The Online Photographer

The Best One-Volume History of Photography

A spread from Photography: The Definitive Visual History by Tom Ang

A few reflections about histories—

I used to be a pretty good resource for histories of photography and their relative value. I'm not any more. I used to hungrily absorb a lot of the histories I came across; nowadays it's been quite a while since I did more than skim through one.

The histories I know mostly relate to the medium as it was practiced when I was younger, for the simple reason that I read them back then and the period they covered ended at that time. I mark the change from a show I saw in Chicago in the "aughts," the 2000s. It was a roundup of recent photography (it might have been recent acquisitions of the museum where I saw the exhibit; I don't remember). Most of the photographs were "made into art" in some ostentatious or obvious way—they had writing on them, or they were pastiche or collage, or staged or manipulated, or they embodied some idea or meaning using the tropes and means of then-current paintings. Almost all were large. And among all these were two photographs by photographers of the type Gilles Mora included in The Last Photographic Heroes, who were also the type who were presented to me as I was learning. Smallish, straight 35mm B&W enlargements of "found" scenes from life. And you know what? They looked out of place, almost awkward, slightly forlorn. Obsolescent, even. Photography had moved on.

So I don't think it's fair or very useful for me to talk about the histories I know well. My knowledge is out of date. What's the view from now? How do historians see the patterns of the last half century, now that more two-thirds of that half century have passed since I graduated from photography school? I could have talked about 1945–1995 with a fair amount of authority. A bit less so about 1969–2019. I've been paying attention to photography itself during that time, of course, but not so much to the books that attempt to summarize it.

I think it's due to a shift in perspective. I'm no longer the eager student. Now I approach synthetic retrospective with more cynicism—either I can see errors, or I know where they got their information, or I can trace their allegiances, or I simply disagree with their theses. Often I'll read some attempt at historical exegesis and simply know where to find the work of someone who did the same thing better. Most histories, of course, are by people who got their information by reading other histories and rehashing received opinion. Precious few authors are doing original research, mining primary sources, uncovering genuinely new connections. The novelty is just in different ideologies and biases, applied as though with a filter added.

The result is that it doesn't tend to engage me as I read. I'm not saying I wouldn't read a great history, or that I wouldn't like to read the digital-inclusive version, up to 2020, of something like Jonathan Green's American Photography: A Critical History 1945 to Present ("present" in that case was 1984—never put the world "present" in the title of a book intended to last!). I don't think I've gotten close-minded, or at least I hope I haven't. I guess I just got weary of the BS. I think of the fact that Abraham Lincoln read voraciously during his younger years and then at some point just stopped—maybe he figured he had read enough. Maybe that's how I feel. (He was quite a good writer, by the way.)

But I also don't want to blithely recommend histories that stopped in 1984 as though they are still fully relevant. Things really have changed since then.

Lightning in 17 bottles
So here's my other thought. I've always been borderline contemptuous of those compendiums that cover photography by tackling one topic per two-page spread, with a few splashy illos and some breathless summary text that amounts to a glorified caption. Usually organized alphabetically or in some other way that makes the topics into a cheerfully inchoate jumble. The strategy is typical of the kind of pasteurized processed book-product meant by publishers as bookstore fodder for the undiscerning consumer. But I noticed that's how Tom Ang's book is organized, and it occurred to me that maybe that makes sense for photography—photography really is sprawling and multifaceted, and it just doesn't lend itself to conceptual approaches that show it to be highly organized and orderly and moving in one direction like a tightly disciplined herd of cats.

You know what I'd like to see? I'd like to see a modern, contemporary, AD 2020 version of the Life Library of Photography. Seventeen or so volumes that attempt to corral photography, circa now, into rough categories that make sense today, compiled by a team of editors, writers, interviewers, researchers and graphic artists working to an overarching editorial plan. That would be interesting as all get-out. Because I think you could argue that photography has changed as much since 1970 (when the Life Library came out) as it did in the hundred years leading up to 1970. (Or at least since 1888.) Those charged with taking a snapshot of it in similar depth today would illuminate a very different medium, functioning very differently in the world.

It's certainly a fast-changing subject. What's that old expression—catching lightning in a bottle?

So what's the best one-volume history of photography, as of 2019? Beats me. I don't know if there is such at thing.

Mike

P.S. And please, people. The reason Newhall left Mortensen out was that Mortensen was horrible. He barely qualifies as a photographer. It would be like doing a history of serious figurative painting from Eakins to Hockney and making a conspiracy out of the fact that Frank Frazetta got left out. Why do you think?

Original contents copyright 2019 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.

(Not) everything must fade away

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

Michael Perini: "A wonderful post. I have quite a few volumes, at least a dozen that would generally qualify as history of all or various parts of photography, and it hadn't occurred to me to look for one that includes the last 10 or 20 years. Most of my touchstones are similar in vintage to yours. I'm starting to feel—out of touch. I subscribed to the Life Library of Photography series from the first volume through several of the 'yearbook updates.' It was a treasure and a revelation then. I still have every one. I fear the speed of change would make a modern one unfeasible, but it certainly would be nice."

James Cockroft: "I found the Color volume of the Life Library of Photography in a Friends of the Library book sale for $1. It's water damaged, most of the pages are stuck together, and the fastest films on offer when it was written topped out at 160, but it's still perhaps the best book I've seen on color photography. I'll be keeping my eye out for other volumes in my used bookstore travels, for sure."

Don Craig: "There, in a gleaming pool of abandoned hemolymph, lay the writer's severed hand. Conan grunted. 'Frank was a friend of mine.'"

The History of Photography

I have a question. Just personally curious. Have you ever read a history of photography?

I won't specify what or which. Long online article, ancient classic from the '30s, whatever.

You can answer just plain yes or no if you like, and I'm not going to slag anybody for a "no" answer.

Mike
(Thanks to c.d.embrey)

P.S. Also, check out the Featured Comments for the "Too Easy" post below—just added.

Original contents copyright 2019 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.

(Not) everything must fade away

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

David Miller: "Yes. I have five such volumes in my library. Since my collection of books of and about photography runs to several dozen and my accumulation of books of history must be numbered in the hundreds, it is hardly surprising that there's a bit of overlap. (I even have a volume titled A History of Histories.) But I can quit any time…."

Sherwood McLernon: "I have a little over 100 books of Photography (not counting how-to books which have mostly been given away) which according to comments written here, is a fairly modest collection. My earliest (and favourite) history is The Picture History of Photography by Peter Pollack which I've had since the mid-seventies and which I re-read from time to time. [Note to others: I'd get the Revised and Enlarged Edition —Ed.] Another one (that I purchased on a visit to George Eastman House) is A History of Photography from 1839 to the Present, published by Taschen, which takes a more encyclopedic journey.

"About a quarter of my photographic library is made up of biographies/autobiographies of photographers that I admire."

Timkey64: "Actually no I haven't. I would buy such a book, as long as it was international in flavour, not just US."

Mike replies: You might start with Tom Ang's Photography: The Definitive Visual History. I don't know it, but it gets high marks from buyers on Amazon and it seems to be in easily digestible form, and Tom Ang is British as far as I know.

Bob Keefer: "Yes, though nothing that I felt captured the story. Mostly the histories are written by people (John Szarkowski comes to mind) too rooted in the fine art/criticism/theory world, and so manage to miss the gut-level thrill of looking at photos."

[Note: The following two comments came in right next to each other in the following order.  —Ed.]

Pat Coddington: "I've read THE history of photography by Beaumont Newhall."

Andrew Molitor: "Yes, several. Newhall's is the worst."

Mike replies: At least that sums up the range of opinions about Newhall!

Personally I prefer the original edition. I didn't care for the extra chapters in later editions which were added to "correct" its perceived deficits and address its critics—if you just keep in mind that it represented an American photo-art-establishment view c. 1964 you'll be fine—it's a creation of its time and place. And people forget now how influential it was in helping photographs become accepted as legitimate content for art museums and as legitimate subjects for scholarly study. It was more valuable in its day than it's given credit for now. And it should be remembered that it was originally just an exhibit catalog!   —Ed.]

Edward Taylor: "Yes, Several. The first one I read was a series of Time-Life books in the '70s. I remember being unable to put them down. I still have them somewhere around here."

Mike replies: That was the Life Library of Photography, published by Time-Life Books around 1970 or '71, reprinted in 1980. There were "Yearbooks" for a few years after publication as well, in an effort to keep the set up to date, and there were editions published for several other countries. Originally there were 17 volumes: The Camera, Light and Film, The Print, Color, Photography as a Tool, The Great Themes, Photojournalism, Special Problems, The Studio, The Art of Photography, Great Photographers, Photographing Nature, Photographing Children, Documentary Photography, Frontiers of Photography, Travel Photography, and Caring for Photographs. It included a fair amount of history but was more of an overview than strictly a history.

Stephen Woolford: "Yes, but I rarely read histories of photography cover to cover. Mary Warner Marien's Photography: A Cultural History, for example, is a really useful book but I've tended to dip into it and I couldn't swear to having read all of it. I probably get on better with books of essays like Geoff Dyer's excellent The Ongoing Moment."

Peter Marquis-Kyle: "Oh yes I have—starting with Helmut and Alison Gernsheim's A Concise History of Photography which I read in the late 1960s. My LibraryThing catalog lists 49 books with both 'photography' and 'history' tags—an indication that this is an ongoing interest."

[Note: The following two comments also came in adjacent to each other. Sorry for pointing this out twice in one post but these coincidences make me chuckle. —Ed.]

Graham Byrnes: "I've read the plaques in the garden of the Institut Lumière down the street while eating my lunch...does that count?"

Andrew Lamb: "No, not all the way through. Have dipped into books like The Art of Fixing a Shadow (does that even count?)"

Mike replies: If you're forcing me to adjudicate, I'd say you each get five Life Points out of a max of fifteen.  :-) 

Francisco Cubas: "My first and only book on the matter is Michel Frizot's A New History of Photography. Frizot refused to see the history of the medium as a chronological list of great photographers, so he divided the subject in chapters by periods of times and themes, and assigned different authors to each one. It's a marvelous book, because it gives you a great vision of the complexity and flexibility of the medium. It was published in 1994, before the great digital meteorite, but it showed me that a single book on the subject is impossible, and that one should always be careful when using the word photography; its meanings are too diverse."

Has Photography Gotten Too Easy?

Is photography too easy?

Maria Popova—along with Virginia Woolf(!)—suspects that maybe it's gotten to be. Their point is that when something is rare and valued, more effort and care is expended on it. By becoming thoughtless and easy, it also tends to become trivial and devalued.

Maria, the Bulgarian-born Brooklyn writer who pens the famous Brain Pickings site, first quotes Virginia Woolf, the great author and woman of letters:

The Victorian age killed the art of letter writing by kindness: it was only too easy to catch the post. A lady sitting down at her desk a hundred years before had not only certain ideals of logic and restraint before her, but the knowledge that a letter which cost so much money to send and excited so much interest to receive was worth time and trouble. With Ruskin and Carlyle in power, a penny post to stimulate, a gardener, a gardener’s boy, and a galloping donkey to catch up the overflow of inspiration, restraint was unnecessary and emotion more to a lady’s credit, perhaps, than common sense. Thus to dip into the private letters of the Victorian age is to be immersed in the joys and sorrows of enormous families, to share their whooping coughs and colds and misadventures, day by day, indeed hour by hour.

The quote comes from a 1926 book called Victorian Photographs of Famous Men & Fair Women, a monograph of Julia Margaret Cameron's photographs originally published in 1926 by Woolf's own Hogarth Press, for which Woolf wrote an introductory essay. Woolf was Cameron's great-niece.

The book was later reprinted by David R. Godine in 1973 (who, coincidentally, I met in Oregon and to whom I made an unsuccessful appeal for employment). It was reprinted by others after that, but Godine's reprint was in the possession of the Corcoran School of Art library when I was a student there in the '80s (and in the possession of many D.C.-area gallerists and curators in the '80s, I noticed). Few students used the library, but I soaked up every photography book on its shelves. 

Maria comments:

Woolf’s point applies not only to letter writing but to the very medium celebrated by the book in which her essay appears, and in fact to every technology that ever was and ever will be. She couldn’t have—or could she have?—envisioned what would become of photography as the technology became commonplace over the coming decades, much less what digital photography would bring. But her insight holds true—the easier it becomes to convey a message in a certain medium, the less selective we grow about what that message contains, and soon we are conveying the trifles and banalities of our day-to-day life, simply because it is effortless to fill the page (or feed, or screen, or whatever medium comes next). Letters about lunch items have been supplanted by Instagram photographs of lunch items, to which we apply the ready-made filters that have purported to supplant the artistry of light, shadow, and composition. The art of photography, too, is being killed by kindness.

I mentioned the other day that my "root teacher" would have been Clarence White (because David Vestal was my teacher and Ralph Steiner was David's teacher and Clarence White was Ralph's teacher), which is when I discovered the nice story about Clarence White only being able to afford to expose two photographic plates per week during one period of his life. Because they were so precious, White, who was obsessed with photography at the time, would spend all week planning how he was going to use his two shots on the weekend. And a high percentage of those pictures are now among his masterpieces.

I'm not saying this is conclusive evidence of any particular answer to the title question, but it's hard to argue with the claim that the situation that exists in photography now is effectively the opposite of that!

George Frederic Watts' painting of Julia Margaret Cameron

Julia Margaret Cameron's portrait of her niece, Julia Stephen,
Virginia Woolf's mother

George Charles Beresford's famous photograph of
Virginia Woolf, 1902. She committed suicide
by putting stones in the pockets of her overcoat
and walking into a stream.

So is photography being "killed by kindness"? That's the core of Maria Popova's point—"...the easier it becomes to convey a message in a certain medium, the less selective we grow about what that message contains, and soon we are conveying the trifles and banalities of our day-to-day life, simply because it is effortless...."

(A friend of mine just sent me a picture of his lunch, as a joke, based on this post. Well, I hope that was the reason anyway!)

Mike
(Thanks to Jim Schley)

Original contents copyright 2019 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.

(Not) everything must fade away

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

Daniel: "Whether one is forced due to circumstances or chooses to slow down, this video on photographer Jim Brandenburg may be of interest. He was facing burnout with his photography. National Geographic shooter. He went home—and decided to expose one frame a day for 90 days. No do-overs, no fudging. Just one frame each day. A lot to be said with a slow, contemplative approach. But, without a good grounding the the basics it would be an exercise in frustration. Many of us learned when the cost of that one roll of film was a big limitation. When one lens was all we had. We learned to make things count and took time to explore before tripping the shutter. Mistakes were made and analyzed so they would not happen again—or if they did so they were somehow useful for creative purposes. Concentration and contemplation does wonders for fine results."

Mike replies: Interesting. When I taught photography, I wanted to have my students try two exercises: one was to shoot six rolls of film in one outing or shooting session (they were issued one roll of 24-exp. film a week by the school, so six rolls would have been a whole lot). And for the other, they were to cut a short strip of film, load it into the camera manually, and head out to shoot it—they would have just one frame to take a picture with—as you say, "no do-overs, no fudging."

The plain foundered for a variety of reasons, not least of which is that I myself couldn't reliably place a 2–3-inch clip of 35mm film in the film gate of a 35mm camera and get the back closed such that the film was where it was supposed to be. But Jim B.'s exercise isn't too far from what many large-format photographers do. Roy Stryker complained that Walker Evans would go out to shoot for a whole day and come back with six sheets of exposed film, and that was on a good day—sometimes he returned with fewer, or none. And Jim Sherwood told me of an old shooter he knew (I think Jim worked for him once?) who would head out to cover an assignment armed only with his Speed Graphic and six film holders—that's twelve shots. Try covering a basketball game or a political rally or a social event with twelve shots!

JOHN GILLOOLY: "Perfect timing. I made a quick Facebook post the other day while eating lunch at the Gardner Museum in Boston between assignments (the post included a photo of the paragraph in the book, but that is not really needed):

"Thumbing my way through an Edward Weston book during lunch at the Cafe G at the Gardner Museum I was struck by this: it said Weston was busy sorting through 800 negatives that were captures over an eight-month span that covered 19,000 miles and 24 states. In another section of the book, it was estimated that he made approximately 6,000 negatives during his life.

"It is amazing how technology has changed photography. Weston was mostly shooting sheet film, a single negative on a large format camera that then needed to be individually processed, developed and printed in the darkroom. During the trip mentioned, he was working at the prolific clip of three exposures per day.

"This is a pretty busy week for me as a photographer in the middle of one of the busy seasons of the year. I will easily shoot more than 6,000 images this week. And if needed, I could capture and store all of those images on one single card, carrying them around on something the size of a dime.

"It would be interesting to see how the photographers of that era, including Ansel Adams, would go about the process today. Would their end-product be better or worse with the option of higher volume capture at each location? While we often glorify their process, it wasn’t necessarily a choice; it was just dictated by the limitations of the time."

Mike adds: Here's another fun fact: On Weston's "eight-month span that covered 19,000 miles and 24 states," which would have been his Guggenheim trip, he didn't do very well. He had a pretty low hit-rate. I guess three shots a day of a chaotic variety of subjects he didn't know very well was "spray and pray" for him!  :-)

toto: "Oil painting is so easy now. You don't even have to stretch your own canvas or mix your paints. Just by a pre-stretched canvas and tubes of paint."

Dave Levingston: "I’ve had a personal experience that exemplifies this. Back in college in the 1970s I started photographing dance at Ohio University (where the Clarence White School of Photography is located, by the way). I was pretty good at it and the dancers were very happy with my photos. Shooting dance performances back then was a technical challenge. The stage was dark, the film had to be push processed, and of course autofocus was decades away.

"After I retired I decided to return to OU and make more dance photos as a way to 'pay it forward' for the kindness and support I had received when I was a student. That was in the early days of digital and it was still a challenge shooting with my Nikon D100.

"I would edit my photos and put them on a site where the dancers could order prints. I put the prices at cost. A lot of dancers bought the prints. But over the years the orders declined. Eventually they stopped all together. I realized that dance performance photography was no longer difficult. The dancers had plenty of photos taken by their friends with their digital cameras and even with their phones. And they had no use for prints. They just wanted small digital files for the Internet."

Stan B.: "Photography is not only easier (and of better technical quality), but perhaps more importantly, is now much easier to disseminate. And as is usually the case with any advancement in technology, society's knowledge of how to distinguish the wheat from the chaff lags critically behind. Growing up, I used to love special effects in movies—realistic, high-quality effects were a welcomed rarity. Now they can literally defy reality, and are overused to the point of replacing a cogent story line."

Yoshi Carroll: "Everyone talks, all the time, and deep conversation is painfully rare."

Paulo Bizarro: "It is a lot easier to do things today than it used to be five, 10, 20, 50, 100 years ago. Including: cooking; filming; writing; driving; traveling; space travel; weather forecasting; finding and exploiting underground riches; etc, etc. It is called technological advancement."

David Comdico: "There is some truth to this. Convenience is the mantra of modernity and is usually at odds with art (see Tarr's The Werckmeister Harmonies). Certainly, it is easier than ever to make a bad picture. But to do something well is always difficult. Letters seem quaint when compared to email and downright archaic when compared to texting. But neither of these make a good letter any easier to write. The other misguided notion in this essay is that photography has been made too easy by digital technology. This is a quaint notion. 'You push the button, we do the rest,' was the slogan Kodak used in 1888 to sell photography to the masses. 1888. That is not a typo. Photography has always been a democratic medium and the ease with which one can make a picture has always been a blessing and a curse."

RIP for a Reader

Allow me today, if you will, a reminiscence.

The other day when I wrote that April Fool's post, I hadn't been intending to write one. I just felt the content for that day had been a little sparse (I mean, how exciting is it to read that all the Print Sale prints have shipped, unless you're getting one?), so I bashed it out. It was one of those posts that takes only two or three hours from conception to completion. Sometimes coming up with a blog post is like pulling teeth. Other times words flow like water.

I think most people enjoyed it. (One or two really did not.) However, a number of people were actually fooled, which isn't the best result. What you want is for people to be fooled at first and then wise up to it as they get into it deeper, so they can kinda laugh at themselves but not end up annoyed about being lied to. In this case, though, I actually like the underlying idea—those phantom museums of new work, making ephemeral images from the electronic ether into real paper and ink prints as a good deed for the world—so I sort of segued into blocking out the idea. It's not a preposterous idea, just an idealistic one. I'd be seriously charged up about it if I could do such a thing. Although it might be good if I were  younger at the start of the project.

I was also surprised at the reactions to my plot-point about having gotten married. A number of people said they'd hoped that was true, because they want me to be happy, and I'm touched by peoples' good wishes for me. Thank you, if that included you. But I really didn't mean that to be a big point of the piece; it was just a means of explaining how the narrator (the fake me) suddenly came into a big whack of cash.

Kicks
However, one reader I did expect to hear from was a guy who I've been hearing from for fifteen years or more, who originally would sign his comments "Bryce Lee of Burlington Ontario Canada." Bryce was a railfan, a train photographer, and a loyal TOP reader...and a follower of my column "The Sunday Morning Photographer" before that, and a subscriber to my doomed print newsletter The 37th Frame before that. When my son was a boy I mentioned in a column that he couldn't afford the outlandish custom "kicks" (shoes) he had designed for himself using a website's customization tool. ("Daddy, you aren't allowed to call them 'kicks,'" to quote 11-year-old Xander, which was then spelled Zander.) I promptly got a check in the mail from Bryce, with the words "for Zander's kicks" on the memo line. Guess Bryce didn't know he wasn't allowed to call them that. From then on I'd get a donation in the mail from Ontario every year, regular as rain.

I heard from Bryce many times over the years. When his mother died; when he moved out of the house he was born in; when he sold his Nikons (although he kept buying more), and when he began distributing his vast collection of train photographs to interested parties hither and yon. When his medical problems proliferated and limited his mobility and his photography. Some missives were morose and pessimistic and spoke of his declining interest in photography. A few of his tales were lurid and made him seem just a trifle scary—he often mentioned that he was in the vicinity of seven feet tall and weighed 350 pounds, and he once told me he had killed an attack dog with a hatchet and a man with a car. (The latter an unavoidable automobile accident, not anything sinister, of course.) He loved dogs, though, and often asked after mine. Apparently he used to like to ride his motorcycle in full leathers, which, given his size, must have been a imposing sight.

He wasn't a friend any more or less than many other readers are—I've met hundreds of you and heard from thousands more. But over the years Bryce's quirk was that took a lively and good-hearted interest in personal details. He liked to give me advice, and many times lavished praise on me for being a good dad—reading between the lines, I guessed that either he had not received much parenting from his own father, or that the parenting he did receive was—how shall we put it?—less than it might have been. He consistently seemed gratified to an unusual degree by the signs and hints of care and regard toward my son that I showed glimpses of, here and there, in my writings. In any event, when I said anything personal on the blog, however glancing, Bryce would usually seize on it and offer up his 2¢.

So I didn't know and couldn't guess what the general reception of that April's Fools Day post might be, but I thought I knew one thing: that it would draw a response from one Bryce Lee of Burlington Ontario Canada. Even if he realized as he read it that it wasn't true, if he had read that I was getting married he would have had something to say. We never met in person, but I knew him well enough to know that.

A few days later it came to me that I'd been wrong. I hadn't heard from Bryce after all. Then it struck me that, come to think, he had been silent for several months. The light bulb went on above my head at that point, sorry to say—he had sometimes regaled me with lists of the many maladies he suffered from. I did a Google search for a possible obituary...and unfortunately that was what I found.

Very sad.

The family of photo-dawgs
Surely our ranks are thinned by death now and again...most of the time unbeknownst to the rest of us. There's seldom any way to know if a name that had become familiar has merely drifted away due to lessening interest or has left less willingly. Sometimes I go back and read old posts and feel a certain poignancy and sadness when I come across the name of a commenter we don't hear from any more. They might still be happily pursuing their pleasures elsewhere, of course. As is the case when someone leaves the 12-step fellowship I attend, it's usually not given to me to know what becomes of the missing.

I visualize photographers the world over—I sometimes call us "photo dawgs"—as a big, far-flung, extended community of people of like mind—united (as well as leveled) by our common interest. I feel the camaraderie even with people I read about who perished before I was born, and I fancy that a photo-dawg or two of the future, not yet born, will come across some of my words one day and perhaps feel the kinship too. We're diminished when one of us fades off and leaves this coil.

So to Bryce, and, insofar as he stands for them, to all those we lose, a few parting words: thank you for reading, dawg, glad you were one of us, and godspeed.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2019 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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

Robert Harshman: "Mike, I really liked the April 1st story. It convinced me that you should at least write some short stories if not a novel or two. And I thought your response to my question of 'what day is it?' was perfect—Monday. And your idea about what to do with a windfall of money stuck me as very good. A nice dream. The story was very entertaining. that's also why when one of the lotteries reaches above 1/2 billion or so I throw away a few dollars to entertain myself about what I might do if I won even though I know the odds are pure never going to happen. Sorry to hear about a reader passing away. A fellow dawg, gone by. May he RIP."

Rob Campbell: "That's a good, sensitive and thoughtful piece, Mike. It often strikes me that people who regularly frequent a site become much more than ships passing in the night; they assume a personality that we construct for them from the clues they slip to us. We might get close, or be very mistaken, but either way, unless we find out, they become those characters for just as long as they remain posting. Silence becomes a worry. I frequent the late Michael Reichmann's site, and over the years, people just vanish after regular posting, leaving that question mark. One, I heard, perished by being on ice at the wrong time or place and others have let it be known they have various illnesses, and you draw your own conclusions when posts end, especially from some who are obviously talented photographers. It is a reminder of the temporary nature of now."

Christopher May: "This feels all too familiar. Just about a year ago, I was in a similar situation.

"Many years ago, I crossed paths with a lady in the UK. We met thanks to common interest in a comparatively rare lens — the Tamron SP 180mm ƒ/2.5 LD IF. I had posted some images taken with the lens on my Flickr stream and she came across them while pondering buying another of the 3,000 copies that were made to celebrate Tamron’s 35th anniversary. She wrote me to seek out a more fleshed-out opinion of the lens. We soon discovered many similarities in each other, both in photography and in life in general.

"We ended up writing quite often. Sometimes it was about nothing—a new camera or lens—and sometimes it would be very deep discussing health issues or relationship problems. She helped me through a very tough breakup and we both leaned on each other for support with bettering our dietary and exercise regimens.

"I was also fortunate enough to be able to meet her in person. When my fiancé and I traveled to Kenya, we had a layover in London and were able to meet up with my Flickr friend and spend a day roaming with our cameras. I’m so happy that we had that opportunity and I had hoped to repeat it again someday.

"Last year, she had ventured off towards Ailsa Craig which was always one of her favorite photographic subjects. Before she left, we had chatted up lenses again and she decided to bring some Zuiko glass to use with her Olympus E-M1. A couple days after her arrival, I sent a message to see how things were. I never got a response. She traveled to quiet locations and didn’t have great phone service; sometimes I wouldn’t hear from her until she found WiFi at a coffee shop or such, so I wasn’t too worried. As time went on, though, it seemed more and more out of character for her to neglect checking in. She didn’t have any family that she was close with and I didn’t have any contact information for the few friends she kept up with in the UK. I kept trying email, Facebook messenger and overseas calls to her cell number. I even started wondering if and how I could contact UK authorities. My fiancé was also looking for information and eventually came across an obituary. She had died the day after our conversation about the Zuikos.

"I still have a lot of mixed feelings about everything. On the one hand, I’m extremely grateful for the Internet age that we live in allowing me to make and keep friends an ocean away. At the same time, though, it hurts that I didn’t find about her passing until weeks after the fact. I wasn’t able to attend her funeral. I don’t even know what happened to her. I try to let all of that go and focus on the gift of her friendship. I succeed a little more with that every day but there are still days that it seems unfair. As the axiom goes, though, life isn’t fair. It seems that death isn’t, either.

"My thoughts are with Bryce’s family and friends. I remember seeing his comments before and also made note of the fact that he was another rail photographer (we seem to be an even more select set of photo dawgs across the world and across the web). I’ll echo your godspeed wish, Mike but will add a little railroad flair to it. Highball, Bryce! Wishing you good light and lots of trains on the other side!"

Martin D: "That is a very moving piece about Bryce Lee, Mike. Thank you for writing it. Yes, we all occasionally encounter such strange associations with another person: distant at one level but close and selectively personal at other levels. The relationship develops quietly and becomes part of our lives, sometimes more visible, sometimes receding. Sometimes we already treasure it whilst it is alive, and sometimes we only realise its true importance when they cease. Either way: such associations make us better human beings. Losses hurt, they also make us grow, in appreciation of the lost friendship if nothing else. A fitting photograph of the end, Mike. Your old associate Bryce, wherever he now is, will appreciate it."

Sony Supercamera Sale

Cheapest A7rIII
Sony's most desirable supercamera, the full-frame mirrorless A7rIII, went on sale last night at midnight at B&H Photo and at Amazon. You can also get your choice of a variety of extras for free, including a microphone or a 4TB hard drive (check all of the options under "Configuration" at both sites), and three months of Adobe's Creative Cloud Photography Plan. The discount is $400 and the price is the lowest you'll find on the 42-MP powerhouse.

Knew you'd want to know.  :-)

Mike

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Leon Droby: "Thanks for the heads up on the deal, but a supercamera? I had one for about nine months. Amazing camera. But, I found the longer I had it, the less I used it.

Towards the end of that nine months, I ended up getting a Fuji X-H1. My usage has gone back up. And because I used it more, my pictures got better.

IMHO, any camera that encourages you to take more pictures is a supercamera.  ;-)  "

Mike replies: Couldn't agree more. It's the real reason to buy the right camera—because the one that pushes your buttons and floats your boat and lights up the pleasure centers of your brain-pan will be more fun to use and you'll use it more.

I first realized that when I read a comment by Lee Friedlander, a photographer who at the time I considered severe and uncompromising...he said something to the effect that a lot of his pictures came about because he just liked to get his cameras out and play with them. If he could say something like that, I figured it was okay for anybody to feel that way.

By the way, not only did the price of the X-H1 drop all the way down to $1,299, but right now they're giving away the power booster for FREE along with the camera. With two extra batteries too. That's an awful lot of equipment for the money! Those cameras must really not be selling. I don't understand why...I liked it a lot when I tried it. And to think, I didn't buy it because I couldn't afford it when the body alone was $1,650.

Kenneth Tanaka: "In contrast to Leon’s comment, I certainly endorse Mike’s designation of the Sony A7R III as a supercamera. Mine has been my main go-to camera for a variety of challenging jobs since late 2017. I haven’t found any task it cannot just perform but excel at yet. This is a terrific opportunity to save lots of cash and get arguably the best general-purpose digital camera available today."

Editing the Baker's Dozen

I now have about 300 submissions for the Baker's Dozen, so it's off to work on that.

Here's my process:

• First I search for "BDMuseum" in Mail, which brings up all the submissions.
• I've looked at most already when they came in, but I'll go through them again slowly and look again.
• After waiting at least a few hours and maybe till tomorrow, I'll go through and flag all the ones I think are prospects. With that many submissions, there will probably be 30–60 that I'll flag.
• Then I'll go through the flagged ones again. At this point the pictures are already familiar to me, so I'm looking for which ones seem to have "legs," staying power. I'll be pretty aware of which ones I like more than when I first saw them, and which ones less.
• Then I'll pick the ones I think have to be included no matter what the final set looks like...the "shoo-ins," to use an old expression. I might have to choose between repeated subjects. For instance, in this batch I got a number of pictures of museumgoers sleeping or resting, at least three of which I already know I like, and a number of "abstracts" of architectural details. I probably wouldn't include more than one of each in the final set (if that).
• At that point I'll have a nucleus, so the task becomes to fill in around the main picks to make a coherent, balanced set and a pleasing sequence. I can't tell you how I do this or what I look for; it's mainly done by "feel" you might say. Does anything look out of place? Do two pictures have echoes of each other and need some space between them in the sequence? This is the stage that I'll also check for unintended related elements...for example, do multiple pictures feature strollers, or one particular dominant color? I might choose to mitigate that, but maybe not. On the flip side, there may be something I need to balance out some choices I've already made. One thing I don't consider is the sex of the photographer or where they come from. If three pictures in a row are by women or there turn out to be four pictures by photographers from Italy, that won't bother me. I also don't play favorites with readers who comment a lot, or who I've met, or who might be friends. Well, friends might have a little higher bar than the rest of you. Otherwise it's a pretty level playing field.
• In sequencing I like to start and finish strong, with a strong picture in the middle. But that's not written in stone; maybe there could be some other path, like distant views moving slowly to intimate ones. The pictures sort of tell you what sort of sequence they need. Also, it's not absolutely critical, so there's no sense getting crazy about it. Sometimes one ordering works as well as another.
• Once I have a pretty good fix on the choices and the sequence, I'll review what I have for written material and consider how to present it. For example, in the "Yellow" portfolio I wanted all the pictures close to each other, so I put the written material at the end.

How long will this all take? Well, until I'm satisfied with it—until I feel like I've made the most enjoyable post I can out of the material I have to work with. If that takes four hours total or fourteen, I don't really care. Nobody cares how hard you worked. :-)

Have a nice weekend!

Mike
(Thanks to everyone who submitted)

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Open Mike: Protein and the Power of Propaganda

["Open Mike" is the often off-topic, anything-goes Editorial Page of TOP, in which the Editor indulges himself slightly more than usual on whatever happens to be on his mind. It usually appears on Wednesdays. Oh well, maybe it doesn't usually.]

-

It's amazing how effectively false "facts" can suppress the truth under the right conditions. Propaganda (currently also called "fake news," although that charge is often hurled, gaslighter-style, against real news) has real reach and power.

For example: almost all Americans believe that it's important to get protein, that protein is an urgent dietary need. They'll also tell you that protein only comes from meat and dairy, and that it's impossible to get enough protein from plants except by combining specific ingredients in cunning and exacting combinations. You know, just the sort of mad-scientist thing whacky pinko vegetarians who look like goth zombies would do.

Peter Est Français!

Photo by Carl Westergren, April 4th, 2019

Got this nice note from my friend Peter this morning:

Dear Mike,

A beautiful day. Je suis Français (I am French).

It's now official. Today, I was welcomed into French nationality and citizenship at a ceremony in a Paris town hall. It was a beautiful ceremony, and I was one of more than 70 others, from nationalities from all over the world representing a sort of mosaic of international geopolitics of these past seven decades.

I am very proud to be both French and American. Today was actually for me one of the most moving days of my adult life in many ways, and a culmination of now having lived in a country, France, for more than 40 years, that I love so much. After the ceremony, I went for lunch at my home away from home, La Brasserie de l'Ile St. Louis. I want to thank the very many people for their beautiful support and comments and congratulations on this wonderful day. Vive La France, Vive La République.

And just before that, I got a text from my friend Earl, from nearby Rochester. He's in Paris, and guess who he ran into on the street? None other. Just by chance.

Congratulations to Peter. Not bad for a scrappy kid from Fort Wayne.  :-)

(posted by) Mike

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Earl Dunbar: "I was stunned to see Peter approaching me on the street and then doubly thrilled that today was his citizenship day. When I planned and started this trip, I pretty well knew Peter would be in Paris, and mused 'Wouldn’t it be lovely to run into him? But no, not likely to happen.' Then BAM!!! It was such a thrill—bien fait and congratulations Peter!!! One of these days my son will also become a French citizen, so I will be thrilled again!"

Scott Moore: "So beautiful. I know him only through your site (and his photo hanging on my wall and his book in my bookshelf) but he has always struck me as such a warm-hearted gentleman. And to see him and hear him so happy warms my heart. All the best to Peter. Vive La France, indeed."

We've Come a Long Way, Dudes and Dudettes

Does it ever occur to you to be grateful for the (good!) changes you've been able to witness, and the cool technology you've experienced the introduction of? It's something I appreciate. I've very glad my lifespan straddled traditional film and early digital, for instance. I wouldn't give up experiencing either one if I had my choice.

I mentioned recently that my first computer was an Apple 512k Macintosh, in 1985. (It was also author Michael Crichton's first Mac, and his experience was similar to mine—amazed and pleased, never looked back.) 

The very first Apple hard drive was made for our computer, although I didn't buy one. Too pricey. I'll bet Michael Crichton had one. This is it, the HD20.

A couple of days ago I broke down and bought this as my media drive. Loaded it up yesterday and overnight. Unfortunately it's almost full.

HD20: $1,495, 20MB, about the size of a large telephone book. That's a dated reference, by the way.

Samsung T5: $329 on sale, 2TB, and tiny and light. Its capacity is 100,000 times that of the 1985 drive.

And this is fun: at the Apple HD20's price of roughly $75 per megabyte, the T5 would have cost $150 million. But that's in 1985 dollars—adjusted for inflation, it would be $372,090,000. I wish Moore's Law applied to printer ink.

The 500GB model is still available at the sale price of less than $100. If you have any use for such a small drive.  :-)

Mike
(Thanks to Charlie. Top illustration courtesy
Museums Victoria.)

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David Brown: "My company designed and manufactured all those early hard drives for the Apple Computers. My have times changed. All my storage is SSD now."

Jamie Pillars: "Regarding the Samsung T5, these things have gotten just too small! I can picture it now...I load it up with my entire photo archive and then lose it in the couch cushions!"

Vocabulary: Eye AF and Related Terms

Eye-Start: A system invented by Minolta (?) whereby the camera turned on and began to autofocus when you put your eye to the viewfinder. Now used in some cameras to switch between the rear viewing screen and the eyepiece viewfinder.

Eye-Controlled Focus: A system invented by Canon for film SLRs in which a series of sensors in the viewfinder eyepiece read the "bump" of your cornea to cause the camera to autofocus on the area your eye was looking at in the finder. Successful implementation varied between individuals but for many people it worked well. Available on a succession of cameras between 1992 and 2004, the technology did not make the transition to digital.

Face Detection: A digital camera feature whereby the camera recognizes human faces and uses this knowledge to set the autofocus point, usually, but not necessarily always, on the nearest face.

Eye Autofocus (usually written eye AF): A refinement and further development of face detection whereby the camera recognizes the eyes of the subject and focuses on them. Current eye AF has gotten so good that cameras can prefer the nearest eye of a face, and, in continuous AF mode, track the eye and keep focus on it as the subject moves.

Face (properly facial) Recognition: "a biometric software application capable of uniquely identifying or verifying a person by comparing and analyzing patterns based on the person's facial contours. Facial recognition is mostly used for security purposes, though there is increasing interest in other areas of use." (Techopedia)

Mike

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Terence Morrissey: "As a long time Nikon user i recently purchased the Sony A7RIII for the EyeAF feature and it rocks!"

Herman Krieger: "A really intelligent camera—sees a scene, and decides that it is not worthwhile to take a photo."

Mike replies: That feature used to exist. It was called, "each exposure costs you XX¢ and X minutes at the developing sink."

Mike Schwarts: "If I could afford a new camera I would get the Sony a6400. It combines eye and face detection with a really good focus tacking feature. I believe it can be set to eye detect as default and jump back and forth as it loses the eye and/face and come back when detecting either again."

William Schneider: "I really appreciate the facial recognition feature in Lightroom software. When scanning my father's Kodachrome slides, it was a huge time saver having software recognize and tag faces in family photos. When exporting them from Lightroom as JPEGs, I included the names in the metadata.

"The feature isn't perfect, i.e., faces change as we age, but it saved a ton of time making the archive."

JOHN GILLOOLY: "The firmware update that augments the continuous eye-tracking on the Sony A9: gamechanger."

John Merlin Williams: "Re: Face Recognition. One of the earliest uses was a CNN/IBM-developed application that could identify newsworthy individuals in live-stream video. I saw this in production in 2000. CNN received simultaneous and continuous satellite feeds from more than 30 news agencies. The system could identify and tag most people in those feeds, on-the-fly, from current and past stories, previously identified by CNN editors. They could capture segments of just the pertinent people from live feeds, and do almost instant parallel searches of previous clips, providing a video dashboard of options to an editor. Example: watch for the faces of the U.S. President and U.K. Prime Minister seen together in a live feed and present the editor with multiple clip options to yield: 'After yesterday's meeting (old clip), the two leaders announced this morning (new clip)....'

"It's hard to describe how magical this was (almost 20 years ago); all this could take place in a few seconds. CNN used this to deliver edited stories before other broadcasters, establishing CNN as the first place to go for breaking news. They had a similar system for voice recognition to identify the speaker(s)—in case the editor wanted only feeds and clips in which both persons spoke in the same segment (not just one). I was in awe then, and sad to see that face recognition is most often cited in stories about surveillance/privacy intrusion."

Super Recognizers

We've talked before about prosopagnosia, the condition also known as face blindness. People who have it lack the normal human ability to recognize other people visually. The example I always think of is Oliver Sacks, the late great writer on neurology. When Dr. Sacks would go to a restaurant to meet his assistant of ten years for lunch, she had to raise her hand so he'd know which table she was at—he couldn't recognize her.

Turns out there's an opposite condition—a small number of people are so-called "super recognizers," sometimes used by police departments to identify faces in difficult conditions. They have the ability to recognize abnormally large numbers of people from clues and levels of familiarity too subtle for most of us. Even with the burgeoning use of face-detection technology for many uses (some legitimate, some worrying), "you always need someone at the end to confirm it," said Kenny Long, a former super recognizer with the London Metropolitan Police, as quoted in this article at c|net.

Back in photo-land, many Sony cameras (and maybe other brands, I don't know) have also become "super recognizers" of a sort. The feature first called Face Detection and more recently known as Eye Autofocus (Eye AF), has developed to a remarkable degree in recent models such as the super-speedy Sony A9. Here's a Sony page giving instructions for using eye autofocus in many Sony cameras. I saw a video that "tested" or demonstrated eye AF with the Sony A7rIII that impressed me a lot—in one situation, Stuart James was able to shoot a model through foliage and the camera zeroed right in on the model's eyes, where most cameras' AF would have been fooled. I'd think it would be a feature of great interest to dedicated portraitists and fashion photographers.

Dr. Sacks' book that includes his reflections on seeing and visual perception, and in which he discusses his prosopagnosia, is called Mind's Eye. Dr. Sacks was portrayed by Robin Williams in the remarkable movie Awakenings with Robert De Niro.

Mike

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Joe Holmes: "My son apparently has mild prosopagnosia—to this day he rarely greets anyone by name, thanks to the odds that he's wrong or simply doesn't know if he's ever met them before. But it seems that the genes he lacks all accumulated in my daughter, who may be a super-recognizer. She'll spot a minor actor from a film she saw one time years earlier, and she's always right. It's like perfect pitch in a way."

(A regular reader and commenter): "I did an online test a few years ago that strongly suggested I am a super-recogniser. It's something I've always known I am significantly better than average at, and it has occasionally led to almost a precognitive experience where I know I am going to bump into someone in a few moments because, in fact, I've already seen them subconsciously in a crowd or at a distance out of the corner of my eye.

"But for me at least there appears to be something of a downside.

"I know of people who say they can, perhaps in times of stress when they need something to think about, imagine the face of a parent or friend and focus on it, hold it in their mind's eye, etc. I can't really do that. It's as if I am seeing stars at night but they disappear as soon as I look directly at them instead of out of the corner of my eye, or I am trying to hold too many marbles at once: I can't assemble the whole face in a way that is really stable, before it is lost. I know what they look like, and I can probably describe them bit by bit, but I cannot hold a still picture at all.

"I can visualise little parts of that face—a smile, or eyes—for much longer periods of time, and as a result I seem to have learned a way to visualise people through their likely reaction to some news or a joke, and I remember interactions and emotions (in conjunction with my own). So I have to evoke little mental vignettes; I have strong emotional memories and I often describe people that way.

"As an aside, I'm also almost totally unable to remember someone's younger face if I know them as an older person. I'm not sure how uncommon that is.

"I'm not sure if this form of 'aphantasia' and super-recognising go together, or indeed whether my ability to imagine a face is really abnormally bad, but I do know which ability I'd prefer to have!"

Mike replies: That's very interesting. I might be something like the opposite of you. I'd say I'm on the low side of average when it comes to recognizing people. I even embarrassed myself with a neighbor for that reason a few years ago—I met him about four times and each time asked him who he was. He took offense. But on the other hand I have a very stable memory for faces of people I know. In fact, a few years back I started to have age-related trouble with names (extremely common) and I started to fret about my memory (also very common in people of late middle age). But then I realized that when I thought of someone, the image of their face comes into my mind immediately. So it isn't my memory that's faulty, because my memory of faces of people I know is still instantaneous. It's just that the verbal name component is getting more difficult to collate with that visual memory.

Joshua Hawkins: "I've read a few posts just this morning about the new Sony 5.0 update and how it's helping sports photographers. It's huge for them. Shooting through nets, rackets and random objects between the camera and subject is just the norm for sports. This technology is really wonderful, if still young. I also really like face tracking, and especially the eye tracking, for doing editorial style work with 1.4 glass. It's really improving my hit rate on in focus shots. (I don't use Sony, but it's all the same idea between different manufacturers.)"

Tommy Williams: "I discovered that I have a well-above average ability to recognize faces when I worked at Microsoft, on the main campus, where there were more than 25,000 people present each day. I would greet people in hallways, cafeterias, and walking between buildings and many of them had no idea who I was. Rather than making people uncomfortable, I stopped greeting anyone who I suspected wouldn't recognize me."

Xf Mj: "Well okay, these made for a fun late afternoon: TestMyBrain: Super Recognizers and Face Memory Test. I always wondered...I do recall being remarkably bad at the color (shade? hue?) recognition thing you once posted."

Mike replies: Thanks for that, that was fun. I scored 61 out of 72 on the TestMyBrain one, average being 58.5 and average for my age cohort being 56.4. I'm a little surprised...I would have guessed that I was below average. It occurred to me that I might have done better if I had quickly assigned names to the six faces!

New Advance in Smartphones

From a recent article in The Verge it looks like there's been a further advance in low-light photography in smartphones. The article compares Google's previously impressive Pixel Night Sight in the Pixel 3 with the forthcoming Huawei P30 and P30 Pro, which leave the Pixel 3 in their dust. Note that two of the illustrations are the "windowshade" type, where you can move the dividing line back and forth. (Does anyone know the proper name for that? I searched but couldn't come up with anything.)

Witold Ziomek, Sunrise in Bagan, Myanmar
Second prize winner in the Architecture category

While you're at The Verge, another of their recent articles you might want to take a look at shows some of the award winners from SkyPixel’s 2018 Aerial Photo and Video Contest. SkyPixel is described as "an online photo-sharing community owned by Chinese drone maker DJI." Some of these are pretty cool—this is essentially a new category of photography since I was a-comin' up. I have one aerial shot in my portfolio, but I had to hire a helicopter to get it! You can see more of the winners directly at SkyPixel's own page.

So does anyone know why the Huawei P30 and P30 Pro appear to be available in other countries but not in the U.S.? [Note: See David Comdico's Featured Comment below. I was not up on the news. —Ed.]

Mike
(Thanks to John Hogg)

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David Comdico: "Huawei has been charged with being the commercial surveillance arm of the Chinese government.

"The CFO has been arrested in Canada at the behest of the US and has been charged with violating US sanctions on Iran, which was a shot across the bow to both China (vis-à-vis our trade war) and Europe, who still have an agreement in place with Iran (they built special payment channels to circumvent US sanctions).

"I don't believe there is much evidence of espionage, but none is needed as this is really about geopolitics. The Chinese are moving beyond manufacturing and are threatening to lead in design. In our increasingly benighted age, the military is the US's last strategic advantage."

Mike Pasini: "The window shade effect is called an image comparison slider. The one the Verge uses looks like Juxtapose from the Knight Lab, which they probably installed on their server (rather than using the option to embed). When it comes to comparing image qualities, I think a rollover where the entire image changes in a flash is more instructive. But, as Knight Lab says, comparison sliders are 'ideal for highlighting then/now stories that explain slow changes over time (growth of a city skyline, regrowth of a forest, etc.) or before/after stories that show the impact of single dramatic events (natural disasters, protests, wars, etc.).'"

Mike replies: Thanks Mike.

Eric Perlberg (partial comment): "Since it's unlikely that Huawei have invented a more sensitive sensor than Sony with its huge breadth of experience and it's unlikely that Huawei have better AI neural net algorithms than Google, I’m wondering if it doesn't take a series of images and use a Photoshop-like median image-blending stacking technique. I first heard about this in a Lenswork podcast. Apparently astrophotographers use this technique and so does Brooks Jensen with his Micro 4/3 cameras in low light. In this article, you can see a very sharp image made from 10 similar shots at ISO 25,600. The shots don’t have to superimpose, just be similar. The software aligns the images and averages away the noise and misaligned pixels."

expiring_frog (partial comment): "Eric Perlberg says: 'it's unlikely that Huawei have better AI neural net algorithms than Google.' As a generalization, that may be true. In practice, don't forget that this field moves very very fast, and what you're seeing may be simply a combination of: a.) Google hasn't updated the Pixel 3 software to use the very latest neural net tech—it takes time to implement, test and push out something like this; b.) Huawei is actually ahead of Google in this specific feature—NN advances come from many different quarters, not just Google; (c) tThe P30 Pro has three cameras plus a depth sensor, which give much more data for the software to work with. In theory, the Huawei can take as many photos in two seconds as the Pixel can in six (ignoring zoom differences); d.) At least one of those cameras is better (ƒ/1.6, 1/1.7") than Google's (ƒ/1.8, 1/2.55"). (Disclaimer: I'm a computer graphics/vision researcher at Adobe. My comments are conjecture based on publicly available info.)

Ned Bunnell: "Lars Rehm, who writes for a number of tech sites, posted some zoom shots from this camera phone. Pretty decent images and a good indication that optical/software zoom will be on all devices within a few years."

'At the Museum' Update

I've gotten about 230 submissions for the Baker's Dozen portfolio. I'll be doing the initial edits no later than this weekend, so if you still want to submit something, plan on doing it before the weekend.

Lots of great stuff so far. This is going to be another tough one to edit.

Mike

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A Non-Review of the 2018 Mac Mini

This absolutely doesn't rise to the standard of a review—I'm not remotely competent to write one. On the other hand, I've used Macs since 1984, pretty much from the day they were introduced. I've lost track now, but I believe I've owned or regularly used 17 of them since that first one, either at school, at the office, or at home.

But I did want to mention that my new (2018) Mac Mini has had an almost transformative effect on my workdays, and I'm delighted with it.

The specs on mine are:

• 3.0 GHz Core i5 (six core)/ Gigabit ethernet
• 16GB RAM
• 512GB SSD drive

I had Apple install the extra RAM, even though we know they overcharge for it. List price on my Mini is $1,499.

The decision was really between the 3.6 GHz quad-core i3 and the 3.0 GHz six-core i5. I don't really have any way of knowing the practical differences the choice would make for me, but since I seem to always have a lot going on on the desktop, I went with the six cores over the higher clock speed. And it seems to have worked out.

Nothing in the middle
A while back, I was grousing about the lack of a mid-range model in the Apple lineup, a non-iMac, display-less model between the cheap intro-level Mini for "switchers" and the graphic-arts-studio-level (but now seriously outdated and kind of a bollix from the start) Mac Pro.

[Aside for non-Apple people: Apple really expects desktop buyers to buy iMacs, which are the proper heirs of the original all-in-one Macintoshes. And they're lovely machines—I've owned them right from the first "Blueberry" iMac of early 1999 to my current upstairs computer that I use for book writing, a lovely 21.5-inch Retina iMac with an SSD. Mine is a 2017 I bought as a factory refurb.]

Well, here's my point: the 2018 Mac Mini is that Goldilocks computer I wanted. It just happens to be in the old Mini box, is all.

I'm astonished by what a difference it makes. Everything is zippier, even the work I do online in the TypePad compositor where I spend most of every day. It never makes noise, never gets hot, never crashes or hangs, and is highly responsive to everything I want to do with it.

I suspect that my previous Mini—a 2012 model I picked up because it was higher spec'd than the pre-2018 Mini—got worked hard and put away wet by its previous owner(s). It might be the second-worst Mac I've ever owned, after a klunky John Scully era desktop that coincided with the nadir of Apple in the mid-to-late '90s. The 2012 Mini is the only Mac I've ever had that crashed (my '93 Quadra 605 of sainted memory crashed once in six years, when the little battery on the motherboard that kickstarted the display ran out of juice). Before I sell the 2012 Mini I'm going to get it cleaned, get a new fan for it (the old one is broken now), take out the second hard drive (I suspect it makes it harder to cool) and maybe even get a new main drive put in if it's not too expensive.

Whee!
Given that I input hundreds or most likely thousands of little commands a day, from scrolling a folder to resizing an image for the Web to flicking between windows in Firefox, the aggregate improvement in the speed I can work is, as I said, transforming. It saves me loads of time over the course of a day and imparts a sense of ease and freedom I had been missing. I didn't even realize how much my creaky old 2012 was slowing me down and frustrating me, until all that slowness and frustration vanished.

Downsides? Just one—the disappearance of the card slot. Yeah, yeah, I know all the arguments, but I've always appreciated the elegance of the built-in SD card slot and I'm sorry to see it go. The current killer Thunderbolt3 hubs are the $299 OWC Dock and, even better because it reads UHS-II cards natively, the hugely flexible American-made $310 CalDigit TS3 Plus. I'd love one of those, but I'm a beer budget guy. I use a Lention USB-C 3-port hub I bought for $20 on eBay.

Conclusion
Would I recommend the 2018 Mini? Heartily, if it happens to be what you need. Me, I like to be able to unhook the computer and stash it in a safe location when I'm away, and I like to be able to use my 27" NEC monitor.

But really, if you're currently not locked in by past choices and just need a super-slick, beautiful computer and want to be able to do anything on it, including working with photos, my first recommendation would be one of the still-new 2019 21.5" Retina iMacs. They're light and easy to move around, very pretty, and right-sized. The display is lovely (and you don't stop thinking so—I still appreciate mine whenever I use it) and let's face it, they'll do most anything most of us ever want to do. There are 27" models too of course. I've owned three 27" iMacs and I work on a 27-inch monitor right now, but I could live with the 21.5" size. Those start at $1,249, which means you're paying no "Apple tax" in any sense. They're just plain worth that.

...In my opinion. Your biases may vary.  :-)

So all is well in TOP-land. I imagine I'll be writing about Mac no. 18 at some point on down the line.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2019 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.

Everything must fade away

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Featured Comments from:

Mark Cotter: "'Non-reviews' are often the most helpful. I think of myself as knowledgeable enough about specs to decide what could suit me, real world reviews are the most useful. And this is especially useful as I am thinking of replacing my seven year old 27" iMac (the last with a DVD drive built in), and a Mini similar to your configuration is on my list."

The International Digital Photography Museum

Not that I mean to downplay this news at all, but, first of all, I'm getting married!

She's a TOP reader, and has been for the past eight years. She said she has watched my personal peregrinations with interest over the years, and 16 months ago now she decided to introduce herself. Her name is Magda, and she has residences in Budapest, Hungary, and New York City as well as a vacation home in a location she prefers not to disclose. After we get married we'll have two vacation homes, the second one being this little house I've been living in for three and a half years here in the Finger Lakes! I won't be giving this place up.

Now for the relevant part. Magda happens to be the widow of very accomplished and urbane man who was famously successful in business in Hungary. She married him when he was 54 and she was 32; he died five years ago now. She's one year older than I am. We both consider ourselves relatively young, and we're both in good health, so there is still time to do the things we want to do. And neither one of us is terribly interested in merely collecting the conventional trappings of wealth...we want to do something; something useful to society and, specifically, for photography.

Same shows, different audiences
Of course, I have spun my idealistic notions at her gleefully for some time now—a few of them, admittedly, pretty crackpot. (She would say "most," possibly with an exclamation point appended to that. I do get carried away with ideas sometimes.) But because her wealth is essentially limitless and her interest is in public architecture, we've decided on the following plan, which we're pretty well along with already at least in concept.

We've decided to create a series of "mirror" museums—so far, we have plans for three in the United States, one in Canada, and two in Europe—one each in Prague and Budapest. Each building will be proximate to existing museums that already draw crowds—for instance, the one in Corning (local to where I am now) will be a hop, skip, and a jump from the wonderful Corning Museum of Glass, and the one in Chadds Ford will be within an easy drive of the Brandywine River Museum of Art.

Each Museum will have its own architecture, designed to complement its setting and its culture, but all of them will have very similar facilities—three beautiful large galleries and two small ones, an entry atrium and book shop, a number of small offices, several workrooms, and so forth.

Celebrate the new
Here's where it gets interesting. We won't be showing existing art, at least in terms of the actual objects—we'll be making our own. The halo Museum organization, IDPM, will employ master digital printmakers as well as curators. The printmakers and curators will work with living digital photographers to create exhibitions that will then be mirrored in all six locations worldwide. This might be one large exhibit in all five galleries, or several concurrent exhibits split between the various gallery rooms. Since every venue will have its own conservator and framer and presentation specialist, all that's required for coordination between locations will be the shipment of the newly made unframed prints, whether they're made in Europe or America. Pretty simple. Each show will be up for three months, for a total of four "changeovers" per year.

Not only will every print be newly custom-made for each exhibits, but small limited editions of each photograph shown in every show will be available for sale to the public—with all of the proceeds going to the photographers. In that sense our strategy is something of a hybrid between a traditional museum and a gallery, as well as a hybrid of a business and a type of charity called a "grant maker." Oh, and by the way, photographers themselves will not have to bear any expense for their shows.

Here's a big difference from a traditional museum: the IDPM will not maintain a collection. We will keep a record of what we show, but we will not collect and archive work—rather, we will help create it and release it into the world at large, where it may fly on its own wings.

The Mission statement
That's because our overarching mission will be to support active, working photographers of all kinds with these shows. Not only will they receive the intangible honor of having their work shown in six premium venues in North America and Europe, with printed catalogues, but they get to keep all the proceeds from any print sales. (Unsold prints will become their property when the shows are over, too.)

As you can see, this is sort of like TOP's print sales writ large! Very large.  :-)

You would think all this would be a lot of work, but, it turns out, not so much. Magda is used to having "people" doing things for her. And boy, do we have people. We are in the process of hiring directors for every museum, curators, printmakers, architects, builders, you name it. And we already have a core staff of administrators and helpers. After working alone for a decade and more, it's heavenly, let me tell you.

Launch is scheduled for 2023. The initial locations are: Toronto, Canada; Corning, New York; Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania; Santa Fe, New Mexico; Prague, Czech Republic; and Budapest, Hungary.

Magda has plans for more museums—three more in Western U.S. cities, and one each in the UK, France, and Germany.

To say this is all exciting is a vast understatement! Oh, and by the way, my title is Director of Exhibitions. Our curators will work under me and although they will work largely independently, with lots of freedom, I'll have the final word on who, and what, gets shown. I'm chomping at the bit.

I'll keep you posted.  :-)

Mike

Original contents copyright 2019 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.

Everything must fade away

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

Dave: "Mike, Congratulations, and congratulations! Wow, that's a lot of news to digest. I'll bet you'll be inundated with requests from photographers who never thought such a museum (with such fair treatment of the artist) would ever exist. From your description, Magda seems fascinating. Best of luck!"

Zack Schindler: "Does this mean that the with your newfound riches that the first ten posters here will be sent one of the new Leica Safari Edition M10-P's with matching lens?"

Mike replies: Since you suggested it, yes!! Unfortunately, you are commenter number 13. Chance is cruel.

Robert Harshman: "What day is it?"

Mike replies: It's Monday.

Jnny: "Magda sounds lovely. Has she asked you to forward expense fees yet?"

Mike replies: Made me laugh....  :-)

Bahi: "Why am I reminded of buried Leicas? That one still hurts. :-) "

Ctein Prints Have Shipped

No foolin':

All orders from our recent Ctein print sale have been shipped. If there is anyone who hasn't gotten a "your order has shipped" email from Ctein and an email from the USPS with the tracking number by today (be sure to check spam folders), they should email Ctein at [email protected].

Mike

Original contents copyright 2019 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.

Everything must fade away

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Featured Comments from:

Ken: "I got Ctein's email Saturday though I haven't heard from the Post Office about any tracking numbers. But no matter: I received my print about a half an hour ago. Wow, very nice! Thanks to both TOP and, especially, Ctein. Once it is framed, it will have a prominent place on the wall in the living room."

The Very Very Very Best Backup...

...Is still a box of prints! (Or a "few-of-a-kind" custom book like a Blurb book.)

Okay, maybe not the best backup but the best archive.

I had planned to make this point again two days ago (bringing us around full circle in recent discussions here on TOP), when this comment came in from David L. night before last:

"My engineering career was as a hard drive engineer and in server storage. My advice—make prints."

(That's his whole comment.) 

Ending up with prints is still a good idea, even though I know most people don't do it.

It's always been a good idea to think of a photograph in digital form as a transitory state—a state between the taking of the picture and the final object—a print, or printed book, or whatever the final creation might be.

Of course we do want to have a working archive—our shooting in mass unprocessed form—so that we can go back and print old files, reconsider our editing choices, or bring together different groups or pairings or whatever. It's the raw material for our ongoing creative activities as photographers.

A well-made print (pigment inks on stable paper) is a write-once, set-and-forget medium. It has to be physically protected, sure, but that's a different problem, and one I've written about elsewhere.

Ultimately nothing is permanent—but it's a good idea to remind ourselves every now and then that "backup" of the material we work from is just a fluid working state, and not, in itself, a final achievement.

(See what I do for you? I just said with 264 words what David L. said better with 17. Heh!)

Mike
(Thanks to all of you who helped me with my backup strategy)

Original contents copyright 2019 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.

Everything must fade away

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

Tim Smith: "In my 20s I worked in a print darkroom for several years. We entered into a contract with Yale to make contact prints of their extensive collection of glass negatives. Aside from the fact that they were stunning and technically amazing, it strikes me that as long as they haven't been smashed or destroyed, you could do the very same thing today. I fear that the evolution of digital may someday make even the best drives obsolete or at least very difficult to recover. I can't even remember all the storage devices/methods that have come and gone, like: SCSI tape drives, ZIP drives, CD-RW, etc.

"So yeah, prints."