The Online Photographer

Open Mike: 2018 Lexus RX L

["Open Mike" is the anything-goes, off topic editorial page of TOP, wherein slacker Editor Mike Johnston allows head writer Mike Johnston off the leash. This feature always appears on Wednesdays, always, no exceptions.]

The Germans are lucky. We all know the story: Congress, alarmed at the influx of cheap Japanese cars overtaking the U.S. car market, passed laws limiting the number of imports from Japan; the Japanese decided that if they couldn't make lots of money by exporting lots of cars, they would make money by exporting cars that cost lots, and Lexus (Toyota), Infiniti (Nissan), and Acura (Honda) invaded the luxury car market like the Japanese battle fleet bearing down on a tiny Pacific island.

At first, it looked very much like the Japanese were going to go all Godzilla on the luxo car market, laying waste to everything but the .1% exotics up at the tippy-top. But the Germans are still in the game. Why? Because the Japanese oblige them by shooting themselves in the foot...again, and again, and again.

They do it in three main ways:

a.) by persistently making their luxury cars so gawd-awful ugly that they hit you like a wet fish in the face, one aesthetic assault after another;

b.) by making every car in their lineups look exactly like every other car, a helpless urge toward mindless conformity that prevents any particular model from having something called individual identity and recognizability, things very much wanted in status-oriented cars. It's a glitch which is apparently so ingrained in the Japanese psyche that no one in that nation can see how toweringly dumb it is as a marketing move; and

c.) by assigning anonymous anodyne labels to the cars—labels that not only lack panache, they suck panache out of the cars, wring it out like a wet washcloth and leave it lying in the dirt. Quick, recite the Acura lineup! Heck, the last Acura I can remember the name of was the Integra (1985–2006)...and I drive an Acura.

The Acura Beak screamed DO NOT BUY ME so effectively that Acura put the same snout on all its models up and down the line.
Mercedes breathed a happy sigh.

Okay, I was one of the eighteen people who bought the ILX 2.4. But I have to think for a while, staring absently up at the ceiling of my office, before I can come up with the right letters. "ILX" doesn't exactly conjure the romance of driving. And in case you're wondering, yes, my "Acura What's-It-Called-Again?" does have the infamous Acura Beak, but at least it's muted, relatively, on my model. And while I still remember the name Acura Legend, I couldn't tell you the alphabet code for Acura's top sedan of the past twenty years or so. Can you? (Google was not much help. When I inputted "name of most luxurious Acura sedan," the first things that popped up were an ad for Porsche and a sponsored link to a Mercedes website.)

Let's be clear: the Japanese are better at making cars than the Germans. Just like they're better at making cameras. Yet Audi sells slightly less than BMW/Rolls-Royce, which sells slightly less than Mercedes...and still Audi sold 2.76 times what Lexus did in 2016*. And Acura and Infinity? Nowhere to be found among the top seven luxury brands. Whaaaap-waaaa.

How could this be? One reason is that the original Lexus LS400 was pretty much the last Lexus that looked anywhere near as good as almost any Audi. By rights, the last-ever Mercedes should have rolled off the line in about 2009. The Japanese should have killed the Germans, just like everybody thought they were going to back in 1989. But the Japanese turned out to be their own worst enemy.

And now Lexus is doing it again. What comes after the page break is what afflicted my eyes first thing this morning when I opened my iPad and innocently clicked on a link in a Motor Trend email. It wasn't fair; I wasn't awake; not prepared; I had no chance to protect myself. I'm nicer—I'm warning you. Take a deep breath, steel yourself, and

Cool Stuff and More Cool Stuff

Peter Turnley, Ground Zero, New York, September 12, 2001

• First of all, I just added three new inclusions (eight new photographs) to the previous "Baker's Dozen: Pictures Taken with Leica Lenses" post. Do not miss!

• Second, as he did last year, my friend (and yours) Peter Turnley is having a holiday print sale of full-sized 16x20" prints in both black-and-white and color. This is not an official "TOP Sale," but Peter will make a contribution to TOP if you hit the "referred by" menu at the bottom of the sale page:

The selection is mighty and the prices very nice: note especially the three-print deal of $1,000 for three prints, as this is the lowest price Peter has ever sold his full-sized 16x20-inch prints for. These are exactly the same prints that sell for $1,400 to $2,000 (for one, not three) in brick-and-mortar galleries the rest of the year.

Even if you don't buy one, you can exercise your delectation skills by looking over the 18 pictures and deciding which ones you like the best. They're good to see.

• Cyber Monday this year beat Black Friday for sales, and was both the biggest online shopping day ever and also the biggest sales day Amazon ever had, adding up to a significant slice of the holiday sales pie. I'm scared to look at how I did, so I haven't checked yet (if I didn't do okay, I don't want to know. I know I'm getting the tar beat out of me by video review sites).

In any event, B&H Photo has some marvelous "Cyber Week" sales still going on. Here are some links to some outstanding deals:

Sony page

Nikon page

Canon page

In case you haven't noticed, the Bigs would really like to sell you a camera or lens this year. The competition is cutthroat and the prices are...well, just cut.

Consider for instance that at the Sony page, you can get the original Sony A7 for only $798 (!), the A7II for only $1,298, and the A6500 for only $1,198. Look around at the pages at those links. Now's a good time to pull the trigger if the timing is right for you.

Peter Turnley, Paris, 1991

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

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Eli Burakian: "Simple question with probably no correct answer: how do I know, or attempt to determine, if a specific fine art print is a good investment, financially speaking? Are there specific rules of thumb or generalizations that would aid in choosing? I never buy prints that I don't love, but beyond my limited understanding of photography in the art world, I'm pretty clueless about what factors go into determining financial value to specific artworks and artists."

Mike replies: The clear best advice is, don't—that is, don't buy fine art prints as investments. Buy what you love (as you said you do), and limit your spending to what you can comfortably afford. Art isn't a safe investment until you get to the level of silly money, and sometimes not even then. With those conditions met, it can be a highly rewarding investment if you find something you love that keeps "giving" whenever you look at it, something you'll really enjoy living with.

Remember that all art is essentially tulip bulbs (cf. chapter 3 of Charles Mackay's Memoirs of Extraordinary Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, "The Tulipomania").

If you really want to buy photographs as financial investments (I know several people who do), start by building a relationship with a professional gallerist who can advise you. They will ordinarily spend more time and take more trouble with you if you spend a fair amount of money with them. I believe one of my acquaintances spends well into six figures annually (just my guess), and quite plausibly seven, on photographs as investments, so he naturally has good relationships with the gallerists he buys from.

David Boyce adds: "To Eli Burakian: Mike has covered lots of the bases, but one thing to add to the buy what you like thing, buy what you love, not like. Things that you know that regardless of the value you will keep them, be entranced and entertained. And buy in depth, several works by the same artist, not one here and there by different artists. If you want work that is going to grow, or at least hold its value look for work that is 'controversial' or 'difficult.' Works that divide opinions. Those are the ones that might grow in value. And I say might. I'm an artist and my wife and I collect. But we are different to a lot of buyers; we kind of hope stuff we own doesn't become too valuable as then there is the temptation to sell it. That would cause lots of emotional pain."

Mike: One of my favorite stories is one my art teacher told. He had an opportunity to buy a watercolor from Andrew Wyeth's very first show...for $25. He almost pulled the trigger, got cold feet, and passed. Over the years, he watched the price of the very picture he wanted to buy rise to $250, then to $2,500, then $25,000, and finally to $250,000. He said he was filled with regret and remorse at ever step—but largely because as the price rose, he became increasingly aware that he would never again have any chance to own it. But then the painting rose in price to $2.5 million, and he said at that point, he no longer regretted not buying it. I asked him why, and he said, "because I would have had to sell it if it were that valuable. It would be too expensive to keep in the house. And I loved it. If I had bought it, I know I would have wanted to keep it."

Baker's Dozen: Pictures Taken with Leica Lenses

Bob Swanson took the perfect frontispiece for this post in 1967 with his Leica IIIa. He's not sure of the lens; I believe it could be the 5 cm ƒ/3.5 Elmar. He says, "Moved on. Still have the Leica and lenses (somewhere)."

-

Once again, I got hundreds of entries for this fortnight's Baker's Dozen (193 emails, many with several pictures), and once again I extend my apologies to all the photographers I was forced to leave out. I'm not sure there was a single "bad" picture submitted, which makes sense. A great many were interesting, or beautiful, or touching. Thanks to everyone who participated, whether you find your picture here today or not. As before, it was certainly a treat for me to see them all (I think I do these "Baker's Dozen" calls for work because they're so much fun for me—they reconnect me with actual photographs, which sometimes seem a little too "up the road and off to the side" during my daily life).

Here we go! —Mike

Photo by Peter Wright

Peter Wright took this wonderful picture with the 90mm Elmarit-M pictured at the right, which he purchased used when he "got back into Leica photography." He says he sent it in for repair because the red dot fell off, and then the replacement red dot fell off too, so he made his own and attached it with super glue! You can see it in the picture. The camera is the M240.

"I discovered that the lens has a slight rear focus of 2–3 inches when the subject is at about 10 ft. and the lens is wide open. However I compensate for this by jogging the focus ring just a smidge clockwise after making focus. (You learn to accept/embrace adaptations like this if you are a regular Leica user.)" He says it's his most-used lens. If he gets other pictures as great as this one, I can see why.

David Burnett, A gathering of NYC citizens at Ground Zero, 9/11/11

And then what would a post about Leica lenses be without a Noctilux? Famed photojournalist David Burnett took this with the famed ƒ/1 lens and a then-new Leica M9 at the 10th anniversary of 9/11 in New York City. His Noctilux had been "sitting in a drawer since late '78," he writes, "since I could never get it synched to my M4 rangefinders...but oh, how great with the M9!" This was shot at either ƒ/1.2 or ƒ/1.4.

David, one of the great American PJs of the past almost 40 years, is currently with Contact Press Images, which he helped found.

Here's another famous Leica lens—the Dual-Range Summicron. For this picture, Lindsay Bach of Fort Washington, Maryland, used the Leica M2 and the DR Summicron shown at left, purchased secondhand in 1984. This shot was made in the close-focusing range. It certainly has that "DR look" that's so familiar.

"I purchased a Beseler copy stand last summer along with a small light box, some old negative carriers from eBay and began camera-scanning medium format negatives using a Sony A7RII fitted with a Sony 90mm G OSS macro lens," Lindsay writes. "The results were immediately superior to anything I had gotten from the scanners—and for the first time, the grain in the image files looked like grain did through the darkroom grain enlarger."

The candid portrait was taken in New Orleans in the 1980s.

Photo by Larry Angier

Jealousy alert: Larry Angier, who lives in the Sierra Nevada in California, got a call from a local contractor who told him to come quick, because they'd found a closet full of old cameras and were going to throw them out. It was all "a day away from the dumpster" as the contractor put it. Larry rescued the orphaned cameras (owner or heir unknown, I gather), none of which, judging from the most recent of the partly-exposed rolls of film he found in them, had been used since the '90s.

The cameras and lenses had seen better days but not a hard life. Of a pair of IIIf bodies, the shutter of one was still working; the other is now a shelf queen. The IIIg and the two M4 bodies needed only CLA (clean-lube-adjust, for you post-film people). The M3 needs a CLA but also a new beam splitter and, Larry says, "my guy can't fix it." But that's not so bad: the black-paint M4 is working well with lenses from the same era. Larry says there were lots of non-Leica items as well, including a Canon 7S with 28mm to 135mm lenses, including two 35mms and two 50mms; a Voigtländer Prominent system with three bodies and six lenses; and so on.

Many of the 1950s lenses had some fogging, but the M lenses, which include a 28mm Elmarit-M, 35mm, 50mm, and 90mm Summicrons, a collapsible "radioactive" 50mm Summicron, and a 90mm Tele-Elmarit, "are now back in use, gladly focusing on good old Tri-X and Fujicolor film." There were also several other M and LTM lenses; three Visoflex finders, bellows and lenses; and all sorts of tubes and adapters. "Needless to say, it was quite a collection," Larry tells us.

And all "just a day from the dumpster." Some guys are just lucky!

Photo by Earl Jamgochian

"I stumbled into Leica to some extent, not planning on buying into the system," writes Earl Jamgochian of Fullerton, California. "Just happened to stop at my local used camera shop to pick up some Tri-X on the day that an estate collection went on the shelf. An M6 TTL and two lenses—35mm Summicron and 90mm Elmarit—came home with me. I added the 50mm Summicron a few months later, to round out the set." Earl used the 50mm to take this picture of his grandson learning to walk.

"To my eye, there's a 'pop,' a richness of color or depth of grayscale range with the Leica images that I don't see with my other 35mm camera/lens systems. I know of the mythological Leica 'glow.' I don't think my eye is good enough to make that determination, at least with color negative film and scanned images; too many variables. I sometimes wish I had had the Leica in the Kodachrome era."

Photo by John Dana

From there, let's move from the old to the new, and from one far corner of the USA (Southern California) to the other—John Dana lives in the State o' Maine. John bought the Panny/Leica Nocticron—full name, Panasonic Leica DG Nocticron 42.5mm ƒ/1.2 ASPH. POWER O.I.S.—specifically for flower shots, and it wasn't easy for him to pull the trigger: "I stewed for months over this lens, from the first rumors, through the early press releases, reviews, and then user experiences. On the one hand it cost a bundle; on the other, it promised to be a legit 'magic' lens for the Micro 4/3 system, only the second after the Olympus 75mm. So, finally, after considerable inner dialogue (picture the angel on my right shoulder, the devil on my left), night after night, the lens (and, as it turns out, the angel) won. I picked this image because it emphasizes the water droplets on the stamen and the petals, while showing off the azalea flower. The lens works great for this. It was taken in the early morning after a night of dense fog. The flower was just in the light, and the lens allowed the background to remain dark, without disappearing. I rarely crop images, believing that what I saw through the viewfinder at the time is important and worth keeping. I picked this image because it emphasizes the water droplets on the stamen and the petals while showing off the azalea flower. The lens works great for this. It was taken in the early morning after a night of dense fog. The flower was just in the light, and the lens allowed the background to remain dark, without disappearing. I rarely crop images, believing that what I saw through the viewfinder at the time is important and worth keeping.

"I like this lens a lot."

Gordon Haddow, Cathedral of San Fernando, San Antonio, Texas

Here we're getting about as far away as we'll go from the old overbuilt golden-age E. Leitz taking lenses. Yet it doesn't look wrong. Gordon Haddow took this graphic detail shot with a Panasonic DMC-ZS20 zoom point-and-shoot. But it has a Leica-branded DC Vario-Elmar 4.3mm to 86mm (24–480mm-e) lens. "Nice little camera for walking around with," Gordon reports. Processed in Lightroom.

I guess cheating from the editor is a hazard of the Baker's Dozen idea, but I just couldn't choose between these two great shots sent in by Ivan Muller of Pretoria, South Africa. The handsome fellow above is a fisherman on the banks of the Sabie river in Mozambique. He caught the two tiger fish, Ivan tells us, with his bare hands! The photo in the inset, which I think is equally excellent, demands a closer look; all the reposing body parts add up to a painterly composition. It's a shot of Ivan's family and friends on a lazy Sunday afternoon at his best friend's holiday house on the banks of the Ebenezer dam, in the Limpopo province.

Both shots were taken with the Leica Elmarit 24mm ƒ/2.8 ASPH as found on the 12-MP Leica X1 camera introduced in 2009. Ivan is a commercial photographer based in Pretoria whose personal work is mainly to document the people and places of Southern Africa. He adds, "I also have a soft spot for street photography and architecture when I'm on vacation in Europe, specifically Italy."

Photo by William Schneider

While not meaning to give you an overdose of cute kids, I have to agree with William Schneider that this shot has an odd sense of mystery somehow. I'll let Bill tell us about it: "The photo was made with a 1958 collapsible Leica 5cm ƒ/2.8 Elmar that I had purchased cheaply. I found it in an old camera store that had creaking wooden floors—the best kind of place. The photo shows my nephew as a child. You can't quite tell what sort of trouble he's into. It's a mysterious, quirky moment, and it also presented an opportunity to show the proportions, volume, and roundness of a young child's head. The photo was made in 2002. I was using Tri-X film at the time, and likely exposed at EI 200 instead of the rated film speed. I used very dilute HC110 developer because it was cheap.

"I photographed with the Elmar lens for a short time, then sent it to Sherry Krauter for a CLA. It came back much improved, but I used my other lenses much more often. The Elmar is a bit cumbersome to operate because of the way the aperture dial turns with the front assembly while focusing, and it's optically slower than the others. But the 'look' it produces is very nice. It has 15 aperture blades that create a near-perfect circular opening. The Leica MP body shown with the lens is not the one used for the child's picture. I used a Leica M6TTL, but it's been sold.

"From 1987 through 2003, I taught a darkroom photo class that was required for some majors at Ohio University. I've recently retired from teaching. During that period, I've witnessed a great upheaval not only in the technology of photography, but also in the makeup of the photography student population and how they work. Still, I had one student interested in doing darkroom work, and he purchased the Leica M6TTL mentioned above. I gave him a very good deal knowing that he'd use it.

"I still have the Elmar lens though, and I'll keep it for sentimental reasons."

Photo by Dan Smith

"Photographer Dan Smith here in beautiful Nanson, North Dakota where Winter had not yet hit. Still fall weather and only four or five subzero days so far as we move into Winter." So began Dan's email.

Dan took this at the Mohall Diner, in Mohall, North Dakota, with a Panasonic Lumix LX-7. "As I eat I watch the other folks in these diners and restaurants and when I see something that looks interesting I pull out the little Panasonic. This gentleman and his family were eating two booths from us. Talked with him after we both ate and let him know of the photograph. He was passing through on the way back to where he lived further South.

"The little Panasonic is not threatening to folks like pulling out the Canon 1 series bodies with a lens tends to be."

Photo by Steve Renwick

Steve Renwick is doing retro right if you ask me, and I think all you grizzled old photo-dawgs out there will agree: "Shot on glorious Tri-X with a Leica M3 and collapsible 50mm Summicron in January 2016. This is at the beach at Pillar Point, near Half Moon Bay, California. Exposure was set by sniffing the wind and using the Force.

"The camera is from Dave, my former darkroom teacher, who taught at Skyline Community College starting lo these many years ago and retiring last year. He bought the camera and lens almost new in 1964 in San Francisco. I think he was not entirely convinced that selling it was a good idea, but he fixed me with a gimlet eye and said, 'Well, I know you will use it.' I didn’t exactly experience the scales falling from my eyes and proceed to sell all the other cameras—I won’t let go of my beloved Nikon FM3A—but damn this is a fine piece of machinery. I agreed with Dave that loading anything other than Tri-X in there was inadvisable and probably illegal."

Photo by Millard Maclaughlin, scanned by his grandson, Gordon Coale

"Kodachrome..." writes Gordon Coale. "...That was something. This isn't my picture. It was taken by my grandfather, Lt. Colonel Millard Maclaughlin, in 1949 and 1950. He went to Morioka, in northern Japan, as part of the occupation forces. He took these pictures with a Leica IIIc, a Summitar 50mm ƒ/2 lens, and Kodachrome. The picture of the camera is the one my grandfather used. It's mine now.

"About ten years ago my uncle gave me a slide case of my grandfather's slides. Among them were 44 slides from his stay in Morioka. Four years ago I scanned them for my family members. My grandmother had written titles on the slides. One of those is the picture of a slide that I'm holding.

"Scanning them was quite an experience. Each time I brought another up in Lightroom I was amazed at the color and detail. Today photographers complain if their camera can't cleanly produce photos at ISO 3200. I think Kodachrome in my grandfather's time ASA 8, maybe 16. It was easy to block up shadows but I was able to pull more detail out than I thought was there by looking at the slide."

Jana and Marta at the Skopje Zoo, Leitz Wetzlar Elmarit 90mm ƒ/2.8. Photo by Darko Hristov.

This next one is tricky, because it violates the bounds of the straight "Baker's Dozen" concept a bit. But it's so interesting in several ways that I decided to share it with you.

First, Darko Hristov of Skopje, Macedonia, sent the above photo of his older daughter Jana with her cousin Marta as his submission for this feature. The camera and lens choice, he said, is telling: "this is a picture shot with the Leica M2 on Ilford Pan 400 using the old Leitz Wetzlar 90mm Elmarit ƒ/2.8. A magical lens, but hard to work with on a rangefinder. Nevertheless, when you get it right, angels start to sing." He continues, "I also have a Leica S with a 75mm CS ƒ/2.5 lens. The fact that I don't include a Leica S photograph but have chosen pictures taken with that old Elmarit should speak volumes."

Elena in the intensive care unit

But if you detect a seriousness on Jana Hristov's face in the portrait, you're not wrong. Far more interesting than the camera information is the backstory of the photograph that Darko shared with me. The picture of Jana and Marta was taken a week after his younger daughter, Elena, was born two months early with severe respiratory problems. "At that time Elena was still in an intensive care unit bound to a respiratory ventilation machine, and we did not know if she would survive. It would remain so for the next three months. The shot of Jana and Marta was taken at the Skopje Zoo, where I took the girls for a day trip in order to project a hint of normality."

Elena, age two

The story has a happy conclusion, though. "After the first three months, luckily everything got better. Elena is six years old now and a healthy and lovely girl."

Smartphone selfie of Darko and Elena now

This last picture, of dad and daughter, was taken two days ago on Monday of this week.

Although just four pictures, they illustrate a story. I hope it's not too much of a stretch to include the supporting pictures and the backstory as a slight nod to the classic photoessay and the old idea of "the concerned photographer," since those things are an element of Leica's history and heritage too.

But lastly, back to cameras and lenses...that fourth picture, of Darko and Elena now, was taken with a Huawei P10 phone that identifies the taking lens as a "Leica Summarit H" on the back! So in the end we're back to pictures taken with Leica lenses.

(My thanks to Darko for his help putting this together, and very best wishes to the Hristov family of Skopje!)

Dave Reichert, Carol on the Pacific Coast Highway, August 1978

And finally, one more for good measure: this is totally cheating too, but as a former custom exhibition printer and darkroom rat I couldn't resist. This picture wasn't taken with a Leica lens...but Dave Reichert used a Leica enlarging lens to print it! The inset JPEG shows the whole neg. Dave made the old print on Kodak Velox, enlarged with a Leitz 100mm ƒ/4 V-Elmar, on his Beseler 45-MCRX with a Beseler Point Light Source. "The oddest of odd-bird enlarger heads," Dave calls it, "used only by certifiable photographic masochists. There's virtually no information about it on the Web except for some user manuals for sale. I gave away my entire darkroom a couple of years ago, but for some reason I kept the point source head. Go figure."

Brett Weston used a point-source enlarger head too, in his darkroom in Hawaii where he printed at night with all the windows open to the humid Pacific Ocean air. The 100mm V-Elmar was a fine old enlarging lens. (The picture was taken with a Nikkor.)

[Ed. Note: Thanks again to everyone who submitted! And sorry again for all the fine pictures I didn't publish, including the portrait of science fiction authors Larry Niven and Robert A. Heinlein, and the picture of Henri Cartier-Bresson out and about.

If you think there are more that 13 choices here, you probably miscounted. But no need to bother counting again. Let's just go with 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.)
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Wes Cosand: "Wonderful. The series by Darko Hristov was what I needed tonight."

The Old Flog Turns Twelve

The Online Photographer, which you are reading at this moment, is 12 years old today*. The very first post went up on November 28th, 2005. At that time, blogs were the very latest hip, hoppin', happenin' cool thang—and my ambition was to try to keep one going for one whole year. It was a preposterous notion, and I had every expectation of failure: I was a dilettante, and (as I used to say) "constancy was my worst thing." I couldn't do anything once a day, not even the dishes. What were the chances I could write a blog post every day?

But I was dead broke, and had no prospects, having just been turned down for a job editing a twice-a-month in-house newsletter for an independent hospital, for barely enough money to keep me and my then-12-year-old son alive. They said I was "overqualified," which, while true—I could have done that job working only on the weekends—was a bitter, bitter pill. I think Wisconsin Electric turned our power off three times that Summer.

I had always wanted to write books, and I still cart a bushel full of book ideas lovingly around in my head, where they shall probably still be when I shuffle off to Buffalo. As a countervalence to that, though (have I said this before?), Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, considered his detective tales to be fluff, pining to become a "serious" writer. He even tried to kill Holmes off, but was forced by public clamor to bring the sleuth back to life again. Short take: Doyle had found his rare good thing, a gig that many writers would kill Moriarty for, but he didn't even appreciate it. I've seen the same thing many times in a number of different fields over the years. So maybe I don't get to write books. But I get to write, and I have readers, yo. Be happy where you hunker. Life happens at home.

This is post number 7,714, and if you arbitrarily assign 500 words per post including things like replies to comments and the like (this one's 350 so far), then I've written 3,857,000 words on TOP since 2005. That's the equivalent of 38 full-length novels, by word count at least. Steven King has written 107. Then again, Anna Sewell wrote only one. It is called Black Beauty. Conceived to encourage the ethical treatment of horses but beloved as a children's book, it was published in 1877 and its invalid author lived on long enough to see the early glimmering of its success. It has never been out of print and to date has sold some 50 million copies worldwide.

Am I digressing again? I am, I am. Better get back to building that Baker's Dozen post. Seven done and six to go. But happy b'day, old flog.

Mike
(Thanks to all of my readers then to now)

*And fast becoming a difficult adolescent.

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:

Dean Forbes: "Happy Birthday to us (it's mine today, too)!"

Richard Skoonberg: "Congratulations, Mike. Your blog is the hippest, coolest, and most sublime blog on this here Internet. I am very grateful you have stuck it out for 12 years. I didn't know that about Arthur Conan Doyle, but the same was true for Rod Serling of 'Twilight Zone' fame. He never thought much of his writing for television; he longed for fame on Broadway as a playwright. Congrats, again, for a remarkable milestone!"

Edward Taylor: "I feel a little like it's my birthday too. I followed you here from a different website, and I have read every post and every comment on your blog since the beginning. I have even written a few articles for your blog. The Online Photographer was a long shot that worked! Or, maybe not such a long shot since you are so good at what you do. It's been a great run and it's not over! Congratulations Mike!"

Baker's Dozen: Young Photographers (Call for Work)

Good mornin'.

First of all, it's "Cyber Monday" today. It's the day when you're supposed to buy something through the links of your favorite website to help keep them in business (hint, hint) (wink).

I get remunerated for the number of things I sell through my links as well as for their dollar amount, so even if someone (a hypothetical person) were to order a few things of negligible cost they would still be helping out. I'm just mentioning this theoretically—I'm not entirely sure, but I think the terms of service of my various affiliations specify that I can't actually urge you to use my links. I'm just reporting about Cyber Monday here. Here's a list of those affiliates:

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

But in case you do, thank you! Of course, I'm just as grateful if you ordered anything through my links during the rest of the year, but I'm trying to go along with the program here. I don't know what I'm doing. It's really hard to make a living on the Web.

It's going to take me longer than eight hours to compile the "Baker's Dozen: Leica Lenses" post, so please look for it tomorrow instead of today. I didn't want to start until I had all the entries in, and they were still arriving as of late last night. 

Next up
To paraphrase Monty Python, and now for something completely noncommercial. For our next Baker's Dozen, we'll be featuring younger photographers. TOP's audience skews old (they have more in common with me—you know, like polymathic sagacity and dashing good looks), but I know you're out there! And I'm sure you more mature photographers know younger ones you can clue in about the call for work.

I was going to ask for only teenagers and kids to submit work, but I decided that would be pushing my luck (extra points if you're still a teenager or younger, though). So we'll arbitrarily set the dividing line at your 30th birthday—if you're 29 or younger* on the deadline, you can submit. The deadline will be Thursday, December 14th.

Regular readers might remember this one by my son Xander (short for Alexander). He's 24, and has been shooting his rock-climbing buddies and other sad and scary things with my old Sony A900. 

The specs are the same—send the picture(s) in an email, saved in sRGB and 800 pixels wide. The subject line must be

bakersdozenyounger

...Just like that, or I won't find your entry when I search for it in the email stack. Tell me your name, where you reside, and any details about the pictures you care to; keep the verbiage shortish if you would be so kind, as I am swamped with words...happily, but still**.

On to "Pictures Taken with Leica Lenses" tomorrow—it is gonna be great.

Mike

ADDENDUM: Peter Marquis-Kyle brought up an interesting wrinkle—this is a call for work from photographers who are young now. But Peter suggested we do a call for pictures people of any age took when they were young. It's a great idea, and I'll do that in the future. But not this time 'round.

*In honor of Jack Weinberg, below, who coined the phrase "Don't trust anyone over 30" during the free speech protests at UC Berkeley***. The phrase, which was picked up by a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle and radiated outward from there, "became one of the most memorable expressions of the turbulent 1960s era" according to the Berkeley Daily Planet.

Jack Weinberg. Courtesy Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley Archives.

Jack Weinberg is now 77.

**I know I should take my own advice. I've been writing too "long" lately.

***I hope you noticed that this is an old-guy reference about youth. ("Amused myself, and that's half the battle." —Craig Ferguson)

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The New Leica CL

Here's a new camera that's right down my alley. For several years I shot with the Minolta CLE, which was Minolta's version of the original film Leica CL, using the great 40mm ƒ/2 M-Rokkor, which was Minolta's version of the Leica 40mm Summicron-C (the Minolta was the better lens because it had better coatings. The CLE was a better camera than the CL, too, let down only by fussy, finicky, frustrating film loading). 

Leica has now revived the old "CL" name (back then, it stood for "compact Leica") for the digital age. Any time an old-line company reuses a canonical name from its own history, it's a good sign it's proud of the new product.

While there's no doubt I would like and enjoy the Leica CL, however, I have one tiny problem with it. And that is: why in the world would anyone ever buy one?

Image courtesy Camerasize.com

It makes no rational sense. Compare it for instance with the Sony A6000. The CL appears to be a perfectly serviceable small and handy little digicam with a 24-MP sensor. The Sony A6000 is a perfectly serviceable small and handy little digicam with a 24-MP sensor...made by the company that makes the sensor. The difference is mainly that the Sony is currently on sale for $448 (without a lens, although a basic lens costs a negligible amount more) and the CL with its slow little 27mm-equivalent pancake lens is going to sell for...$3,795. That's THIRTY-SEVEN HUNDRED AND NINETY-FIVE DOLLARS.

The value equation is insane. You could buy eight Sony A6000 bodies for the price of the Leica CL and its little lens, and have money left over. Or you could buy a Sony A6500 top-of-the-line model, and a Samsung Gallery Note 8 smartphone with its excellent camera, and the latest Sony full-frame A7II mirrorless camera, and still have enough money left over to treat your spouse to not one but two $250 dinners at restaurants that most people, maybe not billionaires, would consider nice.

But I can still think of a few reasons why you might still prefer the Leica. Here's what I come up with:

• You're not price-sensitive to the cost of cameras. With tens of millions sloshing around uselessly in your many bank accounts, it makes no difference to you.

• You hanker after the status, prestige, and exclusivity of an expensive alternative—using the "bargain" version of anything doesn't make you stand out from the riff-raff and the hoi polloi.

Okay, those two bullet points are, I don't know, kinda surly. So are there any positive ones?

• You're a great aficionado of Leica, enjoy the heritage and history of the products, and have stuck with them for many years, and you would rather stay within your "home" brand for everything. And the CL is not the digital version of the film CL, the CL is the digital Barnack-camera. That's worth a lot, if you're steeped in Leica lore.

• You love Leica lenses. The quality satisfies you and nourishes your enthusiasm. You know you like the look. And besides, that tiny 18mm pancake looks wicked cool (it does, too, brother).

• You want it. It's not hurting anybody else, and spending money on your hobby is better than spending money on vices, so, so what if you do? You want it. Get it. After all...

• ...It's Christmas.

Well and good so far. And there's a reason that appeals to me:

• Leica is the only company today that dares to make simple cameras. It's blatantly, painfully, excruciatingly obvious that the camera companies have allowed themselves to chase features 'n' tech right down a rabbit hole, making cameras so ridiculously complexified that only tech-whiz mavens can really wrap their heads around them...in the meantime just frustrating the hell out of most other users and driving them straight into the welcoming arms of blissfully simple smartphones. Simplification is the next frontier, like connectivity and software was the next frontier up until just a few years ago, and cameramakers, heads firmly planted in the sand, are ignoring it. Only Leica has the Jobsian confidence to be different and pare down to essentials. "Designed with Leica's minimalist yet functional school of thought, the CL is a compact, sleek mirrorless digital camera offering intuitive control...."

Say no more. Reason enough to go for it?

Mike

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Bear: "I really, really, really want to love you, Leica CL. I want to love you so much that your price is not an object. But sadly, my darling heart, I don't."

Chan: "I have few dollars left after buying Leonardo's Salvator Mundi, so maybe I'll buy the CL."

BH: "Turns out everybody already owns a compact camera with a 28mm lens. Just check your front pocket."

Rodolfo Canet: "An often repeated argument in the Leica User Forum about the CL is that it's a 'little fun camera.' Maybe you missed the 'fun' aspect in your value comparison, Mike. I, for myself, am a party-spoiler: when I spend so much money—I've done it—I use to agonize and become very sad."

Ken Tanaka: "Careful there! You’re talking about something that could have been a nominee for Camera of the Year...in 2007. What’s the value proposition of the CL? Beats me, Mike. Simplicity? Nonsense. Triple the image quality of, say, my Sony A6500? No chance. How about equal image quality and/or versatility to its price peer, the A7RIII? Yeah, right. The allure of the 'pure,' lovely Leica M10 I understand. The allure of this under-featured over-priced CL escapes me."

Peter Komar: "I was waiting for the Leica to show up on your site and yes I would like to own one but never, ever will. I would like to know how many of your readers own Leica digital cameras and how often they are used—daily, weekly, once a month, three times a year? But again I would like to own one, that's is the lure of the brand."

NickD: "Since you are clearly in a mischievous mood Mike. If they must buy a new Leica CL then make sure they buy it through your Amazon link!!!"

Mike replies: In the twelve years I've been in business, I don't think twelve people have bought a Leica through my links. It's more like, I hope they go to B&H Photo through my links and then buy something else!

V.I. Voltz: "I would pay $3,300 to not have to deal with Sony menus and controls."

George Sinos: "Until recently I taught a five-week 'Intro to Photography' class at the local community college. For several years this course was mainly populated with students that wanted to 'learn how to use this expensive DSLR.' The first week was dedicated to learning how to choose a focus point, and making the camera focus on what you wanted, instead of what it wanted. So, every camera need to be set for center focus point, program mode, and all of the 'intelligent' features turned off. With 20 students in a class, several camera brands and models, this was usually a 30–45 minute exercise.

"Most of the students were surprised that, at the end of five weeks, they had learned a handful of fundamentals and didn't need 90% of the features on their camera. At a minimum, they were better prepared to choose which features were of value to them. My biggest problem was every camera manufacturer had a different name for functions that were similar or identical. Even within the same camera family there were different menu structures and names. I read a lot of manuals, most of which were pretty bad."

Steve Biro: "All of the reasons you listed for why one would buy the Leica CL are completely legitimate. And yet...I personally would never buy any digital Leica. The issue for me isn't whether they are good cameras. It's more a realization that all digital cameras are only temporary mounts for their lenses.

"I can't imagine that the new CL—or any digital M—will still be working 50 years from now the way, say, an original M4 is. I'm not even sure about the 25-year mark. Eventually, the electronics will fail and that will be that.

"And then there's the question of whether someone will even want to use a 25- or 50-year-old digital Leica. Already, the sensors in Leicas from only a few years ago are dated and produce results that are noticeably inferior to what one gets from the latest technology. That's not Leica's fault. That's just life in the digital age.

"So, for me, there's no value proposition at all in any digital Leica. But that doesn't mean they're not lovely cameras, including —maybe especially—the CL pictured above. For those who have the means and desire, I say more power to you."

Maggie Osterberg: "I kind of feel like I already own that camera—the Olympus Pen-F. Yeah, I know there are more dials and buttons and the sensor is bigger, yada, yada, yada. But, in practical, day-to-day use (especially if you avoid using all the JPEG do-dads), the Pen-F comes awfully close.

"I got mine to stand in for my M9-P while it was getting a new sensor from Leica, and it did yeoman's work for me. Heck, they even look alike: even as a Leica user, who loves her M9-P like she loves her faithful collie, I have to question the roughly US$2,700.00 price difference. Especially since Leica makes a range of Micro 4/3 lenses. Not to mention that I can use all of my M-series lenses, too.

"The CL is gorgeous, no doubt amazing, and probably a joy in hand. But unlike the M-Series cameras, it's not alone in a crowded marketplace."

Nick Rains: "Not sure if anyone here has actually used one or has just read about it...I now own one, and I love it to bits. I'm lucky that I get to see a lot of Leica products before release, and I ordered this within ten minutes of unboxing it. The lenses are astonishing and the IQ overall is brilliant. Forget APS-C vs. full frame, irrelevant, pixel-peepy stuff. The prints look gorgeous, even A2s and that's all that matters. If you liked the Q you'll love this."

Al Mallozzi: "For the record I am a longtime reader of your blog. I am a Leica shooter: M6 for seventeen years, used almost daily, mainly B&W. M262 used daily, even more so now that I am retired. Leica makes great products."

It's Today

It's actually Black Friday today. Hard to believe....

Here is our link to B&H Photo's Black Friday deals and

Our link to Amazon's Black Friday deals. Because it's today.

I had a great Thanksgiving yesterday, thanks to Leslie and Kat. (I have to say, I love Thanksgiving. It's my favorite holiday.) Use our links and poke around at B&H and Amazon today. But get outside, too. Have a nice one!

Mike

ADDENDUM: Izzy Flamm tells me these are among the most popular deals so far today at B&H Photo:

Canon EOS 5D Mark IV DSLR camera (body only) with Watson battery: final price $3,199; savings $609; free accessories valued at $130.

Canon EOS 6D Mark II DSLR camera (body only) with Watson battery: final price $1,699; savings $509; free accessories valued at $130.90.

Canon EOS 6D Mark II DSLR camera with EF 24–105mm ƒ/4L IS II USM lens and Watson battery: final price $2,599; savings $709; free accessories valued at 130.90.

[Ed. note: I am uncertain as to whether the above deals include the pictured Canon battery grip, and I couldn't get confirmation before B&H closed today. I'll try to get this clarified later. The Nikon links below do include the Nikon battery grip. I assume the Canons do as well but the listings are unclear. P.S. Please do not e-trample other shoppers in the frenzied struggle to claim these deals.]

Nikon D750 DSLR camera with 24–120mm lens with Watson battery and Nikon battery grip: final price $1,996.95; savings $1,429; free accessories worth $119.89.

Nikon D750 DSLR Camera (body only) with Watson battery and Nikon battery grip: final price $1,496.95; savings $829; free accessories worth $119.89.

Apple 15.4" MacBook Pro with touch bar (late 2016, space gray, 2.6 GHz i7, 256GB SSD): final price $1,799; savings $600.

Apple 15.4" MacBook Pro with touch bar: (late 2016, space gray, 2.7 GHz i7, 512GB SSD); final price $2,099; savings $700.

Apple 13.3" MacBook Pro (late 2016, space gray): final price $1,149, savings $350.

Apple 13.3" MacBook Air (mid 2017, silver): final price $849, savings $150.

Samsung Galaxy Note 8 SM-N950U 64GB smartphone (unlocked, midnight black): final price $799.95; savings $170.

Moto Z Play XT1635-02 32GB smartphone (unlocked, lunar gray): final price $299; savings $150; free accessories worth $34.95.

Zhiyun-Tech Crane v2 3-axis handheld gimbal stabilizer: final price $479; savings $170.

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Happy Thanksgiving

...Well, I guess I should have mentioned that I'll be "off" (mostly) today and tomorrow, and then the weekend. I'll post the "Baker's Dozen: Leica Lenses" on Monday.

And of course today it's Thanksgiving in the U.S., so I want to wish Happy Thanksgiving to everyone who is celebrating today.

Thanks for the discussion, two days ago, in the "Fixed Object" post. It might be an all-time highlight for wonderful, thoughtful comments across a wide spectrum of responses. Grateful thanks to everyone who commented. I haven't even finished posting all of them yet.

The above is not a photograph. It's just a snapshot, because it's just informational. I wanted to show you the new campfire pit that my friend Dave Standish made for me. It's just what I wanted, country-style, stout but not perfect. This shows the maiden fire, the first one I had after the mortar set.

Here's Dave, at work encasing an old concrete chimney flue in stone. You can see that the mortar is still wet in the top courses of stone. Dave and I have had some very interesting discussions about "anonymous craftsmanship" which I'm sure will float to the surface on TOP sooner or later. He doesn't sign his work or collect records of it. When I asked him about that, he said "I know where it all is." He's a neighbor, too—he farms cattle and poultry and grows vegetables and fruit trees in the high meadows up Welker hill from me. He raised the turkey we'll be eating tonight.

I've always loved craft for craft's sake, and Dave is a great craftsman. He's an old-fashioned stonemason of a kind whose numbers are dwindling. He apprenticed for more than 20 years. He told me he knew his apprenticeship had ended when the taciturn old master he worked for contemplated something he had done and after a long silence said, "good as I could do." Dave's skill is great and his work is beautiful.

So what does this have to do with Thanksgiving? Well, I've mentioned several times before that I and my brothers and cousins are descendants of a Mayflower pilgrim, William Bradford. And Dave is a descendant of Miles Standish, who also made the two-month crossing of the Atlantic against the wind in the Mayflower, that crowded and leaky square-rigged, beak-bowed merchant ship that was nearing the end of its service life. Tonight I'll be having Thanksgiving dinner with Dave and ten other local friends at our friend Leslie's house in the woods. I just think it's kinda cool that both of our however-many-times great-grandfathers also ate together at what is called "The First Thanksgiving," at the English settlement of Plymouth, in what eventually became Massachusetts, A.D. 1621.

Hope you have a good one. Remember to count your blessings.

Mike
(Thanks to Dave)

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Tom Burke: "Happy Thanksgiving, Mike! I reckon that your descent from William Bradford makes you an honourary Yorkshireman, given that he hailed from Austerfield which was then in the West Riding of Yorkshire. (These days it’s in the Metropolitan District of Doncaster, in South Yorkshire—the Ridings were abolished in the 1970s.) So if you ever make it to the Broad Acres, think of it as a homecoming. Looks like the Parish Church (where William Bradford was baptised) is still there. Obviously in his adult life he fell out of sympathy with the evolution of the Anglican Church and became a Separatist, which lead eventually to his participation in the Mayflower voyage. Which you would probably regard as a Good Thing! (I don’t know if you know this, but a Separatist was someone who wanted to separate themselves from the established church in England because they regarded it as too corrupt to save. The laws in force then effectively forced Separatists to leave the country. A Puritan, on the other hand, was someone who believed that ithe Anglican Church could still be Purified, and therefore stuck with it, and with England. Oliver Cromwell would be an example.)"

 

Open Mike: Are You Getting Older?

["Open Mike" is the often off-topic Editorial Page of TOP. It appears on Wednesdays, with the possible exception of when it doesn't.]

-

Are you getting older? Not all of us are. The young are not getting older—they're just continuing to be young. I didn't start getting older, for instance, until I reached my 50s. Before then, from in here, I was just me. Aging was something that was going to come along later.

All people are different in terms of what they're most in touch with. Some people are most in touch with their bodies; some with their minds. Some people are very in touch with their emotions. A lucky few have arrived at a "value system" that serves as a filter through which they evaluate and view the world and events within it—I know one person who views the world through the filter of radical left-wing politics; another through Freudian psychoanalysis; another through aesthetics, fashion, and style (this, like all value systems, can lead to distortions—once, when she was young, this friend casually waved off the matter of Nazism's atrocities on the way to waxing eloquently and at length about how cool, and how sexy—yep—their uniforms were); others through a variety of passionate hobbies or pastimes or pursuits, like Jay Leno with cars. It's one of the attractions of photography for me that it's only a funnel: different people can be wholly passionate about it yet put it to the service of radically different interests. Recently I've had the good fortune to meet several old-order Mennonites whose value system is that of their community and their churches, and I have to say they are among the happiest, most well-adjusted humans I have met. There is a great deal to be said for belonging to a tribe. Some people are most in touch with their spiritual side, whatever that means to them. Others might be most in touch with their relationships and friendships.

I'm not very in touch with my body. Somewhat out of touch, I'd have to admit, with my emotions. Literally out of touch with friends, since I don't call them or see them enough!

I'm mostly in touch with my mind. And I've been utterly fascinated watching it...well, decline.

Should I not admit that? Or not write about it? I know this is an unpleasant, even tragic subject, but really, why not hold it up to the light and look at it? We all get old if we're lucky, so why not take an interest in what's happening to us as it happens? Noting the emergence of little glitches in things like my typing, my gait, and my speech, and the declining of my mental powers, was what most clearly alerted me to the fact that I was aging.

I think we reach a stage, in middle age, when we naturally start paying attention to our health. It's like we haven't seen it coming. As if it surprises us. We're like, "Whoa, this is going to happen to me?!? [Expletive deleted]. I'd better stop smoking and start going to the gym."

This may simply be a standard, common reaction to the aging process. Evolution protects us by "programming" certain outlooks at different ages: when we're young we think we're invincible, and young people accept certain risks to their safety in order to experiment, or to have sexual experiences, or for purposes of lekking...just as if they're programmed to do so. Similarly, people at some indeterminate middle age often have what I call the "uh-oh" response: it starts to dawn on us that, in David Letterman's words, "this train only goes one way," and that we had better wake up and take care of ourselves if we want to...well, last.

I live right next to a road in a recreational area—it's open to cars, but in the Summer, cars are greatly outnumbered by cyclists, women pushing strollers, joggers, walkers, dog-walkers, even people on skateboards and Segways. I think of this "uh-oh" idea every time I see a roly-poly fiftysomething striding purposefully past—especially the ones who have outfitted themselves for exercise with special clothes and shoes (and sometimes, if they are female, unflattering tights), and are doing that hilarious hand-up pumping action with their arms. I see that as merely a signifier—they're walking, but what the signifiers signify is, "I'm not just walking, I'm exercising!" (Dammit Gumby.) Doubtless they will treat themselves to an extra cupcake because they burned off so many calories, or so they think, out on their brisk constitutional.

Those folks do make me smile, but I'm not mocking. I walk too. And they're trying. Big points for that.

Here are three basic things you can do for yourself as you reach the "uh-oh" phase of life: You can exercise, improve your diet, and improve your sleep.

Exercise
Taking that first item first, there's new research showing that working with weights is excellent exercise for aging bodies. There's a nice article about that called "The Best Exercise for Aging Muscles" in the NYT that reports some fascinating recent findings. (Good luck with that one, Self! I said to myself.)

Diet
The second, diet, is something I've been working on for a long time, with decidedly mixed results on account of I have average to below average self-discipline and poorish impulse control, along with quasi-addictive behaviors around sugar (common among still-recovering alcoholics such as moi). But on that head I'd like to recommend a plainspoken little book called 4Leaf Guide to Vibrant Health by Kerry Graff M.D. and J. Morris Hicks. Regarding the "Whole Food Plant Based" (WFPB) eating plan the book espouses, it's very interesting to me that the "V-word" diets (vegetarian and vegan) are essentially centered around an ethical stance towards animals first and foremost...embodied in the late Linda McCartney's idea, "don't eat anything with a face." But you can be a vegan and eat mostly junk food. Rather than focusing on what not to eat, WFPB tells you what to eat: roots, bulbs, stems, leaves, flowers, fruits, mushrooms, nuts and seeds, legumes, whole grains, and spices*. I'm personally convinced that anyone not used to eating that way should try it for six weeks. Assuming you are able to pay close enough attention to how your body feels, it will be highly educational.

A small book about the size of a guidebook, the 4Leaf Guide is a very short, succinct tour of the many issues surrounding eating plans today, and does indeed guide you through that confusing maze. The difference 4Leaf brings to the table is that it assumes you'll want to bring WFPB into your eating plans to whatever degree is right for you; hence 1Leaf, 2Leaf, 3Leaf, or 4Leaf. There's no all-or-nothing about it. There's also a short but effective online questionnaire that evaluates the healthfulness of your current diet.

(Disclaimer: I've been dating Dr. Graff, and she's a friend. However, Kerry donates 100% of her proceeds from the book to charity, so she doesn't stand to benefit monetarily from my endorsement.)

Sleep
The third one, sleep, is something that has interested me since I took a course at Dartmouth called "Sleeping and Dreaming" from the late Dr. Peter Hauri of what is now called the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Sleep Disorders Center. Dr. Hauri, who was Swiss, later became the Director of the Sleep Disorders Center at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota. On this heading I'd like to highly recommend Chapter 8, "Rhythms," of the book The Hungry Brain by Stephan J. Guyenet Ph.D. The book, which is about recent developments in obesity research from a neuroscience perspective, was recommended to me by the venerated and oracular Oren Grad, curator of Not-So-Stately Grad Manor View Camera Museum and Graveyard, who himself has 17 advanced degrees and speaks 14 unrelated languages and I am only exaggerating slightly. Oren works as a medical policy analyst, an incomplete description of his job, which takes 6.4 minutes to explain even briefly and again I am only exaggerating slightly.  :-)

Anyhoo, the chapter in The Hungry Brain about sleep is eye-opening...er, eye-closing. The book as a whole is written for laypeople, but I would have to say it would be best for people of considerable scientific literacy, which does not exactly include myself. In case you don't want to read it, here are a few things the author recommends for improving sleep:

• Stay in bed long enough—that is, reserve enough time for sleep. Note that this varies between individuals: average sleep need is eight hours, but the range of normal sleep need can be anything from four to 16 hours and anything in between. But if you're like most Americans, it's probably 1–2 hours more than the time you reserve for sleep now. 

• Set times (or "windows") for going to bed and waking up, and try not to deviate from that schedule.

• Use the bedroom for sleeping and sex and nothing else; remove distractions such as TVs, pictures, fish tanks, clocks, and mirrors.

• Make the bedroom as dark as possible at night and as quiet as you can.

• Starting two hours before your bedtime, lower the lights in your house as much as possible, and don't expose yourself to anything upsetting such as the news. Don't watch any kind of television or video or sit at the computer.

• For an hour or two before bed, don't expose yourself to blue or full-spectrum light. You can do this by using "warm" (2700K) light bulbs in your house—or, for the truly propeller-beanied** among ye, you can get yourself a pair of these and wear them for a while before bed:

They're Uvex blue light blocking glasses. Especially useful if you must work at the computer before bed. (Which you shouldn't do, but which I do. I haven't gotten a pair of these glasses yet though.)

• Expose yourself to blue light as soon as you get up in the morning. You can do this with a SAD (seasonal affective disorder) therapeutic light such as this model by Verilux, but a more effective means is to just go outside for five or ten minutes after you get dressed every morning. (I do this because I take the dogs out first thing. May be one of the reasons why I'm sleeping better lately than I ever have in my life.) There's lots of blue light in daylight. It will help you wake up and re-synchronize your body's circadian clocks.

• Don't nap.

• Don't eat in the two or three hours before bedtime.

There are all sorts of good reasons to get a good night's sleep, and, by extension, to work to reset your body's clock mechanisms. All those reasons are beyond the scope of this already-too-long post, but I will mention a couple of fascinating things from The Hungry Brain: habitual lack of sleep correlates surprisingly well with obesity. (It also increases your risk of injury or death in an automobile: driving while sleepy is almost exactly as predictive of accidents as driving while drunk.) Not only that, but eating during or within your sleep period is an exceptionally bad idea. One study fed a control group of rats in the middle of their waking hours, and a test group in the middle of their sleeping hours. The group fed during sleeping hours became obese, and the group fed during waking hours stayed at a sleek, healthy weight, even though both groups were fed exactly the same amount of calories. This suggests that food intake might be metabolized differently by the body when ingested during the hours of the night.

That's enough typing for me on these topics! This got a little out of hand. As someone*** said, sorry for writing so long, but I didn't have enough time today to write it short.

Mike

ADDENDUM: The day after I wrote this post, I had a dream in which my hair got grayer and grayer over about a 24-hour period, and I ended up looking like Nelson Pass. Think aging was on my mind, maybe?

*Here are a few examples of what those things mean: roots (potatoes, carrots), bulbs (onions, garlic), stems (asparagus, celery), leaves (lettuce, spinach, and other salad greens), flowers (broccoli, artichoke), fruits (berries, citrus, tomatoes), mushrooms (white, shiitake), nuts (walnuts, pecans), seeds (pumpkin seeds, hemp hulls), legumes (beans, peas, lentils), whole grains (rolled oats, brown rice), and spices (nutmeg, turmeric, oregano).

**Not to say tinfoil-helmeted

***Usually attributed to Mark Twain, but then, as someone else said, a lot of things are. To paraphrase Yogi Berra, Mark Twain never even said half the things he said.

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

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Ken James: "Hi Mike. This subject is standing squarely right in front of me this very minute. My jaw dropped when I saw that you had posted on the subject. In April of this year I got up one morning and I was 42 or so. This morning when I got up I was clearly around 75. Like you I am mostly in touch with my mind and as you also totally utterly fascinated watching this change. Yes you should write about it, absolutely. I will read eagerly. I am enthralled by the subject. I have had several things happen to me the last bunch of months which has totally shifted my perspective. I am really 70. I do pretty good with all three points you bring up. I have been a vegetarian most of my life, but never eat junk food, except for pizza and that once a month, only. Cheese has always been a no. The most interesting thing is the change in outlook on life, and looking at the perspective that time gives one. I will look for your friend's book. Over the years I have enjoyed following your adventures in eating and diet. I find this subject also very interesting."

bryan willman: "I'm actually getting younger. Partly because in my younger years various health issues made me 'old,' and those are better managed now —> younger. Partly because my life circumstance allows much more time for exercise, proper sleep, and so forth —> younger."

Don: "This is excellent: Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams. A really good read by a sleep researcher. Most memorable for me was the idea that we should set an alarm clock not to wake us up, but to tell us it's time to go to bed. Also, from another source: 10, 3, 2, 1. 10 hours before sleep no caffeine. 3 hours before no food. 2 hours before no work. 1 hour before no screen."

Steve Jacob: "Hi Mike, very apposite in my case as we are of a similar age and decrepitude.

"Ten years ago, I was overweight, had high BP and cholesterol, and was prediabetic. My weight is now normal, BP 120/70, blood sugar normal, cholesterol 3.1. Drug intervention at my age is almost standard, but I am on the minimum dose in each case. Most of it is precautionary.

"I lost 28 lbs. by simply avoiding sugars and simple carbs, as well as fatty foods and alcohol. I also eat small amounts as needed, rather than full meals. I eat probably about 6–7 times a day, but small quantities, which reduces my appetite. I feel ‘full’ after a tuna salad, which is great.

"I don't have anything in the fridge that's bad for me, so there is no temptation. I have a very standard shopping list of healthy foods, which also means I have one less boring chore to think about. I have far more interesting things to do, and life is too short.

"Similarly, I do much more exercise, but never for its own sake. I find the idea of it mind-numbing, so I do it for some other motive, not to feel virtuous. I find reasons that are entirely practical, or fun, and which integrate it into my useful activities. I call it stealthercise.

"I live in an area of London full of rivers and canals, so there are many winding scenic routes between my home and most places I frequent. Instead of using a car or bus, I walk. It's tough in bad weather, but in good weather, I take a camera.

"I also like wandering around London. It's a huge area (around 500 square miles) and there are wiggly routes around all of it that throw up interesting discoveries. It keeps me engaged, I meet people, find great little galleries and museums, and interesting images. If I end up miles from home, there is always a bus or a tube to get home on. It's not exercise, it's exploring.

"However, the one thing you didn't mention, and which seldom gets serious attention, is mind exercise. A few years ago, I started doing cryptic crosswords, something I was never good at. Gradually I started to 'get it' and now I can sit down and polish off the Guardian daily in about 30 minutes. It was hard, but that’s the point. I am now trying the Times.

"It also contributes to my stealthercise, because my favourite coffee shop is three miles away. I walk there, pick up the paper en-route, spend a happy half hour stretching the brain over a skinny latte, then walk home via the scenic route, carrying my groceries in a backpack.

"Six-mile round trip by the river means I hardly notice the fact that I walk around 30 miles a week, briskly. It also means I can buy groceries from several sources and markets, instead of just drudging round the supermarket and being tempted by all the unhealthy

"About three years ago, I also started writing a technical book. It was a subject I knew something about, but if you want to find out how little you really know, just try writing a book about it (or running a course about it). It put me back in the zone I was in at college - trying to understand something, and then trying to find a way to explain it—which is another challenge in itself.

"I found that my mental abilities improved markedly as part of the process. This took some time, and so did the book, but the difference after a year was astonishing. I looked back and realised how dumb I had become. It was quite scary.

"One of the problems as we age is that we become habitual thinkers, avoid challenging what we think we know, and get very defensive about it. We actively stop creating new neural pathways and rely on habitual thinking that was forged and fixed in our thirties. Creating new ones helps us cope with change, like digital cameras and editing software, and change habits that are no longer appropriate—like partying, eating burgers, and getting drunk....

"Neural pathways, like muscle tissue, need to be constantly renewed, and it has to be something challenging. The trick is to make sure there is also a real objective that matters to us, not a dull virtuous one that is an evil necessity.

"Exercise or dieting for its own sake, or simple vanity, becomes a chore to be secretly and subconsciously subverted. 'I ran six mikes today so I deserve a pizza' is the reason why there are so many fat joggers around. A little self-knowledge is a dangerous thing, and far too many self-help books are written by charlatans.

"I find getting obsessed about things other than myself is a lot healthier."

Quote o' the Day: Barack Obama

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"Sometimes you've got to choose the aesthetic over the narrative."

—President Barack Obama, advising his former White House Photographer, Pete Souza, on the editing of Souza's new book, Obama: An Intimate Portrait, released earlier this month

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The Fixed Object (A Spiky Thorny Question)

How very curious that even only a few hours after posting, we had gotten several diametrically opposed answers to the question in the the previous post.

One comment, however, spurred a different but related question in my mind. Paul Giguere said, "I recently bought a Sony RX100 Mark III for $750 and have pretty much used this as my only camera since then. To date, I have shot about 1,500 photos with it. So far, that comes out to 50 cents per photo."

Maybe it's just that I've had a private discussion going recently with a distinguished figure in the field (who does not wish to be quoted or named) who said that, for him, a photograph has to be an object—but the question that came to my mind was: has Paul shot 1,500 photos with his RX100 Mark III, or just 1,500 files?

The spiky thorny question is, are files really photographs yet?

I suppose they are in some sense, because they can communicate to another person. A file doesn't have a fixed form, however. It can't reliably carry the intentions of its maker to an audience once it's released into the world*.

I wonder if, when people talk about how many exposures they take, they're really making a fair comparison. For 1,500 exposures of B&W film I would have loaded 42 rolls of film onto cassettes, made 42 contact sheets, between 50 and 250 work prints, and maybe 12–15 finished prints. That's a huge amount of work and a considerable expense—so much so that I haven't worked this way in the past 17 years or so—but all the same, it's not entirely fair to assume that it's replaced completely by just making digital files that don't have a fixed, finished form.

To get to the same point with digital I would:

• Spend a fair amount of time at the computer and in Photoshop—not as much time as loading cassettes and developing film and making workprints, but enough time that it offsets somewhat;

• "Try" maybe 30 or 35 prints to see how they looked as prints, even if I were just "playing" or indulging my enthusiasm; and then...

• Make those 12–15 final prints, which would each require several sheets of paper to "get right" and, of course, the ink to print them.

Inkjet printing paper is (this is still astonishing to me) actually more expensive than sensitized silver gelatin photo paper, and there is no parallel to ink costs in silver gelatin printing except the paltry costs of the chemicals. Just as digital exposure are "free" whereas film exposures weren't, digital ink is costly in a way that has no analogy in traditional B&W film work.

The latest picture in my little iPhone portfolio of 12 or so prints that I hope to exhibit locally. It's called "Three Fish Jumped." It's destined to be a print but hasn't been printed yet. Illustrating this post with it constitutes publication, however. © 2017 by Michael C. Johnston.

Knocked out
These are just musings on the previous topic, that is, the relative expense of my photo hobby then and now.

I confess, too, that Dan Khong's comment made me shudder (except when I release my inner Buddhist and embrace my acceptance of the impermanence of material things):

Know when digital becomes expensive and you wished you had continued with film?

It's when your stored images get lost in a hard drive crash, or slowly but surely gets incompatible with the passing of time during which you got tardy and ignored the hassle of reorganizing your files.

That's when the nightmare begins, and decades of work gets knocked out.

Dan's words made me reflect that, out in my barn, I actually have these two things: a box containing old external hard drives from the 2000s, none of which will spin up any more and that require connectors that are no longer current—and the drives have pictures on them I don't have any other backups of. My bad, I know, but that's the situation. And a box containing notebooks full of negatives from the 1980s that I haven't touched in years, but that are still in perfectly good shape and could still be printed or scanned with no penalty.

My friend Ken Tanaka likes to chide us whenever the topic of film vs. digital comes up, as if everything new is simply better and saying anything in favor of old ways is hopeless reactionary regression and neo-Luddism, but my position is that when things change, it's interesting to be aware of what we have lost as well as what we have gained, even if the gains are greater. I'm newly sensitive to this as I get to know some of my Old Order Mennonite neighbors here in the region. There are definitely ways in which I would not be happy with the losses if I had to follow their way of life, but I—we—mainstreamers—have definitely lost some important things as well. In fact sometimes when I contemplate how my Mennonite neighbors live, I'm tempted to believe we "Standard Americans" have lost our way more than a little.

But I digress from the digression. What do you think of the idea that a photograph is not really a photograph until it becomes an object with a fixed form? Before you scoff and dismiss the question, consider that your descendants will probably never see it otherwise, and, certainly, posterity will never offer it at auction. But as long as we're taking that tack, do think this question is even, well, valid at all?

I might especially ask the people who bought Gordon's print "Precipitation" in the last sale, as you compare your print with the online JPEG representations you saw previously. Are they just different forms of an image? Do the two forms of the picture equate?

I have to admit, I think photographs are whatever they are...they can exist only on the cellphones of two friends, and only for two hours or two days before they're deleted, or they can be preserved as treasured artifacts in the vaults of great city museums, or anything in between. As a critic and commentator of the art and the practice of imaging, it would be foolish of me to believe anything else. On the other hand, I have to use myself and my feelings as a sort of compass or barometer as well, and I admit that at one time, I had difficulty accepting prints on resin-coated paper as "real"! I felt, somehow, that a photograph of mine wasn't really real, or done, until I printed it on fiber base paper. That's ridiculous and indefensible objectively, naturally, yet still, I did have that feeling. And I have to confess that there's a part of me, just a little part, that retains the sense that all my image files on my computer aren't really anything yet, that they don't yet quite exist. I can dismiss this feeling, and certainly reason my way around it, yet I can't quite banish it completely either....

Mike

*As an example of this, consider that in this post about two photographs by Nick Ut, both are crops, and I first presented the picture of Paris Hilton "being whisked off to jail" in the post as if it were the whole picture. Then we discovered a less cropped version, and then, later, one that was even less cropped. Which is the real photograph? Who got to decide—Nick, or the editor who assigned him, or someone else? Who cropped the most cropped version, and is the least cropped version actually the whole frame? No way of knowing. At least not without more research than I care to get into. Putting a picture into a "final, fixed form" is important if you work as an artist, because it's an important aspect of your intentions, which matter.

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Manuel: "A very interesting question. Do photographs exist before they're printed, enlarged, scanned or published?

"Recently I've made an in-depth research on the subject of copyright in photography. In continental Europe it isn't required that a work is fixed in order for it to be copyright-protected. All it takes is that the work is discernible in any way. Therefore, the moment a photograph is created—the one that determines protection—is when the photographer presses the shutter release button. Thus the photograph exists even in the form of a digital file (or a negative).

"This isn't idle. You might need to prove the originality of a photograph, and the metadata can be used as evidence. Likewise when needing to prove you are the author of the photographic work.

"Not so, apparently, under Common Law rule, where it's the copy that gets copyright-protected. In this case the photograph doesn't seem to get protection until it's reproduced by means of fixing it, be it on paper or any other means that bring it to the world of objects. According to the U.S. Copyright Act, a work is 'created' when it is fixed in a copy for the first time.

"Of course, the U.S. having signed the Berne Convention, courts might rule that the moment of the creation is when you press the shutter release button. The jury's out (no pun intended).

"So much for the legal side. Being 54, and having a drawer full of memories in the form of printed photographs, I've fought the idea that a digital file is a real photograph for some time, but now I've come to terms with the idea that what we see in the computer screen is a photograph. It is. I no longer care to print my photos, even the ones I find most significant. I'm not famous and probably my photos will never be exhibited, so why bother?

"I have no issue with virtual photographs. Of course it's always more interesting to see Bruce Gilden's portraits at an exhibition than on the computer (let alone on a smartphone); the experience is inimitable. But what if one never has the chance to see them at an exhibition? Better see them on a computer than never see them at all.

"Finally: 'when things change, it's interesting to be aware of what we have lost as well as what we have gained, even if the gains are greater.' That's what I call wisdom, Mike."

Keith: "A file is where you evaluate the technical qualities of an image, a print is where you evaluate the emotional qualities."

David Brown (partial comment): "Whatever was current when you were in your teens is the real stuff (for you)."

Mike replies: There's something to that, there really is. I used to put it this way: "The world you expect is the world you were born into." Everything else feels like change, or "the future," or things not as they used to be (or should be). But of course the world I learned about and discovered as a child was not the same one my grandfather, born 1902, found when he got here. I really am quite sentimental about the vivid experiences of my boyhood, it's true.

On the other hand I wouldn't trade the experience of living through the digital transition. I firmly believe that I've lived at the perfect time to have been a photography enthusiast—it was a great privilege to live before digital, in a time that was still so connected to photography's beginnings, a great opportunity to live through the change, and a great experience to live and work on the far side of it now, as well...to have made my entrance portfolio to art school in a little darkroom beneath the basement stairs, with my fixer-stained copy of David Vestal's The Craft of Photography opened on the sink, and to be making a portfolio with my smartphone now!  :-)

Ken Tanaka: "Two comments regarding your thoughts here, Mike. First, my recent comment regarding the film vs. digital topic wasn’t meant to be sarcastic or a reactionary criticism of 'old' media. It was an observation that you had presented a bit of a non sequitur for comparative measurement. That digital imaging is superior in every measurable technical parameter to chemical photography is no longer an arguable matter. But comparing the two beyond imaging capabilities is like comparing very different technologies, not simply old and new. The communications overlay, for example, makes the whole cost-per-frame measurement silly. What would it cost to make a film frame immediately viewable by hundreds of millions of people? And, let’s face it, how many die-hard film photographers are still wet-printing much, if any, of their work? For color the answer must certainly approach zero. Yet you can easily print nearly -any- digital image for the cost of a cup of coffee today. And so on.

"As I've said a great many times, here and elsewhere, photography for the vast majority of camera owners is a hobby. It's a diversionary undertaking for pleasure. I salute anyone who gets their enjoyment from the craftiness and tactility of chemical photography. But truly comparing its costs to digital requires that you first establish the field of view for those costs.

"As to your other point, a photograph becomes a photograph when an image is recorded…on any medium. But anyone expecting a digital image file to be an everlasting keepsake is a fool. There's simply no excuse for not making a physical embodiment—a 'print'—of your most prized digital images today. The permanence, quality, and affordability of today’s photo printing processes is superb. You don't have to have a piece of grand art to make a print. Nor do you have to make tableau-sized prints. But the only way to ensure the longevity of a photograph, especially a digital image, is to print it."

David Boyce: "Oh boy. Cat, pigeons. I am going to say film, but for a different reason than most I suspect. Digital makes it way too easy to spray and pray. I still use film for a lot of things, and the reason being that it makes me consider each frame. Each push of the shutter is thought about, composed and completed with conscious consideration. The plus side of this is that when I use digital I use the same approach which saves me time (which is money as we all know) in front of the computer editing and adjusting. When I find my frame rate in digital climbing and the actual good shots declining I head out with a film camera and reset my way of thinking."

JohnMFlores (partial comment): "I've grown much faster as a photographer with digital than I did with film."

Mike replies: True for me as well.

Richard Man (partial comment): "What I am most interested about is how many 'keepers' I get, not how many frames (digital or film) I have shot. The keepers are the 'photographs,' the rest are potential (some are much less than others)."

Film vs. Digital

I know, sorry about the title.  :-)  But people seemed eager to discuss this point, which arose in the comments to Friday's post and took off from there:

—For you, would you say digital is more expensive than film, or vice-versa?

(I'll give my own answer in the comments.)

Mike

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[Ed. note: The following two comments came in one right after the other.]

Ken Bennett: "I was spending several thousand dollars a month on film and processing. My first digital cameras—a pair of Canon D30s in early 2001—were totally paid off in a couple of months. A pair of 1D bodies the following year (at $5,500 each) were similarly paid off within the year. It's more complicated now, since clients think digital is 'free' and don't want to pay for any associated costs. Freelancers and studio photogs and others running their own businesses have to face that. But for me, a staffer at a small university, the reality is that digital is far less expensive than shooting film."

Benjamin Marks: "OMG. Digital is so much more expensive than film, it is not even funny. Factor of five or seven. This is because film hardware was a durable good. Still is. Ten- to fifteen-year upgrade cycle and the pro level gear still worked a (human) generation later. Digital is the opposite. It is a fashion/consumer good. Obsolete after three to five years. And your upgraded camera can require an entire computer hardware/software upgrade downstream. Ugh. I love what I can do with digital, but I hate the technological cul-de-sac."

Geoff Wittig: "It depends on how you shoot, and on your tolerance for sitting out the upgrade cycle. If you shoot thousands of frames a week, you might come out even or possibly ahead with digital capture. Not for me, though. Back when I shot K-64 and Provia, I was painfully aware that every click of the shutter cost about 75¢ between film and processing, even if the resulting images were garbage. There was a powerful financial incentive toward accurate exposure, and shooting hundreds of frames 'just to be sure' was an expensive luxury. On the other hand, you could shoot equally excellent images with a battered used K-1000 or a brand-new F4, and getting a 'new sensor' was as simple as using better film. I shoot digital with the same exposure discipline I used with slide film, so 50–100 frames is a lot for a day's work. Hence for me digital has been much more expensive per frame, once I add in the cost of camera bodies, even skipping several upgrade cycles. It gets more complicated if you add image quality (okay, resolution, tonal smoothness and color accuracy to be specific) into the equation. To get the excellent print quality at large sizes I can now achieve with digital capture, at a minimum I would have needed 6x7 medium format or (more likely) 4x5 large format film, and both cost and inconvenience would explode."

psu (partial comment): "Like most of the 'big questions' that are endlessly debated on the hobby forums there is no single context-free answer here."

[Ed. note: This is a tiny excerpt from psu's lengthy and thoughtful comment. For the full text of any "partial comment," please see the full Comments section.]

Tex Andrews (partial comment): "Hmm...well, in capital investment digital has been far more expensive. One reason for that has been upgrading, from 3.2 MP to 5 to 8 to 10.1 to 24 to 36 and then 50. In between also adding in several cameras for specific functions, and now one as a backup. And then there are all the lenses. So, that's been a lot of money since 2001, even though over half of the cameras were bought as refurbs or at the end of the production cycle, so at deep discounts. But that's also a bit of an anomaly of the age. People coming into it now don't have to do that as most of us have had to this past almost two decades."

Mike replies: Very good point. I've watched more and more people get off the upgrade treadmill as the years have gone by and the products have matured.

Tobias Key: "I think it's worth noting that film is cheaper to get into, and you only have to spend money when you want to shoot. Digital requires you to spend all your money upfront, often quite a considerable initial investment for pro level gear. So although film might not be cheaper in absolute terms, the cost might be more manageable if your income is unreliable. I think this might be why film cameras have found popularity among younger photographers. The best pro film cameras hold or slightly increase in value so are essentially free or even a modest investment. So you can always get that part of your cash back too."

Dennis: "I can't tell you whether I'm spending more (on an annual basis) now than I did when shooting film (I don't have a good sense, never mind inflation). But I can tell you that I'm shooting a lot more photos for my money."

Andrew Lamb: "This is a trick question. Both of 'em are expensive. Film processing isn't cheap and the constant upgrading of digital cameras or changing of systems (and we all do it) is similarly costly."

Lance Evingson: "Digital is far cheaper, thank goodness! Garry Winogrand once quipped that to do street photography in color one needed to meet three conditions. One of them was to be independently wealthy...."

Mike replies: And many photographers we now consider famous names were independently wealthy, including Cartier-Bresson. Others willingly accepted poverty so they could do what they loved, or broke themselves self-funding outsized projects.

Rodger P Kingston (partial comment): "I think digital is significantly less expensive, due to the elimination of the costs of film and processing alone."

AlanH: "I guess it depends on the parameters; for example, I'm still using film cameras I bought in the '70s and '80s, but not a single digital camera I bought before about 2014. I'm still using analog enlargers bought nearly 40 years ago, but not a single desktop printer purchased in recent years. Therefore, if I were to lump all the digital cameras, specific accessories for those cameras, printers, software and upgrades over the years into one bucket I've spent quite a bit more on digital than ever spent on film-related stuff."

Jim in Denver: "Unquestionably film [is more expensive]. It's borderline ridiculous to even ask. The wholesale destruction of the entire photo processing industry is because the money required to pay for that was removed from the mix. Many local camera stores gone because they survived on processing. Digital became dominant in such a short time because it was cheaper. When I was more involved in the industry it was apparent that professionals making a decent living were spending the value of all their camera gear on film/processing about every three months."

Jeremy Stein: "One of my favorite sayings is: 'After the first 10 or 15 thousand dollars, digital pictures are free!'"

Allan Ostling: "For me, the distinction between digital and film applies only to the recording process, and the subsequent storage of the image for posterity. I currently shoot mostly film; after digitizing the negatives I make prints on my Epson P400, just as I would do if I had the image on an SD card. My theory is that after I am gone any SD cards in my estate would be chucked. Film negatives, each roll with an inkjet-printed contact sheet stored in a ring binder, have a better chance of surviving. This is especially true of my documentary photos of 1970s New Zealand, and the updates which I record after return visits to my ex-pat city of Wellington."

Bill Pearce: "Film is like an easy installment plan. Take photos, pay a bit. unfortunately more inconvenient with the lack of pro labs that offer quick reliable service, but still.... Digital is the same as the homeless people at the foot of freeway ramps. Digital's hand is always out, day after day (new camera, new software, oops now need a new computer) and you don't know what side is up (is that guy really homeless? If so by chance, by choice? Is this new camera really that big an improvement over my last one? Is this latest software update necessary?) and don't even begin to go into workflow. Digital makes people shoot waaaaaaay too many frames; film encourages one to think before pushing the button. Digital allows people who have enough money to run to best buy and get a fancy DSLR and immediately call themselves pros, thus killing a good business for those of us who have devoted much of their lives to learning about our craft and practicing it. All in all, I was happier with a 500CM and a 12-exposure back."

TDE: "I am just a hobbyist, but I specifically remember fretting about costs often when I was shooting film: 'Should I get cheaper film or the more expensive one I like better? Oh, my God, I shot eight rolls of film, how am I going to pay for that? I wish I could find a cheaper place than X for developing.' I haven't had any of those concerns since digital."

David Miller: "The price is identical. They cost the amount of money that I have available and wish to spend on photography. Admittedly I'm spending more money on (digital) photography currently because I have more money available for discretionary spending than I did in my (film) days as a starving student and then not-much-better-fed actor and luthier. Life is pretty good. Now if only my eyesight weren't failing…(ironic grin)."

Jamie Pillers: "About 10 years ago I was paying about $2,000 a year for color film and processing. Since then, I'd estimate that I've spent something similar to that buying, selling, and buying each new iteration of digital camera gear. As far as processing goes, I'm going to assume that the costs of my digital post processing is similar to the money I spent on darkroom stuff.

"However, these issues didn't matter at all in my decision to leave film for digital. About the time digital gear arrived on the scene, I started a new family. It was clear then that I was going to have zero time to lock myself away in the darkroom for hours/days at a time. It was just a coincidence that these two things happened at the same time, but I'm pretty sure that I wouldn't have continued with photography if digital hadn't come along at just the right time.  :-)  "

Heinz Danzberger: "Photography, the ultimate 'I need another gadget' world, always needing another lens, another camera, a backup system...photography is the most expensive! What was the question again!? Busy scouting Black Friday deals...."

Paul: "They are both bloody expensive if you shoot a heck of a lot."

Jon Porter: "Digital is only cheaper than film if you don't churn your gear or print. I do both, big time. In the 10 years I've been shooting digital I've purchased one or two new cameras and several lenses per year, most costing more than I ever spent on a film camera. And my yearly spending on ink cartridges and inkjet paper is astronomically more than I ever spent on darkroom chemistry and photo paper. Even factoring the cost of film, I'm still spending more per year than when I only shot film. But photography is just a hobby, so I don't mind spending more for the convenience of digital."

Richard Man (partial comment): "It's a non-question. Ultimately, which platform gives you the images you want to capture?"

Mark L: "People may not realize that back in the day film and processing was a great profit add-on for many professionals. I always added 25% on those costs and clients always paid without question. Now, try getting them to pay for Photoshop time.... Now that I'm semi-retired I've given up on digital except for a small outfit I use for stock photography for which the free ongoing cost is ideal, but for all personal work it's film all the way and a wet darkroom, which incidentally I recently worked out cost a quarter of what my new digital darkroom cost—but I did have a spare room in the new house (kids gone). I use everything from 35mm to 5x4 and my film and self-processing costs come to bugger all compared to the pleasure it gives me, whereas digital gives me no pleasure at all, so it must cost me too much!"

James (partial comment): "I've spent $15,000 over the last 10 years on digital cameras, and $5,000 on film cameras. The difference is that I still have most of my film cameras, whereas the digital ones have been traded up. So ultimately the hidden cost of digital is the upfront cost and high turnover of digital bodies. We're reaching a point of maturity though, and barring the mirrorless revolution I won't really need to upgrade as often. And for film? Well, I'll keep shooting it, just as quietly and slowly as I used to. Can't do without both. But for my style of shooting, film is definitely cheaper!"

Jim Richardson: "Just getting the picture taken is just the beginning of the cost equation. You then have to consider what it will cost to get that picture into a usable form. For me the cost of scanning slides proved to be the deciding factor that makes digital capture the winner. Beyond a core group of images taken on slide film I simply can no longer afford the cost and time of scanning so that the pictures can be put to economic use. It doesn't pay out. So thousands of images are sitting in file cabinets that will likely never be used again."

[Jim is a National Geographic photographer. —Ed.]

Quote o' the Day: Mark Twain

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The two most important days of our lives:

1. The day we were born
2. The day we found out why

—Mark Twain

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(Quoted by the legendary loudspeaker designer and engineer Siegfried Linkwitz on his Website. I apologize if the formatting of this post is screwy; the template I use is very limited in the ways it allows you to "set" type. "Set" in scarequotes because on the Web, it has become ironic!)

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Phil Krzeminski: "3. And the day we said yea or nay."

Martin Doonan: "I'm not sure whether to thank you or curse you for that link opening up a deep rabbit hole."

Lumix G9 and Leica Lens

Lumix and Leica? Well, all right. What's in a name?

This is what I was talking about when I said yesterday that Micro 4/3 users are lucky. (I got the song lyric wrong—thanks to toto for pointing that out. Now please do not tell me anything more about that song, please.) Not content to let Olympus hold the brass ring for the top camera in the Micro 4/3 category with its E-M1 Mark II, Panasonic has replied with its own assault on the top spot—the new G9, now the company's top Lumix for still pictures.

 

The press release touts a number of interesting features. First of all, though, it's bigger than the company's recent GX8, which itself was mildly criticized for being a little bigger than it had to be (I personally thought the GX8 was Goldilocks—not too big, not too small, but just right). CameraSize says the G9 relative to the GX8 is 3% (3.7mm) wider, 25% (19.4mm) taller (most of that in the central prism-style hump), 45% (28.5mm) thicker (most of that in the beefy handgrip), and, at 658g, the G9 weighs 35% (171 grams) more than the GX8 at 487g. It's bigger than the Fuji X-T2, too, which has a larger sensor but no IBIS.

A few of the features:

• They've upgraded the processor to get the most out of the new 20-MP sensor that I liked so much in the GX8, claiming the "highest picture quality in the history of LUMIX cameras." The new camera is claimed to have better DR and better noise reduction and color rendition in the JPEG conversions. New is an 80-MP-equivalent sensor-shift mode for static subjects.

• The 5-axis "B.I.S." (sic, for body image stabilizer), combined with 2-axis O.I.S. (optical image stabilizer) in the lenses, adds up to "Dual I.S. 2.0." Various claims are being bandied about on ye Net, such as "class-leading IBIS" and 6.5 stops improvement and so forth, but you have to stop and think about what those claims actually imply: namely that laggard Panny now comes up to the standard of Olympus's refined, effective IBIS. Really? That's a darn high bar. An even higher bar: that the G9's "B.I.S." alone is as good as Olympus's with unstabilized lenses. So, okay, we hope: but I've had problems with this and I'm going to be from Missouri on this one. I was unimpressed with the very modest IBIS on the GX7 (calling it a 1-stop improvement seemed about right), and Dual I.S. on one GX8 I used worked fine with a newer 12–35mm lens, but on another, with an older model of the same lens, didn't work right. I would await serious tests and reviews from the bigs.

• Huge EVF. Can't wait to see it. The GX8 has the best EVF I know of. Better than the GX8 means way good. [UPDATE: Jeff pointed out that the Leica SL is better than the GX8 and that's true. —Ed.] DPReview says of it, "we've...been blown away."

As an all-out assault on the all-in E-M1 Mark II, the G9 is going to have an awful lot to cover. But mainly, apart from the three features above: dust- and weatherproof body; greatly improved AF speed and focus tracking (although whether the latter comes up to a good DSLR remains to be tested), with 20 FPS bursts with continuous AF and 60 FPS with locked focus; focus stacking in-camera; somewhat better battery life; and dual card slots, both of which take UHS-II cards.

Ergonomics
Most promising (despite all the above) might be what Panasonic says about the design:

The LUMIX G9 includes a largest-in-class Status LCD on the top, allowing users to check the settings at a glance.

The Fn lever makes it possible to change the setting quickly once frequently-used settings are assigned. The LUMIX G9 also comes with a joystick at the optimal position to achieve intuitive focus area control without taking the eyes off of the viewfinder, together with a focus lever and AF mode button. Dials on the grip and Fn buttons are also located in the best position to operate unseen.

Early reports from people who've handled the camera are highly positive, indicating that Panasonic's camera designers might have pulled a Fuji, paying close attention to all the details that add up to operability. (Fuji, on the X-T2, even considered the sound of the shutter, which is delicious.)

Finally, the G9 starts at $1,699. Although the E-M1 Mark II is currently on sale for only $100 more, $1,799, Panasonic's initial price is $300 less than the $1,999 regular retail price of the E-M1 Mark II.  

I'm hopeful that some of the capabilities of the new G9 will trickle down to a still un-rumored but always possible GX9—I love the GX8's form-factor—but in the meantime, professionals and those who like living at the edge of the envelope may well find a lot to like in the G9. (For those who don't like living at the edge, there's still the GX85, which, in my humble estimation, is one of those special cameras that people really like even after they buy it. It's not available without a lens, unfortunately, but subtract the stand-alone price of the 12–32mm collapsible zoom and you come out with $300 for the camera. It's a good deal, is what I'm saying.)

Back to the G9, isn't it nice to have two choices of a push-the-tech camera in Micro 4/3? Micro 4/3 users get good toys...I'm stickin' by that.

Mike

P.S. Here's another one that will make you think...courtesy, again, of CameraSize.com:

Then again:

John Krumm: "Well, as a former E-5 user, it looks about right-sized to me:

(Link to CameraSize)

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Daniel: "The idea of small and light is nice but a camera that is too small to be comfortable in use doesn't work well. Some of these cameras are just too small for larger hands. Made even worse with winter gloves. I still love the feel and comfort of the 1-series Canons with a 400 ƒ/2.8 on a monopod on the sidelines of sporting events. Just a matter of what is comfortable in use."

Winwalloe: "The only design feature that bothers me on this camera is the side hinge for the rear screen. It means having to make you camera 'wider' when you want the rear-screen to face up or down."

Mike replies: I also don't like that about it. The way I use a rear screen is for stealth, and it's much easier, quicker, and less conspicuous when the screen simply tilts up. The Fuji X-T2 rear screen is ideal in this regard, to my tastes.

Above: Panasonic G9 back screen in tiltable position;
below: Fuji X-T2 back screen

Blog Note

I'm not ready with the new "Around the Web" feature yet, but it will be along ere long. Within the next week probably, the fortnight certainly. Sorry for the delay.

—Mike the slacker Ed.

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People Who Shoot Micro 4/3 Are the Luckiest People

Olympus's three new gee-whiz toys:
the over-the-top 17mm ƒ/1.2, 25mm ƒ/1.2, and 45mm ƒ/1.2

An ancient meme (from before the word "meme" entered popular currency thanks to Richard Dawkins) popped into my mind this morning: "people who love people are the luckiest people in the world." It comes from Barbra Streisand's first Top 40 hit, the annoying, cloying song "People," written by Jule Styne with lyrics by Bob Merrill, from the 1964 musical (and Streisand vehicle) Funny Girl.

I just looked all that up, of course. I haven't heard the song in decades (and would like to keep it that way, with apologies if you're a Streisand fan). Barbra Streisand, in case you've never heard of her, was a big pop star back in the '60s and beyond, with an unusually loyal fan base. Kinda like Celine Dion in more recent times, maybe? I dunno, I'm not good with power pop.

The phrase came to mind because I was thinking that photographers who shoot Micro 4/3 are the luckiest photographers in the world.

The Micro 4/3 consortium sorta boils down to two second-tier companies, Olympus and Panasonic, although there are a few other interesting things out at the edges. But having both those companies both co-operate and also compete with each other has invigorated both of them, and made Micro 4/3 a delightful hodgepodge. There are all sorts of cameras—I tried to count them all and couldn't, either current ones or all-time—and a vast array of lenses that, while decidedly not comprising a coherent, considered system (part of what's good about it, in my view), offer up all the wonderful toys pretty much anyone could dream of. [UPDATE: there have been 50 cameras and 68 lenses not including converters. According to this site, and thanks to Rene Theberge for the tip.] Olympus has been one of the world's special lensmakers since about the mid-'80s, and Panasonic somehow got to partner with Leica for its premium lens line, which is kinda like Buick being allowed to label its upper level cars "Ferrari." You just wouldn't think that would be something that would continue to strike Leica as a good idea.

The three ƒ/1.2 lenses (this is the 17mm) appear to
have been designed specifically for idealized bokeh

Anyway, the claim here is based on functionality and opportunity, yeah—but then, it's not as if Canon, Fuji or Leica don't offer those things. It's really the toy-chest nature of Micro 4/3 that makes its users so lucky. Passionate amateurs and hobbyists just want to have fun (hoo boy, this is bad today—Cyndi Lauper just sprung up uninvited in my ear) and Micro 4/3 (along with everything else it offers) is just lots and lots of fun.

Mike

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James Weekes: "Thus explaining my near constant goofy smile. Love the lenses. Just got the Olympus Pro 12–100 ƒ/4 lens (Curse you Kirk Tuck) and have spent hours using it. Wonderful."

Carol Teater: "As a Micro 4/3 user, I am less than excited with how divergent the system is. I see it more as two systems what will mount each other's lens, rather than a single, unified system. For example, I have an Olympus body and mostly Olympus lenses, and if I decided I wanted a Panasonic body, their DFD technology will not work with those lenses; you fall back to old contrast focus algorithms. If you buy any of the ƒ/1.2 primes listed above, same thing. I would think it would less of an issue with these, as the biggest concern is with C-AF, at least to me.

"Of course, it could be that the Panasonic bodies would focus my lenses better than my Olympus, as it is an older model (E-M1 original), but if I was going for the top models, I would guess that the E-M1 Mark II would perform better C-AF with my lenses than the G9. It would be great to see some comparison between the E-M1 Mark II and the G9 using Olympus lenses, but that is not too likely to happen, I think. I guess I could always rent a G9 and an E-M1 Mark II and try them with my lenses if I were planning to upgrade, but I more likely would just get an E-M1.

"That is the biggest concern to me, but there is also the issue of advanced OIS incompatibility and incompatibility of some Panasonic lenses with Olympus bodies for various reasons.

"Most people in the Micro 4/3 world seem to agree with you, though, including some people who have lenses from both companies. Me, I have a couple of Panasonic lenses, but mostly try to stay with Olympus lenses so I don't run into these issues. And once in one system or the other, I am very unlikely to get a body from the other one.

"FWIW.  :-)  "

Benjamin Marks: "Are you familiar with the neologism, 'earworm'? 'Girls Just Wanna Have Fun' is now bouncing off the empty space on the inside of my skull. Agree with you re power pop. Pop music lost me starting as a teen in about 1979, when I stopped listening to AM radio...I am not denigrating it, you understand, it just doesn't make me feel anything significant. And life is too short. But you couldn't escape it either and a couple of short years later Cyndi was prominently played (and re-played) in the running shoe store where I worked.

"Avaunt! Cyndi Lauper, I expell thee! Shucks. Didn't work."

Mike replies: "Earworm" is a calque (repurposed loanword) from the German Ohrwurm. I love the word calque since it is itself a calque, from the French meaning imitation or close copy.

Amy Sedaris says you banish earworm by intoning to yourself the phrase "By...MENNEN" from the old TV commercials. I'd say it works, but I don't want to jinx it.

Peter Gilbert: "From Thom Hogan: 'Did you know we're approaching 30 Panasonic m4/3 bodies [and] over 20 Olympus m4/3 bodies?' (Recent article on his sansmirror website)."

Digitizing 35mm Slides and Negatives

The Leitz Aristophot with some of its accessories
(Note: you don't need one of these)

-

Written and Illustrated by Henning Wulff

Digitizing slides or negatives can be a huge pain. The best way to get optimal quality used to be, and sometimes still is, to use a dedicated film scanner with its attendant software. Popular examples are the Nikon Coolscan series, such as the 5000 and 9000 models, which are now rather long in the tooth and need old computers or third-party software to work. The other problem is that they are slow, and even though the 5000 and its predecessors had batch feeders, they were too finicky to not need constant supervision.

A current solution, and my favorite solution, is to use a digital camera to digitize film. I'm going to concentrate on 35mm film here, as larger film is often better handled by other methods.

Vs. scanners
Photographing 35mm slides and film using a digital camera has a number of advantages over using a slide scanner. Mainly, it's a lot faster. As I (and probably many of you) contemplate digitizing thousands if not tens of thousands of images, time becomes a factor. Also, speed equals less boring. Digitizing is not very high up on my list of exciting things to do. I don’t want to digitize everything, but I don’t want to stop just because I ran out of time. Secondly, the files will be in the camera raw format, for which I have good software with a decent UI, and the raw files are relatively compact. Scanners need scanning software, which is almost universally clunky, and produces TIFFs, which, while they can be imported into the same processing software, are huge. They are probably the most universally readable files, so that is in their favor, but they are big, with the attendant problems that creates.

Camera and lenses
Which camera; which lenses? Macro lenses from the last couple of decades are generally very good to excellent and can almost universally extract the maximum of information out of most film of 25 ASA and up, as long as the lenses are operating within their design parameters. Current macro lenses for direct mounting to cameras are almost all designed with floating elements and for reproduction to 1:1, so are suitable. For slides, particularly in cardboard but also plastic mounts, flat-field reproduction is not critical as it's impossible to get the film flat unless they're removed from their mounts and placed in glass carriers. That's a huge pain that most people aren't going to put up with. Negatives are easily placed in glass holders, but then negatives are in general often not as "sharp" as slides.

I have a couple of different cameras at my disposal, from Micro 4/3 to full frame. The FF cameras (including a Sony A7rII) obviously have the highest sensor file quality, and the Micro 4/3, particularly the earlier ones, have a 16mp-sensor producing lower file quality. However—and this is the crux of my argument to generally use the Micro 4/3 cameras—the sensor size is not the same size as the film size. This is important, because it is necessary to focus on each slide separately, and that means manual focusing for the FF cameras. It is optically impossible to focus at 1:1 with AF, in whichever format. Thirty-five millimeter to FF digital is 1:1 imaging, so focusing has to be done manually by moving the camera or slide/negative. Thirty-five millimeter to Micro 4/3 is 1:2 imaging, approximately, so focusing can be done using the lens's autofocus. This speeds operation hugely.

In general, I use an Olympus E-M5 Mark II for copying with a Panasonic/Leica 45mm ƒ/2.8 Macro lens. If I want to get a bit higher file quality I use an Olympus E-M1 Mark II [currently on sale] with an M.Zuiko 60mm ƒ/2.8 Macro, but the differences are minimal and are rarely visible. I find it slightly clunkier to use for this purpose. On Kodachrome 25 it’s just noticeable on the most demanding slides. For very fine grain B&W film it's worthwhile to use the Olympus's multishot (i.e., pixel shift) capability, which results in effective 40–60mp files, but for slides and B&W films over 32 ASA I've not found this to be worthwhile. But multishot/pixel-shift is still faster and more convenient than switching over to FF, and results in similar quality.

Lighting
For lighting I'm using a color-corrected fluorescent lightbox or an incandescent light source, with a couple of high quality acrylic diffusion panels between the light and the film. The final diffusion panel is about 5cm behind the film. This avoids additional dust problems. The only important thing is that the light has to be truly continuous in wavelength and duration.

All cameras are calibrated with the X-Rite Passport ColorChecker, and for unconventional items I shoot reference images of the ColorChecker or color patches/gray scales under the same light sources as the lightboxes to make sure I have a solid basis for correction. I often deviate from that in processing, but at least I have a common base.

Stands
The camera gets mounted on one of two stands: either a wall mounted Bencher copy stand or an adapted Leitz Aristophot. The Aristophot was intended for reflected and transmitted micro photography in the range of 1:1 to 20:1 and lenses of 12.5mm to 120mm were available for it. It is usually used with a Leica MD camera or 4x5 camera (included). Depending on age, the focal lengths, names and apertures differed slightly. I have the 25mm ƒ/2.5, 50mm ƒ/2.8, 80mm ƒ/4.5 and 120mm ƒ/5.6 Photar lenses for it as well as a Zeiss Orthoplanar-S 60mm ƒ/4 and an Olympus 38mm ƒ/3.5. All these lenses are excellent, but the longer Photars are best in the range near 1:1. These do not outperform the Olympus 60mm ƒ/2.8 Micro 4/3 lens for slide copying, although for slow, high-acutance films they are worthwhile. However, the stand seems to be made of solid steel and although not that big, weighs about 60 lbs.

Alignment starts with good levels and a glass-mounted Kodalith negative. A couple of shots tells me what corrections have to be made.

Shooting technique
I usually shoot at ƒ/4 for glass-mounted slides and ƒ/5.6 for plastic-mounted slides. Occasionally ƒ/8 is required for cardboard mounted slides or other problematic film. At 2:1 (the Micro 4/3 magnification ratio), the depth-of-field is greater than at the 1:1 ratio required for FF cameras, so you gain a bit there, but of course the shorter focal lengths mean that diffraction creeps up sooner, so ƒ/8 is definitely the limit and ƒ/5.6 is better. Sometimes with wrinkly slides a compromise is necessary.

In summary
When practical considerations like using autofocus and the speed of workflow are taken into consideration, using a Micro 4/3 camera with one of the macro lenses made for it is an excellent option for digitizing 35mm slides and negatives.

Henning

Henning Wulff, who lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, is a retired architect and commercial/architectural photographer with a background in physics. He has used/shot many, many cameras and systems, from Minox to 8x10, and used to enjoy darkroom work. The only continuous thread in his equipment over the years are Leicas—since 1962.

©2017 by Henning Wulff, all rights reserved

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Marcelo Guarini: "Many thanks for sharing your technique Henning. I have a Pen F and the ZD 50mm ƒ/2 (with adapter) and the 60mm ƒ/2.8, and a couple thousand selected Kodachrome 25 slides. I have a Durst enlarger stand that I will adapt for the job. Thanks again."

Moose (partial comment): "You have missed a crucial, at least to me, aspect—dust, dirt, scratches, etc. The better dedicated film scanners, and even some flatbed scanners with illumination and holders for film scanning, have an IR channel which allows automated dust removal. This is, in my awed opinion, magic. No spotting!!"

Steve Hutchison: "I have been using a similar method to digitise slides for myself and family members. Results vary depending on the source material but some of the more recent Kodachrome 64 from 25–30 years ago looks excellent. The worst are the Agfa slides which are very purple and seemingly always with fungus. The speed of this system is what makes it attractive however, I can do a box of 36 in less than an hour including tidying up in Lightroom and uploading the resulting images to Googledrive for my father in law to download and relive his memories from 50–60 years ago, and that is the magic."

Geoff Wittig: "Excellent post! I have some thousands of 35mm slides, only a relative handful of which I have scanned. I still have a working Minolta Dimage 5400 scanner which is very good at extracting all available image data, but egads, is it slow and clunky to use, and on my current desktop the only software that works with it is Hamrick's 'good enough' Vuescan, which is pretty tedious, although I can't complain about the price. I'm feeling more than normally obtuse after reading Mr. Wulff's explanation, as I have all the requisite gear to do this, but never thought to try! (Smacks self on forehead)."

Dennis Moyes: "Honestly, you're really going to waste time doing this when there are reasonably priced, high quality service bureaus that will do it for you? I for one have better ways to spend my time."

Mike replies—even thought it's not his article—: Devil's advocate on that: Do you really want to ship your most precious irreplaceable slides and negatives off to some anonymous service bureau? Speaking just for myself, that would drive me completely crazy.

David Dyer-Bennet: "I tried a service bureau. The idea is good, but the price was not that minor, and I was not happy with the results compared to what I produce myself. And a more professional service bureau would have been even more expensive. (what sort of prices do you get good results for? Maybe I just didn't hunt well.) They seemed oriented towards producing 8-bit adjusted scans in sRGB, whereas I want 16-bit unadjusted scans in ProPhoto space (I want them to get the data out of the film and leave the rest to me). Also, the workflow is better if I get to decide what to scan as I'm running things through the scanner; I don't scan as much, and more of it is the right stuff."

Gerard Kingma: "An addition—how about medium format? I've literally written the book on scanning (shameless plug), and I shoot Fuji Velvia slides with my Hasselblad and an A16 645 back. Projection on the wall is the end product, and there's still nothing quite as marvelous. However, for print and web use, I can't feed the framed slides into my Nikon 9000 scanner. There's no holder for 6x6 slide frames. So I reproduce them with a Canon M2 on a tripod, with the slides on the light table. Here's the thing: I take two pictures, one of each half of a slide, and stitch those together in Photoshop CS5 > Automate > Photomerge > Reposition. The merge is seamless and it effectively doubles the resolution to about 35 MP. It works."

Lost Comment and Picture (Joni Mitchell)

Gerry Kopelow was a teenager in the sixties. Here's a shot of Joni Mitchell he got at the Mariposa Folk Festival in Toronto in 1967 or so (before security). Handheld Leica and Tri-X.

Big bad, much sorry. I failed to publish the above photo by Gerry Kopelow and the following comment that Jeff Markus wrote in response to the Joni Mitchell post (it's good, read it):

My first exposure to Joni's music was through a woman friend, though, as it was 1969, I was hearing the first two albums. Joni and Joan Baez seemed to be what many of the college-aged women here in California were listening to then. Never cottoned to Baez, but always liked Joni. A year later married a Joni fan, so Clouds and Ladies of the Canyon were in heavy rotation. Buffalo Springfield and Neil Young's first solo albums were my contribution.

Two years later, single again, I've fallen in with some hard-partying U.S. sailors stationed in Spain who have off-base living privileges. They've rented a huge old house up a dirt road and someone brings to the party a copy of Joni's new album, Blue, which has a lyric about her going to a party up a red dirt road in Spain. Still my favorite Joni album.

1985—working as a photo assistant and printer for Norman Seeff, in the studio shooting for the cover of Dog Eat Dog. We're told by the trainer not to move or speak as she brings the timber wolf out to meet Joni. The wolf circles a couple of times, then goes up and licks Joni's cheek. The trainer is astonished, says "he really must like you, he's never done that with a stranger before."

Two years later, taking a break in Joni's living room while shooting for the cover of Chalk Mark in a Rainstorm. She's explaining that she started using jazz players for her studio work because she was told by her rock players that they just didn't understand her strange chordal structures, but that the jazz guys would. After the break our first setup was at the piano. She played the lead-in for "The Last Time I Saw Richard," then couldn't remember where it went. I muttered "goddam weird chords," Joni busted up laughing, Norman got the shot.

My runner-up favorite Joni albums are Hits and Misses because the little white car on their covers is my Hollywood beater, four cylinders of fury, the mighty Datsun B110.

I just love stuff like this...a supposedly "off topic" post about Joni Mitchell becomes ON topic because we hear from the assistant to the photographer who shot many of her album covers. Great stuff. The Internet is goddam weird chords.

I meant to feature this but the task got lost in the shuffle. Big thanks to Jeff, and to Gerry.

Mike

P.S. My work day is done already (always goes fast), so Henning's article gets pushed back to tomorrow. It's about using a pixel-shift camera to rephotograph slides and negatives, another topic that arose last week.

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The (Many) Ones That Get Away

I saw a marvelous photograph just now. It's a dark, heavily overcast morning in Penn Yan. While not actually foggy, the air is laden with moisture and visibility at not-very-great distances is limited—the far shore of our narrow lake is muted in the gray air, pastel, pearlescent, its details indistinct.

Where Route 58 turns on to Liberty Street, coming North and West, there is a sweeping left-hand turn that doesn't quite make a right angle (the proper adjective is "obtuse," but "obtuse angle" is an obtuse phrase for people who don't remember high school geometry). As I drove East and South toward home this morning after an errand, I saw coming around that corner, first, a Mennonite horse and buggy—the horse a dark, sleek young bay, stepping at a brisk trot, the cab of the black buggy shrouded in shadow; and, following it around the corner, slowly, a hulking semi trailer-truck, all white, almost spectral in the half-daylight. It would have made a gorgeous photograph...

...For about half a second. Visually it coalesced, hung there poised for a fleeting moment in my sight, and then fell apart again.

I mused to myself that to have gotten that shot, I would have had to be on foot, walking, camera in hand. And I would have to have been on the lookout; because I am often lost in thought, I'm not always alert. It struck me that even if I had been situated ideally to encounter that wonderful momentary scene, I still would have needed some luck, not to mention good chops, to get the shot. Maybe better chops than I have any more, at my age.

I'll think about that picture-I-missed for a few days, holding it in my mind. Gradually it will fade, as most of the pictures-I-couldn't-take do. (Although a few I can remember for decades.) I don't know about you, but as I go about almost every day, I see far more photographs than it's possible to even try to take.

Mike

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Ken James (partial comment): "Walking around seeing pictures seems to be one of the side effects of being a photographer methinks."

richardplondon: "I recall someone (Henri Lartigue?) writing that as a child—before he had his first camera—he already longed to 'fix' or 'freeze' momentary sights and impressions as if captured by a camera in that moment. He would do this by blinking twice, quickly. Whatever flashed on his vision, isolated in time and in circumstance between those two black blinks, became an inarguable visual 'quantum.' Of course, this pretend-photo could not then be reliably remembered, let alone later re-manifested. Hence the camera.

"Yet, for example, the Impressionist painter Marquet was known for having precisely such a facility. He'd go for a walk, and when he got home, paint some scene he'd encountered—in lively and highly characteristic detail that was impressive to his fellow artists who'd accompanied him on that same walk."

Stan B.: "The ones that got away, the ones you almost got, the ones if only if...yeah, they add up after a while. The truth is, these magical visual moments of happenstance and grandeur occur in every city, town and path in between, all around the world, every hour of the day. They coalesce, shine and dissipate at a second's notice with your presence or not, with your recognition or despite it. And it's a wonder we ever get to pay any one of them any justice at all...."

Keith (partial comment): "I'm not sure which is worse, to see a shot you can't get for whatever reason, or being in just the right time and place for the shot but screwing up somehow."

Lindsay Bach: "I call shots like the one you saw 'retinagraphs.' My retinagraphs, etched in memory, are some of the most indelible images I know. Though they can be shared with no one, they are treasures nonetheless."

Good Morning!

Heh. This was just for fun. I belong to an online music discussion group, and one of the members just posted a new mix called "Perpetuum Mobile," and one of the group, Scott Ettin, responded a photo of his cup of morning coffee with the message "digging this over my morning cup." Another member of the group then responded with a photo of his morning cup. So I took a picture of mine...and then decided it needed, um, a little something extra.

Both shots were taken with the iPhone 7+, the one of the coffee cup in "Portrait" mode with fake software-generated bokeh. I don't normally make any Photoshop creations except when I'm just fooling around. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

I'm currently getting my coffee roasted to order by Stone Creek Coffee in Milwaukee, brewing it very simply. A few months ago I cut down from two 14-ounce mugs per morning to one.

A very nice guest post from Henning Wulff coming up as soon as I get it prepped.

Mike
(Thanks to Scott Ettin, KK, and C60Crew)

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

Bob Rosinsky: "Mr. Coffee."

David Dyer-Bennet: "The appearance of the face down in the cup was produced non-optically, right (by the app, presumably, combining images)? Because the only optical approach that comes to mind involves a fairly large half-surfaced mirror, and I doubt you wanted the effect that badly."

Mike replies:

No app—as I said, it was just me combining these two hasty phone snaps in Photoshop—bad Photoshop, by definition, since I hardly ever do this sort of thing.