The Online Photographer

Rumors of DxO's Demise Exaggerated?

The latest news from DxO, the French software maker, is that the company is merely reorganizing under Chapter 11 protection and will not abandon its customers. So what does that mean?

Well, there's probably no way of knowing. "Bankruptcy" seems to mean a variety of things for different companies in different circumstances. I've been trying to follow the bankruptcy proceedings of our local supermarket chain (it's the only store in our town, and would drastically affect quality of life here if it closed), and the more I read about it the less I can tell you about whether our store is safe or endangered.

However, DxO made the following announcement today:

We are very confident that this procedure, which should not last for more than a few more weeks, will not affect our customers in any way. In fact, we are pleased to announce the following upcoming product releases:

• In June, we will release a free update (version 1.2) of our flagship software, DxO PhotoLab. Recently awarded the TIPA 2018 Award for Best Image Processing Software, this latest version of DxO PhotoLab will include improved local correction features, and will add support for 7 cameras, including the Canon EOS 2000D and the Sony A7 III. This release will also be an opportunity for us to reiterate our commitment to the “perpetual license” model (as opposed to a subscription model) that allows our customers to update their products according to their needs, rather than in a constrained manner.

• In June, we will release the new version of the Nik Software Collection, which DxO acquired from Google at the end of 2017. Much awaited by the Nik software community, this first “by DxO” version focuses on fixing bugs that up until now could disrupt the user experience, as well as on ensuring full compatibility with the latest Mac OS and PC platforms.

Encouraging as these statements are, it's worth noting that news about corporate restructuring from the corporations themselves could be strategic and might not necessarily be reliable. But at the moment, at least, things certainly look less than dire.

Also worth noting is that according to Wikipedia, DxOMark is a separate company.

If anyone knows more about this, feel free to jump in. Also, if there are any users of DxO PhotoLab out there, let us know what you think of it.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2018 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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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

adamct: "For what it's worth, in a Chapter 7 bankruptcy, the assets of the debtor are sold to satisfy the debts. That would effectively mean the end of DxO as an independent entity. In a Chapter 11 bankruptcy, the debtor strikes a deal with its creditors to try and restructure the debt. This is why the debtor in a Chapter 11 bankruptcy is often referred to as the 'debtor in possession'—the debtor gets to hold onto their business and assets while they try to repay the restructured debt.

"But as Mike says, this can mean wildly different things in practice. Sometimes debtors are able to reorganize, pay off the negotiated debt amount, and move on with a successful and stable business. Other times, the reorganization is a failure and the debtor ultimately winds up in Chapter 7. The third option is that the debtor just manages to hold on, repeatedly restructuring its debt, never getting rid of it, not fully failing, but really not all that successful, either.

"Fingers crossed that this is just the first step toward making DxO more stable and setting the framework for future growth and success."

Ilkka: "I am not a lawyer and I am not French, but I believe there is no 'Chapter 11' in France. But when an American newspaper or other news organization reports about it, they may well use the common US term. It just means tbat the company is reorganising under some sort of protection from banks and other creditors."

ScotInDortmund: "French law has a similar provision to Chapter 11, protecting the company while negotiations with creditors proceed. —Ron Preedy."

[See Ben Marks' comment in the Comments Section for more background about bankruptcy and reorganization. —Ed.]

Bahi: "I use both Lightroom and Capture One heavily (and provide support and training for users of both). Despite that, I still have a soft spot for DxO's PhotoLab and its predecessor, DxO Optics Pro) and continue to happily pay for PhotoLab. (Sadly, only one person has ever asked me for training on DxO products in about a decade.)

"DxO's converters have an interesting and overlooked feature that makes me hope for the survival of DxO—and it's not the much lauded Prime noise reduction, which can be useful but gives results that look impressive in some ways but often seem a little unnatural to me.

"The feature I like is the method used by DxO to correct heavy barrel distortion in mirrorless lenses. I use it for the 17mm Olympus ƒ/1.8 but it applies to many mirrorless zooms and wide-angle primes.

"Even quite expensive lenses rely on software corrections, perhaps to help keep lenses smaller and lighter. For Micro 4/3 cameras, these lenses carry their lens-correction profiles internally. The camera embeds the profiles in the raw files. The distortion is usually corrected automatically by the camera for JPEGs.

"Lightroom (and Adobe Camera Raw [ACR], of course), Capture One (C1), and the in-camera corrections will all give you automatically corrected images when they read the raw files. However, the results will have substantially narrower fields of view than the results from DxO PhotoLab. That can be a big deal.

"The DxO correction algorithm presumably uses some kind of image stretching to achieve its corrections—I don't know. It's perfectly good, with no visible artifacts to my eye; straight lines do indeed come out straight and the results are sharp and detailed. The great thing it is that the odd hand or foot at the edge of the frame will be included in DxO's output but cropped out by Lightroom and C1. This has saved otherwise good pictures that were taken at events or on the street, where you have little control of your position.

"Photolab's interface feels a little clunky and slow but it's also clear that the output quality can be very impressive and that the software has been built by people who care about image quality. For me, though, the killer feature is its clever lens correction.

"I was pleased to read the article, Mike–I'm hoping for DxO's survival and am also hoping that diehard fans of Nik Silver Efex 2 (I'm not among them) will pay the upgrade cost to keep the company in business."

huw Morgan: "I think it's a little ironic that a bankrupt company is touting its software licensing model while Adobe records record profits after adopting a subscriber model. I'll put up with the minor annoyances of a subscription model if it's the price that has to be paid to keep my vendor solvent."

Richard Barbour: "DxO PhotoLab is my primary raw converter these days since jumping off the Adobe subscription bandwagon. It's good for what it does but of course isn't Photoshop, so I find myself often invoking the 'export to application (Photoshop CS6)' function to finish processing a photo. PhotoLab is hard to beat if you want to keep up with the latest camera updates, want a very good default rendering of your raw files (with numerous presets to give one-click satisfaction) and excellent global editing capability. The imported Nik functionality is also useful for local edits, although not quite as well implemented and integrated as one would like. I'm hoping they will fix that in the upcoming release. I also hope DxO is able to solve the current crisis and continue to be a good processing alternative."

David Sparks and the Black Skimmers

Photo by David Sparks

In support of the Sunday Support Group this week I thought I'd share a personal project by TOP reader David Sparks. Here's part of what he wrote:

I am an 80-year-old retired neuroscientist and a longtime lurker on TOP. My retirement hobby is nature photography, primarily bird photography. The stimulus for sending this note was your posts about the Sunday Support Group.

The project I just completed is a collection of photos of Black Skimmers, each of which is intended to illustrate historical quotes that describe the unique structure and behavior of this bird. The quotes are taken from writings of Charles Darwin, Rachel Carson, and from early articles in the archives of ornithology journals such as The Auk and The Condor. The quotes are prepotent. I selected the photos to illustrate the quotes. I thought the emphasis on the words would interest you with your love of writing. Quotes and photos were converted into a 44-page, 8x8-inch lay-flat book printed by Zno. Only a dozen copies were printed and given to family members and a few birding friends. Now I am working on two or three similar projects and trying to 'touch them every day.'

Here's a link to a site showing the cover and contents of the Black Skimmer project.

I wonder if the stuff I'm doing is of any interest to people who live in the real world of photography.

I enjoyed David's project, primarily for the reason intended—it let me "meet" a species I previously knew nothing about. But I think there are a couple of other reasons, just for me. I'm reminded of what I learned from Jiro Dreams of Sushi—"too much rice, and the rice wins; too much fish, and the fish wins." In other words, balance is key. In putting words with pictures over many years and observing many projects which do, I've learned that balance between the two is difficult to achieve. One or the other usually "wins." David's use of the quotes with pictures, for me, strikes a nice balance. The pictures amplify the quotes and the quotes amplify the pictures.

Finally, it's just nice to get such a clear window into something that someone else really cares about; I always enjoy that.

Mike

P.S. About Zno books: "In 2012 the photo book market was dominated by press-printed books. Professional photographers preferred a special kind of books called flush mount albums, also known as wedding albums, but they were expensive.

"Today we are the biggest flush-mount album maker in the world, and we make high quality albums with the lowest price and the fastest turn-around time. We make everything ourselves. Our mission is to make all things beautiful and make them insanely affordable.

"We've also grown to become a global company. Our product and design department is in San Francisco, California. Our manufacturing is in Shanghai, China. Our global delivery and warehouse is in Houston, Texas. We ship to all countries at low flat rate." (From the Zno website.)

Original contents copyright 2018 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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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Rob de Loe: "This really is a wonderful project. The photography is terrific, and the text matches beautifully. The link you provided actually allows the reader to read all the pages. It's well worth the time. It would make me enormously happy to be producing work like this when I am 80."

Dave Burns: "I just received my first Zno book a week ago with photographs from my workshop in Cuba with Peter Turnley. I was surprised at the high quality given the price but I would definitely order again. Recommended."

UPDATE: Reply from David Sparks: " Thank you for highlighting the Black Skimmer project on TOP. I thank the authors of the comments for their generous remarks too. A sentence or two about the motivation behind my current projects follows. The general goal of my bird photography is to try to capture, in an unobtrusive manner, the beauty and uniqueness of the birds, and some of the characteristic behaviors displayed in their natural habitat. The Black Skimmer project and the other projects I am working on now is an effort to preserve some of the successful images in a format that will be more accessible to family and friends when I am no longer around. Unless I do something to give prominence to selected photos they will just remain part of the bloated Lightroom catalogs where they now reside."

Mike replies: Thank you for letting me feature it. By the way, I might point out that having it featured on TOP also bears out the wisdom of your program for "giving prominence to selected photos." Good job on that!

Sunday Support Group: Great Crash

My self-belief crashed this past week (did it seem kind of arid around here? I was depressed). I read the descriptions of several leading thrillers, re-read mine so far, and got morose. I thought, what's the use? How can I compete?

But here's the interesting part: I recovered again. I thought, well, I'm a bit weak-willed, and I don't have a well-armored belief that I can do what I want to do. But I've committed to doing it. So I hauled out the calculator again, figured out the number of words I've written every day on average so far and the number of words I need to write each day to achieve my goal of a first draft within this calendar year (~350), and plunged back in. Because, y'know, I've committed to doing it; so I'm going to do it. And the very next day, the day after my self-belief fell off that cliff, I was back at it, and had a pretty good day.

I'm pretty proud of that. This lack of self-belief often kills my projects. My pattern is that I get excited about the idea, plunge into the work enthusiastically, then suffer creeping doubts as the initial enthusiasm ebbs and my insecurities creep in, and then, rather than face those feelings and deal with them, I throw in the towel and give up. I had a nice conversation with Kirk Tuck, too, about his book. So I figured maybe the best thing to do is to break my pattern, and simply slog onward. I'm not that bad a writer. I'm having fun, generally. Yeah, okay, so it's likely I'm not writing the next Da Vinci Code or Harry Potter and the Slythering Dementers Play Quiddich or [name successful bestselling novel]. But I said that in 2018 I'm going to finish the draft of a book. And it's just not that hard to write 350 words a day; I've been doing that and then some for years.

So then, onward.

It was a good lesson: in any long-term project, feeling discouraged is inevitable. Deal with it. Plan your work and follow your plan.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2018 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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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Kenneth Wajda: "Everybody writes a lousy first draft; that's what first drafts are. The problem is we look at other authors' finished work and we compare our first draft to it and get discouraged, yet they all wrote lousy first drafts, too. The difference is they kept re-writing while we quit. So don't quit, good writing is rewriting, and right now you're just getting ideas out on the page, it's clay that you will shape later. The one thing you have that they don't have is your original voice and they cannot give us what you can so we need your voice, not a variation of their work. Keep going. You're doing it."

Mike replies: That was very encouraging, thanks.

Dennis Mook: "Your feelings about writing mirror how I sometimes feel about my photography. 'What's the point?' often times I ask myself, 'It has all been done before.' Yet I grab my camera and go out as often as I can. I won’t accept failure as an end state. I feel failing is necessary as an intermediate step to learn, grow, regroup, assess, acquire more determination and continue to strive for success. But I also think failure is relative and not absolute. Major League Baseball players are an example of those who fail more than 60–70% of the time but that is considered a success.

"One more thought. If you have done absolutely everything you can, left no stone unturned, tried every avenue available to succeed, did everything possible you could do and you don’t achieve your goal, in my opinion that is not a failure."

Bob Cook: "I'm not sure I can bring myself to check in with you any more. Sheesh, I have problems of my own."

Mike replies: Really? See, I thought today's was a very positive column. You can't help feeling discouraged sometimes. The message is that you can swerve around it and leave it in the rear-view mirror. It's a good thought, or so I thought.

Kirk Tuck: "Mike, you inspired me. I'm working on my second 'Henry White' book today. I'm aiming to be done with it in time for the holidays. Keep writing the Sunday support column; I think it's helpful for all of us!"

Random Excellence: Kai Plews

Kai Plews, Dex and Gus

'Daddy Goggles': I got this note the other day from TOP reader Mike Plews, about the photograph above, which was taken by Mike's son Kai:

This is an example of a person’s critical faculties completely deserting them. Kai sent me this shot he took with his phone on Sunday. It is of Dex carrying his kid brother Gus back to the van after a play in the park.

I completely love it but this is a case of double-thick daddy goggles at work. A picture taken by my son of two of my grandchildren arrives front-loaded for me to love it. I have it as my desktop image right now, both to look at two of my favorite people on the planet and also to remind me of just how subjective the analysis of what we do can be.

It feels like a strong picture to me even without the family connection, but because it is of these two I go batcrap crazy about it and any kind of critical detachment is out the window.

Being only an e-friend of Mike's and not knowing Dex or Gus at all, I still think it's a very fine picture. But just knowing how Mike feels about it makes me see it sympathetically to his view of it. What do you think?

(Published with Kai's and Mike's permission.)

Mike
(Thanks to Kai, Mike, Dex, and Gus)

Original contents copyright 2018 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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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Aashish Sharma: "I've commented very few times here and only when a picture shared here made me smile. This is one more of those. I'm not someone you might consider very 'discerning,' or even someone who consistently knows what he likes, but a few of the pictures you've shared here over time have triggered a really emotional reaction from me. Thanks for sharing this one. Cheers, Aashish."

Speed: "It's a terrific picture. The bandage on one boy's elbow is icing on the cake. No staged shot this."

grigoris: "I think that the composition is a little too tight. I would rather see the full body of the exhausted kid carried by his brother. Anyway, I like it but not much."

David Maxwell: "This is the kind of picture that makes me love photography! It is packed with emotion and really conveys a sense of nostalgia for me. I would hang it on the wall and enjoy it for a long time.

"The aspect ratio makes me think it was taken with a cellphone, not that I care at all because the picture is so superb. My son was born 3.5 weeks ago and I have taken almost all of the photos of him with my phone, despite using him as an excuse to buy a refurbished Canon 80D and two lenses. I definitely view all of the pictures I have taken of him through 'daddy goggles.' Ten-year-ago-me (heck, one-year-ago-me if we are really being honest here) would think that I've turned into a loser, but I'm having too much fun to care! Wow, parenthood changes everything.

"My wife turned 40 on Tuesday and she loved the photo I gave her of her holding our son minutes after he was born. It was taken with the 80D and printed at 8x10. I haven't actually told her about the 80D, but if she ever does realize that it is a new camera, I will point to that picture and tell her I couldn't have gotten as good of a shot with my old (but beloved) Rebel. Not sure if it's true or if she will believe it, but it's worth a shot."

Joe Boris: "Mike, before even reading your post this image just grabbed me, and I expected to find in your copy, the story of some great photographer whose work I'd like to see more of. That it is a 'phone grab' of the shooter's kids sent without second thought to another family member, in no way diminishes the impact of its emotion, gesture and beauty."

Ken Bennett: "This photo stopped me in my tracks before I knew anything about it. Exceptional."

Mark O: "Its the composition and subject matter that do it for me, rather than the technical aspects. Two kids, at play in the fields, one completely tired out and the other, hair blown back, Band-Aid on arm, headed home after a day properly done. Reminds me of when I grew up, when any time spent inside was considered lost time."

Mark C.: "I think it works. It has the air of the classic street photo of people's backsides as they walk away from the camera, which I usually loathe, but it works for me anyway. Part of that is probably the cute kid factor, which I often like; part of it is the big outdoors/landscape, which I also usually like. And I suppose all the photo critique stuff that I might feel, but haven't much learned to quantify, must also be okay since it's enjoyable to study. (Is good near-far balance one of those photo-critique factors? It seems to have that.) From a 'photo critic' who doesn't even know the jargon."

Ken Tanaka: "Well Mike Plews, I don’t have any 'daddy goggles' but I think it’s a damn fine image, one that transcends the personal family memento snapshot. Anyone who’s had a sibling should be able to immediately identify with the moment captured here. A wonderful moment of childhood, made universal by the faces being obscured. But just enough of Gus’s face is seen to convey an end-of-a-great-day feeling. Dex’s elbow bandage is the cherry on this wonderful sundae. Thanks for sharing this wonderful image with us."

Counterpoint (and Some Casteneda)

After yesterday's post I got this wonderful response from my friend Kirk Tuck of VSL, which really provides the best sort of counterpoint:

I must be especially dumb. I've been doing this photography thing as a full-time professional since 1988. I worked in advertising and academia before that. I am so dense that I just ignored all the articles and talk about how hard it was to be a photographer and spent the time...being a photographer. While I'm not going to see my work in any museums, and no-one is rushing to make a monograph about my career, I never missed a mortgage payment, never missed a car payment, never missed a month of putting in a percentage of my income for retirement, and never went hungry. I've been to exciting places and seen exciting stuff. I've been offered a glass of wine by one President and photographed two others besides. I watched the birth of high tech from up close. I've watched nearly 500 live theater performances, either for free or while being paid to do so. Some of them were really good. I've had the opportunity to play with the most fun cameras and teach fun classes. I got to write, and get paid for, five books about photography. I've just finished paying for my kid to go out of state to a prestigious private college for four years, and did so without incurring any debt. I've put enough money in the bank to retire, but why would I want to when this is so much more fun?

Maybe everyone else is just doing it wrong...

If I had embarked on what I thought would be my first career, electrical engineering, I have no doubt that I would have not done nearly as well, would not have a flexible schedule that routinely allows for a mid-morning swim, would weigh five hundred pounds and would have consumed tons of bad take-out pizza at the tawdry desk in my shag-carpeted cubicle. And worse.

Not everything is about the money. You only get one go at life and if you aren't doing what you love you are only cheating yourself.

Retirement is only for people who didn't like their careers.

—Kirk Tuck

I also got this the other day from Dave Reichert, which seems especially apropos of Kirk's comments:

Anything is one of a million paths. Therefore you must always keep in mind that a path is only a path; if you feel you should not follow it, you must not stay with it under any conditions. To have such clarity you must lead a disciplined life. Only then will you know that any path is only a path and there is no affront, to oneself or to others, in dropping it if that is what your heart tells you to do. But your decision to keep on the path or to leave it must be free of fear or ambition. I warn you. Look at every path closely and deliberately. Try it as many times as you think necessary.

This question is one that only a very old man asks. Does this path have a heart? All paths are the same: they lead nowhere. They are paths going through the bush, or into the bush. In my own life I could say I have traversed long long paths, but I am not anywhere. Does this path have a heart? If it does, the path is good; if it doesn't, it is of no use. Both paths lead nowhere; but one has a heart, the other doesn't. One makes for a joyful journey; as long as you follow it, you are one with it. The other will make you curse your life. One makes you strong; the other weakens you.

Before you embark on any path ask the question: Does this path have a heart? If the answer is no, you will know it, and then you must choose another path. The trouble is nobody asks the question; and when a man finally realizes that he has taken a path without a heart, the path is ready to kill him. At that point very few men can stop to deliberate, and leave the path. A path without a heart is never enjoyable. You have to work hard even to take it. On the other hand, a path with heart is easy; it does not make you work at liking it.

—Carlos Castaneda (1925–1998), from
The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge

-

Mike
(Thanks to Kirk and Dave)

P.S. The Wikipedia page on Castaneda is very interesting if you've never heard of him. The conundrum of the validity of received or "authentic" vs. invented wisdom is present in many religions and seems to be encapsulated in Castaneda.

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Featured Comments from:

Gordon Cahill: "I'm with Kirk. 100% I've been as busy as I wanted to be for much of the last 25 years. Photography as a career has evolved. If you also evolved then you'll be OK. Being a photojournalist is a shrinking pool and Nat Geo don't want to give me a year to photograph sea slugs in Patagonia, but I do OK. By a small margin of skill and a bit of luck I've done my favourite thing as a job for so long I don't think I could do anything else. And I've loved almost every day of it."

How To Become a Professional Photographer

I heard a great joke the other day:

"I got a Ph.D. in philosophy. Which means I'm really smart. And also that I'm really not very smart."

I wonder if you could say something similar about pro photography these days. Being a professional photographer means you're really skilled and smart...and, also, it may not be a very smart thing to be.

It's a tough profession, one that requires a multitude of competencies, wide-ranging expertise, and more energy than most ordinary people possess. Also very good work habits, very good basic organizational skills, and, almost always, great people skills. It's challenging. It requires many aptitudes and mastery of many things. You really have to be well above average (no Lake Woebegone joke) to even make it as a pro photographer. And yet one could argue that it's also kind of a questionable choice of profession for anyone with that many skills and assets.

At this somewhat advanced point in my life I know a lot of people who were professional photographers for five or ten years and then quit and went on to something that made a little more sense as a career. This includes the hot-shot, high-dollar pro from whom I took an intensive, expensive seminar back in the '90s. (He billed $1.6 million [gross] in '93, "and that was a lot of money back then," rimshot.) He's been in high finance for the last twenty years. That is, unless he retired already, I don't know. I finally tracked him down a few years ago, and he wasn't very chatty.

The subject of the seminar? How to become a professional photographer!

Mike

Original contents copyright 2018 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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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Josh Hawkins: "You need to be smart enough to be a photographer and dumb enough to not realize you should do something/anything else. It's a very narrow range to fit in."

Dave Polaschek: "Perhaps the good business to be in is selling seminars on how to be a professional photographer!"

Ken Bennett: "I've been doing this for a living for 31 years next month. For the last 21 I've been the staffer at a university. I often get students asking me how they can 'travel the world and take pictures.' (I swear that every single one of them has used that exact phrase.) I laugh and ask them how large is their trust fund.  :-)  Then I stop laughing and ask them the same question again.

"I have a pretty good idea how to become a professional photojournalist—in 1985 or so. Start at a small newspaper, work up to a midsized daily, then win some awards and move up to a wire service or a major daily. Easy—except that the pipeline is now in tatters. Heck, the most recent Pulitzer prize winner for spot news shot it on his last day at the paper—before leaving to work at a brewery.

"I know that a handful of my students have gone onto successful photo careers (we did an entire issue of the alumni magazine dedicated to them.) but it's not something I can recommend to anyone in good conscience. For those who are trying, good luck and I hope you make it."

Gordon Lewis: "I agree. It seems almost as questionable a choice as being a photo blogger. (Heh, heh....)"

Sunday Support Group (A Day Late)

I've been posting notices about my book-writing project on Sundays, as a way of encouraging others to keep up with their own large 2018 projects. A day late today.

March was, to put it kindly, a setback for me. The Joni Cole Rule is "touch it every day," meaning, whatever you're working on, at least open it / sit down to it / pick up the instrument or the camera—whatever "touching it" means for your project, do it every day. Not to apply any porcine lip-gloss, I failed at that in March. We had a big snowstorm with a loss of power, I went into the hospital with a heart-attack scare and came out with the rather bizarre (under the circumstances) condition placed on me to not type for a week or two, and I lost willpower and momentum.

Then I found the last piece to the puzzle, which was to work on it first thing in the morning, when I have the most energy. My mentor said, "I think your idea of hitting the writing hard when you’re the sharpest is a good idea, but the best thing about it is that you’re on a schedule. Scheduled writing is critical; otherwise, it’s too easy to let go. It’s like exercise. You gotta do it, but if you don’t have a schedule, you’ll start skipping."

March was a month of skipping; April has been a month of regular work. It's been going great.

Overall, I'm really glad I didn't let the setbacks of March swamp the project. Could have happened. I'm now a little behind my original schedule, still, but catching up fast, and I'm getting work done regularly—six days a week. (Monday, when I play pool with the older guys, is my day off now—from writing, and, usually, or this is the plan, from TOP.)

Moral of the story: don't let setbacks sink the project. Keep working at the method, meaning the mechanics and the nuts-and-bolts of how you work, until you hit on the way of working that allows you to get the job done. Until you're working easily and regularly, without needing too much in the way of self-discipline or willpower, you're not there yet; keep trying. I'm thankful I did.

Lastly, although this isn't pertinent, I have to say I just love working on the book. It's so nice to be able to write without the pressure of immediate publication. I only work for 75 minutes, first thing in the morning after getting up, taking care of the dogs, and fixing coffee, but I look forward to it each and every day. I honestly want to do this for the rest of my life, or at least as long as I've got my marbles. I'm blessed that TOP allows me to work those extra 75 minutes every day.

Hope your own project is going well too!

Mike
(Thanks to J.C.)

Original contents copyright 2018 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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David Maxwell: "Maybe a day late for you, but right on time for me. On Saturday I started a new book project. Time will tell if it is the one to break the 5,000 word barrier (I write very quickly and efficiently to that point, before rapidly losing momentum) or if it will join dozens of other abandoned projects. Previous manuscripts fell into one of two categories—books that I wanted to write or books that I thought other people would want to buy. The latter always fizzled out due to lack of passion while the former would usually die because what little pragmatism I possess would rise up and tell me that I'm wasting my time. Fortunately my newest project combines the two for the first time. I'm referring to it as a 'memoir/how-not-to guide.' It has been a fun few days of brainstorming, outlining, and writing. I have high hopes for this one. Thanks for the inspiration Mike!"

Strange DNA

Some things never change: Fast and slow Zeiss 35's on the Sony A7III.
Illustration from CameraSize.

Companies don't have DNA and neither do product lines, and yet, mysteries persist.

Many moons ago, I had caught the photography bug and was saving for my first camera and considering what to buy. I was taking classes at the University of Maryland, and on the way home from College Park I'd get off the Beltway and stop at Industrial Photo, where I'd befriended a counterman named Ray Mohr. Ray raised pot-bellied pigs out on a farm in Maryland. Although he liked photography, he loved pot-bellied pigs—I later visited his farm and snapped pics of the piggies with my then-new Leica M6 and 35mm Summicron.

But that was later. When I was first buying a camera I wasn't impressed with the then-new Leica M4-P, so after grave deliberation I settled on Contax. Seemed like the best of two worlds—Japanese body, German (Zeiss) lenses. I wanted an RTS, but I was working at a garden center as a handyman and money wasn't plentiful, so I settled for a Contax 139Q. To go with it, I bought a 50mm ƒ/1.4 Planar.

That's what I had when I entered the Photography program at the Corcoran School of Art in 1982. Somewhere in my first year or so, I made a big switch. It took me a good long time to ramp up to it, too—I traded the 50mm for a pair of Zeiss lenses, a 35mm and an 85mm.

In both cases, Zeiss (or Yashica, I don't know who made those decisions) followed a corporate strategy—you could pick either a slow lens, or a fast lens. The fast 35mm and 85mm were both ƒ/1.4's. Both were huge (relatively), heavy, and expensive. Or, you could have either focal length in a slow version—both ƒ/2.8's. I chose the slower ones, again because of cost.

Eventually this dichotomy—slow or fast—became frustrating to me. For my taste, one lens in the middle would have been better than either extreme. Later on, in other systems, I usually settled on ƒ/2 lenses, or something close (my first Nikkors were the AF-Nikkor 35mm ƒ/2 [(1989–95], later called the "AF-D," and the AF-Nikkor 85mm ƒ/1.8 [1987–94]).

Blood will tell—?
Well, that was long ago. So it seems positively weird to me—eerie, uncanny, bizarre—that today you can buy two Zeiss 35mm lenses for the Sony A7III...and one is slow, one fast, just like it was back in the early '80s when I bought that first Contax from Ray the pot-bellied pig farmer.

I'd still prefer one medium-sized, medium-cost, medium-speed ƒ/2 lens to the slow/fast pair, too, although that's probably just knee-jerk, hidebound mental habit, plus a dash of orneriness.

The whole rest of the world has changed and, like I say, neither companies nor product lines actually have DNA. It just seems that way sometimes, is all.

Mike

[UPDATE: No insult to him—I hope he's still going strong—but Ray was both a farmer of pot-bellied pigs and also a pot-bellied farmer. So the ambiguity of "pot-bellied pig farmer" works.

I would have loved to include a picture of the pigs, but the negatives are in a book and the book is in a box and the box is in the attic of the barn. It would be a lot of work to get it from here to there. Given my lack of organization, might even be functionally impossible....]

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Outages

Sorry about the recent "Origin DNS Error" outages. This was a scheduled outage for maintenance by TypePad. Supposedly over now. I didn't have anything to do with it nor could I / can I do anything about it. I hope it won't be any more trouble and I apologize for any inconvenience it might have caused—

—The M.C. Without a Clue

Connectedness

You surf, sometimes you hit flotsam and jetsam.

This still survives on Pinterest (I generally loathe Pinterest, by the way)—

Look at that handsome youngster! The text is "Meet Butters a Petfinder adoptable Labrador Retriever dog | Waukesha, WI" (top left). The original Petfinder page has gone 404. (He's actually a pit mix, though I would bet he's half Lab at least.) Butters was a difficult adoption—he suffered from anxiety, especially separation anxiety; coprophagia; leash reactivity; and DHD (doggie hyperactivity disorder. I just made that up. But he had it). He couldn't be crated (he would have an involuntary poop and get it all over himself), and it took a year to housetrain him. I probably walked a thousand miles while I was helping him get over leash reactivity, two patient and often challenging miles a day. He almost took me to the limits of my patience and fortitude...

...Not quite, thank God. Now he's a lovely fellow with a gentle heart who has a few residual peccadilloes but nothing out of the ordinary. He leashes fine, no more coprophagia, he's potty trained at last, and he just looks sad and hangs his head when I leave the house, as opposed to what he used to do, which was to go crazy and have an unintended bowel movement. Things have greatly improved.  :-)

Clickbait
I ran across this: "10 Photos That Flipped People's Lives Upside Down." Kinda interesting, although also a little creepy. It's hard for me to observe pop culture today—it's impersonal and omnipotent, flighty, fickle and airheaded but also a remorseless, irresistable juggernaut capable of crushing people like insects.

It occurred to me the other day that the future is probably going to be a neverending series of platform migrations. I like email myself, and I still center my own communication activities on it, but I distinctly remember thinking, in the 1990s, that one day it was going to become useless because commercialism would swamp it. That day is almost here—right now, less than 5% of my email is relevant personal communication from people I'm at least marginally interested in hearing from. And that's just counting the "good" emails, not including all the stuff that's sloughed off into my spam folder by my spam filters. For several years now I've already been meeting people of my son's generation who don't use email at all, and recently I'm having the experience of sending people emails who later tell me they don't get them because they never check their email any more.

So we move on to various other platforms. Texting, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. We're now defined in part not just by how much of our lives are online, but on the particular platforms we happen to favor. I actually sent an email not long ago and the recipient replied, "I don't read emails any more. Can you send that to me on Messenger?" Uh, really? No, I can't, because I don't do Messenger. Or "I don't Messenger," which might actually be proper English.

Young people already watch YouTube and Netflix more than broadcast television and cable. Many people, doubtless including the intrepid "Charlie from Top 10s" who posted the "10 Photos" video I linked to above, are entrepreneurs trying to meet the need by crowdsourcing (hey, remember that word?) content for YouTube, and profit from it. But YouTube is already less compelling to me than it used to be...I used to helplessly watch one video after another as linked videos appeared in an unbreaking stream, but now each one is punctuated by an ad. Even though I can skip most of the ads, or half of them anyway, the interruption reminds me that I should be doing other things, and that breaks the spell and I turn it off. Doubtless YouTube will outlive its own usefulness and currency someday in the not-so-distant future, as commercialism swamps it and, inevitably, clamps down on and crowds out anything original or creative or personal.

As with online photos, it bugs me that I could watch YouTube all day and still have no idea what's on it, because I would be seeing such an infinitesimally small portion of all it contains. That's an irrational feeling on my part, but I feel it anyway.

Photography online make me feel like the story of the Inuit Indian who won a trip to New York City. Asked during an interview what he thought of the experience, he said, "Too many faces! How do you remember them all?" Having grown up in a village of a hundred souls, his basic assumption was that he should memorize and remember every face he ever encountered. He always had. But faced with a mere day's worth of the numberless legions of NYC pedestrians, that portion of his settled worldview experienced circuit overload. I know it's irrational, but it bugs me that I could look at photography online all day and yet still see so little of it that it would statistically be extremely close to "none at all." It's not enough to be "connected"; I need some kind of shared culture, some kind of recognized culture, something I can keep up with and stay abreast of, to feel connected.

Mike

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John Camp: "Your post is like a continuation of the last one; I almost commented on that one, but resisted, but I can't resist this time.

"At one time, long ago, most people lived in 'bubbles' that were actually physical. You married somebody who was born nearby because they were in your physical bubble, and you didn't usually move outside of that. With the arrival of mechanized transport, the bubbles of some people expanded, but most still hung close to home. At some point (I would say after World War II) the idea of physical bubbles began to break down, although many still continued to live in them. In my generation, in my hometown of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, most people still married people who were from Cedar Rapids, and often from the same high schools. But quite a few married outside the town, and often from distant places, because for the first time in history, large masses of people went to college, and began marrying not because of natal proximity, but because of some other selection process, like intellectual or financial compatibility.

"That's now been further shattered by instant communications where people form relationship groups with other people they've never physically met...and even meet for dating and marriage purposes online, and across very large distances, before they engage physically. As physical bubbles continue to lose relevance, it's now become necessary for people to form their own (conceptual) bubbles. Bubbles are a way of limiting social and intellectual contacts to a manageable state—if you try to keep up with everything, all the time, you will live in a constant frenzy. So you gotta have that bubble.

"TOP is one chunk of my personal bubble. Because it's part of my bubble, I've actually met you (Mike) physically, when you were in Wisconsin, and even wrote a book with another person, Ctein, who I met in the TOP bubble. While I have lots of interests, as most TOP members seem to, I actually resist adding many of those chunks to my bubble, because when you get too many chunks, you get frenzy.

"At one time, and not really all that long ago, a few adventurous people made great efforts to expand their bubbles—they'd move from Cedar Rapids to New York, or Paris, looking for something they couldn't find at home. Now, you have to make a great effort to restrict your bubble to achieve some kind of person peace and coherency, or you will go batshit crazy."

Rodolfo Canet: "Interesting to read Mr. Camp's comment ten days after my older son returned from Argentina, where he flew to finally meet face-to-face his online girlfriend. They've been 'engaged' for...eight years!!!"

Mike replies: According to eHarmony, 20% of Western couples now meet online, and 5% of new marriages began as online relationships. Older photographers might remember Maxim Muir, who was once a leading expert on photo chemicals, especially print developers. He met his wife online and they decided to marry before they had met in person. They've been very happy for many years, at least as of the last time I heard from Max.

Open Mike: Poetry and Heart (and a Bit of Gray Fog)

["Open Mike" is the Editorial Page of TOP, wherein we occasionally vent spleen.]

-

This is a bit dyspeptic, so approach with caution.

Sometimes, I get the curious feeling that I miss photography. A few jokers in the crowd will quip that that's because I never write about it any more, but I'm being serious.

It's not something that I can quite put my finger on. And, of course, photography is a chameleon and its world is a kaleidoscope—there's no "photography," as Roland Barthes pointed out when he mentioned that none of us has ever seen more than a tiny subset of the set "all photographs." So maybe I'm not saying "photography has changed and I miss it," but "the things I personally used to get out of the kinds of photography used to like the best are getting a little harder for me to find." That's more finicky, but usefully less global.

The private term that I've long used for what I look for in photography is "poetry." This is indefensible as a critical principle, but, as I say, it's private, personal, and I know what I mean by it. In writing my book chapters upstairs the private name I use for the same thing is "heart." To satisfy me, every chapter has to have an emotional core. It has to touch somehow on deeper feeling. Writing without heart doesn't reward me with what I want it to be, what I want from it, what I find soul-nourishing in it.

Of course I know that very little writing even aims to have heart.

...Remember when pics could be funky, not perfect?

"Missing" photography might have something to do with getting older...passion, vitality, and urgency ebbs, stealing away unnoticed in the night. The biggest change is...well, let me put it this way. Let's say the number one dream of your life is or was to be a great sports star, a famous and fabled baseball, football (or, for you Europeans and South Americans, football), or basketball player. At age 11, no matter who you are, you are allowed hope; maybe it could happen. But by age 45, if it hasn't happened, it very likely ain't gonna. The dream is the same as ever, but your age gives you radically different perspectives on it. That's what advancing age does to ambitions and the determination and fervor that goes with them. Those ships have sailed, you might say. At my age it's pretty clear I'm never going to be a great photographer, included in all the future history books. So I guess I could guess that one thing I miss is the sense of mission and possibility and potential of youth. Even if whatever dreams you had were always long shots, always unlikely, still, they're permitted to the young, denied to the old. That's all.

And there are a lot of things I miss about the photography I grew up with. The primacy of black-and-white. The inherent necessity for prints and printmaking. The difficulty of it, or the nature of the difficulty of it (because digital is difficult too, just differently). The direct chain of connection to artists and practitioners of bygone eras, who used essentially similar techniques and faced essentially similar problems, and that feeling of camaraderie with them. Those were my brothers and sisters, you know? Now most photographers just can't see how they're relevant. And maybe they're not.

One thing I miss is what was touched on by Carl Weese in his post the other day: the bygone sense that mastery was progressive and additive and that once you knew something, you knew it. Now, mastery is temporary and provisional and needs constant updating. Ralph Gibson probably still prints on the ancient Leitz enlarger he bought from Robert Frank. But n people say you can't compare the A7III to the D750 because the D750 is four years old and it's a whole new era now. It doesn't matter how well I mastered the HP B9180 printer or Photoshop 5 or the various sharpening protocols for 3-megapixel camera files: none of that matters any more. Master something now, and the ground will soon shift underneath you. Some people love this (because they get to master new things!), and it's possible it just appeals to people with different skillsets and mind-sets, and isn't either bad or good. And maybe it's just the nature of the business I'm in. But it seems like the tech stuff is harder to get past and put aside these days than it used to be. Or does anyone ever truly get past it any more, and just concentrate on pictures and what they show?

Most of all, though, what I miss is the poetry behind reality that photography seemed to access so effortlessly, and the sense of heart that I felt I could detect in the work of various artists. Oh, please don't take this as some sort of grand indictment or sweeping pronouncement—it's just a matter of degree is all. Sure, there's still poetry and heart out there. It's just become a little harder to find, is all, a little more fugitive—just as the "signatures" of weird old poorly-coated lenses were hard to miss and the highly perfected lenses of today seem pitilessly perfect, analytical, clinical, and difficult to differentiate from each other in pictures. You know what I mean? 

If you want to think I'm just getting old and creaky, that's okay. I don't mind. Might be you're right. Could be I'm just getting a little out of focus, losing the obsessiveness or passion (whichever you prefer to call it) that I used to enjoy or suffer from (again, take your pick). But I feel kinda in need of renewal. Spring better get here quick! It's snowing again today, and yeah, I know I'm supposed to be patient, and yeah, I know I should practice acceptance, but I'm just frustrated as hell with the weather. Makes me want to scream. I need daffodils, bunnies, robins and spring-green buds on the branches of the trees, g'dangit! Get this gray fog off me!

Sheesh.

Mike

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Paul Richardson: "Amen to everything you said. Even the weather part."

Paul: "I don't think it's an age problem because I'm 45 and I'm also missing the poetry in most photography. Digital is just too good.

"It's funny but your post has felt personally quite poignant as I've just received Sally Mann's new book A Thousand Crossings. You just can't get much more poetic in photography than Sally. Digital is just too damn realistic; it doesn't tell it slant."

BERND REINHARDT: "I'm pretty sure that Ralph Gibson uses a Leica M Monochrom these days, so he has managed to learn a new medium. His mastery is his seeing and that hasn't changed."

[In the "different strokes for different folks" department, read these next two together— Ed.]

David Saxe: "Could not agree more Michael. I think the Internet has taken over. These days all one has to do is post your pictures on Facebook and voila!—you are a photographer. I notice that a lot of what I see on Facebook or Instagram lacks heart and passion. They are just pictures. Most of them are JPEGs posted straight out of the camera. There is not the slightest sign from the photographer that there was any other effort made to convert the image into a photograph. No burning, dodging, nada. They are just straight images. They are simply saying 'This is what I saw.' I doubt most of these guys even print their images. I have been making photographs for over 45 years. Not one of my images was ever straight printed from a negative or JPEG. Once you start working on an image, it becomes something else, something you own. I think that part is missing in photography today. Its simply too generic."

Rob L.: "I found that I started loving photography more again when I started shooting JPEG only and accepting what I got. The required ongoing technical prowess to stay current is fun, until it isn't—and having shipped off my Nikkors and D750...not because they weren't good, but because I simply couldn't talk to them effectively. Silly Fuji's with their dials and wheels and 'make it pretty' preset JPEGs are a balm when I just want to record my world. But you've also been through a lot—hopefully spring, whenever it may show it's leafy head—comes, you'll see a shot and have a sense of the wonder."

Earl Dunbar: "In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, it's named 'quality.' We all need it; finding or achieving it is the journey regardless of how early or late."

The Amazing and One-of-a-Kind Jamie Livingston Project

You probably remember the Jamie Livingston Project, the ultimate "PAD" (picture a day) project...possibly in all of the history of photography. Jamie Livingston took a Polaroid SX-70 photo every day of his life starting in 1979 during his last two months at Bard College, and ending at his death on his 41st birthday.

In a true labor of love and as a great devotion to the memory of their friendship, Jamie's great good friend (and ours), Hugh Crawford, who has been a part of the TOP Commentariat for years, had the pictures published as a book. That's right, all 6,754 of them. The project was right at the outer edge of what the printer could accommodate, and the book is formidable: it's 780 pages, 12x15x3 inches, and it weighs 11 pounds.

Let's just say you're not going to ingest it all in one sitting.

And if you can't go for the big kahuna, there is an elegant little sample book that includes a number of Jamie's photographs that include the Twin Towers of the now-perished World Trade Center. It's tiny, slight, and much cheaper, so you can have a sample without having to deal with the 11-pounder.

The big book is $150 list, $125 on Amazon, and $95 for Hugh's friends, and you can have it for even less. As he writes:

Here's the link to the direct sales site for the books.

Totally bananas and off-topic: According to USA today, which listed the top misspelled words by State in its coverage of the Scripps National Spelling Bee, 'bananas' is the most  misspelled word in New Mexico, but the most misspelled word in Wisconsin is 'Wisconsin.'

So the secret coupon code for TOP readers is 'top hat,' because who can remember how to spell bananas anyway?

TOP readers get 10 dollars off of each copy of Some Photos of That Day: 6754 Polaroids Dated in Sequence and an additional 10 dollars goes to Mike's Regrettable Weather Re-Wiring Recompensatory Wishlist, or the more easily remembered MRWRWRW.

The books are also available on Amazon at higher prices for people who insist on buying on Amazon but there is no advantage that I can think of.

This is not a project for the faint of heart, on any level (now the race is to see if Hugh can break even), but it's really unique in the history of the medium. Quixotic, yes, but I think it's a project worth supporting. One of photography's true epics....

Mike
(Thanks to Hugh)

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ALP0A: "I'm so delighted to see this. I've been a reader here for several years now Mike, but I must confess I've never left a comment. I think it was a comment by Hugh on here himself which led me to Jamie's story several years ago and in turn inspired me to begin my own daily recording. I went through a bad divorce and wasn't getting regular contact with my children and this was a way of nulling the pain, forcing me outside but also leaving a record so my children could see who I really was. Thankfully I'm now in daily contact with them and they are growing up wonderfully and also love the original story. I've just ordered my copy and look forward to receiving it. I promise to try and comment more now. I do love this site. David."

Sony A7III: IS

Ken Tanaka said the other day, "The Sony A7III is already one of the most 'reviewed' cameras in amateur photo history," and Dan Bracaglia at DPReview rather famously declared that it might become his new-go-to recommendation for enthusiasts and semi-professionals, taking over from the excellent Nikon D750 (currently on sale).

The first thing I wanted to try was the image stabilization (IS), so I wandered around the house snapping this 'n' that with the ISO set to 800 and the aperture set to ƒ/8, which gave me exposures between 1/4th sec. and 1/8th sec.

And...wow. No complaints so far. Time after time I got solid-as-a-rock images with no sign of camera shake. I took dozens of trials, naturally. Here's one example at 1/5th of a second:

Deathless art photograph of my kitchen, as good as Walker Evans (uh, not).
Lens is the FE 55mm ƒ/1.8 Zeiss.

Detail (should render at 100% for you after you double-click on it).
Note that those are grains of salt on the stove. And
that the blog software softens images somewhat.
I can live with that kind of quality at 1/5th sec.

B'cause, y'see, I gotta see for myself. And since IS is the only reason I'd switch away from the X-T1/X-T2, I needed to find out about that first. Because if it wasn't what I wanted, back into the box and back to B&H Photo it would go.

So now, with that out of the way, I can start learning the menus and how to set up the camera. Otherwise I wouldn't bother.

I have to admit that whenever I go around making "test" exposures, I feel like a geek/dweeb/propellerhead/dork/dope. Always have, as long as I've been doing it. But y'know, ya gotta do what ya gotta do.

And after I realized how well the system worked, then I had to go around and do it some more, just because it was making me happy. And that really made me feel like a dork.

Own it, Mike!

Mike

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Rob de Loe: "Ah, the kitchen stove shot. I confess to having a bunch of those in my 'test' catalogue too. There isn't another place in the house where I get that much shine, bright light and colour. It's my go-to location for comparing lenses if I'm trying to decide one over the other!"

Stephen Scharf: "I've been obtaining similar results with the Fujifilm X-H1. Here is a photograph of my EAR 324 phono stage taken at 1/10 second with the Fuji 18–55mm racked out to 55mm (83mm in 35mm-e).

"The image above is small due to TypePad's image posting size limitations, so here's a link to the original-size photo.

"As can be seen, it's tack.

"The UK-based YouTube video review guys, The Photography Team, have photographs using the Fuji 90mm (135mm-equivalent) taken at 1/4 of a second.

"So, be mindful, Mike, that you have also have a choice in the Fuji ecosystem, and you wouldn't have to sell off those sweet Fuji lenses."

Mike replies: You have an EAR 324? Do you mind if I, um, hate you?

kirk tuck: "The writer at DPReview did not give his final approval on the Sony versus Nikon recommendation. He stated that he'd wait for the tests to decide if the Sony was truly the camera that he would recommend going forward. Let's not jump the gun...."

Mike replies: Granted. Fixed now.

Moose: "It seems your standards may be low for this. Robin Wong reports, 'I can confidently hand-hold the Panasonic G9 with the 12–60mm ƒ/2.8–4 IS lens down to about 5 seconds, with a 50% hit rate. Yes, you heard that right—5 seconds! I thought I could only do that with the Olympus E-M1 Mark II.' He shows examples.

"I don't recall at the moment who, but others testing the E-M1 II reported similar 4–5 sec. results. Your example @ 55mm-e and Stephen Scharf's @ 82mm-e are fine, but already with the E-M5 II's older IBIS, here's an example from me of 1/20 sec. @ 600mm-e.

"This example also points out why multi-second IBIS doesn't mean much to me. Pretty much everything I shoot handheld (other than tests) moves; people, flowers, critters, trees, clouds, water all move. In my practical experience, subject motion is much more of a problem than insufficient IBIS, even on the last generation of Micro 4/3 IBIS. So, the IBIS you report is indeed very useful, although possibly not quite enough for me, with my interest in macro and telephoto, but far from the best available. It makes sense, really. The distance the sensor has to move is twice as great for FF, and the weight to be moved goes up with volume. Making some assumptions with insufficient hard data, it seems an A7III sensor is something over twice as large in volume as a Micro 4/3 sensor. To move over twice the weight over twice the distance and stop it to half the precision in the same amount of time is a considerable challenge."

Mike replies: My ulterior motive in trying out the Sony is that I'm giving it a chance to pull me away from my attraction to Micro 4/3. If it doesn't, there's probably a Panasonic in my future. Maybe the G9, but I just can't help but keep holding out hope for a GX8 II, even though I know full well the futility of waiting for imaginary cameras...as I've been doing it for decades.... :-)

Editing 'It Must Be Color'

Two ideas for future Baker's Dozens: subtle color, and matching colors. More about this later...I think if I announced another BD before presenting the acutely late "It Must Be Color," a number of you guys would put out a hit on me.

In editing the "It Must Be Color" submissions I suspect the big problem is that the concept isn't entirely secure in my mind. Mostly I'm pretty confident when it comes to editing; I have my methods and my typical "queries" with which I approach any given picture. But I recognize a number of different ways that readers approached the challenge—that is, the criteria by which you chose your own selections—and I recognize that many of them are somewhat different, but that your choices are valid nonetheless. This makes it more than usually difficult to eliminate contenders.

As you might expect, the big challenge, accordingly, is...eliminating contenders. Usually, the easiest parts of editing are the outliers: the obvious "nos" and the obvious "yesses." It's those "hmm, maybes" that are maddening. But in this BD, there just aren't as many obvious yesses and nos.

I would say in general the easiest ones to eliminate are pictures that I think are clearly good but that I'm not convinced have to be in color...rightly or wrongly, I think they'd work in B&W as well. And, the pictures that I admit have to be in color, but nevertheless don't seem to be entirely successful as photographs.

Two other kinds of submission I've been able to be a little harder on are standard naturey subjects, and pictures that are mostly just "of" subjects that happen to be colorful. But even these aren't easy to dismiss, because there are some of each kind that are very good.

I'll put up examples of each of these types, but not until I pick the final Baker's Dozen. Never know what's going to make the final cut until the final cut is made.

All in all this has been more than a bit humbling for Yr. already Hmbl. Ed. I can't say I've done much more than circle around the task for weeks, without getting down to work, but that's because I know I'm not on footing that's as solid as I usually stand on.

More anon; I'm gaining on it. Thanks again for all the submissions, and no, I haven't forgotten about the Younger Photographers group.

Mike

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Joe: "I've been in your position, Mike, and it sure helps to be part of a small group making such decisions. It's also easier when there's a hard deadline with no extensions. Might not make for better decisions, but it makes for decisions."

Curt Gerston: "I’m looking forward to seeing your choices for this...I’ve recently assigned 'color' as a subject-assignment to my students, and it’s a bit difficult to explain the concept to middle-schoolers. I’m hoping to show your contest winners as examples."

We Hear from Adobe

We got comments from both Eric Chan and Thomas Knoll for the "If It Ain't Broke..." post by Carl Weese, and Eric provided some useful links. Check it out....

Mike the Ed.

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Superstition

Okay, I am not saying I'm superstitious. Except about one thing, which is the feng shui principle that if the bottom of the stairs in your house directly faces the front door, your money and good fortune will pour out onto the street and you'll become poor. (Or, the chi will come in the front door and rush upstairs, depriving the first floor of chi.) I don't know why I believe that superstition and no others, but whatever. Maybe it was a mini-stroke that affected a tiny cluster of brain cells.

So I don't really believe that receiving a camera to test makes the weather turn bad and stay that way. But...I just think it's funny that the weather has been miserable here ever since the Sony A7III arrived. The morning the deck had a coat of shiny ice on it. The dogs were somewhat flummoxed. Butters pranced fleetly along the walk, attempted to make the turn, and slid right off, then turned around and started sniffing the deck to try to discover why that happened. (Often, sniffing is not the best information-gathering strategy.)

It stands to reason that miserable weather cannot last for a whole month. Especially in mid-April. Then again....

Mike

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Richard Man: "Feng Shui is not necessarily just superstition. It is often based on very sound principles."

Mike replies: I'll say. It's folk-based so it has that peculiar mix of total wigged-out loopiness along with solid, practical, time-cured wisdom. For example, the only book on feng shui I ever read suggested that a single man who wants a woman should get rid of his single bed and get a double bed, complete with a duplicate bedside table and lamp. I did exactly that, and, not long after, my son's mother was in my life. The idea was that if you want something in your life, make a welcoming space for it. It's solidly practical advice.

Gordon Lewis: "For what it's worth, the weather currently sucks in pretty much all of the northern part of the U.S., not just TOP World HQ, so whatever mojo you think might be affecting you must be powerful and pervasive."

Mike replies: You see what I'm up against.

Patrick Perez: "You shouldn't be superstitious. It's bad luck."

Moose: "Last Sunday, you recommended Jay Maisel's It's Not About the F-Stop (and Light, Gesture & Color) Get out your copy: 'There's Nothing To Shoot,' pp. 10–11; 'Bad Light,' pp. 12–13; 'The Gifts Are Always There,' pp. 26–27; 'Be Aware of the Ordinary,' pp. 28–29; 'Try Something Different,' pp. 76–77; 'Try For Pics You've Never Seen,' pp. 78–79.

"Your shot of mounded new snow a few weeks ago is one of the best, to my taste, that you've shown in quite some time. Where are the photos of Butters on ice, of the ice? Which things in your house have you not yet seen photographically? Maisel quotes Haas, 'Above all, never lose your enthusiasm!' Go get'em, Tiger! \;~)> "

Mike replies: I appreciate your good reminders Moose, but this is actually part of the process that I've developed with camera reviewing over the years. I've noticed I consistently tend to be overly influenced by first impressions, so I've learned to put a new camera in amenable or promising situations—"easy" situations—at first to avoid being negatively influenced. As long as the first results don't overly dampen my enthusiasm, I move along to greater familiarity with ease, but sometimes bad first impressions can be a little too tenacious or lasting with me. It's just a personal foible, something I've noticed about my personality or my brain, that I attempt to overcome consciously and deliberately. It's as if it's a way that my thinking needs to be calibrated, you see what I mean?

Tom Fangel: "Niels Bohr had a visitor from a US university. They went to Bohr´s summer cabin north of Copenhagen. As they approached the house the visitor noticed an old horseshoe nailed above the door frame. 'Do You really believe in this kind of superstition?' asked the visitor. 'No, of course not,' answered Bohr, 'But I have heard that it works even if you don't believe in it.'"

William Furniss: "You have really jinxed it now."

gert.weber: "Hi Mike, amateur astronomers have a rule of thumb when they get a new telescope: For every inch of diameter you have to wait one week for a clear nightly sky. Poor guys with new 16-inch telescopes!"

Rick Denney: "Adams had 'Clearing Winter Storm,' But he also had endless complaints about the unrelenting gloominess that was Alaska weather during a rare visit. Which is on my mind—I have a trip to Wrangell and St. Elias National Park booked this year, as a break-in trip for a new 645z. Alaska in July can be glorious...or not. I am bringing a weather-resistant lens in case that’s my only choice."

brian: "Here's a way to make good use of bad weather with the A7III: Set it up to your taste so that when you actually want to use it, both you and the camera will be ready.

"You surely remember the days when you could pick up an unfamiliar camera and use it immediately, without ever consulting the manual. With Sony, at least, those days are gone. The Sony menus are complex but not illogical, and with the combination of a 'Function' menu and a 'My Menu' along with the various customizable buttons and the ability to recall various combinations of settings, it's easy to get what you want when you want it without ever again diving into the main menu sections—but only if you've invested the necessary effort. The 'customizing the camera' section of the online Sony Help Guide is your friend, and it offers a productive way to spend one or more evenings while you wait for better weather.

"Just as an example: Sony's new 'Highlight' exposure mode used with +1.7 or +2 EV dialed in works well as an 'expose to the right' system for raw files, but that's not at all obvious when you unbox the camera."

Idiosyncrasies

Everybody has their little idiosyncrasies. Some little thing they do or phrase they use or sound they make. And idiosyncrasies are a good test: because, usually, if you don't like the person very much, they can become grating or annoying. But if you do like the person, they might become endearing.

Mike

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Open Mike: Musical Tastes

["Open Mike" (no karaoke) is the often off-topic, anything-goes Editorial page of TOP. It appears on...ohthehellwithit, it appears whenever it appears, I give up. —MJ]

Most of this has surfaced on TOP before, here and there, but repetition never hurts and what's more, repetition never hurts.

Musical tastes...everyone's is different. I was mainly into later '50s jazz for about 10–12 years. Now I’m back to listening to some pop and rock for the emotion, but my tastes are eclectic. I listen to a fair amount of classical but my tastes in that area are pretty circumscribed, basically instrumental music from the Baroque to the late Classical period, favoring smaller-scale over larger. I went through several years in the '80s obsessed with Bach. Almost addicted: if I didn't get a Bach fix every three or four days I started jonesing. Favorite: BWV 1052, which Robert Schumann considered among the greatest of masterpieces. A window to the heavens of great God.

I have a turntable in the family room with a few hundred old albums, including the first one I ever got when I was seven years old, “Something New” by the Beatles, a USA-only packaging, bought new in the Summer of '64. Although I grew up with it I don't really like rock that much, and I don't care much any more for blues, other than roots blues, although I used to. By far my favorite period of rock is '90s grunge. About three times better than the '60s if you ask me, although the '60s were also pretty good.

I have about 14,000 music files* but overall they don’t really reflect my tastes…more my explorations.

It takes an awful lot for a whole record to break through into “favorite” status and it doesn’t happen very often. Some favorite albums that I b'lieve are all from the 2000s:

Post War by M. Ward

Small Town Heroes by Hurray for the Riff-Raff

'Sno Angel Like You by Howe Gelb (of Giant Sand—he hired a gospel choir for the project, and the result is zany but completely enjoyable, to me anyway). Howe Gelb is an isolated and neglected genius.

Continuo by Avishai Cohen (jazz)

The Double EP: A Sea of Split Peas by the brilliant Courtney Barnett, a young Australian singer-songwriter. In her natural state she sounds like she's high.

You Had It Coming by Jeff Beck. Soundtrack to my life during an important year. Strange it didn't damage my hearing, except maybe it did. After my GF bailed on me, I was afraid to listen to this again for a long time, but when I finally did it wasn't too bad.

That's enough of that. Nobody works in albums any more.

I listen to a fair amount of pop too but it's like gum, sweet at first chew but pretty soon you want to spit it out. Songs with words are problematic if you ask me, because it adds a whole 'nuther layer the artists have to get right. A lot of musicians suck at lyrics. There's a legend that Paul McCartney's original lyrics for "Yesterday" started with "scrambled eggs," but John and George Martin jumped all over him, insisting the melody was way too good for stupid lyrics. (This is why some people do better work in bands.) Another example: "Seaweed" by the Fruit Bats. Gorgeous melody, instrumentally perfect (the intro of the banjo at 1:23 breaks your heart, just lovely), but the lyrics are so go**amned horribly shi**y it makes me want to wring Eric Johnson's neck every time I hear it. A potentially brilliant gem of a song ruined. If I were rich I'd pay him a lot of money to write new lyrics for it, and I'd hire a guy to stand there next to him and hit him with a stick every time he started drifting off into stupid. (I blame Weezer and "the Sweater Song," which kicked off a brief fad for willfully stupid, trivial lyrics**, as if it were cool...fortunately pretty soon people realized it was just stupid rather than stupid-as-cool.) Lyrics are like color in photographs: a whole extra layer that has to be right or ruination results. /rant

A few recent-ish favorite songs or cuts:

• "Fade Out Lines" by The Avener, a deep house rework of "The Fade Out Line" by Phoebe Killdeer and The Short Straws that was a hit in Europe. (But, again, if you're tempted to listen too hard to the lyrics, best not to.)

Lorine Chia

• "Eve's Perspective" by Lorine Chia. This might be a lesbian anthem for all I know, although I don't know anything about Lorine. But I've been listening to a fair amount of hip-hop and rap recently and I'm naturally drawn to the slowdrag melodic stuff such as Geto Boys' "Six Feet Deep" which rechannels Marvin Gaye. I'm over this now ("Eve's Perspective," I mean) but the cut had legs for a whole year for me.
• "Destiny" by Henry Binns and Sam Hardaker (Zero 7). Bobby Burnett turned me on to this, and it alone is enough reason for all the people who made it to have been born.

• "Turiya and Ramakrishna" by Alice Coltrane (jazz)
• "Arriving Somewhere But Not Here" by Porcupine Tree. A long, dramatic, almost operatic cut, in the style of high-period Pink Floyd. A good example of the importance of primacy in art: if this had come out in the '70s it would have been as famous as Tubular Bells. But despite being completely amazing no one's ever heard of it, or heard it.
• "Gabriel's Mother's Hiway Ballad #16 Blues" by Arlo Guthrie. A stone folk classic, but I just discovered it last year, waiting in the line at the car wash. Whatever's old is new the first time you hear it.

My two favorite musicians, in any genre, are Coleman Hawkins and Hank Jones. (Both have huge discographies. To sample, try the Hawk's Here and Now, an Impulse disc from '62 which has both "Quintessence" and "Apache Love Song." If you have Amazon Prime you can stream it for free on Amazon; otherwise better get it on iTunes, as it's pretty thoroughly out of print. For Hank, try any Great Jazz Trio record or one of my faves, "Bluesette." I love Mr. Hank, he is a paragon of taste and modesty and chops that never stop. R.I.P.

Finally, a few amazing videos everybody should see:

• Tash Sultana, "Jungle," (bedroom recording). New discovery to me, compliments of a woman I don't know named Isabella.
• Marquese Scott used a spell of homelessness, living on the street, to work on his urban dancing, and this vid earned him an apartment and a BMW. Or so I heard, and I like the story so I'm not fact-checking it. The music is a Dubstep version of the controversial "Pumped Up Kicks" by Foster the People from 2010.
• Imogen Heap's virtuoso one-woman "Just for Now" is a must-view.
• Ibeyi's "The River" is simple but stunning, very creative, and I love the song.
• If you're into dance compilations, there's a great one of Christopher Walken (who dances in just about every movie he does), and a film preservationist did a mashup of dance clips from old movies set to "Uptown Funk" that's pretty wonderful
• Finally, compare this one and this one. Threads, it's all threads.

Obviously this conversation could continue. Music is a consumable as far as I'm concerned. I need fresh, and it's a constant exploration, a constant search. It's possible for someone to love music and not like a single thing I've mentioned in this post. An ocean, fortunately, and you can't drink up it all. Suits me.

Mike
(Thanks to M.D.)

* I'm sorry, but nothing by Leonard Nimoy.

** The prototype is Jimmy Webb's "MacArthur Park" from 1968—even Webb himself was put off by its bloated, bombastic, over-the-top arrangement violently yoked to dopey, meaningless lyrics. Wikipedia tells us that comedian Dave Barry nominated it as the worst song ever written. Listen to the original Richard Harris version for the full-on treacle of the arrangement. One hopes its great popularity had mostly to do with audiences' appreciation of its campiness....

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Wolfgang Lonien: "What a coincidence that you bring up music. I used to be a bass player when I was young (almost like in another life), but lately—short before my 61st—I've begun online jamming again—and 'published' an album. Listen to it here if you like. And honest critique is welcome, tho please keep in mind that this is a) only some jammin', and b) I'm missing some 35 years of practice, so I'm like a bl**dy beginner...."

Mike replies: I wonder if I have the right page...it sounds very accomplished to me, not much like jamming. Good on you for getting back to it and getting yourself out there in any case! I'm always impressed by that. I hope my novel will be like that.

Ken: "Your tastes in music, cameras and photography are seemingly (mostly) the opposite of mine. Maybe, for me, that's one part of what makes TOP interesting to read. Better that than an echo chamber."

Mike replies: Yes, that's why it's so important for reviewers to be honest and open about their tastes and prejudices. That way, readers can learn from them even if they don't agree with them.

Speed: "Re: Scrambled eggs. Keen to not forget his magical dream melody, McCartney wrote some temporary lyrics for the song—about scrambled eggs, and named it after the breakfast dish. They went: 'Scrambled eggs, oh, my baby, how I love your legs.' Scrambled Eggs became a running joke between the band for 'months and months' ... 'We almost had it finished when we made up our minds that only a one word title would suit and, believe me, we just couldn’t find the right one. Then, one morning, Paul woke up, and the song and the title were both there. Completed!' See the article here."

If It Ain't Broke....

Written by Carl Weese

Not long ago Mike mentioned how annoying it can be when software manufacturers include changes in an update that disrupt our accustomed workflow. I’ve just encountered one of these situations and thought it might be useful to recount what happened and what I’ve done—so far—to cope with the changes.

As background, while I still shoot large format film and work on scans in Photoshop, with digital capture I do almost everything in Adobe Camera Raw (ACR), the raw file development module of Photoshop Creative Cloud (PSCC). After a recent update of PSCC, the first time opened a capture from Bridge into ACR I saw that the main, or “Basic” panel of buttons and sliders was significantly changed. The top of the panel now begins with a Treatment line, with radio buttons for Color and Black & White. The next line is Profile, with a dropdown and an expansion option that turns out to offer a large number of profile choices. The pane where we used to do the b&w/monochrome conversion now has only the set of sliders for Black & White Mix. (I’m currently reading a book that quotes frequently from books and correspondence of late 18th century authors, and I’m amused to find that their use of Capitalization is almost as extravagant as Adobe’s.) Next I noticed that the very useful-if-you-don’t-overdo-it Dehaze tool has been promoted from the fx pane to the Basic panel.

Then I hit a snag. I’d just shot a session that I planned for B&W. Over years of working with ACR I’ve saved quite a lot of User Presets. Things like half a dozen frequently-used white balance settings, four different levels of vignette (lens falloff) corrections, something as simple as a setting that only invoked the monochrome/grayscale conversion of the HSL pane. I selected all the captures in the session, then went to the top menu for Edit > Develop Settings…expecting to see all of my custom presents. They were gone. Copy, paste, previous conversion, and ACR defaults were the only options. Those aren’t exactly difficult to use, but they’re nowhere near as convenient as having my own set of User Presets available.

So I headed to the Presets pane, and found a whole new set of dropdown menus: Color, Creative, B&W, Curve, Grain, Sharpening, Vignetting, and then finally, User Presets. I applied my grayscale preset to a single file, dropped back to Bridge, selected the rest of the session captures, then went to Edit > Develop Settings > Previous Conversion.

Later, I began to work with some new captures. There were just a few so I brought six into ACR, selected all and hit the new Black & White button at the top of the Basic panel. Yuk! The conversions were harsh and ugly. They were a terrible tonal representation of the color image before conversion. Hmm. The second line in the panel, Profile, read out Adobe Monochrome. I dropped back to Bridge and brought up one of the files I’d converted earlier, and found that the Profile read Adobe Standard B&W. What’s going on?

Back to the new files, up into ACR, and I opened the long list of Profile drop downs. Under B&W there were seventeen options. Most were harsh and ugly, but a few looked more promising. The last five clearly imitated classic pan film filter effects, B&W Yellow Filter, B&W Orange Filter, etc. Then I noticed that one of the dropdown options was Legacy, and sure enough, when I opened it, there was Adobe Standard B&W. Apparently, calling up my grayscale User Preset located this option under the hood and provided the grayscale conversion I’d been used to. It really is the Legacy conversion that used to be the default. Rummaging around a bit, I found that I could make Adobe Standard B&W a Favorite, and I could cut Adobe Monochrome from the Favorite list (if not consign it to an inner circle of Hell), making Adobe Standard B&W effectively the default if I hit the Black & White button up in the first line of the Basic panel.

On a more positive note, I was disconcerted when I first found the new and improved User Presets drop down, because, as I moved the cursor down the list of presets, the image in the Preview window jumped all over the place. Each Preset was being immediately previewed. Once I’d gotten the mono conversion issue at least preliminarily settled, I went back to look at this again, and have to say that I like it. Mousing over my set of saved White Balance settings and seeing the Preview image show the effect without actually committing to it is really quite cool. Same for my set of vignette correction settings. Not to mention my often used highlight recovery settings. I’m going to save more of those at a finer grade of distinctions because it is now so easy to preview their effect by just mousing down the list of User Presets before selecting one of them.

There’s some validity to, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” and changes like these can be annoying, especially if what’s going on is pretty opaque, but sometimes there’s really good stuff to be found in what the anonymous elves stick us with in each upgrade. I’m old enough that being forced to learn new stuff is supposed to be good for me, so I’m not all that annoyed.

Carl

Carl Weese, who lives in rural Connecticut with his artist wife Tina, has been teaching the esoteric art of fine platinum printing in group workshops and private tutoring sessions since the 1990s. He has had several Pt/Pd print sales on TOP.

©2018 by Carl Weese, all rights reserved

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Rob de Loe: "Under the new model Adobe is following we are going to have to get used to frequent major changes like this. I actually like the new Profiles approach. I compared the Adobe Monochrome profile to the one I developed using the old camera profiles, and I prefer Adobe Monochrome. It brings out just a touch more separation between tones at the start, meaning that it gives me a bit more headroom to make adjustments using the other tools. My only worry was that Adobe will 'tweak' the Profiles in future versions, meaning that in a few years an image I open in Lightroom will be different than it is today because the foundational profile was changed behind the scenes. It's been suggested to me when I raised this elsewhere that Adobe won't do this; instead they'll preserve Adobe Monochrome as it is, and make a new version with a new name. This is the approach they use with Process Versions (so I have some hope that this may be how they do it)."

Eric Chan: "Here is some more information about the new Profiles feature in Camera Raw (also applicable to Lightroom). And here's a video that provides an overview of the feature as presented in Camera Raw. Rob, we are definitely sensitive to preserving the appearance of your existing (already-edited) images. If we find ways to improve the quality of the profiles, we would be creating new or additional profiles (instead of changing the appearance of existing profiles). Cheers, Eric Chan, Camera Raw Engineer."

Thomas Knoll: "Mark presets as Favorites to have them appear in the Bridge menu. It is now common to have hundreds or more presets installed, and we needed a way to keep the menu usable."

[Thomas Knoll of Adobe Systems is the original creator of Photoshop. —Ed.]

Carl replies: Marking presets as Favorites to have them appear in the Bridge menu works nicely. There are only a few user presets I frequently want to apply to large groups of files, so it was easy to add them back to the Bridge menu as Favorites and have them back again.

Howard: "Let me recommend an enlightening book that will help with these changes: Who Moved My Cheese by Spencer Johnson, M.D."

Sony A7 Mark III In Da House

The TP (theoretically perfect) or PoP (perfect on paper) Sony A7III arrived last evening!

This is petty—I'm griping, and I admit that—but here are the first two things I noticed.

1. No charger. It's one of those deals where you get a cable and a USB adapter for charging the battery in-camera. Granted, Sony's pricing on this model is aggressive, and maybe this is a smart way of cutting costs. But it's faintly annoying that I had to wait for this box to arrive for three weeks and the very first thing I discover is that I'm going to have to order a charger and an extra battery and wait for those things too. (Or that's what I would have to do, if I were keeping the camera.) To add insult to injury, the bleedin' BC-QZ1 charger is corded (I hate that—I much prefer chargers that plug right into the wall), and it costs EIGHTY-EIGHT dollars. Really? That's [x]% of the value of the whole camera, where x is a number Ctein could figure out but I can't. [UPDATE: Frank Gorga says it's 4.4%. Thanks Frank.] And the extra NP-FZ100 battery is another $78. The aggressive pricing just got a little less attractive.
2. The engineering of the box. Yeah, this is probably because I have to repack this and send it back to B&H a month from now, and also because I've unpacked and repacked way too many cameras in the last 30 years or so. But all the little cardboard puzzle-pieces fell to bits when I was removing the stuff from the box, and I already know I'm going to be irritated trying to get it all back together. I always am, but I'm going to be again. With all the talented engineers the camera companies have at their disposal, can no one come up with a competently engineered box that's logical and easy to repack? It's not asking the moon.

I know I'm sounding like a grouchy graybeard, but that's only because I'm a grouchy graybeard. (Only sometimes grouchy. Mostly pretty dang cheerful, to be honest. Once you're past that pesky midlife crisis, it's really pretty great to be alive.)

Anyway I'm waiting for the battery to charge, and then I get to try the TPoP A7III! Which is a good thing, and I'm not losing sight of that. Also on the good side is the fact that the Sony A7III's battery life is claimed to be the best of any mirrorless camera.

And away we go!

Mike

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01af: "Oh dear...so from now on, four weeks of frowning skies and downpours in upstate New York."

Mike replies: EXACTLY. You understand!  :-)

Earl Dunbar: "Sony should have Apple make their packaging."

Apple duckhead

Joe Boris: "To put one of your curmudgeon-ings to rest, if you've ever owned an Apple laptop or other device that came with one of the (I can't find a way to attach the pic I just shot of it to this post) small, white, 'folding 2-pronged outlet adapters' [called a 'duckhead' —Ed.], they will insert perfectly into the cord port of this Sony charger, the Fuji X charger, and most other similar devices. This tiny thing replaces the long cord entirely. It is only 1x1.5x.75", so it almost fits in a pill bottle. I bought five of them on eBay several years ago for a few dollars, and now every charger I use that came with a cord, now wears one of these."

Fred: "Thank you Joe Boris for that very useful tip about the Apple charger outlet adapter [duckhead]. I've had a handful of these laying around from my Apple purchases over the years and now they have a use, a very good use at that."

robert e: "Hi Mike! Great to see you back in full stride. Interesting that Richard Butler of DPReview awarded the NP-FZ100 battery a 'Gear of the Year' award last year, for its role in sufficiently eliminating the usability gap between mirrorless and mirrored ILCs. Could it be that its value is actually greater than the 4.4% of cost? There seem to be plenty of off-brand chargers, not so much batteries—yet. Looking forward to the review!"