The Online Photographer

'Sharp' Is Subjective

Marion Post Wolcott, Durham, North Carolina. Five Points, center of city, with Chesterfield cigarette factories in background, 1940 (detail).

Sharpness, which we've been discussing, is a subjective impression. The following is concerned with sharpness as seen in pictures, not as a technical property which can be measured.

Sharpness is not necessarily the same thing as higher resolution or greater detail; actually, true high resolution can seem subjectively less sharp because edges are less emphasized and contrast becomes effectively "more local." Often, a high degree of subjective clarity can still be conveyed where there is surprisingly little fine detail.

It all sort of depends what you mean by "sharp"; or, we might say, by what sort of sharp you happen to like. People who say they like sharpness sometimes like clarity, which can be conveyed by adroit lighting (artificial or natural) and the sensical delineation of form. One example of that might be certain classical Hollywood-style portraits, similar to this double portrait by Karsh, which, you'll notice, retains a sense of high sharpness even as a quite small JPEG (with very little fine detail, like I said above). Others might respond more to emphasized edges or boundaries, which emphasizes the impression of what's called "3D effect" even though you're obviously looking at only two dimensions. I know people who were pretty preoccupied back in the film days with finding high acutance (edge effect) developers. Still others might like the effect of clear and detailed elements set off by soft areas, finding vividness in the differentiation: pictures of soft motion-blurred water over precisely described wet rock, which describes the first print I ever bought, or in-focus objects conventionally set against out-of-focus background and/or foreground elements—such as this portrait by Dave 6163—exemplify this effect.

Sometimes, a high amount of readable visual detail does the trick, even if the detail might not be of the highest resolution, as in this 1940 photo of Durham, North Carolina by Marion Post Wolcott, in which 1940 Durham almost looks like a model of 1940 Durham. You can spend a lot of time looking around in this image. After clicking on the full size version, look at the house with the porch in the middle left of the picture, for example (the detail at the top of this post)—it's very clear in terms of form but the level of actual resolution isn't the highest, at least by Fuji GFX 100 or gigapixel standards.

Some respond to high overall contrast like this picture by keid* (the asterisk here is part of his handle or alias—it doesn't signal a footnote), while others respond to microcontrast. (The "Structure" slider in Silver Efex Pro 2 is basically a microcontrast control.) Color can even contribute to clarity, and thus a sense of sharpness, because opposing colors can create color contrast. This picture by Fabrice Schmitt has low overall contrast but is an effective use of color contrast.

I won't go on and make this into a full-blown disquisition; y'all know how Yr. Hmbl. Ed. can go on and on sometimes. (Sorry about the "y'all"—I'm still in Durham.) The point is, sharp isn't just one thing. It kinda depends on what you mean by the word. And, on whatever charms your eye.

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.

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Featured Comments from:

William Schneider: "Howard Bond made beautifully crafted prints from view camera negatives. Photos and stories by Howard were often featured in Photo Techniques magazine, the one that you once edited. He began experimenting with unsharp masking in the darkroom, and the magazine offered a sample print for sale. I purchased it, and immediately upon arrival, I knew that the technique was not for me. Good thing too, because the darkroom process was very time consuming to pull off."

Mike replies: I'm glad to hear that. My idea for those sales was so people could see original examples of various techniques for themselves.

Kefyn Moss: "Photographs are a conglomeration of many visual and aesthetic qualities, as you so eloquently point out, and sharpness is not a very accurately defined one. You're helping to boost the clarity here Mike."

New Word: Overtourism

Never encountered this word before that I can remember. "Overtourism" refers to major tourist destinations getting swamped with visitors and becoming degraded from overuse. I encountered it in this article, which essentially recommends that you help save major venues from overtourism by helping to ruin less well known and more out-of-the-way places, or extending the burden on famous hotspots into what was previously known as the offseason. Not sure if that would really help. Maybe a better solution is just "stay home"?

Of course, that's easy for me to say—I've already seen the Tower of London and the Leaning Tower of Pisa and a lot of similar places, and although I distinctly recall from my youth that feeling of freedom and adventure when setting out on a trip, even a weekend road trip, I no longer have the travel bug much. I do realize, of course, that for many it's a major aspiration.

As far as travel and photography is concerned, naturally I have nothing but support for those who like to combine the two activities. But I'm personally convinced that I take better pictures of places I know well than places I drop in on for brief periods. I'm also convinced that there are pictures everywhere. We don't necessarily need to travel to find them.

YMMV, as they say; everyone's different.

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.

Please help support The Online Photographer through Patreon

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

Murray Davidson: "It's the other blight of our times—Global Swarming."

hugh crawford: "'Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too crowded.' Attributed to Yogi Berra."

Tom Bell: "I am lucky like you Mike to live in an area of real beauty. Luckily Dartmoor has a subtle beauty. But like many places it has one place,'Widecombe in the Moor,' made famous by the song 'Uncle Tom Cobley.' The result is that all the tourists go there! This has advantages in that everywhere else on the moor is empty...a glorious unspoilt wilderness. As time goes on I feel we need to take fewer flights and rush around less. For me I feel the time to see these great places has gone...the crowds destroy the ambience and must be a nightmare for locals. I remember a great travel book by Evelyn Waugh, in which he comments, 'I was not a tourist merely a traveller passing through...and I thank the Lord I went when the going was good.' That was written in 1950 or so...goodness knows what he would make of today.

"I am eternally grateful I have pitched my tent on Dartmoor for forty years. A life blessed and free of crowds."

Mike the Ed. adds: From Wikipedia, for those who don't know: "Dartmoor National Park is a vast moorland in the county of Devon, in southwest England. Dartmoor ponies roam its craggy landscape, defined by forests, rivers, wetlands and tors (rock formations). Trails wind through valleys with Neolithic tombs, Bronze Age stone circles and abandoned medieval farmhouses. The area is dotted with villages, including Princetown, home to Dartmoor Prison used during the Napoleonic Wars."

Nigel (partial comment): "I live in the industrial north, in a town which is off the tourist bucket list. Scratching around in local bookshops throws up a whole load of locally published books with places to visit near to home. It is amazing the interesting places you can find near to home if you dig around. I can walk in the high Apennines in some wonderful landscapes, without meeting another soul all day. I have a Renaissance 'perfect' city just an hour away as well as other interesting monuments that a bit of research brings to my attention. The good thing about local locations is that they are usually uncrowded and the people are happy to have somebody around who takes an interest in their town or village. I can usually get permission to use a tripod in some old dark monuments and other things that make my photography easier. I also get to have some nice conversations with the local people."

Stan B.: "While there's no going back in time, traveling to a far-off destination is like being revitalized, seeing with new eyes. It can be inspirational, life affirming, reinvigorating—add whatever reality-changing accolades you'd like. It can also change one internally, depending on what you see, where you go, what you do. Granted, you usually only get to scratch the surface when traveling, philosophically and photographically, particularly when limited by time. But travel is the introduction, not the endpoint; it is up to the traveler to pursue what he gleans from his travels and incorporate it into his life's journey."

Christer: "From an old tourist guide book I found on a flea market in France 30 years ago: 'A man who has seen a dozen cathedrals has seen a lot, but a man who has seen one cathedral twelve times has seen more.'"

Greg: "'How did Zion National Park become more popular than Yosemite or Yellowstone?' from the LA Times. Twitter, Facebook, and Flickr play a role in overtourism. Dobrovnik is limiting the number of cruise ships that can stop. The list goes on."

Misha: "Re '...help save major venues from overtourism by helping to ruin less well known and more out-of-the-way places...[like] the Leaning Tower of Pisa': I did my duty, and went to Niles, Illinois instead."

Mike replies: That's pretty funny. Photo Techniques was based in Niles, and I never visited the Leaning Tower. I also went to art school for three years a couple of blocks from the White House, and never toured the White House.

On the other hand, I was there at the 1996 Mount Everest disaster, I sailed around the world in the Vendée Globe race, and I've hung suspended from a rope in a pitch-dark crevice in a remote area of the Peruvian Andes. So I guess that says a lot about me.

Dennis: "This idea occurred to me only after spending some time wishing I could travel more to 'hotspots.' When planning a trip to Yellowstone, I bought a book that gave step-by-step instructions on how to locate great viewpoints. I recall standing at one well known picture spot for maybe 10 minutes taking pictures while dozens of other people came and went, including one guy with a Graflex! While in Jackson Hole, I visited Tom Mangelsen's gallery and on another trip to Moab, I visited Tom Till's gallery. I read up on how much time Mr. Till spends out in the field away from his family. And it dawned on me that I'm nothing more than a tourist on these trips, with no local knowledge, no experience-based expertise, a one week window in which to hope for good weather. And it finally struck home that the best photos of any place are taken by people who know that place and can visit it repeatedly.

"I still want to see new places and I want to take pictures while I'm there, but that's more about vacationing than about photography, and I'm not content to do most of my shooting close to home."

Steve Rosenblum: "There is another approach. In my travels I have found that most tourists won't walk more than 50 yards from their car or tour bus. You can visit Yellowstone at peak season and if you throw on a day pack and walk one mile up a trail away from the road you will most likely find yourself all by yourself. Ninety-eight percent of the visitors concentrate themselves in the 2% of the park near the roads."

Bill Tyler: "You write, 'there are pictures everywhere.' I agree, and have an exercise I like to do from time to time, when I think of it. Here it is. Assuming you have a camera of some kind (a phone is fine) make at least one photo you find interesting, without moving your feet. If you're sitting, don't get up. It's not likely you'll make great art, but if you can't find even one composition within reach, you need to try harder. Oh yeah—one more rule—you can't plan this. When the idea surfaces, that's when your feet get sticky. Having said that, here's one I did just now—a  self portrait in a conical metal lamp reflector made with my iPhone."

Mike replies: I love that exercise, and I like the picture! Even though it's not sharp. (Just kidding.)

John Camp: "When you read certain kinds of articles that 'rank' cities by some selected criteria (taxes, cost of living, weather, crime rate, beaches, whatever) you're not often told that whatever the ranking, you really don't live in a city, you live in a neighborhood. St. Louis is ranked as the worst city for crime in the US, but I've been there, quite a few times, and there are great neighborhoods in St. Louis that are perfectly safe. But you could also pick out a different neighborhood, go there. and get robbed.

"The same thing applies to these tourist destinations. They're essentially ranked, and promoted as 'best' for whatever your enthusiasm might be—art, beaches, slot canyons, whatever. Most tourists who go to Paris aren't really going to Paris, they're going to 'Paris.' They're going to the City of Lights, the Louvre, they're going to the Musee d'Orsay, the Picasso, they're walking along the Seine, getting croissants at Les Deux Magots, buying books at Shakespeare and Company...but I bet your friend Peter Turnley could take you to great places in Paris that don't see a dozen tourists in a week. (I once went to a fascinating place in Chartres that I bet Peter hasn't been to, or even heard of.) I mean, if you go as a tourist to places that are advertised as 'must see' stops for tourists on every website on the Internet, what do you expect?

"There are even great places, I mean really great places, that aren't overrun. A certain propensity for bad weather helps—Madrid, Vienna and Amsterdam have museums to rival the Louvre, but for much of the year, you won't see Louvre-size crowds there. Buy yourself a warm Patagonia ski jacket and some gloves, maybe long underwear, and Amsterdam and St. Petersburg are wonderful places in January, though a bit dark. I was once in the Breughel room at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna in June and was almost alone.

"You just gotta avoid the Internet traps. Unless that's what you want. I'm looking at you, Malibu."

Yesterday's Post...

...Drew a lot of comments. I had a dentist's appointment yesterday afternoon and I was away last night, so this morning I will be working through the discussion, posting Featured Comments and vetting the comments for the regular comments section [UPDATE: caught up now]. Please stop back to see some of the interesting things said.

This is it! We're finally going to get to the bottom of whole sharpness thing and settle it once and for all. (I'm kidding. Should be fun though.)

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.

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Open Mike: Sharp Is Another Way Photographs Can Be

["Open Mike" is the anything-goes, often off-topic Editorial page of TOP, wherein Yr. Hmbl. Editor talks even more off the top of his head than usual. It usually appears on Wednesdays, but everything is a day late this week because I decided to let the Monday topic "soak" for an extra day—it was a treat to have Ctein back.]

-

In the vast precincts where shopping is king—that's what most "enthusiast photography" activity amounts to, shopping (and I'm not above it, God knows)—it's widely taken for granted that sharper = better.

I've never believed it.

Here are a few things I believe:

• Excessive sharpness can be visually unpleasant.
• As many pictures are spoiled by being too sharp as are spoiled by not being sharp enough.
• Sharpness is merely "one of the ways" a photograph can be...sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. It depends on the picture.
• People worry way too much about sharpness. They treat it as if it's a test of belonging to the correct group, or of right and proper (orthodox) belief.
• There are different kinds of "sharpness." No one is actually ever precisely sure what anyone else means by the term.
• Other things are more important than sharpness. And not just content-related aspects of the image—other technical properties too.
• These days, virtually all decent equipment yields results that are sharp enough.
• When you've obsessively maximized and perfected sharpness, you haven't necessarily earned any extra credit for your pictures. That is, a picture can be superbly sharp and still suck.
• When post-processing, you have to be judicious with sharpness, striving for "just right"—a balance—instead of "as much as possible"—the extreme.

As I say, just my own beliefs. YMMV, etc.

There's nothing wrong with sharpness, and I'm not arguing against it—it's certainly the prevailing style, and it does help certain pictures work. But sharpness does not automatically equal better.

Artistically, even radically unsharp pictures can work better than sharp pictures. Let's consider just a few examples from history:

Paul Caponigro, Running White Deer, County Wicklow, Ireland, 1967

Curiously, I've never seen an original print of this. Paul used view cameras, most usually a 5x7, so most of his pictures depend on exact description of form and texture; this one, an exception, is so much a "greatest hit" that at times he has declared a moratorium on sales because he gets so sick of printing it. The magic of the picture is in the motion blur, which powerfully conjures the feel of twilight and makes the deer ghostly and seem to flow. Had the deer been perfectly sharp this photograph would never have been so famous.

Robert Capa, American troops landing on Omaha Beach, D-Day,
Normandy, France, June 6th, 1944

Recently Robert Capa has become retroactively controversial, apparently for the purpose of retrospectively besmirching his reputation, to what purpose I have no idea. It has been suggested by ivory-tower critics, from the warm and comfortable confines of their safe surroundings, that he might have been scared (scared!) on D-Day and that he might have botched this particular part of his assignment, submitting ruined film from which only a few images were salvageable. Well, I imagine I would be scared if I were in the middle of the action on D-Day, too, and, although I am only speculating, I think some of his censurers would shit their pants in combat. And how you have "failed" your assignment when you create (by whatever combination of chance, contrivance, and circumstance) one of the iconic images of the entire Second World War and one of the most famous war images in the history of photography, somebody else is going to have to explain. How one still photograph could better convey the sense of being mortal and human and exposed in the midst of the hell of the invasion, I do not know; and I also don't know how Robert Capa's accomplishment could have been improved if this picture were sharp and clear and fastidiously exposed according to armchair optimum practices, and if it were accompanied by more outtakes.

Andy Warhol, Sean Lennon, 1985 (Polaroid)

Sharp color Polaroids were the exception, not the rule. At least you didn't need digital skin-smoothing actions.

I should go on—I could build ten examples like these three—but I have a dentist appointment to get to soon, and am feeling like the condemned man walking to the gallows (I am such a baby when it comes to manning up to the dental chair that it sends me spinning into hyperbole).

Is it just me, or does anyone else miss all the ways that photographs used to be able to be unsharp? It expanded the creative palette, the variety of ways we could achieve creative effects and use them to signify all sorts of things, from the time of day, to the immediacy, to emotion. Now that most every photograph from the most casual phone snap to the most careful professional advertising shot is bitingly sharp and glaringly clear, I kind of miss that. Of all the things to miss.

Again, I'm not arguing against sharpness. I have nothing against it. I often like sharp pictures. I am also completely open-minded to photographers who want all of their work pin-sharp from front to back. It can be a very effective personal style.

Sharp is another way photographs can be, along with all the other ways.

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.

Please help support The Online Photographer through Patreon

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

Andrew Lamb: "I'm sure I won't be the only person to comment that many movie DOPs use older lenses on their Reds or Arri Alexas simply to get away from super-sharp, clinical images. I did the stills on a movie where John Mathieson (Gladiator amongst other films) used an ancient Cooke zoom on a Red."

Herman Krieger: "That's what you call a sharp analysis."

[Herman, who is officially TOP's oldest reader (we surveyed), loves puns. Here's a link to a recent interview with him. —Mike]

toto: "Just give me sharp bokeh, and I'll be happy."

James Weekes: "Thank you for this. I do love a decently sharp representation of what I photographed, most of the time. Then I put my Holga lens on one of my Micro 4/3 cameras and play. I also love the results of these. In color, a lovely, unreal smearing of colors, especially red. In black and white, a return to Tri-X 120, thank you DxO."

Dogman (partial comment): "Concerning D-Day, I once read an article or a section of a book that stated something like seven out of 10 veterans of the invasion admitted to soiling their pants during the operation. The writer said he related these statistics to someone who was also a veteran and the response he received was, 'Then three out of ten were liars.'"

Roy Feldman: "The new book by Patti Smith, Year of the Monkey, has some of the most beautiful unsharp Polaroid B&W's I've ever seen. They are like poems and excel because of their simplicity and truth. Polaroids, despite limitations, are truthful."

PhotoDes: "I've seen the expression 'natural sharpness' used several times on another website and it stuck with me and, more important, caused me to change the way I was doing post-processing, which was tending to over-sharpening. Just what 'natural sharpness' is is hard to say, but having the concept in the back of my mind keeps me in check."

Mike replies: It's a good idea to have that in your head. It's basically my guiding standard for all photo processing—that the technique or properties of the picture shouldn't call attention to themselves or distract from the content of the picture. But an image can be very sharp and still look natural. My standard for very-sharp-but-natural-looking is probably Ctein's bridge and moon print from the Big Print sale. In that he achieved extreme sharpness but in a way that doesn't look unnatural to me.

[A different] Mike (partial comment): "Thanks for this. I am weary of the worship of sharpness."

John Camp: "I have a print of 'Running White Deer' on my wall, and bought it directly from Caponigro's studio, where I'm told it had been hanging on the wall there. One of the cool things is that the photo is in a sense quite sharp—I believe it must have been taken a a very quiet, dark day, with a long relatively exposure, because the leaves on the trees in the background are actually quite sharp. Maybe not razor-edge, but they're not blurred. The contrast between the sharp forest and the blurred deer is one of the interesting things about the shot. Excessive sharpness can drain the life from a photo—blur is one way our eyes detect action or movement. It can also impart a sense of stillness, which may very well be desirable. You pick your poison."

Bandbox: "I've seen 'Running White Deer' often in gallery shows over the years, most recently in shows at 162 Russell Ave., Rockport, ME (just down the road from my house) in December 2018 and this July. I've thought for a long time that Caponigro's work is the gold standard for printing. He's a superb craftsman and still active, though I didn't see anything new from him in these shows."

Robert Roaldi: "Maybe 'sharpness' is just low-hanging fruit. To first approximation, you get it by just spending more money, so it's available to more people than other qualities might be."

Tom R. Halfhill: "Actually, one of the 'ivory-tower critics' who contributed to the recent research of Robert Capa's iconic D-Day photo was J. Ross Baughman, a Pulitzer Prize photojournalist and combat photographer who was severely wounded by a land mine in 1982. (As we know, Capa was killed by a land mine in 1954.) The D-Day project's goal wasn't to besmirch Capa's reputation but to correct the historical record. The new evidence tends to debunk the old story that a teenage darkroom assistant ruined most of Capa's D-Day film during processing. Instead, the evidence suggests Capa shot far fewer frames than he claimed.

"I don't fault Capa for quickly leaving the scene of battle. His position was extremely dangerous, everyone there was scared, and any pictures he took were valuable if he could return in one piece. But correcting errors in historical records is a good thing, no matter where the chips may fall.

"(Full disclosure: Although Baughman isn't a personal friend of mine, we were colleagues at a daily newspaper and were college classmates in journalism school before that. I admire his photography and respect his contribution to the Capa project.)"

Mark McCormick-Goodhart: "Just wondering if Peter Turnley's photo you posted yesterday of the young woman on a Paris balcony motivated you to write today's article on image sharpness. Peter's photograph is magnificently soft. A sharper image wouldn't make it better, and indeed I dare say a sharper rendition would have sterilized the sensual beauty of the scene. Lovely image...timely discussion about image sharpness."

Kenneth Tanaka: "Nice synopsis of sharpness’s stature, Mike. As I noted in a comment to an earlier topic, sharpness is a tool just like other visual characteristics and is best deployed with judgement against the overall visual mission for an image. By the way, as someone who has viewed many thousands of the world’s most highly prized photographic prints I can honestly say that hardly any would pass the sharpness grade of amateur photo fora. Only contact prints would have a chance of being approved by the keyboard crowd! It’s also worth noting that this is mostly an academic subject for work online, where subtlety is hard to achieve even with today’s high-res displays."

Thomas Walsh (partial comment): "A few blogs back I took issue with your comments on the new iPhone. You asked me to wait because there was always something different to consider on TOP. How correct you were. This blog on sharpness is one of the best I've read since finding TOP. I read all of the comments and thoroughly enjoyed them. Thanks, Mike, for this article."

Mike replies: You're welcome. A blog is like the weather in Vermont....

Stefan (partial comment): "I am bored by sharpness."

Around the Web on a Wednesday

(Cuba)

Paris-Cuba: Our friend Peter Turnley is having a major exhibit, entitled Paris-Cuba, that opened at La Fototeca de Cuba, Cuba's National Center of Photography, on September 21. The show is on view until October 20th. In case you can't get to Cuba easily, there's a video. The exhibit of 104 photographs represents more than forty years of photographing the two places.

(Paris)

Shades of Roger C.: The ladies of IFixit—Kay Kay Clapp, who has the quirky title of "Director of Things," and Sam Goldheart, Lead Teardown Engineer—have taken apart an iPhone 11 Pro Max to see what makes it tick. Just seems full of little bits to me, as maybe the important bits are even smaller bits, but then I confess I haven't watched the whole video yet. I will. I do wish I could get an 11 Pro, but then, I have a perfectly good phone that's already paid for.

Ex Seven what?: Blake Andrews has the scoop on the new X-7000, which has 20% more features than the X-6000. I happened to encounter the X-7000 FAQ right after I scanned this article at DPReview, and the juxtaposition seemed apropos. Also, I think I might start answering questions by saying "the new digital economy offers fantastic opportunities and challenges."

If you don't know Blake's interviews, you should put them on your radar. For a random sample, try his April interview with Charles Traub. I found myself almost alarmed by the idea of getting a portrait of Manual Alvarez Bravo and not even captioning it!

Beautiful book of a horrific subject: Few media reports of any kind—video, written word, multimedia—have captured the dreadful carnage in Syria and Iraq with as much thoughtfulness, compassion, and vividness as 36-year-old Irish photographer Ivor Prickett does in his remarkable new book End of the Caliphate. (The caliphates were political entities based in the Middle East in which the shared Islamic religion was stronger than national or ethnic differences. They were stewarded by caliphs, religious figures who outranked the secular leaders.) Literally the book documents a year in the campaign to retake Mosul from ISIS, but symbolically it gives visual expression to the tragedy of endless strife in the region; and the photographer seems as physically invisible in the pictures as his morality and humanity are pervasive. It strikes me that Ivor Prickett's book, intimate and immediate amid desolation and danger, might well deserve to stand among the great books of war photography from photography's history. It also deserves space on your shelf if you are building a library of outstanding color photography.

The HD Pentax DA 20–40mm ƒ/2.8–4 ED Limited DC WR

Pentax lens: My favorite Pentax lens is on sale for $300 off. Limited-range zooms have always tickled me—Pentax once prototyped a 32–39mm "adjustable 35mm," an idea I liked—and the current 2X 20–40mm APS-C zoom (30–60mm-e) is an adjustable normal lens. Don't mindlessly slam it from one end of its range to the other—think of it as a 40mm, 45mm, or 50mm normal that allows you to tweak your framing a bit. Buy one for the as-yet-unnamed new Pentax reduced-sensor flagship that will be probably be shown in Tokyo on September 21st.

New cameras are coming in October: ...According to an article on Thom's DSLRbodies, there are a surprising number of new cameras slated to arrive soon. Thom says, "It seems that we're in for a spurt of new cameras, and both DSLR and mirrorless will be in that mix. The question is whether the market can handle that much iteration. How many of those models will be 'sticky' and get some traction?" Good question. I have to admit that even I just "forget" some current cameras soon after release...they just seem irrelevant. Even though I'm supposed to pay attention to that stuff.

Venerable names that might be fading:

Cadillac: ...Says one car buddy. Caddy went all-in on German-style luxury sports/muscle car sedans a few handfuls of years ago, and built at least one great car, the ATS-V, which has sold poorly (because if you want a car as good as a BMW, why not buy a BMW?). The direction change created a little too much cognitive dissonance with Caddy's established image as a maker of soft, stately, high-status land yachts. Now, with sedan sales tanking (by one third since 2011!), Cadillac might either prematurely cancel its flagship and most Cadillac-like luxury sedan, the CT6, or—gasp—start importing it to the U.S. from China where it is also built. Cadillac has created some gorgeous concept cars in recent years, such as the Escala and the breathtaking Elmiraj (a modern take on the Eldorado), but those aren't making it to market. For much of 2018, Cadillac recorded its lowest U.S. market share in its entire history.

Pentax: With less than 5% market share and with most of its better cameras in the declining DSLR category—and all sporting aging sensors—it's an open question how long the honorable old Pentax nameplate will be around. It's likely that a new APS-C flagship DSLR will be announced next month—see the news item above—but how many fans will buy it? Relative to his own question quoted above, Thom's educated guess there that it "isn't going to be very sticky" (i.e., get much attention or gain much traction in the market). Ricoh has the means to keep Pentax alive even as a losing venture, but it bought Pentax for a presence in the DSLR business just in time for the big downturn. And businesses aren't charities. On the other hand, it's become sort of a cliché to sound Pentax's death-knell, and everyone's been wrong so far.

The New Yorker: A mere six spins around the sun from its 100th birthday, one of the last and best of the written-word real readers' magazines, The New Yorker, might not be around a lot longer. I haven't encountered any scuttlebutt to that effect. But, the surest sign of the circling vultures is right there under readers' noses. The magazine that has historically resided on the coffee tables of the most gracious upper- and upper-middle-class American homes used to be stuffed to the scuppers with snooty luxury ads, but recent issues sometimes don't even fill their prime ad positions. Page after page passes with no advertising, or just "house ads," an ad from the magazine itself or the parent company, or "comps," which are public-service or traded ads. Where all those luxury ads used to be, it's a desert. That's fine with readers, but not a good sign at all for business. Then again, consider these lines from Joseph Epstein: "The New Yorker, like New York itself, is always better in the past. In the present, it seems always to be slipping, never quite as good as it once was. Did the magazine, founded in 1925, have a true heyday? People differ about when this might be. The New Yorker’s heyday, it frequently turns out, was often their own."

New vs. Old: "Pro Wedding Photographers Compare iPhone 11 Pro to Canon 5D Mark IV" at PetaPixel. The results are surprising, except that, as I've always said, better cameras often show their strengths when pushed to extremes in various ways rather than when things are more optimal. The linked article resembles one I wrote for Black & White Photography magazine in the 2000s comparing a small-sensor digicam to DSLRs of the time. Would you hire a photographer to shoot your wedding with an iPhone 11 Pro?

Rats: No photographers among the 2019 recipients of the "genius grants," AKA the MacArthur Fellowships ($625,000 in five annual installments), which were announced this morning. This year, we are chopped liver.

...On the good side, Mary Halvorson got one.

Mike

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Thanks (Blog Note)

My sincere thanks to those of who commented on the "Older You, Younger You" post. I was surprised by the wide range of ideas and moved by some of the more personal testimonies. I got a lot from those. Thank you.

Mike the Ed.

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Topaz Labs Sharpen AI: Artificial Common Sense

Written by Ctein

Please bear with me, Faithful Readers...this is a photography column. It'll just take me a bit to get us there.

I am irritated by the success that corporate/marketing droids have had in co-opting the term "A.I." That stands for "artificial intelligence," and has, in the past, commonly meant some kind of general intelligence that deals with the real world in all its perplexity. The ultimate goal may be (trans)human level, but it's gradable down—you could have parrot-level AI, or cat-level or even goldfish-level (currently, we've reached the some-but-not-all-insects level of AI).

Now it's been degraded to refer to any system that uses one of the deep learning networks (there are many different flavors of those) to learn how to do a sophisticated task. They're popping up all over, and they do amazing things. But Artificial Intelligence? Nah, I don't think so.

(What are those promoters going to do when we get genuine AI? Call it AIFRTTH—Artificial Intelligence, For Real This Time, Honestly? Maybe that's the first question we should ask real AI, if we ever get it.)

I think there's a better descriptor for what these programs do: Artificial Common Sense. I'm not being flippant. I think it's right and significant, and it lets us take these programs seriously. Believe me, we should be taking them seriously.

Common sense is something that we've thought of as being a fairly sophisticated function, a way of distilling down the otherwise unfathomable complexity and intricacy of the world into something we can manage almost intuitively. "Sophisticated" isn't the same as intelligent; dogs and cats exhibit a great deal of common sense, but down at their level of mentation.

At the human level, common sense isn't necessarily either smart or correct. Everyone here has likely had the experience of getting into an argument with somebody who, backed into a losing corner, utters those fateful words—"but, it's just common sense that...." What then comes out of their mouths is invariably wrong. Common sense is not, in fact, good at dealing with the esoteric. But it's pretty damned good at dealing with everyday life and figuring out what's important and what's ignorable.

At the forefront
Which brings me to photography software. Consider the sorts of manipulation and filter programs we use routinely, like noise reduction, enlargement, and sharpening routines. As humans, we look at a photograph and we can easily figure out what is noise and what is detail, because we just know what the world looks like. Sure, there are the edge cases, where the subject detail is getting so similar to the grain/noise in the photograph that we're not sure if the feature we're looking at is real or an artifact of the media. But by and large, we know the difference. When we sharpen or enlarge a photograph, we want the real detail improved and enhanced, not the grain and the artifacts. When we run noise reduction, we don't want it to degrade the real image detail and tonality. We know and can see the difference because, well, we just know. 'Cause we're smart, sophisticated real-world data processing machines.

Until recently, we could imagine that this kind of discrimination was also a sophisticated function, something that would require a pretty high level of real AI to achieve. Sure, we've got algorithms that do a fair job of brute-force faking it, but it's pretty obvious that they're faking it with frequency filters and threshold discriminators and the like. They don't really understand a photograph, not the way we do.

Now we've got software, based on some deeply learnt neural networks, that appears to be doing the real thing, making the same kind of common sense decisions about a photograph that we make when we look at it. These programs don't work by some programmer handing them a finished set of rules and equations. Instead, they throw problems and solutions at them and say, "Okay, now figure out how to get from A to B." The more cases the networks have to chew on, the cleverer the solutions they invent. After chewing on a few million comparison photographs, they've got some pretty clever ideas.

At the forefront is Topaz Labs. For several years now they've been turning out, in my opinion, the best Photoshop filters that money can buy. Yeah, that's sometimes a matter of taste. For example, I've got at least a half-dozen different noise-reduction programs, because no two of them work the same way and each works better on some kinds of images and noise than the others.

In the past year, Topaz Labs have leapt ahead of everyone else by harnessing these buzzword-AI-tools to develop standalone programs and plug-ins that are beyond good. They are unbelievably good. That's not hyperbole—I look at some of the results and I simply don't know how it's possible for a "dumb" program to achieve them.

This column I'm going to talk about Topaz Sharpen AI, a standalone program currently in version 1.4.0 and on sale for $59.99. (These programs are frequently updated, not to fix bugs or add features, but to incorporate the very latest cleverness that the neural net has figured out as it chews on ever more real-world cases.)

Sharpen AI is already scary clever. The photograph below (figure 1) is the very first photograph I threw at Sharpen AI. I did not cherry-pick it out of hundreds of trials. It sold me on the software.

Figure 1

(Note: Even if you click through to the enlarged versions of the figures, you're not seeing them at 100% and there may be compression artifacts—the limitations of the host publishing software. I've put a full-resolution version up on my website here with no compression artifacts, for any who want to pixel-peep.)

This is a photograph I'd normally throw away—I was on a moving boat and it was late in the day. It's the best of a pretty poor sequence, if I'm being honest. I figured it would be a good test case. The first program I tried was Photoshop's Shake Reduction filter. This algorithm is supposed to analyze the photograph, calculate what's causing the blur, and undo it. It's called deconvolution. The tricky part is coming up with exactly the right point blur function and applying it without generating artifacts. As you can see in figure 2, Shake Reduction still isn't very good at that. In fact, I've yet to find any but the simplest and most minimal cases of subject blur or camera shake where it produced an artistically-usable result.

Figure 2

Then I handed figure 1 off to Sharpen AI, selected the "Stabilize" processing mode and let it rip at its auto-default settings. Two minutes later, I got back figure 3.

Whoooaaa...

Yup, two minutes. Sharpen AI is not only clever but a hard worker. On a Retina iMac with a 4GHz i7 processor, it takes that long using seven threads to process a 20-MP image. That is a heckuvva lot of gigaflops, on the order of 50,000 calculations per pixel. Not your everyday sharpening routine, nosiree. In fact, just updating the preview within the application can take as much as 30 seconds. Not surprisingly I have "auto update" turned off; otherwise every time I moved one of the adjustment sliders the program would want to take another 30 seconds to update the preview. (Almost always, Sharpen's automatic settings produce the best results, so I'm not sure why I bother. I guess I'm just a fiddler.)

Once you've gotten past being awed at the overall improvement, take a close look at the thin twigs and branches along the lower sides and the bottom of the picture. Sharpen AI has brought them back into an amazing focus without any ringing artifacts and while leaving the background largely untouched.

If you look closely at the edges of the birds and the nest in the sky areas, you can see some small artifacts—thin vertical lines that extend a few pixels away from the subjects. These are much more evident on the screen than they would be in a print. In fact, I printed out the full image on 17x22" paper and they were completely invisible. The birds and the nest looked perfectly sharp with no evidence that any enhancements had been run on the original photograph.

Other modes
Sharpen AI has three processing modes—Sharpen, Stabilize, and Focus. You've seen what Stabilize can do. Sharpen does more ordinary sharpening and is recommended for photographs that are otherwise in-focus and un-blurred. The effect is modest, but it's clean. So far, I haven't found an out-of-focus photograph where Focus improves things. Unlike Sharpening, which is understated, Focus seems to go way overboard. Perhaps I haven't found the right image to apply it to, but so far it's been useless.

On every photograph I've tried, Stabilize does the best job, better than Sharpen even on photographs that are in focus and don't have any visible camera shake or subject movement. I haven't reached the point of applying it to every photograph, even the ones that don't look like they need any sharpening, but I'm starting to wonder if maybe I should try that.

Sharpen AI will process all kinds of original files—TIFF, JPEG, PSD, and even RAW. I don't recommend using it on RAW, though, if you like the rendition of your usual RAW converter. Me, I like what Adobe Camera RAW does and Sharpen's raw converter doesn't produce the same results, in terms of tone, color or geometric correction. I'm not saying it's bad, but it's different, and even though Sharpen will output a new raw file, the new one won't render the same as the original. My recommendation is to make your usual corrections in your preferred RAW converter, generate a 16-bit TIFF from that and put Sharpen to work on the TIFF.

In past years, I've deleted photographs that were artistically appealing but unacceptably blurry, knowing that I'd never be able to pull prints from them that met my technical and aesthetic standards. I'm thinking I may have made a mistake.

Topaz Sharpen AI—recommended without reservation.

Next column (in a couple of weeks) I'll talk about Topaz Labs' Gigapixel, which is absolutely, positively the best upsampling program ever. It does all those image-improvement miracles that other upsampling programs claim to do... and don't.

Ctein

Ctein, pronounced "kuh-TINE," rhymes with fine, is one of the most experienced and accomplished photo-writers alive. He was TOP's Technical Editor before leaving for a new career as a science fiction novelist. He has written two books of photo-tech, Digital Restoration from Start to Finish and Post-Exposure. This is his 343rd column for TOP; older columns can be found under the "Ctein" Category in the right-hand sidebar.

Original contents copyright 2019 by Ctein. 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 haven't even started reading the article, but I'm writing to let you know how delighted I am to see Ctein back. I have always enjoyed his writing on everything and missed it while he was away. An article by him is even more welcome as it is my birthday! Thanks for writing, Ctein. I'll now go back and read it."

Michael Elenko: "Thank you for this post. I've had this pano HDR I created eight years ago. It was in the mountains, and the mosquitoes were the worst, even getting in my eyeballs. So I could not provide enough stability for the brackets to line up right, plus dusk was coming on, so my shutter speed was too slow for effectiveness. But the shot was special, just too mushy for my standards and a plethora of tried tools. Until I used Sharpen AI at the settings recommend by Ctein. Wowie zowie, this finally looks right. Thank you, I've waited for this."

Joe Holmes: "I tried a demo copy of Sharpen AI on a couple of my images and immediately paid for the software. I find that it can work miracles on certain images, though there are times when it gets everything wrong, when it simply cannot handle an image and leaves crazy artifacts. And then there are times when it does a brilliant job on certain portions of an image but creates bizarre and ugly artifacts on other parts, like the surface of a river or clouds. In those cases I can make the best use of it by bringing a Sharpen AI image into Photoshop as a layer and applying a layer mask to apply the best parts on top of the original image. Even with that extra work, it's worth it, because the results are way better than what I can do with other tools."

Marcelo Guarini: "First, thanks for the initial part of this post, about artificial intelligence. I'm a professor of Electrical Engineering at a university and I am tired of repeating the same to my colleagues, especially those who work in the so-called field of artificial intelligence. I will show them your comments so they can see that I am not the only one with the same opinion. Thanks for the term 'artificial common sense.' Artificial intelligence is too high-flown a term for what deep learning is.

"I have been using Topaz Labs Gigapixel from its inception, and have been very surprised by its excellent results. As you say, 'positively the best upsampling program ever.' Almost every time I open the program to use it, there is an upgrade available. I have been a beholder of its evolution through cumulative training and refinements. Today its results are much better than at the beginning; you can easily see the improvements. It is just a very cool tool. I will try Sharpen AI and will follow your indications regarding the different modes and auto-update.

"Thanks much for your post, and happy to see your reviews again."

Soeren Engelbrecht: "'Since it is often hard to distinguish common sense from equally common nonsense, professional advice is useful.' —Leslie Lamport."

Tom R. Halfhill: "I'm equally uncomfortable with the buzzphrase 'artificial intelligence'—and I write about microprocessors for a living. (I'm a senior technology analyst for Microprocessor Report, the leading newsletter in this field since 1987.) I prefer 'machine learning,' which I think is more accurate and less grandiose, but the 'AI' label is unavoidable because it has become so widespread. Essentially, it's sophisticated pattern matching and sorting. But at a high level, sometimes we don't understand how these neural networks achieve their results. We turn them loose for training on a huge data set, let them chew on it, then evaluate their performance. It's almost a black box, although programmers can delve deeply into the structure to see what's happening. Of course, we don't fully understand how the human brain works, either, so even 'natural intelligence' is mysterious.

"The Topaz Sharpen AI tool is indeed impressive. What I need is a dust-and-scratch removal tool that's equally good. I've scanned tens of thousands of old family photos that need more fixing than I can handle. The automated tools I've tried often can't tell a dust spot from a pearl earring or a scratch from a crease in clothing."

Ken Lunders: "Whoa!! I downloaded Topaz Labs Sharpen AI for a 30-day trial. Well, the trial has ended after less than hour. I'm now $59.99 poorer, but 100% happy with the purchase. I'm delighted to see Ctein providing content here once again."

eliburakian: "Damn, I just spent $300 on the whole Topaz AI suite after reading this and trying out the software. Thanks a lot, now I have some explaining to do to the spouse."

Sunday Support Group: Older You, Younger You

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["Sunday Support Group" is about personal projects, mine or yours, photography-related or otherwise. It appears, at the risk of being obvious, on Sundays. —Ed.]

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Looking for a little help here. Doing a little research for the book.

There are a hundred ways to succeed at photography and a thousand ways to enjoy it. Assuming you've been along for the ride for a while, what would you say are the things about the pursuit that have been the most rewarding for you?

It can be anything, not just the obvious things. For example, my current top three are:

• Discovering the work of other photographers through books and museum and gallery shows
• "Obsessing" over lenses
• Mastering traditional darkroom craftsmanship

Ask me next week; they might change.

But anyway those are just my own "fer instances."

What are the things you've most enjoyed about your pursuit of photography and wish you'd done more of, and what are the things you wish you hadn't wasted your time on? For example, I actually wish I hadn't spent so much time and energy obsessing over lenses, even though I enjoyed it. If you could speak now to your younger self, what would you emphasize? What would you caution yourself against?

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.

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[Ed. Note: Unusually, I will not be posting Featured Comments to this post, to avoid even the suggestion that certain enjoyments and regrets are more important than others. It's your photography—you own it, and you can do anything you please with it so long as you're not hurting yourself or others, and that's okay by me. Please see the Comments Section to hear what readers have to say.]

Dig It: Robert Frank by Louis Faurer

National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution (Estate of Louis Faurer)

Louis Faurer, Robert Frank in Pin Striped Suit, 1947

Leslie Ureña, an associate curator of photographs at the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C. has written a slight but engaging article about Robert Frank as his fellow photographers saw him, featuring two portraits of Frank from the National Portrait Gallery's collection.

You know how some photographers just don't grab you? They're famous and all that, they get attention, inclusion in books, shows, etc., but you just don't get the work—they leave you cold? First of all there's nothing wrong with that—it's natural, just as you find some members of the sex that appeals to you to be attractive and others not, just as you "click" with some songs or pieces of music and others not. Just a matter of chemistry. 

Well, for some reason I have the opposite thing with Louis Faurer. It's not like his pictures blow me away, and I can't point to anything in particular I think they have to offer that's unique or unusual. I just like his stuff, is all. Chemistry, I guess. Granted, I like that "Midcentury modern" B&W style of photography to start with, but still, there's something about Louis Faurer that I just dig.

Mike
(Thanks to Mike Potter)

[Ed. note: TOP is off on Saturdays. Back on Sunday!]

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Fuji 35mm f/1.4 vs. Fuji 35mm f/2 Update

I can tell this is something that's going to fall through the cracks if I don't just splat it out there, so:

In the article "A New Favorite Lens?", I wrote, "I went around the neighborhood and took two dozen pictures twice, once with each lens...." I just wanted to report that I did follow through and scrutinize direct comparisons between the files taken with the Fuji 35mm ƒ/1.4 and the newer ƒ/2 "Fujicron" version of the same focal length (52mm-e).

All with the same camera, within the same minute or two, same settings, etc. This using my new eye (about which more is upcoming, after my next appointment), and my new computer glasses optimized for said new eye and 18 inches. And of course pixel-peeping.

They're both beautiful lenses. What the direct comparisons showed me is that the two are almost indistinguishable at smaller apertures in the middle of the field, to the limits of my biological and computer systems. At wider apertures the faster lens is a bit worse in the corners, and, overall, the ƒ/2 is sharper than the ƒ/1.4 at ƒ/2. The bokeh of the ƒ/1.4 is a little better, by my personal definition of "better." The ƒ/2 lens is just slightly sharper...which came as a big surprise to me, because the faster lens gives the impression of being just beautifully sharp with excellent contrast. Which, come to that, it certainly is. 

Despite my pixel-peeping, the ƒ/1.4 lens (above) still seems, to my perceptions, to have a very nice character or quality that the slower lens doesn't quite have. When I look at pictures, I find myself thinking how could it get better than this? Which has happened with me before when all is to my tastes with equipment and technique. I've generally simply been using it by avoiding the apertures between ƒ/2 and ƒ/4, and just using either ƒ/5.6 and ƒ/8 or opening up all the way to ƒ/1.4 under appropriate conditions—that is, either stopping down or slamming it open—this because the bokeh is ever so slightly dodgy at the apertures I'm avoiding. There's no real need to do this. It's splitting hairs. But variable ISOs make it easy to do, and I feel comfortable with that way of working.

And yet, objectively, I have to say that almost any sensible person could use the ƒ/1.4 and the ƒ/2 lenses interchangeably, and just choose any aperture based on need. I'm not sure I myself could tell which was which blind—and I'm good at that kind of thing. Yes, as Internet says, the ƒ/2 lens is just ever so slightly sharper and more contrasty, but I don't think you'll be able to tell unless you're peering at direct comparisons at 100%...not the way sensible people look at pictures.

The bottom line? They're both lovely lenses. Of the two, I'd recommend the Fujicron first, for its handling and operational advantages, slightly smaller size, and lower cost. But I'm unlikely to sell the ƒ/1.4 ($599), because I like it so much. So far the ƒ/1.4 has found itself on my camera more of the time.

Given that the slower lens came to me used in a trade and the faster lens came to me for free along with the gift of a camera, I'm going to be indulgent in this case, not make a decision, and keep them both.

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.

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Stephane Bosman: "One thing I'm afraid is missed in all the criticism of the 35mm ƒ/1.4 autofocus speed is that, contrarily to most AF lenses, here the whole optical system moves forward or backward, just like with the old manual focus lenses. It is a classical double Gauss design too and I don't think there is another way to make a double Gauss design autofocus. I don't have the knowledge to actually know this, but I suspect its character is linked to those characteristics and one can't have a fast-focusing lens that would render the same way.

"I hope they never change it. Maybe I should get a spare one just in case."

Shot o' the Day: Del "147" Smith (OT)

I never write about pool (as you know), but I've never seen this before. Del "147" Smith is playing Chris Lawson in a short race to five at the 2019 WPA Players Championship at Griff's in Vegas. Neither player is having a good day—the big guy is whacking the hell out of everything and the little guy is missing simple shots.

Having broken three times, Smith, who is British and naturally a snooker player—which means he's likely to be not very good at the break shot—has scratched on the break not once, not twice, but three out of three times. (Scratch means to pocket the cue ball, which you're never supposed to do. Note that both the commentators are British, so they call a scratch an "in-off." Note also the sound is very low, so you might have to turn up your speakers.) Three scratches on three breaks in a row is not something you see every day, or, well, every year.

Determined not to do it another time, Del lines up on the rack dead straight and hits the head ball, the yellow one-ball, head on. That in itself is a bit of a joke—it's a setup that's not likely to result in an effective break, but it's about the safest way to shoot to avoid a scratch. So watch what happens.

Del doesn't get to break again, so four is his total for the match.

Mike

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How Much Do Amazon Associates Earn? (Blog Notes)

Adam W. asked: "Mike, A very quick question: I do try to purchase through your affiliate links, and I'm just curious what rate you earn from this? I've heard Amazon has slashed their reimbursement rates and I'd like to know how it affected you. I'm just concerned—no agenda (aside from supporting content creators doing the good work :-) If you answer this please don't take long, I don't want to distract you from shooting and writing."

Mike replies: That's okay—this is writing too.

Amazon's rates used to be based on the number of items sold, on a sliding scale. In March of 2017 Amazon changed the fee structure. Since then it has paid a flat rate based on category. Most of those rates are lower than the old ones.

However, cameras and lenses and other items in Electronics were set aside in the old volume model—they were rewarded at a lower rate, a rate that hasn't changed. (I think I'm enjoined by the user agreement not to talk about what it is, but I'm sure you can find it online.) So while I've been affected by the structure change, it's not as catastrophic as you might expect.

As far as I can see, there are three factors that have been reducing TOP's affiliate or associate income since the peak year of 2013. The biggest change is the number of eyes. I still have a large, healthy audience, but in terms of pure numbers it's about a third of what it was at the peak, mainly caused by far fewer occasional or one-time visitors arriving through search engines and from other sites linking to me. In the old days when ordinary citizens (as distinct from photography mavens) were thinking of buying a camera, they'd do online research first, so a post with a title like "Canon G10 Review" would pull strongly. Also, in the pioneer days, people happily sent readers to other websites. Money changed that. These days, nothing I write "goes viral" any more, because so few sites are willing to send their readers to other sites. (Why risk sharing the shrinking income?) The casual digicam shoppers have all gone away, content with the cameras in their phones. Even loyal enthusiasts are buying less, and less often, now. That's merely because the digital camera product category is maturing, something I saw coming from way, way off. So that's the second factor.

A corollary to the second factor might be: I can't sell iPhones. And that nobody needs a camera reviewer to help them buy a smartphone.

The third factor is competition, mainly from video. Camera sites have proliferated, because they're known to be good sources of income. If I were starting this blog today, fergeddaboudit—it would fly like the Spruce Goose. And far more people are watching YouTube videos now than are reading the old-fashioned written word. I do it myself a fair amount (I follow cue sports, and mainly watch online), so I can't really complain.

The thing that is filling in the shortfall for me are your Patreon contributions. The trendlines with everything else are going in the wrong direction, but the Patreon donations are filling in the shortfall so that I don't have to go out looking for a new job yet. (That might be a tad bitter—a lot of the traditional jobs for writers have dried up while I've been off doing this. Gotta finish that book!) So thanks to everyone who pitches in the price of a magazine subscription or a couple of month of Starbucks on Patreon! You are what's making the difference in keeping our excellent community alive.

Still, people who use my links are still the biggest part of what keeps this little boat afloat.

Mike
(Thanks to Adam)

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.

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trecento: "Mike, I buy through your links as often as I can—for pretty much everything. I appreciate your work here, because this in one of the last sites I know of that have a really human voice to them. Yes, there are a few other photo bloggers who do a nice job talking about gear, or talking about photographs. No shade meant for them. But you don't talk like someone selling stuff, nor do you talk like an industry analyst. You talk like a writer. There's a transparency, and a lack of artifice to your work that I like. And, I like the personality that shines through. I hope this blog is able to keep going for some time to come. Wishing you well."

Mike replies: Thanks, trecento. I said a long time ago that I intend to ride this horse all the way to the inn, and that's still the plan. It's been fun!

My Fuji Kit Begins to Evolve

[When it comes to gear decisions for myself, I think it's reasonable for you not to consider me any kind of "expert." Because when we're choosing our own stuff, objectivity tends to fly out the window. As you might have noticed.  :-)  Critiques, kibitzing, and advice are welcome.

[UPDATE: Please also see the first two Featured Comments and the responses below.  —MJ]

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Much as I would like to simply hoard glorious Fuji stuff like a mad king, I'm trying to be practical. Just because I was gifted certain lenses, that doesn't mean I'm obliged to keep them all. Or so I've been telling myself. So I've been trying to clear my head, take a deep breath, and take a clean-sheet look at what equipment I should reasonably end up with, what I should keep and what can be sold on to people who will use them more.

I think that my Fuji lens kit will end up like this:

Wide-angle: I'll keep only one, and I think it should be my XF 14mm ƒ/2.8. I've already bonded with that lens (by the way, of the three pictures in that post, I now only like the middle one) and gotten to know it. It's really a bit wider than I need—24mm-e does it for me, generally, as I'm not an ultrawide kinda guy—but I really like it.

Normals: Here's where I think I'll indulge myself. For the 50mm-equivalent, I think I'll keep both the XF 35mm ƒ/1.4 and 35mm ƒ/2. There's just not a good enough reason to sell one. True, there's also no good reason to keep both, either, but I have them, and I like them, and selling one or the other wouldn't bring all that great a return. So I can rationalize it.

As for the 35mm-equivalent focal length of 23mm, I think I'll do exactly the same thing, even though I don't currently have the XF 23mm ƒ/2. I've had the XF 23mm ƒ/1.4 since I first bought my X-T1 in 2014, and I wouldn't sell it, but I'm keen to get an ƒ/2 as well just because it's such a nifty and pleasing little lens. Same indulgence, same rationale.

Short telephoto(s): Here's where the dilemma resides. I inherited both the XF 56mm ƒ/1.2 and the XF 90mm ƒ/2 from my generous friend—yet, gorgeous lenses though they are, I'm not convinced I actually need either one. I've always thought of myself as a portraitist—it's my best skill, genre-wise—but in the age of the selfie there's just very little call for portraits. I can hardly line up subjects when I offer to work for nothing. If I had a free rein, I swear I'd pay people to sit for portraits for me—hire models, that is—but that's not something I can really justify in the household budget. Despite my golden opportunity, I'm considering de-accessioning both the fancy lenses (after testing them and writing about them, of course), replacing them with the simple XF 50mm (75mm-e) ƒ/2, a lens I like in all ways except that that it's a tad short. (I got imprinted by the 85mm focal length in my youth, when I owned a Carl Zeiss/Contax 85mm ƒ/2.8 Sonnar that I did hundreds of portraits with.) Then again, just keeping the 56mm seems sensible too. Or maybe trading the 56mm and the 90mm for the 56mm APD, which would be another great luxury/indulgence? ("Designed for the bokeh enthusiast," the ad copy reads, and if that's not me, then who is it?) I can't decide.

Telephoto zoom: I'm absolutely chuffed that I'm getting to live with the astonishing XF 100–400mm for a while—it's increasing my experience-base, and I've always valued that in photography—but I'm just as sure that it's not a lens I need. Just as I'm not an ultrawide guy, I'm not an extreme telephoto guy. I'm pretty sure I'll trade the super-duper-zoom for the merely super XF 55–200mm (84–305mm), a lens which is plenty long enough, plenty good enough, plenty pricey enough, and fast enough for me.

Even with this rearrangement, I'll still end up with one very high-end body with IBIS, one backup (my old X-T1, which still has plenty of life left in it) and seven Fuji lenses—six primes and one zoom—which, assuming I keep them for five years to a decade, will still be more lenses than I've ever owned for any one camera for any extended period of time. And owning two lenses of the same focal length for each of my two most-used focal lengths will be a great luxury and a great privilege, and would make me feel fortunate indeed. Which, indeed, I am.

Mike
(Thanks to GW and JB)

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Stephane Bosman: "Call me old fashioned, and no offense meant, but I still have a hard time with the concept of selling gifts."

Franklin Berryman: "I think you ought to wait a while before you run out and sell stuff you have just been gifted, unless you really need the money."

Mike replies: These comments caught me off guard and made me anxious after I read them. Just for the record, I have done nothing yet! But I hadn't thought that I might be considering doing something offensive, or that readers might disapprove of me for it. So I immediately emailed Jay and asked. Here's his response, written for posting...

Jay Burleson: "Mike, I had a two-fold goal for doing what I did. One was to make me happy by sharing my good fortune with someone who would appreciate the gear. The other was to hopefully make you happy by receiving it. I saw this post this morning and I am happy that you are enjoying the lenses, and using them to expand both your photography and in furtherance of the blog (by sharing with us your test results and photos). I have no problems with you doing what makes you happy with the lenses, and I strongly encourage you to do so."

Mike: ...Which is what I understood from our discussions when he visited. I still wonder what others think. I don't like that anxious/upset feeling I get when I think people might be disapproving of my actions. We're all just having fun here, and above all it's important to me to be both open and ethical.

Open Mike: All Cameras Yield Their Gifts

["Open Mike" is the often off-topic, anything-goes Editorial page of TOP. When everything is normal, it appears on Wednesdays.]

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My latest iPhone shot I like:

Tim

I have a friend named Ken who has a friend called "Clean" (because he looks like Mr. Clean) who sold his pool table (a Schmidt! Such things excite me) to a guy named Tim. Tim invited Clean to come play on his old table and Clean invited Ken and me. Clean and Tim were bar-table champions in their league for nine straight years, and they beat us 10–9 with two balls left on the table. That smarted.

Tim worked for the Parks (I think) and clearly has too much energy for being retired. Not only does he restore old games (above are just a few of his vintage pinball and arcade games) but he turned the swamp at the bottom of the farm field behind the woods in back of his house into a park: the swamp is now a lake with a bridge over it, everything's landscaped and manicured and mowed, there are working streetlights sprinkled over the area sprouting out of the grass, and he's set out vintage park and playground accoutrements and equipment here and there, along with a few gazebos and outbuildings. He holds big parties out there, with music piped through old horn theater speakers (big ol' Klipsches, which I also like).

The area where I live is sparsely populated. Tim lives out in the middle of nowhere. His little handmade fantasy park is surrounded by woods and by farm fields that disappear up and over the rolling hills. From a car, from any direction, you'd never know it's there.

As I mentioned, Clean's old table that is now Tim's is a Schmidt. A.E. Schmidt pool tables have been manufactured in the United States of America for 169 (!) years, under the continuous stewardship of six generations of one family, and you will find Schmidts—the people, I mean—on the factory floor to this very day. The factory is in downtown St. Louis, Missouri, between the Peres Drainage and the mighty Mississippi, a hop, skip and a jump from the Illinois border. They've never diversified—they make pool tables. The pool tables are superbly constructed but not overbuilt, and expensive but not overpriced. A.E. Schmidts are all-American, old-fashioned American. Not a lot of fuss, not a lot of fame. They make about 600 a year. They have a standard catalog but they build to order, so you can tell them what you want. Set one up right, with Accu-fast cushions and Simonis 860 cloth, and they're just the sweetest tables of all to play on.

I don't have one and have zero connection to the company. I made the foregoing paragraph tight because I can go on when the subject is pool tables. And you know how I can go on.

Zeiss Contessa and Sony NEX-6

As for my iPhone, which is currently one of my two main cameras (the other is a Fuji X-H1), all cameras yield their gifts. Of all the cameras I've ever shot with, the iPhone is another. It has been exactly like every other camera I've ever liked: it can be a lot of fun to shoot with, and, if I shoot with it enough, every now and then I get a shot I like.

I graduated from photography school intending to expand my experience of different cameras, and I've shot with an awful lot of them over the decades, from a Minox to a Contessa to a Wista to a Xapshot to a NEX-6. The only problem with my iPhone is that it shares some of the limitations of small-sensor cameras, and in the back of my mind it kinda bugs me that I'd have problems if I wanted to print certain ones past a certain size. But then, I love the viewfinder indoors. Win some, lose some: also like every other camera I've ever liked. 

It can be a lot of fun to shoot with, and, if I shoot with it enough, every now and then I get a shot I like. All cameras yield their gifts.

Mike
(Photo of Tim I. published with his permission)

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Steve Jacob: "There's something comfortably reassuring about guys in sheds making things. My father's shed had a metalworking lathe, and he was forever making pieces to keep my decrepit Citroen on the road, or fix things around the house. He was also quite adept at mending clocks and heating thermostats and even fax machines. Now we live in a disposable society, oblivious to how things work, infantilised by 'smart' software and helpless victims to built-in obsolescence. We are becoming less individual and more like simple cells in an amorphous, aimless organism with an infinite appetite. Don't think we'll cope too well after the apocalypse."

Mike replies: I wish, wish, wish I could remember the title of the book—I can't—but in the late 1990s I read an autobiography written in the early 1900s by a woman who had grown up on a remote farm in the Midwest in the 1800s. Much of the book was not of great interest to me, but in the middle was a longish section about farm life in her girlhood, and she detailed a number of the specifics of how they dealt with problems, notably medical and dental emergencies—the nearest doctor was days away by wagon or horseback, so a trip was a big undertaking. They had to take care of most medical issues right there on the farm. The section made it clear how enormously resourceful those people were—they did everything from making their own clothes to taking care of their own toothaches to birthing their own children—and how much of that knowledge is simply lost now because it hasn't been needed for so many decades. As you say, after a big disruption, the survivors could well need such knowledge again. 

Tom R. Halfhill: "A family-owned business (A.E. Schmidt pool tables) operating continuously for 169 years is impressive. Offhand, the only older U.S. family-owned business I know of is the Martin guitar company, which has been operating for 186 years (since 1833). Sometimes, specialization beats diversification and consolidation. May both companies continue to thrive."

hugh crawford replies to Tom: "C.F. Martin & Co has been around for a while, but the Zildjian Cymbal Co. of Norwell, Mass. has been run by the Zildjian family since 1623. Founded 14 generations ago in Constantinople by an alchemist who was trying to make gold and accidentally invented the metal used in their cymbals. Oddly, most of the oldest family businesses in the U.S. are farms and funeral homes."

Mike adds: There is a funeral home near here in Bath, New York, owned by the same family for 94 years, that still runs a furniture store next door. Apparently in 19th- and early 20th-century America it was common to find undertakers and furniture stores adjacent to each other, owned by the same family, because the cabinetmakers who constructed the coffins would also make furniture.

Luigi Colani 1928–2019

Luigi Colani

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Written by Adam Richardson

The man who made SLRs look and feel the way the do, Luigi Colani, died yesterday at 91.

Until the recent turn toward more angular and retro cameras, a lot of SLRs/DSLRs looked much the same, as you know, and all can trace their lineage back to the work the German industrial designer Luigi Colani did for Canon, specifically the Canon T90. Colani was a flamboyant designer who pushed a concept of biomorphism, and his vehicles in particular were pretty crazy-looking.

Here’s an article about him.

And here’s my own humble write-up/photo essay on the T90, which pioneered not just the shape of SLRs for the next 30 years (seriously, compare the grip and shutter button area of it to the EOS 1D of the last couple years—they're almost identical), and also the button/thumbwheel control combination that we take for granted today, which had never, to my knowledge, been used on any product of any kind up till that point in 1986.

Just to give a sense of how big of a leap the T90 was, compare it to its predecessor, the famous AE-1, which stuck to the classic aluminum/leather sandwich look. Then the EOS 1D, some 30 years later, looks hardly changed from the T90 despite bearing almost no resemblance to it "under the hood."

He designed many products in a wide variety of categories. The T90 was one of his more tame designs. He did some other really wild concepts for Canon, shown lower down on this page.

Luigi Colani died after a severe illness in the town of Karlsruhe, on the Rhine river west of Stuttgart.

Adam

Adam Richardson's Instagram is @massmadesoul

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J Williams: "The modern camera world owes Luigi a big debt. A Canon T-90 was my first 'serious' camera. Nothing remotely like it at the time. The grip felt like Luigi had taken a lump of clay, grasped it in his hands and then said 'make the grip like this.' At the time I could not imagine why anybody would buy any other SLR. That's how far ahead it was compared every other SLR in existence at the time."

JohnW: "The T90 was definitely a seminal design and the culmination of the A series manual cameras. The F1 was around in its native form till 1994. But there's a big evolutionary gap between the T90 and the EOS 1D series. The first 'enthusiast' EOS film camera to followed the T90 design pattern was the EOS 650 in 1987; the family resemblance is unmistakable.

"The 650 was the first of five similar bodies with varying feature sets between March '87 and September '89 when the EOS 1 arrived. The EOS 1 was clearly a modernized T90 with AF and the new EOS lens mount and immediately endeared itself to the pro shooters and the upper-end amateurs. I had bought a 620 the year before and seriously coveted one but never could quite justify the plunge. The film series EOS 1's all had detachable battery grips and the early L series lenses were limited to a 28–70mm ƒ/2.8 and a 80–200mm ƒ/2.8. They were both excellent lenses for their time, but the 80–200mm had a flush rear element so was not tele-converter adaptable.

"With the combination of the T90 derived design and the EOS technology, Canon dominated the SLR market for the next 20 years and ate Nikon for breakfast, lunch and dinner. It wasn't till the arrival of the Nikon D2 that Nikon retook its appropriate place in the market. Canon still has the largest market share even today due in no small part to the lead they leveraged from combining the lessons of the T90 with the EOS system. And yes, Canon set the pace and the market followed in both general design/layout and technology.

"Thank You Mr. Colani. RIP."

GrantC: "I was running a camera store when the T90 was introduced. They were extremely difficult to sell, partly because of the then-extreme styling, but also because the earlier T-series had set the expectation for dubious construction quality. Most customers associated the T90 with the unrelated T50 and T70, and the much higher price tag caused them to look at the more 'traditional' bodies. For years the AE-1 was the most popular SLR sold, and those users who wanted a 'better' camera and wanted to stay in the Canon line bought the A-1. Those customers didn't see the T90 as a viable successor. Some went to the New F1, and others traded in their FD-mount equipment to buy into the EOS system when the 650 and 620 were introduced the following year. Once the EOS cameras were out, T90 sales—at least in our stores—came to a crashing halt. I've always thought that if Canon had made the nameplate more professional looking, rather than using the cheap cartoonish screen-printed logo it used on the lesser models, they'd have sold far better."

Paulo Bizarro: "To this day, the EOS 1V remains the camera I most enjoyed shooting with. A large part of that is due to the ergonomic design of the EOS family, coming from the T90."

iPhone Takeaway

I’m reminded of a story my father told me years ago. He was visiting an engineering firm and the owner was showing him around. They came to a large room with men sitting at drafting tables (this was in the 1940s) but not seeming to be doing much. The owner commented “I hope to God they’re thinking because they’re costing me money!”

—Rip Smith

Okay, had a little fun yesterday (some people love that, some people don't like it), and threw a little water on the merry iPhone 11 marketing bonfires, like it matters to anyone but people who read me. But the bottom line from my point of view: if you're waiting to upgrade your iPhone for the sake of the camera, wait another year or two...

...They're still thinking.

Mike

P.S. I'll be keeping my iPhone 7+ until then. I'll post my latest iPhone shot I like in the next day or two.

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Moar Lens

I wanted to post a brief announcement about the three-lens camera in the new iPhone 11 Pro, but as I wrote I found myself being a wise-ass...which as we know, usually means I'm being an ass and not wise. According to an interview with CBS in 2015, Apple executives claimed there are 800 engineers working exclusively on the camera in the iPhone. My wise-ass question is, has someone been keeping track of what they've all been doing? Did they have to wait until Apple Park was completed in order to get started? Was there a giant company-wide intramural round-robin of Words with Friends going on? Or have they been working on the Penske file all week?

Because at a superficial glance it seems like the biggest change is that they added an ultra-wide lens...which would fall under the category of market poaching, since clip-on wide-angle attachments are one of the semi-popular aftermarket accessories for iPhones. But poaching an idea from the aftermarket to capitalize on what customers are already buying is kind of an ordinary move, not to mention rather anti-Jobsian in spirit, isn't it? Do you really need 800 people for that?

Okay, there are other things. There's a night mode (already common on Android competitors). Portrait Mode fake bokeh is now available on the middle focal length as well as the longest (a video reviewer said that formerly having Portrait Mode only on the "telephoto" lens was a quote-unquote "limitation." There are so many problems with that statement that it sends my wise-ass mode into overload, starting with the fact that a 52mm-equivalent lens is not a telephoto in fact or in deed). And the 800 engineers are reportedly working on exposure stacking, for which a sententious name has already been chosen and which will get done as soon as they finish the Penske file. (See? I can't stop.) And the selfie camera module on the front has been improved to the standard of the camera modules on the back, because as everybody knows "pros" need to make higher-quality selfies.

Anyway, I guess the primary thing to mention is that I've always said you should never really comment on a camera until you actually hold it in your hand and use it, because there are things you can't know from descriptions and feature lists. And I have not done that. But I have to say I'm a little mystified, and more than a little disappointed. Maybe the stories I've been hearing for years about computational phone-ography, something that seemed to be so imminent when the iPhone 7 with its two lenses came out, are not going to come to pass.

Still, I'd still like to know what all those engineers do all day. I don't want to rat on anybody or get them in trouble with their boss, but I'm getting a little suspicious.

Mike

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hugh crawford: "I was hoping that the Time-of-Flight camera would make it into the iPhone 11 but fortunately for me it did not so I don’t have to buy a new phone right away."

Mike replies: I had to look that up.

hugh crawford adds: "Oh, I thought everyone (don’t ask me anything about sports or celebrities) was following 3D and computational photography. Here is a link that explains what I’m talking about as it relates to the iPhone."

Mike: It always makes me smile when the following happens. These two comments came in within minutes of each other:

beuler: "The best 'hands off' camera preview. Ever. The biggest camera improvement on the iPhone 11, as far as I can tell, is in the viewfinder. By that I mean the large palm sized screen that is used for framing. It's very bright and accurate, according to other previews. Now, back to that Penske file."

Jeff: "Step one. Immature rant about Apple or Leica. Step two. Watch the page views and comments flood in. Very disappointing post."

I think the relevant quote is, "You can please some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the times, but you cannot please all the people all the time."

I looked it up on Quote Investigator, and this deserves to be called a folk saying. The original version uses fool, not please, and the earliest verified citation is by a politician named William J. Groo, who said something like it in September of 1885, 20 years after Lincoln's death. Groo's maxim might have been based on a French saying by one Jacques Abbadie that made its way into Diderot's famous Encyclopédie. After Groo said it, it was ascribed to Abraham Lincoln, and sometimes to P.T. Barnum, but there is no record that Lincoln ever said it.

In my defense, I can only say, somewhat ruefully, that if I actually knew what made the page views and comments flood in, you can be sure I would be doing more of it, and would not be shamed into doing less. It's not actually easy.

Viktor: "Mike, you just made my day! And with references to Costanza as well, hilarious."

Mike replies: Has anyone looked for the 800 engineers under their desks?

I should stop.

spot: "Do. Not. Stop.  ;-)  "

Mark Jennings: "Maybe good stuff gets slow walked until the 5G phone."

Jim Arthur: "Um...I'm pretty sure the image you posted is the new KitchenAid Triple Burner Induction Cooktop with downdraft venting and the new celebrity chef catchlight."

JG: "I laughed at this...."

Michael Perini: "I thought Apple’s announcement was significant. Of all the possible features that Apple could have spent resources on to insure sales, they chose to improve photography. If that is not a message heard by camera companies I cannot imagine what could be clearer. It says 'There's a big market there, and we're going after it.'"

Sunday Support Group: Make It a Game (OT)

["Sunday Support Group" is hopefully meant to provide support and inspiration for peoples' personal projects, photography-related or otherwise. It appears, at the risk of being obvious, on Sundays. —Ed.]

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Humans love games. Toyota used this when it devised its suite of dashboard monitors for its Prius line—Prius owners use the feedback to optimize their mileage in a game they've dubbed "hypermiling."

Lately I've been using a similar strategy with eating: make a game of it.

Backtracking a bit—my eye operation in June derailed my diet. I survived my confinement by eating quick meals of peanut butter sandwiches, which got me back into sugar and bread again, and I have addiction issues with sugar and bread. From there, my healthy eating broke down.

But as I mentioned recently, in my life I've quit cigarettes (1985, age 28) and I've quit alcohol (1990, age 33), and I know how to deal with addictions: you keep struggling until you get it. The struggle with addiction seems endless when you're in the middle of it, but in fact it's not endless—or doesn't have to be—eventually, if you keep trying, try different things, and are willing to go to any lengths to change, you can change. You get it. The new habits "stick." The struggle recedes into history. The trick is to keep trying until you succeed*.

Playing games with the brain
Diet isn't just about food ideology—it's also a lot about behaviorism. The best three beginner's starting points for overhauling disastrously bad eating, for instance, are all behavior related:

1. Don't eat between meals
2. Don't drink calories
3. Stop eating two hours before bedtime

So anyway, my latest trick with myself is also behavior related—I've made a game of my goals. I printed up a sheet with my daily goals on it and then at the end of every day I just tick off the ones I achieve. The total is ten, so I can easily count up my score on a ten scale.

The top third of my daily score sheet

Now, obviously, your sheet would have your goals on it, and would look a lot different from mine. I drink two mugs of tea in the morning, have a main meal in the afternoon built around rice, potatoes, sweet potatoes / yams or whole-wheat pasta and one or two vegetables (I eat as much as I want), and then have a dinner of bean, chickpea, split pea, or lentil soups (I eat as much as I want of that, too). The rest of the things are specific to my own bad habits and the details of my own particular daily life. For instance, there's free popcorn at the Moose Lodge where I play pool, and that's a failure point**. I want to try to limit myself to one serving. (I failed yesterday, but I beat my friend 8–6, so you lose some, you win some.) You'll notice that on my sheet I get two checkmarks if I avoid sugar for the day, that being my major weakness—if you have no "sweet tooth," sugar might not even be on your own list at all. "Didn't eat out" is because I'm making much less money now and sort of in a battle to try to make it to Social Security, so I've been trying to comprehensively reduce my expenses, and eating out is a bigger expense than most people think. Not to mention that there are restaurants that have not a single healthy meal on their entire menus. The last one, "soup made," is just because I need to keep up with the chore of making my homemade soups for the evenings—when I don't have any on hand, I have nothing convenient to eat in the evenings, and for me that's a big failure point.

Make your starting point an automatic success
Speaking of behaviorism, the first check on my list is a free point—I love my tea and never miss it. It's a "list trick" I learned long ago. Let's say you're making out a list of things to do the next day. Well, what you do is begin the list with three things you've already done! That way you wake up in the morning and you can tick off three items right away. It makes you feel like you're already on the right track, and makes it easier to dive into the rest of the list. Try it; it might sound dumb, but it works.

Everything for the week fits on one page. I eat three salads a week and three berry smoothies a week, and I allow myself one serving of meat a week, mainly so I can either partake when meat is on offer at friends' houses or have an occasional meal of sushi.

That's it. Just wanted to share this trick in case you might like to try it with your own goals. Make a game of it! It's surprising that it works, but it appears to be how we're wired.

Sugar is hiding everywhere
Oh, and by the way—you might wonder how peanut butter sandwiches got me back into sugar. Well, the peanut butter I was using has three grams of sugar per two-tablespoon serving (amusingly, the label says "3g sugars including 3g added sugars"), and the bread I bought has six grams of sugar per slice, of which five grams are added sugar. So each peanut butter sandwich I fixed myself during my recovery contained 15 grams of sugar—that's three and a half teaspoons of sugar per sandwich!

There's added sugar in everything these days, including our vegetables, which are being hybridized to be sweeter. I bought a package of celery the other day and look what it says on the bag:

And that "occasional sushi meal" I mentioned? I can't give myself the two points for "no sugar" on days I eat sushi. Sushi rice (and "sushi" is the rice, not the fish) is made with vinegar...and sugar. You have to be careful with this stuff—it's a minefield out there.

Now I gotta go walk. It's not that it's good for me and I need the exercise, it's just that I need the point.

Mike

*This is not advice that I'm a big fan of when it's generalized—I take a dim view of those mindless "persistence" exhortations that are perennially so popular. There are many things you shouldn't persist at—most notably those things at which you consistently fail, or for which you obviously have no aptitude. But addiction recovery is one area where persistence really is the right idea.

**Popcorn is only healthy if it's not cooked in oil and is unsalted. Otherwise it's pretty fattening.

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Lior: "Here's the merciless version. (SMBC is very funny and very, very intelligent.)"

John Daw: "Hey Mike, Prius owners did not coin the term Hypermiling. It came from a guy name Wayne Gerdes. He was getting upwards of 60 MPG with his stock Honda Accord by driving a certain way to maximize mileage. He dubbed it hypermiling. You can use this strategy with any vehicle. Hope all is well."

David M: "I suggest you also keep a second sheet of paper (or an app) that tracks each day you 'succeed.' The pressure to have a successful day goes up substantially when you've done it, say, 11 straight days. I use a Apple (Watch) app called 'Streaks' to keep track of whether I have done my daily push ups. I'm currently on my longest streak of 294 straight days!"

Fred Herzog 1930-2019

Fred Herzog. Photo by Ward Perrin.

In an odd coincidence, Fred Herzog died the same day Robert Frank died, far on the opposite side of Canada. Frank was a photographer whose essential work was poorly received and denigrated in its day; its importance was primarily in its outsized influence on other photographers over time. His fame and importance have done nothing but advance and increase. Herzog was a photographer who worked quietly in anonymity because he couldn't afford to print his work when he made it. He had no influence in his time. He was discovered and became known only late in his life, when his Kodachrome slides could be digitized and printed by inkjet and the value of his archive was recognized and published in books. His fame is modest and still in flux, still provisional. He's still understood as only a regional photographer, primarily a documentarian, which I think will change as more people come to appreciate his work. (Is Wright Morris a regional photographer? Is Edward Hopper a regional painter? No.)

For me personally, Herzog was one of the best discoveries of the present century. I love his work. I own a copy of Frank's The Americans (of course, because anyone who cares about and owns books about American photography ought to), and Lines of My Hand (which I like more and have spent more time with). I also own Sarah Greenough's formidable tome Looking In: The Americans, Expanded Edition, which I confess intimidates me and which I've barely cracked. I bought those books out of respect and appreciation.

I sought out Fred Herzog's books out of love, love for the work. This is just my opinion, but I think Herzog's work is more relevant to photographers now, as photography is practiced now. I can get in thrall to particular pictures, get lost in their world. They're as satisfying as good food when I'm hungry. Of course it isn't a contest. It just strikes me as ironic that even Herzog's death will be overshadowed by the same-day death of a far, far more famous photographer, that's all. It seems fitting, cynically speaking, in a sad way.

On a bright note: he did get to live to see his work recognized, in stark contrast to another famous 21st century late discovery with whose story his will probably always be linked, Vivian Maier.

The main obituary is at the Vancouver Sun. (Herzog was German-Canadian). His only book in print is:

Modern Color ($36.10)

And his out-of-print books are:

Fred Herzog: Photographs (Hatje-Cantz)

Fred Herzog: Photographs (Douglas & McIntyre)

and

Fred Herzog: Vancouver Photographs, which is still cheap enough to buy, and was the book we discussed when we first featured Fred. (Get it while you can—it's well worth having.)

He is represented by Equinox Gallery.

I hope it's not in bad taste to discuss his books in an obituary notice, but he's not very well known and his fame is fragile and I feel a certain urgency in advocating for, even proselytizing, his work. Interest in artists blooms at their deaths. I really want this guy to remain part of the conversation. I want photographers working now to know who he is.

Because for me there's little qualification needed: Fred Herzog is one of the greatest of street photographers, and one of the great color photographers. No asterisks or hyphens needed.

R.I.P.

Mike
(Thanks to Glenn Brown for pointing out that Frank and Herzog died at the opposite ends of Canada.)

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Tommy Brown: "Mike, Agree 100% with your take on Fred Herzog. I've loved his pictures from the moment I saw my first. I saw some of his prints last year at AIPAD and they're beautiful. Weird coincidence his passing on the same day as Robert Frank."

Mike replies: His pictures remind me of some of yours, Tommy....

Steve Jacob: "I agree about Fred. In fact, it was TOP that made me aware of Modern Color, and I have been a huge fan of Fred's work ever since. For those of us that engage in a similar kind of contemplative documentary style, his work is a masterclass in economical composition. He was the Walker Evans of his time, and it was a great shame he was not recognised earlier in his lifetime."

Tom: "I think Modern Color first came to my attention here on TOP. To anyone who might hesitate I can say it is one of the most often visited books in my collection, particularly whenever I need to refresh my eye."

Merle: "Aww. I picked up Modern Color a year or three ago, probably from your recommendation here. I've very much enjoyed it. I think it's helped me understand why I like the photographs I like."

JohnW (partial comment): "Sigh. Sigh. Sigh. Two of my photographic heroes gone on the same day.

"In 2012 I stumbled into an area of Vancouver named Strathcona, a trendy up-and-coming old neighbourhood with some interesting buildings. One afternoon while roaming the streets looking for material worth photographing, a car pulled up to the curb ahead of me, parked, and out stepped this very European-looking elderly gentleman with a jaunty beret.... Is that who I think it is? I hitched up my courage, approached him and asked 'are you Fred Herzog?' 'I am,' he replied. He was on his way to meet some photo buddies for coffee and a photo walk around the neighbourhood and invited me to join them for coffee. What a treat, and such a genial gentleman. I saw two of his exhibitions, one of them at the Equinox Gallery. If you think the books are impressive, imagine the images printed 30x40" on a white gallery wall...jaw-droppingly stunning. Fred belongs in the pantheon with the likes of Ernst Haas for pioneering the art of colour photography. He's a hometown boy and I got to shake his hand and have coffee with him. What a joy! Sleep well Fred."

Henning Wulff: "Fred Herzog was a good friend and photographic companion as we walked around his favourite neighbourhoods in Vancouver.

"We met in the early '70s, at a time when my photographic business grew and I decided I should maybe take some photography courses. Fred was head of Biomedical Communications at the University of British Columbia at the time and taught a mid-level course on photography from there. I endeared myself to the teacher by pointing out some technical errors he'd made in the middle of class. I stayed afterward in part to apologize and we talked a couple of hours and he showed me around his domain; many copy stands and micrographic equipment. The upshot was that he asked me to become co-teacher of the course, and that was the start of our friendship.

"Over the years Fred sometimes presented slideshows of this (mostly) 1950s Vancouver Kodachromes to groups of friends, and all of us knew how great his work was, but, as noted, there was no good way to print the images to his liking, so slideshows were it.

"He retired early, and from the mid '80s explored other photographic interests like shooting butterflies, and travelled worldwide in pursuit. Later, the galleries showed no interest in anything other than his early pictures. In his later years I often went to see him, and we went on walks, for the sake of walking, talking and shooting, usually followed by lunch or supper.

"I haven't seen him in a number of months, but having no contact with his son or daughter and knowing his increasing frailty, I suspected the worst. That moment has come. Many people will miss him."

Jeff: "The best thing about the expanded version Looking In, even if you ignore the rest, is studying the contact sheets in the back. A mini-tutorial of sorts on Frank’s shooting, and editing, approach. Highly recommended."

Rens Horn adds: "Be aware that only the hardbound copy has this goldmine, not the softcover. I used to work in the library of the Nederlands Fotomuseum in Rotterdam, which unfortunately only had the softcover. I brought my own hardbound copy for students to study."

Nic M: "Jack Simpson of Vancouver was a friend and posted a bit about Fred Herzog. In his thread someone posted a link to a four-minute video about Mr. Herzog by a local TV station."

Open Mike: The Rise and Fall of Formats

["Open Mike" is the anything-goes, often off-topic Editorial Page of TOP. It usually appears on Wednesdays, but was delayed this week out of respect to a departed legend in our field.]

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A TOP reader who signs in as "Speed" turned me on to this the other day. It's a lovely active graphic about music carrier formats, starting in 1973 and ending in the present year.

"Animated chart of the day: Recorded music sales by format share, 1973 to 2019" on Carpe Diem.

Since I lived through this whole period and have been an avid consumer of music my whole life, it's fascinating and familiar.

In 1973, vinyl had 70% of sales and 8-track tapes were number two. You can see cassette tapes kill 8-track (remember the Sony Walkman craze?), and watch vinyl wither to almost nothing. CDs grow and grow—until they have almost the entire market, peaking in 2003 or so at a whopping 95.7%—and then they start to fall. (If you can believe it, classical music fans were the strongest early adopters, since they appreciated the deep black silences and absence of surface noise—things like this amazing performance on CD were an utter revelation in the '80s.) Ringtones come and go (remember that?). Vinyl (my personal fave, although I wish DVD-A had caught on) starts a slow resurgence, which you can watch. Downloads dominate for a time, but are replaced by streaming.

Unbelievably if you were around and buying music in 2003, vinyl is now about to surpass CDs in market share for the first time since the early 1980s—the CD format is dying at a rate three times as fast as vinyl is growing. Does anyone listen to CDs any more? The only player I have is in the car. Quote from an audio reviewer after the advent of CDs: "CD players lack sport. You plug them in and have nothing to do! A beautiful turntable is a toy forever!"*

As far as that goes, remember this post? (Note that I misquoted the foregoing remark in that article. I was going from long-ago memory, as I often do. The quote above is the real quote, researched, found, and fact-checked.)

As for music formats now, here's my latest discovery, first heard in the car last night way out on a dark country road in the light of the waxing gibbous moon, beamed down (sans visuals) from a satellite. Plus ça change....

I've watched this neat graphic about twelve times now. Unfortunately I don't think there's a way to stop it for a "snapshot" of a particular year, or slow it down, but if you love music and are of—ahem—a certain age, it's a delight.

Thanks, Mark J. Perry—and thanks, Speed!

Mike

*Anthony H. Cordesman, SOTA Star Sapphire turntable review, Stereophile magazine, May 1986. I appreciated Tony's play on Keats's "A thing of beauty is a joy for ever."

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.

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