, in my view—not helpful. Indeed, it seems that the value-judgment portion and function of criticism gets magnified sometimes at the expense of criticism's other features, so that the critic assumes either the position of advocating in favor of the work or of dealing with it negatively. The former can be like foisting off an unwanted opinion on others, and the latter, like other forms of insult, falls somewhere on a spectrum between the entertaining and the offensive.

So, apart from first reporting the widely held view that Helen Levitt is among the greatest of this nation’s living photographers, it might be useful to try to approach her work in value-neutral terms. This seems appropriate for several reasons. First, Levitt herself, as Sandra S. Phillips says in her essay from the exhibition catalogue, "has never considered written criticism as central to the understanding of her work." Second, Levitt’s reputation does not stand to gain or suffer from anything I might say about her work. (I had thought this wouldn't need to be said, but, as many readers evidently felt it necessary to defend Paul Strand's reputation from me, I guess I should say it). Third—and this is much more pertinent—critics are, in large part, people who love the arts they write about, and the simple incitement of enthusiasm (or of strong passions either way) stands high among their priorities. This is certainly true in my case. I love looking at photographs, thinking about them, and letting them provoke feelings. The experience of seeing certain photographs is, above all, a welcome treat—akin to a Saturday morning, a good meal, or hearing great music, or the gratification of any other appetite, aesthetic or otherwise. Even in a life that has lately been rich with the experience of photographs, I found the Levitt show an especial pleasure. Finally, Levitt's work is enigmatic: modest in subject yet artistically ambitious, evanescent and rare at the same time it is quotidian, and graceful as well as offhand.

I say all this only to incite you to go see the pictures for yourself if you can; the experience is well worth the effort. The show from which this small portfolio was extracted is currently traveling. By the time you read this, it will already have been to San Francisco, New York City, Washington, D.C., and Detroit; and in the near future it will be at the Art Institute of Chicago (February 4–May 2, 1993); the Presentation House Gallery, Vancouver, B.C. (May 31–July 29, 1993); the Seattle Art Museum (August 20–October 13, 1993); the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Salt Lake City (October 31–December 12, 1993); and at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (January 6–March 27, 1994).

If you’re unable to see the show, the book is recommendable as a retrospective of Levitt’s work, although the color reproductions, as I’ll discuss later on, don’t do justice to the originals.

• • •

Helen Levitt, who is now elderly and lives in Greenwich Village, has been making pictures on the streets of New York City for most of the middle part of this century, beginning in the late '30s and continuing until now. Despite this, her output has been as economical as her shooting style, which is sparing and evidently has a Zen-like concentration; so the exhibition, despite being remarkably solid, also gives a sense of being complete.

Most of her best-known pictures are black-and-white, and concern the gesture of activity, and have children in them. About Levitt's style, three points come to mind. One, it is not stylish; like a calligraphic brushstroke, it appears to have merely happened, and to be merely "there." Second, it manages to totally efface the photographer—she is simply not there. Her presence in the scene is seldom felt. (Phillips reports that she used a "right angle viewfinder," which is two blocks down and one block over from the correct term, but serves.) Third, it is respectful. There is little irony in these pictures and no sarcasm or nihilism. She is no stranger to the neighborhoods she photographs, and I don’t think it's going overboard to guess that she has real affection for the places and the people in her pictures. Her stance is humane, her pictures humanistic.

Almost every one of her pictures has to do with action or gesture. "Dancelike" is an adjective that is often used to describe them. In a few, for instance her balletic basketball players, this is obvious; in most, she indicates a sense of this dancelike interplay by presenting us with what appears to be a choreographed moment. This moment, of course, is snatched in full flight, and it is in the extreme and consistent incisiveness of these instants that her genius truly lies; some of her pictures might be thought of as the apotheosis of the grab shot. Yet in no way are Levitt's pictures records. They are more like poetry—some cross between the Haiku that a Taoist hermit might have scrawled on a rock and the raucous brevity of street graffiti (which, incidentally, fascinated her early on in her career). (Just as a point of interest, some of her graffiti pictures were made, literally, with Walker Evans's camera.)

• • •

What adds a whole new dimension to Levitt’s artistry are her color pictures. If Levitt were like most photographers, she might just as well have been content to rest on the laurels of her early body of work, adding on to it as opportunity and circumstance permitted. But not only did she venture into color, she had to do so twice: virtually her entire first decade’s output of color pictures, in the form of irreplaceable slides, were stolen from her and have never been recovered. Two pictures left over from this earlier decade are present in the show, but for the most part that work is lost. Shortly before his death, the pianist Dinu Lipatti recorded the Waldstein sonata. The tape was later erased by a record company employee. The value of any lost work can only be surmised; but the loss of Levitt's early color work, like Lipatti's Waldstein, is almost certainly a tragedy. How much of a tragedy, we will, sadly, never know.

The color work that does exist is certainly some compensation. It is busier and closer-in than her earlier work—but then the city, too, has gotten busier and more hectic. Despite the fact that her pictures are not "about color"—any one of them would work in black and white, and I mean that as a compliment—the color adds a vibrancy and an immediacy to the scenes that suits the subjects.

Unfortunately, the reproduction in the book doesn't really do justice to the originals. Some processes just seem to fit certain pictures perfectly. Just as Paul Outerbridge’s bizarre obsessions were perfectly suited to the bright but somehow sickening colors of the early carbro process (those awful skin tones are just so perfectly excessive), so Helen Levitt's color work seems ideally suited to the dye transfer process. The colors are bright without being garish, with just a whisper of unreality. In the picture of the man watching TV in the alley, for instance, the elbow of the railing is luminous with sunlight and jarring in the original; in the reproduction it just looks fuzzy and washed out. If you can, and if you appreciate dye transfers, see the originals.

The biggest mistake one might make with any of this work, however, would be to judge it with a set of knee-jerk technical standards in mind. None of these pictures are about the aggrandizing of technique; at the same time, the technique is all it needs to be.

This is work that you need to be open to. I began by making a few points about the act of criticism, and one more point along those lines needs to be stated: namely, that some art can be talked about more than it deserves to be, and some art doesn’t need to be talked about much at all. To talk too much about the art of Helen Levitt is like pulling a plant up by its roots to see how it manages to live; this is work to enjoy. Certain commentators have said that one function of photography has been to supplant memory. Levitt's color pictures seem to gainsay this proposition: to me, each of them seems like the sort of glimpse you might find yourself startled by, arrested by, and that you might try to hold on to in memory. Only two or three seem like any picture I've ever seen before. Most are not generic. Each one has character, each one is individual like a person. In each there is warmth, and mystery, and a little distance, and no small measure of charm.

I’ve been racking my brain for the right way to illustrate the feelings that Helen Levitt's color pictures give me—I'll try this. Sometimes, walking the streets of a city, you might hear the strains of distant music; you might recognize the song. If your mood was cloudy with fretfulness or anxiety or the hurry to get your errands done, the snippet of song, if you recognize it, can transform your mood—transport you, one might say, or take you out of yourself.

Not long ago, I was wandering the streets photographing, and got lost. I hadn't had much luck and was feeling cross. Walking down a back street lined with apartment buildings, I suddenly heard, from deep within the building I was passing, an opera singer practicing. The notes were just scales, but they had a wistful quality. The singing immediately reminded me of a former friend who was an opera singer, a young woman named Sarah Hoover with whom I'd lost touch. Then, as I stood and listened, I gradually became aware that it was Sarah; although I had had no inkling where I was—I had just been wandering—I realized gradually that I was on the street where she lived. As I looked around I began to recognize everything around me; suddenly everything became familiar. I was right around the corner from a street I knew well. I was struck by the most inexpressible mixture of happy memory and homesickness and wistfulness, and a sudden burgeoning awareness of the joy and sorrow of everyday life. I stood and listened to Sarah practice for a while, then I walked on. And as I walked away the singing faded. But the mood stuck.

I think that's very much like the feeling I get from Helen Levitt’s color pictures. Beyond that, perhaps I needn’t say.

•  •  •

 

Copyright 1992, 2009, 2017 by Michael C. Johnston, all rights reserved

 



Dear Mike Johnston—

My brother, in Utah, happened to see your review in C&D and sent me a copy.

Now that I finally got the address of the magazine, I’m writing to tell you that your piece is among the three best that have ever been written about my work (#1 being Agee’s). I treasure it as it made me feel happy. Amanda at Fraenkel Gallery is sending me copies.

Also—I think you are a very good writer. Thank you.

[signed] Helen Levitt

[postcard from Helen Levitt, 8/15/93] 

Note: No new comments are Featured on Classic posts. Please see the Comments Section for all the comments.

Around the Web on a Friday (Week 42)

Photo by Peter Turnley

• I've been helping my friend Peter Turnley promote his Cuba workshops, which Peter likes because he gets high-quality participants from TOP. Since I last posted about it many places have been reserved, although there are spaces left for every workshop. Up next is the New Year's workshop. Officially called the New Year in Havana and Viñales Photography Workshop, it runs from December 30th 2017 to January 5th 2018. The full price of $5,250 includes the hotel in Havana, air travel round trip from Fort Lauderdale to Havana, visas, three local guides, transportation in Cuba, several group meals, a daily photographic itinerary, and critique sessions led by Peter. The workshop takes place in Havana, with a day trip to Viñales. A price reduction is available in case you want to arrange your own air travel to Havana.

TOP reader Ray Wallace writes, "I took part in a Peter Turnley workshop in Cuba last year (March). Simply stated, it was the best photographic week of my life. Peter is a joy to work with, offers guidance artfully and tactfully, and is immensely skilled at conveying to workshop participants the importance of truly connecting with subjects instead of simply slapping the shutter button. I enjoyed working with him so immensely that I asked him, and he graciously agreed, to present a lecture on the campus of Indiana University Southeast." (The lecture took place last October third. Dr. Wallace is the Chancellor of the University.)

There are several places left, but be sure to sign up soon.

Leonardo's Salvator Mundi (Savior of the World) is on a worldwide tour
before returning to to Christie's in New York, where it will be
auctioned at an evening sale on November 15th.

• A girl named Camera: In 1977, American tennis great Arthur Ashe married Jeanne Moutoussamy, a photographer and graphic designer. In 1986 the couple adopted a daughter, naming her Camera after her mother's profession. Other great photography-related baby names: Berenice, Dorothea, and Lisette for girls, and Ansel, Fox, and Walker for boys.

• Keeping the crew awake: Ever wonder how to hire a crew for a "high production" photo shoot? Julia Hanley of Wonderful Machine lays it all bare in a recent post at Rob Haggart's aPhotoEditor blog called "Expert Advice: Hiring Crew for Photo Shoots." When she once lost a booked assistant to a scheduling conflict, for example, Julia says "my first move was to ask the remaining assistant if he had any recommendations for locals whom he'd worked with previously. I sometimes take this approach because the remaining assistant will usually recommend someone they're used to working with, making the shoot run smoother." One of the potentially most difficult aspects of coordinating a crew, she writes, is catering. For one thing, she needs to know right from the start if anyone on the crew or among the talent has any food allergies or dietary restrictions. "I also like to keep the meals light so that the crew isn’t falling asleep halfway through the day. Another crucial trick to keep people awake is to have lots of fresh hot coffee (or cold brews) on set at all times!"

Fresh hot coffee, mmm. And you were wondering how I was going to work dogs, nimble sports cars, vinyl records, or coffee into today's post? Never a problemo. I've been doing this a while, you know.

William Phelps Eno, inventor of the stop sign. This is not a
mugshot, but a French driver's license c. 1912.

• Fading reds: You probably don't know who this man is, yet the things he invented affect your life almost every day. He is William Phelps Eno, an early campaigner for traffic regulations from the days when there were none. Among other things, Eno invented the stop sign, the one-way street, and the traffic circle or roundabout (or at least the protocols for how they're used by motorized traffic).

He was first smitten with his passion for "rules of the road" when, at the age of nine, he and his mother were trapped in a seemingly insoluble tangle of horse-drawn carriages on the streets of New York City. "That very first traffic jam (many years before the motor car came into use) will always remain in my memory," he wrote in 1909. "There were only about a dozen horses and carriages involved, and all that was needed was a little order to keep the traffic moving. Yet nobody knew exactly what to do; neither the drivers nor the police knew anything about the control of traffic."

I realize the above reads like it's a deft lampoon, but it is all true.

Eno's eventual proposals—after he grew up, that would be—were logical and rational:

1. We must have concise, simple and just rules, easily understood, obeyed and enforced under legal enactment.
2. These rules must be so placed and circulated that there can be no excuse for not knowing them.
3. The police must be empowered and ordered to enforce them, and men should be trained for that purpose.

No one had thought of it before.

Stop signs were originally yellow, according to Ryan Felton at Jalopnik, because red paint pigments couldn't stand up to the sun and rain without fading. California solved the problem of fading pigments first, by using porcelain enamel. The octagonal shape was adopted at a conclave of official traffic-control mugwumps in 1923.

Oh, and by the way: William Phelps Eno, the father of traffic regulation, never learned how to drive. The French driver's license pictured above, issued to Eno in 1912 by A. Bertillon, the Préfecture de Police in Nancy, France, was honorary.

The new 2017 Leica Thambar-M 90 mm ƒ/2.2
will ship in November

• Leica to revive 1935 Thambar: Speaking of old stuff, this is new. Leica is making a modern replica of its own "Thambar" lens type that dates from 1935. From the veritable press release—from, Ja, Leica—"While modern lenses typically strive to achieve the highest levels of sharpness and clarity, the Thambar-M 90mm ƒ/2.2 is all about 'the look.' The Thambar lens is known for its ability to capture portraits with a signature aesthetic that cannot be reproduced in basic digital post processing."  The new lens will cost $6,495, which seems like a lot to pay for an unsharp lens, even one with 'the look,' until you consider that the old original lenses run from $4,000 to $8,000 depending on vintage and condition.

Thorsten Overgaard has samples of both, and lots of information on Thambars, in this roundup of Leica short telephoto primes. (You may have to dig around in that a bit.)

• What?! Oh no: I passed a Porsche SUV (that very concept already a sign of cultural decrepitude) in the parking lot of the grocery story yesterday, and squinted to read the small silver badge on the side: Diesel. Oh yes—the maker of the canonical nimble sports car has degenerated to producing diesel trucks for public consumption. I am hurt in my heart. To paraphrase Julius Caesar: "et tu, Porsche?"

• A very interesting show catalog: Arbus Friedlander Winogrand: New Documents 1967 is an exceptionally interesting exercise, at least for those of us who are into the history of photography (and love photobooks). Many big high-ticket museum shows feature printed catalogs in the form of deluxe books, which serve as both a record of the exhibition and also a means of bringing the show to those who can't attend in person. But one of the most important shows of the 1960s in New York never had a catalog. It was John Szarkowski's "New Documents" show at the Museum of Modern Art, which introduced three major figures of the second half of the 20th century in American photography, Diane Arbus, Garry Winogrand, and Lee Friedlander. 

Now, on the 50th anniversary of the show, a catalog for it has finally been issued. I haven't seen it yet, but it's a tantalizing concept: it promises to both commemorate the show, finally, but also to take a thoughtful retrospective look at it and put it in historical context. The first review on Amazon is by Paul De Zan, who is also a TOP reader; Paul succinctly nailed it. I'd quote his short review, but whenever you write a review on Amazon, Amazon owns your words. (Did you know that?) I'll try to get this. The book, I mean, not Paul's review.

• America's loser President (SNAFU of the week thus far: He promised $25,000 from his own pocket to the father of a dead soldier—something he didn't have to do in the first place—and then reneged) apparently believes that the Auguste Renoir painting on his private jet is real, whereas art experts are pretty certain it's fake. But it looks like a Renoir, and hey, it's signed. Proof enough. Regarding that $25k, the White House is now saying the check's in the mail.

• Not censored: "The only valid censorship of ideas is the right of people not to listen." That's a quote from Tommy Smothers, half of the '60s folk singer / comedy duo The Smothers Brothers. And, assuming you know who Tommy Smothers is, here is your weird factoid for the week: Tommy Smothers played guitar on John Lennon and Yoko Ono's song "Give Peace a Chance."

• Apropos yesterday's post, LensRentals really does things right: the Sony/Zeiss 24mm ƒ/1.8 ZA Sonnar arrived today in a neat little package. On the end you're supposed to open, the packing tape is printed with the words: "RELEASE THE HAPPY! OPEN HERE!" and on the wrong side, the packing tape reads "YEAH...NOT THE HAPPY SIDE. TRY AGAIN." And inside, with the pre-addressed return label, what do you find but...a piece of tape, in case you don't have your own packing tape to reseal the package.

Each time I rent something from these people they have found a way to make it easier to do. How long can that go on?

• Adobe has unveiled an online ("CC") subscription version of Lightroom, Lightroom CC, rebranding regular ol' Lightroom, which has been updated, as "Lightroom Classic CC." DPReview breaks it all down for you. Why can't life just get simpler instead of incessantly more complicated?

• The not-so-fresh face of a new breakout musical star belongs to none other than 77-year-old photographer William Eggleston. The Memphis photography great, who just two years ago published his magnum opus (and who I'm told is popular among both the old and the young), has released an album of music called, well, Musik. (Tim Vine joke: "So I went down to the local music shop. I said, can you teach me how to read music? He said, why? I said, because I keep pronouncing it MUSS-ick.") "The material on the new 'Musik' collection mostly comes from the late '80s and early '90s," relates the Commercial Appeal website, "a point at which the usually technology-adverse [sic—I think the writer means averse] photographer became fascinated with a new synthesizer, the Korg OW/1 FD Pro. The instrument had 88 piano-like keys, the ability to emulate the sound of any instrument, and a four-track sequencer offering Eggleston a grand palette of musical colors.

"Eggleston would ultimately create a mass of improvised symphonic pieces and interpretations of standards, totaling some 49 floppy discs, with more than 60 hours of material, which [producer Tom] Lunt then compiled and edited into the 13-tracks and nearly 60 minutes found on 'Musik.'"

"Mr. Eggleston," adds Boomkat, "often says that he feels that music is his first calling, as much a part of him, at least, as his photography." Hmm.

Here's how the Germans really really pronounce 'Musik.' [This link didn't work on my phone or tablet, but works on the computer. It's just a German guy saying "musik."] I would pre-order it on vinyl, of course.

• Do not click on this unless you have six minutes to waste: Work Fails. (Caution: NSFW language.) The one at 5:10 left me fairly gobsmacked. Think of how much work that one's going to take to clean up, assuming those boxes were all organized on the shelves. Or even if they weren't.

Good thing nobody ever sees what goes on behind the scenes here at TOP!

That's it for us for the 42nd week of the year 2017, a year which has sped by improbably quickly so far. That means: ten more weeks to go in 2017. If you enjoy our shenanigans and you possess a shred of mercy in your heart, you will naturally remember to click on the links below to do any shopping you need to do during those ten weeks!  :-)  And bless you for that. It costs you nada, but drips a dab of gold into my coffers every single time you do it. A coffer, by the bye, is a strongbox or treasure-chest. Mine is far from full, but I like to keep the bottom covered, at least, with no bare spots showing.

Hope you have a good weekend. I have to take a couple of days off next week, but I will post a "classic" (translation: old) TOP article or two on both Monday and Tuesday. Hopefully ones you haven't seen or don't remember. Comments will remain open, but won't be posted until later in the week. Please come back Monday!

And thank you.

Mike
(Thanks to many friends, correspondents, and tipsters)

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.

B&H Photo • Amazon US • Amazon UK
Amazon Germany • Amazon Canada • Adorama

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

No featured comments yet—please check back soon!

Sony vs. Fuji: A Slight Change in Protocol

Lake Keuka shoreline near Penn Yan. Sony A6500
and Sony/Zeiss 16–70mm zoom.

I get grumpy easily when it comes to zoom lenses. To explain why, I'll just mention that when I bought a small used Mercedes in 2010*, it was the first car I ever owned that had an automatic transmission...

...And it drove me crazy because I never knew what gear it was in.

I realize that this is a simple failure on my part to get with the program: everybody in the world knows the whole point of automatic transmissions is that you just forget about gears and let the car take care of it.

But I wanted to know, and couldn't let go.

Anyway, right out of the gate I experienced some, er, disappointments with the Sony/Zeiss 16–70mm ƒ/4 lens on the Sony A6500. The picture above, for instance, is dead sharp in the middle of the shoreline and a bit unsharp on the edges, both north and south.

Since the point (for me) of the A6500 is the in-body image stabilization (IBIS), and the 16–70mm has in-lens IS to which the camera defers with that lens attached, I've decided to bring the sailboat about and take a different tack. Rather than take the time to figure out what if anything is wrong with the zoom—a potentially long process with a high probability of triggering grumpiness—I've decided to just get a Sony/Zeiss 24mm ƒ/1.8 ZA Sonnar and use that on the Sony, comparing it to the Fuji X-T2 with my XF 23mm ƒ/1.4. That way I'll be using the IBIS in the Sony and also be spared the obligation of testing a zoom lens to find out how it behaves, which can be a bit like describing the color of a chameleon. (The 16–70mm is known to be an excellent lens with a rather high occurrence of bad samples. The 93 reviews at Amazon include 55 five-star reviews and 11 one- and two-star reviews, for example. That's 11.83%, which is a little on the high side.)

I just want to know how my lenses behave and why, that's all. And that's much harder to figure out with a zoom than a prime ("prime" being a colloquial term for a fixed-focal-length lens).

Anyway, the nice folks at LensRentals are zooming a 24mm ƒ/1.8 ZA Sonnar to me which should arrive today, and the 16–70mm is going back to B&H Photo, which kindly loaned me the A6500. LensRentals doesn't rent bad samples, and they test their rental returns to make sure of that. (The 16–70mm was new in the box.) I'm very familiar with the Zeiss 24mm, having owned one for a couple of years a few years back.

I'm not saying there was anything wrong with the 16–70mm, by the way. I'm saying I might have gotten a bad sample and didn't want to take the time to find out. I'm trying out the cameras, not the lenses.

The nice 2014 Acura ILX 2.4 I drive now, based on a Civic and built in Indiana, has the same drivetrain as the '14 Civic Si, including the same 2.4 liter motor and the same sweet, smooth stick shift. And soon I'll be shooting primes with both of this Autumn's test cameras. All shall soon be well in Mikey-land once more.

Mike

*It cost $24k, and magically convinced everyone that I had suddenly become rich. A friend who had just bought a brand-new $48,000 SUV exclaimed, "Ooh, fancy! I could never afford a Mercedes!" It did lose $9,000 of value in a mere three years even though it was already a used car to start with, so maybe I should have been rich to buy the thing, I don't know.

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.

B&H Photo • Amazon US • Amazon UK
Amazon Germany • Amazon Canada • Adorama

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

Juan Buhler: "My Leica M9's sensor cracked (!) a couple of months ago. So I used the A6000 with Zeiss 24mm ƒ/1.8 exclusively during Peter Turnley's workshop in San Francisco last week. Peter already uploaded the workshop's photos (scroll down to see my images). BTW, this was Peter Turnley's first workshop in San Francisco, and it was excellent. I was privileged to assist Peter with the organization a little bit. It was a fantastic experience!"

Mike replies: Juan is a gifted street shooter who I've featured on TOP several times. Juan taking a workshop from Peter is a bit like Raphael taking a painting course from Michelangelo, but then again why not?

John Camp: "Maybe you should confine your lens testing to newspapers taped to the wall. That is a very nice shot and screw the softness, it's a very nice shot."

Mike replies: It is, and thank you, and I wouldn't hesitate to show it—the post was merely to explain why zooms can make me grumpy if I have to learn what they're doing and why they're doing it at every focal length and every aperture. It just takes a long time and a lot of shooting and a lot of looking to get to know a zoom well, that's all.

Missing

I own no fewer than three tape measures, and this morning all three were missing—not in their designated places, because some thoughtless dolt (me) had taken them somewhere to measure something and then neglected to put them back where they belonged.

One after the other.

Three times.

That's not even the worst part—I found all three buried under papers on my desk! (I guess it's obvious which kind I prefer.)

Similarly, I once owned as many as 13 SD cards. But lately I have been down to...drumroll...two.

Two?! I honestly don't know what happened to all the others or where they could have gone. I can't even come up with an educated guess. Wherever the missing socks congregate?

There just seems to have been some sort of gradual attrition of SD cards. One disappears here, one disappears there, and pretty soon it's like the 10 little Indians in the old Agatha Christie novel*, each one anxiously awaiting its inevitable doom. (That's called the pathetic fallacy, if you'd like to know—attributing human emotions to inanimate objects. The pathetic fallacy always made me wonder about fiction, which is the attribution of human emotions to imaginary characters.)

On one hand, it's a tough call as to which SD cards to buy. On the other hand, it seems to not matter very much—the cheaper budget cards I lost were just as reliable as the expensive deluxe cards I lost. (And both are equally useful to me at the moment.) I have one (count it, one) UHS-II card, and to be honest I don't notice the difference in the camera because I don't do the kind of shooting that stresses the card. Maybe Stephen Scharf could tell us about that—he shoots motorsports. But I notice it when downloading to the computer: the UHS-II card is definitely much faster.

...Than, um, my one other card. 

The card with the largest capacity I theoretically still own but cannot find was a 32GB. I seldom had to worry about it filling up. That was nice too. While it lasted.

After considerable fretting over the state of the finances, which are neither bad nor good, I opted to forego the UHS-II cards I wanted, but to go ahead and get the 32GB cards I also wanted. I bought four. As you can see, I chose this one.

I also bought a clever little case for them (which I like—it's slick) under the dubious premise that a case the size of cellphone will be harder to lose. (Hey, maybe my other cards are somewhere all together in a lost case! That's more possible than I would like to admit.)

Ah well. That's life when you're...

Mike

Stephen Scharf adds: Yep, you definitely need the UHS-II cards for shooting motorsports, especially if you're using the X-T2 in boost mode, 11 frames/sec. with the vertical power booster grip. The nice thing is that both the card slots in the X-T2 support UHS-II, so you can configure the camera to "roll over" to the second slot if you need the capacity. The camera does this instantly and absolutely seamlessly.

*You might know it as either "And Then There Were None" or "Ten Little Indians." The original British title was extremely politically incorrect even before that concept was common, and was never used in the U.S. It has been made into a movie numerous times. In English, there were film versions in 1945, 1965, 1974, 1989, and again just last year as a movie for television that I haven't seen but would like to. The book is reputed to be the seventh best-selling trade book in the history of publishing.

In case you're you're curious, all-time world bestsellers numbers 1–6, in reverse order, are The Hobbit, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (you'll want the Gryffindor Edition, of course), The Little Prince, The Lord of the Rings, and A Tale of Two Cities (which is a cracking good read, I have to say); and number one—with a bullet, having sold 500 million copies since 1605, two and a half times as many as the Dickens title—is Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes, the most beautiful, the most brilliant, and the most discreet book that anyone could imagine**. The most recent standard English translation is by Edith Grossman.

(Note that this list does not include books that are or were not primarily for the bookselling trade, such as The Holy Bible, which, with an estimated three billion copies written or printed, is the most widely distributed book of all; neither does it include political tracts such as Mao Zedong's Little Red Book, AKA Quotations of Chairman Mao Tse-Tung, printed and distributed in vast numbers by the communist Chinese government.)

**That's from the Prologue. It was the best my "barren and poorly cultivated wits" could come up with. That's also from the Prologue.

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.

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

Terry Letton: "Get rid of your current camera and buy one that only takes Compact Flash cards and all those SD cards will magically reappear."

Ernie Van Veen: "I have never lost an SD or CF card. That having been said, I have at least five tape measures, all of which have been cleverly hidden somewhere in the house or garage, along with the hammer and Philips head screwdriver...and scissors. I must go look for them. Now, where are my glasses?"

David Dyer-Bennet: "A famous science fiction short story, 'Or All the Seas With Oysters' by Avram Davidson, was very illuminating on the subject of the population dynamics of paper clips, coat-hangers, and bicycles. I wouldn't be surprised if something similar was going on with SD cards!"

Nick Reith: "Hello Mike and fellow TOP lurkers. I have been reading your blog for ages but never had the urge to comment, since most of the contributors are wonderfully eloquent and knowledgeable. However today's reference to the political incorrectness of the 'Ten little Indians' title had me somewhat bemused. I felt I had to break my silence, so to speak. Having done some recent research into 'Native American Reservations' I was shocked to find out that the official name for the federal body that administers these areas is still to this day called the 'US Bureau of Indian Affairs' and that the areas are legally known as 'Indian Reservations.' Seems that old prejudices die hard in officialdom. Who knew? Kindest regards from Nick in South Africa."

Mike replies: Hi Nick, and nice to hear from you, but that wasn't the title I was talking about. I have a friend who has been deeply engaged in Native American issues for half a century, and he informs me that different groups and even different individuals prefer different appellations—some prefer Native Americans or First Nations, but some do prefer to be called Indians. I didn't want to put this in the post, because I don't want this post to devolve into a discussion of it (n.b.), but for the original 1939 British book cover with its politically incorrect original title, Google "and then there were none." (If you reach the disambiguation page, you want the page for the book.) I think you'll agree it sounds alarmingly aggressive and insensitive by recent standards. It was too much for American publishers even in 1939.

Steve Biro: "Well, Mike, those 32GB SanDisk Extreme Pro cards are the best you can get short of going to UHS-II. But the X-T1 deserves UHS-II cards. You should pick up a couple of SanDisks as soon as you can swing it."

Timo Virojärvi: "I'm with you Mike. I'm down to one tape measure and two SD and one CF card."

Don Daso: "You've obviously simply put them someplace for 'safekeeping.' I am a Master Safe-Keeper, so I can relate. The items will surface, on their own, when you least expect them, likely after purchasing a 'final' replacement. Store it well...."

Mike replies: I have that virus. "Putting something somewhere safe" = "hiding it from myself."

It's actually heartbreaking sometimes. For example, I have a treasured postcard from Helen Levitt calling an article I wrote about her "One of the three best things ever written about my work, no. 1 being [James] Agee's." Where is it? Somewhere safe.  :-(

Jim Witkowski: "I had the same problem with tape measures and memory cards. My cards were strewn over my desk and I couldn't keep track of which had new files on them. It drove me nuts. This is a prototype of a box I designed to solve my problem. It has worked so well that I stopped working on the finished box. I'll do that one of these days when I get a round-2-it.

"When I'm out shooting, I keep extra cards in the black wallet."

Mike replies: Brilliant in its simplicity. I like it.

Patrick Medd (partial comment): "SD cards are so small that once out of the camera the wonder is not that they get lost but, that some of them don't!"

Are Classic Photographs Still Relevant?

A nice "idle question" for a sunny Tuesday in the Finger Lakes...are classic photos and photobooks still relevant as references, inspiration, and instruction for today's photographers?

I'm not sure.

Granted, I love the history of photography; I love learning about the great practitioners as well as the excellent-but-little-known ones; and I certainly love looking at old photographs, from Shorpy to snapshots, and everything from the greatest of classic photobooks to ancient, musty photo annuals and antique instruction manuals.

But I'm wondering how relevant it is in today's world, or whether the great pre-digital-era work of the second half of the 20th century has become...well, history.

A few of the changes: today most photographers work in color. That's a big change from when I got into photography in 1980, when most serious photography was still B&W*. Cameras see very differently now—many of the problems that were with us for well over a century have melted away in the era of super-duper sensors and computer-controlled electronics, such that the better cameras nowadays see conspicuously better than most humans do**. While photographs were historically quite difficult to modify or fake, and it was possible to spot it in many cases when they were, today they can be heavily edited and modified with great ease, and the changes are often completely invisible, if the creator wants them to be. Furthermore, the formal culture of photography is changing***, in ways that aren't quite understood yet; even the cultural uses of photography seem to be morphing from one state to another, in at least as major an upheaval as the Kodak and the hand camera craze in the 1890s changed the way photography was used and conceived of.

I recall that when I mentioned one of the formative books of my photographic education—John Szarkowski's Looking at Photographs—one commenter said he thought all the examples were old-fashioned and didn't help him much with what he himself was doing. Another shock was seeing an exhibit of contemporary photography at the Art Institute of Chicago and noticing how out of place, how plain and old-fashioned, two 35mm B&W 11x14s looked amid all the altered and concocted and variably colored wall art.

I don't know. Maybe photographs recognized from life and taken at once with a single release of the shutter-button aren't entirely "relateable" any more. Maybe, some time in the recent past when I wasn't watching, they left the realm of the relevant and entered the musty catalogs of the merely historical.

Mike

*It's a revisionist commonplace for pontificators to claim that color has always been important, trotting out autochromes and Kodachrome and Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky and hand-coloring and yadda yadda yadda in support of the argument. That's largely fatuous: until at least the 1960s and '70s, "the colors of photography [were] black and white," to quote Robert Frank's famous dictum. Color was for amateur snapshots, advertising, magazines, illustrations, and pornography, and only slowly and weakly made inroads into fine art and documentary and newspaper photography starting, slowly, in the '60s and '70s. An interesting process, to be sure, and one that's fun to chart; but that's no reason to overlook the fact that most serious, artistic, ambitious photography was B&W and more serious photographers by far worked in B&W than color until at least the 1980s. Of course important color photographers existed, but color was a "poor stepchild," quietly looked down upon, and the occasional color photographer was usually either a token or an exception. B&W was the baseline standard of that era in serious photography—the basic assumption, the fallback.

**In human vision terms, the best cameras now have about 20/2 vision in terms of resolution, and far better dark vision than the human eye. They don't quite have better color discrimination, thanks to the handicap of the Bayer array, but they're getting there.

***If you don't think it is, quick, name the three leading photographers of the 21st century in your country. Then name a famous show or book that everyone has heard of.

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.

B&H Photo • Amazon US • Amazon UK
Amazon Germany • Amazon Canada • Adorama

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

Michael Poster: "At least with respect to art: all art of the past can be useful (and informative) to the current generation of artists. Photography, for sure. But I’d argue that painting, drawing, literature, and music are useful too. At the museum, I spend as much time with Caravaggio, Sargent, and Hopper as I do with Cartier-Bresson, Arbus, and Friedlander."

Jamie Pillers: "Mike, I suspect you've opened a can of worms here...or maybe opened an old wound. Excellent! I for one believe that photography today is welcoming to everything...from the classically crafted-in-a-darkroom B&W image to all the craziness offered up by all the digital bells and whistles we have today. I've been at it for many years, starting from hours and hours breathing fixer fumes back in the '80s and '90s. I miss those creative and calming times in the dark. But that amount of time pursuing a beautiful print is seriously unavailable to me anymore, given the piling on of life's other responsibilities.

"Thankfully the digital era arrived and I could still pursue that beautiful image here in my office. But I know there a lot of people are still enjoying the joys of film photography. A friend has just started a film-based community photo group and it's growing like mad. And I must say, I'm truly glad that I can't name the three leading photographers of today. The digital era has, to a huge extent, democratized the world of photographic art. There's so much to look at these days, so much impressive photography available to inspire us!"

Marvin Van Drunen: "Books of photographs from well respected, not to mention famous photographers are important to me...but I'm a 67-year-old man with adequate funds to purchase any and all of the photo books that interest me. I've taken pictures for at least 55 years and that history in my life has created an interest in what has gone before. But, I'm quite sure my children are not interested, at this stage of their lives. They are a the stage of life when their major focus is the care, feeding, and future college education of my grandchildren. They may, in the future, be interested in looking at the work of historically important photographers. But not now. My kids don't have the funds or the time or the inclination to study the history of photography.They are, at this time, interested in snapping hundreds of pictures with their iPhones. My job is to encourage them to a least get the pix off their phones and in some way backed up! And, some day they will inherit my collection of photo books. I hope they will at least look at them!"

Robert Gordon: "Two weeks ago I saw the Irving Penn retrospective in Paris. Breathtaking in terms of variety of content and print quality. Immediately ordered the catalog, which is exceptionally well printed."

Stan B.: "Hard to gauge the extent and relevancy of this transition while actually immersed within it, since the changes are still ongoing and the outcome in flux. No doubt the B&W print era is over. More relevant—is the print era over altogether? Photography has sacrificed its primary raison d'etre (preserving the moment for history) for the immediacy that modern technology has now bequeathed it. More compartmentalized than ever, photography is definitely expanding as far as what it is, how it's used and what it means to all concerned...individuals are free to pick those facets that most interest them, and make of it what they will. If you're going to be seriously involved, it helps to be familiar with the history of your medium, and for those more attuned with its past, to at least try to appreciate what is current.

"P.S. That said, unless it's a topical, just published, news photo, nothing surpasses the power and eloquence of a printed photograph on a gallery wall. Many a time, I've thought I've seen a photograph online—only to really discover the photograph for the first time upon viewing it in print form."

Benjamin Marks: "The most important skill that a good photographer has is the ability to see rather than simply look. So yes: this will never go out of fashion. Or, to mangle Hillel: The importance of photography is seeing; all else is commentary."

Paul: "William Eggleston's work seems to be as popular and relevant as ever. Just go on Instagram, you will see his hashtag is happily alive and kicking with daily updates by people of all ages. I wonder if Eggleston would choose an iPhone camera instead of a Leica in 2017 if he was to begin shooting images for his Guide."

Edward Taylor: "Every few months, more photos are uploaded to the Internet than were taken in the entire 150 or so year history of black and white film. Searching for an hour, even on Instagram, I can find many unknown photos that are arguably as good as anything that has come before.

"Even more surprising to me is that I actually dislike many classic photos that I used to really admire, if not love. Now they look technically weak and perhaps even a bit trite. I look at them and think, 'what's the big deal.' An awful lot of art is emperor's clothing and I am beginning to see that in classic photos as well.

"Of course, there are still many that I love, but all together, they represent a tiny fraction of the photographs I admire today. It's hard to say where photography is going, but it will become harder and harder for any photograph or any artist to truly stand out. In every small corner of the world, in almost every amateur or pro's hard drive, website, or portfolio there is amazing work. In several lifetimes, we could only take a brief glance at a microscopic percentage of it all."

Steve Jacob: "Despite probably being median age for this blog-site, I am and have always been a fan of the colour image, and I have thumbed my bargain copy of Herzog's Modern Colour a hundred times since I received it (thanks Mike!).

"I have books by Walker Evans, Elliot Erwitt and others, but that's not because their images are black and white, but because they transcend the technology. If they had been taken with an iPhone they would be just as good.

"Photography is an art based on science, and idealised representational photography will age faster than humour or humanity. All I see when I look at an Ansel Adams image in the flesh is how dated it looks. I can admire the craft in the context of its time, but I have seen so much breathtaking landscape photography in the last 20 years than I am numb to the whole genre.

"Far too much old photography was admired for the craft, not the content. This is largely because it was difficult. Digital has removed the constraints. They key to the craft now it to make it convincingly invisible, which in its own way is no less difficult.

"Even so, digital is as liberating as the 35mm camera was in the 1930s. It demands more of us because it allows us to do more, yet so many demean that very aspect of it.

"It is ironic, because now, content is everything. Copying what is in front of us is no longer worthy of applause. It requires a new perspective in which, I believe, the iPhone has as much of a role to play as the dedicated camera, if not more so. Life is just getting interesting, I think."

Sony RX0

Even if you don't use their cameras, you've got to love Sony. You never know what those guys are going to do next.

Idealized remnant of a bygone era: the Sony RX100 V

You're already familiar with the RX100, now in its fifth iteration and one of the last traditional old-fashioned digicams (I can't believe I just wrote those words) that's still selling well—a tiny all-in-one zoom-lens digicam with a 1" sensor (8.8x13.2mm, much smaller than Micro 4/3 but much larger than the sensors in most digicams and cellphones, and coming into its own now as sensor technology improves). Really one of the best-ever of the digicam type, a type of camera now sadly being decimated by the onslaught of the smartphone camera. This one hangs on by dint of its largish 1" sensor. You oldtimers who still remember the fast-fading early days of digital—you know, back before today's teenagers were born—probably cut your digital teeth on a digicam. Graybeards!

Sony RX10 IV

You know about the RX10, with the fourth iteration available for pre-order and coming soon. Whether you think of it as a best-of-breed bridge camera or a digicam on steroids, it's an all-in-one do-everything Swiss Army Knife of a camera with a 25X optical zoom lens (24–600mm-e). It beats most other bridge cameras in that it has that same "bigger" 1" sensor. (By the bye, a 1" sensor is .35 inches in one dimension and .52 inches in the other. To make intuitive sense of sensor size designations in five easy steps, step one would be to kill yourself.) With an RX10 IV you will be able to do nothing perfectly but virtually everything well.

Sony RX1R II

You know about the RX1, still the world's smallest full-frame (24x36mm, or 35mm size, sometimes confusingly called 135) digital camera. The range-topping RX1R II has the ideal all-purpose lens, a classic and actually reasonably simple(!) control layout, is tiny, and has that "huge" sensor. Its only drawback is that you must cart your money to the store in a wheelbarrow, but even that can be seen as an advantage if you compare the RX1R II to the more expensive Leica Q (also a brilliant little camera). And hey, the plain-jane RX1 is still "affordable," by the recent new-style definition of that concept.

The RX line finally gets to zero. Difficult to emphasize how
tiny this is—only 2.4 inches (61mm) wide.

Sony goes...I have to be careful here...pro
And now here comes the RX0, 0 as in zero. The aforementioned graybeards are all smiley and perplexed over this one, but only because we haven't really paid much attention to the whole GoPro thing. The RX-zero is a tiny, waterproof, shockproof box, with a 1" sensor and a Tessar lens (the Tessar lens design dates from 1902, making it 115 years old) that will shoot stills and 4K video. A GoPro—and you ought to know this by now—is the thing crazy people affix to themselves before doing something really silly, like doing a wheelie between lanes of traffic at high speed on a motorcycle or jumping off a cliff dressed in a flying squirrel suit. The RX0 is really just to out-do the new and hugely popular GoPro Hero6. (Sony already has action cams with smaller sensors.)

An RX0 blown to its bits.

Sony isn't marketing it as a GoPro Hero6 competitor, however. They're emphasizing, um, the unleashing of creativity, a marketing phrase I haven't heard any more than several thousand times before. How? Through networking and multiplexing and connectivity and other words Yr. Hmbl. Ed. only vaguely comprehends—mostly having to do with pro video, something that is admittedly getting a bit past my abilities and yes, interests. (Sorry, videographers—I know you're where it's at. I'm still a still photographer, or, as they now say, a "stills" photographer.) "On the video front, the RX0 is packed with a variety of creative and powerful features including super slow motion capture at up to 960 frames per second, 4K clean HDMI output to an external recorder as well as MF assist and Peaking to adjust focus to exact preferences of the creator, as well as Preset Focus options which enhance control. The camera also offers Picture Profile options and S-Log2, as well Time Code / User Bit features, which are extremely useful for multi-camera shoots." (Yes, that's right from the press release.) You can control up to five RX0s with a smartphone or tablet app. It has WiFi of course. And may I just mention that super-slow-motion ability again, as it sounds neat.

Again, Sony's advantage is in the 1" sensor, which is bigger than anything GoPro has yet put into a camera; and its disadvantage is that it costs $700 to the GoPro Hero6's $500.

Still, the RX0 is another funky little direction for Sony to zing off on. (I'm sure the company is dead serious, but they can come across as zany and happy sometimes, like they're mainly having fun.) At least the RX0 doesn't need a lens system! The RX0 might be tiny, but it's tough: it's waterproof to a depth of 33 feet, can be dropped from 6.5 feet, and will withstand more than 440 lbs. of weight placed on top of it.

Marketed with the RX0 are a number of accessories, from a machined "cage" with 35 threaded mounting holes, for attaching the RX0 to things and attaching things to it, to an underwater housing good to 330 feet.

 All that and, as they say, more...in a package weighing less than four ounces.

What will Sony think of next?

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.

B&H Photo • Amazon US • Amazon UK
Amazon Germany • Amazon Canada • Adorama

• Affiliation to Wex Photo in the UK pending •

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

Dennis: "When I first read about the RX0, my immediate reaction was 'I want one.' Followed by, 'but I don't know why!'

"Now it's been a couple months and the pre-announcement novelty has worn off. I still think it's a great camera for the right creative types who will make use of it, whether to replace GoPros, to attach to drones, or just to put them in novel places to do things that boring still photographers like me would never think to do.

"At a high school band concert a couple nights ago, I saw someone recording with a tiny camera (looked like a little inch-and-a-half diameter sphere, like a web cam) sticking up on a skinny selfie stick. I think I would have found it annoying if I'd been behind him, but not overly so.

"I'll read the other comments in case anyone else comes up with a compelling justification for one of these little things."

hugh crawford: "Gee Mike, Everyone knows the one-inch sensor is called the one-inch sensor because once upon a time the amature /  industrial B&W video cameras used tubes and rather than invent a new lens mount they used the a C-mount, a screw mount whose thread is nominally 1.000 inch (25.4 mm) in diameter, with 32 threads per inch. The tube coincidentally was close to one inch in diameter, but since it was round and made of thick glass and had magnets and electrostatic grids and plates in there, the actual size of the sensitive area was much smaller. (But you could change the size and shape by tweaking the voltages of the magnets and deflectors!)

"Thus, much like old tube TV sets where the screen size is the measure of the diagonal of the tube that contains the screen, the things are called 1-inch tubes. When chip cameras came around, the chips were called one inch because they had about the same sensor surface as the one inch tube.

"At least it is more logical than other measures like 'horsepower' and 'feet.' I actually have an old one-inch camera that is part of a Sony 1/2 inch reel-to-reel porta-pack. It's the wet plate camera of video."

Mike replies: Hugh, the things you think everyone knows, I sometimes don't even understand.  :-)

Baker's Dozen: Sheet Film (Call for Work)

This Toyo-Field 45AII is currently for sale on eBay.
Seventy-one people are "watching" the auction!

Do you, or does anyone you know, still shoot 4x5" or larger sheet film and make contact prints the old-fashioned way?

If so, send me a JPEG or a digital snapshot of a recent print, or of yourself holding a print, and I'll post a sampling of them at the end of next week. Please mention your name, age, and location when you send it, as well as the size of your negative. My email address is m c j o h n s t o n a t m a c d o t c o m. (I don't know why I bother to disguise that, as I'm so awash in spam email already I can barely use email for its intended purpose. But I guess every precaution helps.)

Interested in seeing what people are up to!

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.

B&H Photo • Amazon US • Amazon UK
Amazon Germany • Amazon Canada • Adorama

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

No featured comments yet—please check back soon!

So Did You Like...

...The "Around the Web" post on Friday? Those are a lot of work to put together, but I can do more if people enjoy them.

And to mention it again, I have to be off for Monday and Tuesday of next week, but I'll post a "classic" article on both days. Hopefully it will be something you haven't seen or enjoy rereading. (Comments will be open, but won't be posted until Wednesday.)

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.

B&H Photo • Amazon US • Amazon UK
Amazon Germany • Amazon Canada • Adorama

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

No featured comments yet—please check back soon!

B&H Photo is Back

After nine days closed for Succos, B&H Photo has just this minute reopened. Hallelujah!

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.

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

scott kirkpatrick: "Actually Succoth (Israeli English spelling of סוכות) is just seven days, and only the first and last days are really holy days. The rest is sort of like a shared vacation at the factory, vacation that everyone takes, and it is a vacation from religious obligations. This year it ended just before shabbat, so that Friday-Saturday pair was added to B&H's downtime."

ced muskat: "I guess quite a few customers were into 'withdrawal.'"

David Bateman: "I couldn't find Succos. However Wikipedia has it as a possible pronunciation of Sukkot. Very interesting holiday, seems to be around the same time as Canadian Thanksgiving.

Mike replies: I was just spelling it like B&H did on its page. And yes, it is an interesting holiday.