It's official...as confirmed at my latest appointment yesterday, my new eye has improved to 20/20!
Still has a bit of astigmatism, which can be corrected with glasses.
My other eye has gotten a little worse and will need the same treatment (partial cornea transplant, new lens implant) in a year or two.
What a wondrous time we live in, when failing eyesight due to aging can be corrected with technology and surgery. I've also been impressed by the degree to which my brain merges the information from both eyes and creates an image (a mental image?) that is better than the "raw" data from either eye alone. Tracking this experience—large changes in my eyesight followed by slower adaptation by my brain—has been a fascinating object lesson in just how much we "see" with our brains as well as with our eyes. In a way I feel lucky to have experienced this.
Very much looking forward to getting my new, updated computer glasses, corrected for 20 inches, to make the time I spend in front of the monitor more pleasant. I get a bit of eyestrain now, with the no-longer-correct glasses.
I try to spread the word when I can...if you ever need this kind of eye surgery, don't fear it. We're naturally protective of our eyes, and the thought of having our eyes poked with needles and cut with blades is horrifying. But it's really not bad at all—my surgery was quite bearable. The whole experience was a bit arduous but nothing truly taxing.
...And now this result. I'm very happy!
Mike
Original contents copyright 2020 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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Alan Whiting: "As an astronomer, I've done some research into visual observations (which are still surprisingly useful to the science). I've concluded that there is no such thing as raw visual data: even the simplest observation (such as the brightness of a star) is heavily processed before you, the observer, see it. For a scientist, this can be annoying. This cartoon might be of interest."
Mike replies: That might be the best ongoing "cartoon" strip on the planet right now.
Emerald Expositions, the operator of business-to-business trade shows that runs PhotoPlus (formerly Photo East, and before that Photo Expo) in New York City at the Javits Center, and is the most recent owner of PDN, has announced that PDN will close down and stop providing content.
PDN was founded by a photo assistant named Carl S. Pugh as New York Photo District News, a newsletter for the commercial and studio professionals along lower Fifth Avenue in New York city—the photo district. It was first published in May of 1980 and made a profit from the start. (1979 is generally agreed to have been the peak of photography as a home hobby as well—both home darkroom magazines were founded within a year or two of that date.) As the only publication directly targeting commercial and studio advertising professionals, with content relevant to business as well as photography, PDN soon became national. Pugh founded Photo Expo in 1983 and sold the show and the magazine to AdWeek in 1984. In the 1990s, as President of the Trade Show Division of Mecklermedia, he went on to run the then-fast-growing Internet World Conference.
In its heyday, Photo District News was a thick, glossy, professionally-produced publication that studio pros all across the country felt they had to subscribe to even if they didn't have time to read it. It was the voice and the brightly-lit shop window of the industry. It was neither well known nor widely read among amateurs and hobbyists. PDN also published the PDN Annual, a showcase for talent where photographers could become known. The Annual awarded a number of prizes; the Photographer of the Year award was $5,000 along with a profile in PDN. Naturally, advertising agencies and art directors also kept an eye on the publications, always on the lookout for that year's hot talents.
PhotoPlus, which has been shrinking, will go on this year, but its future beyond that is not known. Emerald Expositions will continue to publish its other publication, Rangefinder, in digital-only format, along with support for the WPPI (Wedding and Portrait Photography International) show, which is growing.
Mike (Thanks to Jeff Schimberg, and others)
ADDENDUM: Here's the email letter PDN sent to subscribers. Thanks to Terry Morrissey for sharing this.
Note that they are repaying their subscription debt (the monies already paid for subscriptions that haven't yet been, and now won't be, fulfilled). Typically, magazines that are folding will sell their subscription debt to another magazine, and you'll get that other magazine for the remainder of your subscription. Sometimes, you're just out of luck, as if you had played a game with a "futures" investment that didn't pan out. It's relatively unusual for a publication to refund unused subscription payments in cash. So kudos to Emerald Expositions for that.
Original contents copyright 2020 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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kirk tuck: "And professional photography has now left the room...."
vince garofalo: "When I worked with Eric Meola I remember PDN was issued on newsprint, also for many years Rolling Stone magazine."
John Shriver: "That's pure class to refund the remaining subscriptions! I've had two subscriptions to magazines that ceased publication (The Perfect Vision and Mainline Modeler), and no funds were returned to me, nor any other compensation."
Jim: "I attended PhotoPlus last October for the first time. It was a terrific event. Most camera makers were there (Sony was around the corner). Each provided free CLAs for their brand. Not only was my digital camera cleaned and checked, they replaced the eyepiece and one of the accessory doors, neither of which I thought was a problem. They also provided models to photograph, well known photographers as guest speakers, and the opportunity to try the latest and greatest equipment, e.g., I got to shoot with the GFX 100. I also shoot film. The number of analogue vendors was very impressive. All aspects from LF camera makers to film manufacturers and darkroom equipment suppliers were represented. All in all, a lot of fun."
jim: "Sad news. I have not only been a long term subscriber (since sometime in the late '80s) but freelanced for them after journalism school and owe them my start as an agency photographer. I got my first contract through connections I made while writing for PDN. Their closing says a lot about the state of the photography industry and its continuing viability as a profession."
["Open Mike" is the everything goes, often off-topic editorial page of TOP, wherein the hounds are released! It appears on Wednesdays. Note for this week: I'm just having a little fun here, so please don't take this personally. Gotta keep myself entertained too.]
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RayC wrote: "Okay, I’ll play. I admit I was taken aback by the statement: 'It's a middlebrow conceit to say "I like everything!" in a chipper voice, which to real music aficionados means that music isn't very important to that person.'
Fortunately it was good to see in the comments that I am not alone in having an 'important' relationship to music, but it is a bit eclectic as well as encompassing various forms of jazz, pop and rock from the '40s on. So many of the artists mentioned ticked those boxes. One that I haven’t seen mentioned and perhaps further solidifies my middlebrowness (?) is Jimmy Buffett, whose music just makes me happy. Not an amazing musician but a very good songwriter and, even better perhaps, a great bandleader who often mixes genres and includes band members like Mac McAnally who is just amazing on his own."
Mike replies: Yep, I've gotten a few complaints for saying that, probably from people who are in the habit of saying they like everything. And that's okay, because we know what you mean. But in reality, "liking everything" wouldn't just mean that you're eclectic and listen across genres—we all do that—or that you have a few guilty pleasures such as Jimmy Buffett; most of us probably have some of those, too. (I can't think of one of mine, unless it's Jacques Loussier.)
If you truly like everything, I have some assignments for you that you'll enjoy. (And by "you" I don't mean you, Ray, just the proposed hypothetical person who says s/he likes everything.)
First, listen to Metal Machine Music—loud. Because you like it, you'll want to go on to enjoy the quarter-speed version, and you'll listen intently to the whole four and a quarter hours of it. Also loud. Without distracting yourself with a screen or a book—no cheating.
I'll wait.
Finished? Still like everything? Okay then, we're good.
As an interlude, it's too easy to throw in some happy celebration of low talent like Green Jelly doing "Three Little Pigs" or—a double whammy of dubiousness—William Hung's cover of "Achy-Breaky Heart." (William enjoyed 15 minutes of fame for his campy badness on American Idol years ago. It was always ambiguous whether he actually understood the nature of his own appeal, which was a big part of the joke.) But that would be too easy. Instead, we'll have you listen to the great William Shatner's interpretation of Bernie Taupin's "Rocket Man," which, as the video shows us, Bernie was forced to sit through. Note the thespian chops as the man who brought Captain Kirk to life goes all-in selling the emotion of "high as a kite by then." Gives you chills, doesn't it?
Don't think you get off there. That's just one song. No. Your assignment is to familiarize yourself so thoroughly with Shatner's discography that you can make a cogent case for the three best (which might, of course, mean worst) of his albums. You'll enjoy the process—it's all about the process.
Next we're off to Edgar Varèse's Poème Électronique, during which you may not think of farts. (Note the first comment: "Who is here because of a class?") But since that's too short—you were just getting into the groove—we'll pair it with John Cage's Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano, one of his most appreciated pieces. The hour-plus of that should satiate the craving in you triggered by the Varèse.
Extra credit: write a five-page paper comparing and contrasting the Cage with Gamelan percussion music, which you also like.
Next up on our concert tour—Teletubbies!! For a whole hour. Hey, you're the one who said you like everything.
After an hour of that, continue the "relaxing" a.k.a. mindless vibe with an hour and 40 minutes of Kenny G serving up cruise-ship music. Alternately, throw yourself into the sea.
At this point, readers might be saying, hey, I like soothing Kenny G music! I have some on in the background right now. What's wrong with it? Or, I've listened carefully to John Cage's prepared piano three times over thirty years and I think it's innovative and important, and you're a Philistine. Both of which sentiments are fine. But...both? Together? From the same person? Would one individual say both those things? Calculate the odds. So then...beginning to appreciate my point?
Billies A person who likes everything has to have, pardon the allusion, catholic taste, small "c." If you like Christian folk such as The All Saved Freak Band, presumably you might also like Abbess Hildegard of Bingen, Christian music from eight centuries earlier. (Or maybe you like Hildegard because you're on board with Lilith Fair and she was a very early female composer.) But, because you like everything, you also disapproved (on artistic grounds) when Ice-T removed "Cop Killer" from Body Count, and you're way into Scandinavian Satanic bands like Beherit and Zyklon-B. Contradiction? What contradiction? It's only music.
You see no reason to prefer Justin Bieber over Eminem or vice-versa—and you like Vanilla Ice too, for that matter. And Vanilla Fudge. And Public Enemy and Drake. You like both Billie Holiday and Billie Eilish, naturally, because who wouldn't?
But back to the tour. How far will you make it through Alphonso und Estrella, one of Franz Schubert's 16 operas that have, as one critic delicately put it, "failed to hold the stage" (i.e., are seldom performed)? It has some nice things in it. Unless you don't like opera. But, of course, you do.
When I think of Schubert I always think of Gérard Depardieu breaking the fourth wall in Bertrand Blier's Too Beautiful for You by noticing the soundtrack and exclaiming "Schubert!" in exasperation....
We won't even get into experimental music. For example, Paul Lansky based his "Night Traffic" on recordings of...well, cars going by. For "Deep Listening" (the musical piece—the term also expressed her ethos), the late Pauline Oliveros took various instruments into a cavernous empty cistern deep underground that had an exceptionally long sound decay. (This piece can be a spiritual experience under carefully controlled listening conditions, such as, late at night with no interruptions, in a state of meditative concentration.) Or one of my personal favorites (no joke, I love these) the early Bass Communion v. Muslimgauze collaborations.
We also won't make you listen to a bunch of "outside" jazz. Or some gorgeous Ludovico Einaudi. (I didn't get to minimalism.)
The point, at the risk of being obvious Think I can't go on? Oh, I could go on. We haven't touched country. Or show tunes. Or campfire singalongs. Or marching band music. Or Lo-Fi. Or Edith Piaf or piano rolls. Post-punk. Howe Gelb. Polkas. Quick, name all the subgenres of electronica. Sheet-music hits from the early 1900s. Brit-Pop. Field blues. Renaissance polyphony. Novelty music and parodies. Dance music and drone music. Thrash metal and ambient. Film scores. Dub and Ska.
We haven't even scratched the surface. Music is much larger than whatever small subset you've been calling everything. You could spend ten years, and incredible amounts of time and attention, just exploring and learning one kind of music—post-war orchestral music, for example, or early computer music, or bluegrass—or just one little aspect of music, like drumming, or guitar building. There are guys who know more about jazz than I know about anything. More than I know about myself. I know that, because my friend Artie, who died a few years ago now, was one of those people who remember every little detail about every day of their lives and can never forget it (called hyperthymesia), and Artie knew many things about me that had completely left my own head. He remembered everything about any way in which his life had intersected with mine, even though that overlap was fairly limited. It's a weird experience hearing things about yourself you don't remember, and then having it come back into your consciousness gradually over the next half-day. So I know I don't know all there is to know about me, despite my having been me for all these years. And you think you like everything? You don't know everything. You're not in the ballpark. You don't even know everything about one thing, where music is concerned.
If you liked all of the above, though (heck, just if you listened to the Zorn and Welk links clear through to the end—I think I'd tell the cops whatever they wanted to know long before that), you win—you were right, you like everything!
Otherwise, stop saying that.
Mike (Thanks to Dan W., RayC, and, as always, Kim, for making my originally average ears bigger)
P.S. I have to admit I actually sorta enjoyed a whole lot of the stuff I compiled here, even the self-parodizing Schubert opera. I'll stick to my guns, though—not only do I not like everything, I don't even like all the songs on The White Album.
Please let me know if any of the links are bad!
Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.
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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.) Featured Comments from:
Robin Dreyer: "I’m worried that it’s not even February, and you’ve already had the most fun you are going to have this year."
Bob G.: "Absolutely hilarious! I couldn’t stop laughing...an essay worthy of the New Yorker, for sure. One question on the assignment—what should our physical state of mind be to listen to the selections? I saw Lawrence Welk in Scranton after a more than a few tokes once, and Makers Mark seems to work with Captain Beefheart...."
Stuart Dootson: "Shatner? Has Been, followed by Seeking Major Tom, followed by (I guess) The Transformed Man. That's just my preference, though!"
Jim Simmons: "Brilliant essay today! When I was in grad school and procrastinating from doing my work, I'd go to the library and listen to their collection of ethnographic records of field recordings of music from the South Pacific, Africa, and other non-western music traditions. Some of it was nearly impossible for my unsophisticated ears to listen to, but it was often mesmerising."
Mark Roberts: "If you're going to listen to Metal Machine Music be sure to get the Dolby 5.1 surround remix issued a couple of years back. Might as well go all the way, right?"
Ken Bennett: "I'm just going to leave this here:
"It features the best atonal banjo solo I have ever heard. :-) "
Mike replies: I don't usually like novelty songs, but that's funny and wonderful, especially the timed silence. Thanks.
Dennis: "Last year, I read This Is Your Brain on Music by Daniel J. Levitin. Most of it made sense at the time, but much of it was far enough outside my realm of knowledge that the details didn't stick. But our brains end up wired to respond to music and much of that wiring happens when we're very young. We 'get' chords; we respond to major chords and minor chords differently; we anticipate sequences that return to their starting point and so on. And people who grow up listening to Eastern, rather than Western music end up wired differently, attuned to different chord structures.
"I imagine that if you drew a circle that represented all music, you'd find some people who enjoy a narrow slice that represents classical and others enjoy a narrow slice that represents jazz. Some of us have a hard time characterizing our tastes, preferring an 'eclectic mix' as you say—but instead of a narrow slice, I'd have a number of little blobs spread out across what would still probably be a fairly narrow portion of the circle. A little of this, a little of that, but not much of a lot of other stuff.
"I think that's the issue—how do you answer the question 'what music do you like?' When you like an eclectic mix; a little of this and a little of that? It's been said that your playlist is a window to your soul."
Mike replies: Your comment speaks to the core of much of these issues. Not only do we "get" chords and so forth, but we also have a remarkable innate sense of internal consistency—a feeling that strategies from one genre just don't "belong" in another. I thought of this in the Masterclass ad for Deadmau5, where he says "Using an SSL G-series compressor on a dance music kick makes no f------ sense whatsoever." Even though almost all of EDM seems immaterial to me, because it doesn't move me or interest me intellectually, naturally he has a strong sense of its internal consistency. We also see this in the proliferating lists of subgenres used by critics. Both Mozart and Beethoven were criticized for doing things "you can't do"—they were pushing the boundaries of what was acceptable in the soundworlds of their day, even though they seem very familiar (and not very "out there") to us today.
That internal consistency makes for some bizarre twists occasionally. I learned a while ago that a number of country artists are "volitional" artists—they're not actually from the country and they don't (or didn't originally) actually speak in a Southern drawl or a Western twang. They adopt those characteristics to get along in the genre they want to be included in. Much like the comedian who created the character "Larry the Cable Guy"—there are videos of him early in his career dressed in slacks and speaking without any accent whatsoever. I asked a guy at my Pool League match last night who the singer of the country hit "Wagon Wheel" ("hey, mama rock me"—that one) is, and I was mildly amazed to learn that it's Darius Rucker, the black former lead singer of the rock band Hootie and the Blowfish. Turns out he reinvented himself as a country artist back in 2008.
The question of "what kind of music do you listen to" is quite similar to the question "what kind of photographer are you," which I never quite knew how to answer.
Hank: "You've name-checked almost all of my heroes. You forgot Conlon Nancarrow."
Mike replies: I enjoyed that. I also appreciated the comment under that video written by Gus Cairns:
"When people rant on about 'This isn't music' I just invite them to think of the list of much more celebrated composers who cite Nancarrow as an influence—everyone from Gyorgy Ligeti to John Adams. Also: try to imagine it in a context, as a piece of music with a practical use such as a film score. It's often Hollywood and TV that actually takes avant-garde music and places it into popular culture—Bernard Herrmann is the best known example of a serious avant-garde composer who also wrote popular film scores such as Psycho. Ligeti of course ended up in 2001: A Space Odyssey and Stockhausen writes stuff that would be perfect for SF films—Xenakis would be certain for perfect horror films—where would Nancarrow fit in? Well, imagine him as the score for a Tom and Jerry cartoon. John Adams wrote a whole chamber symphony in homage to cartoon music, and Nancarrow's music, with its zany pratfalls and jagged assaults, is there in the roots of that style. Lastly, this is the Deep End of Nancarrow. You might want to try the orchestrations of some of his earlier studies first before telling us he's not music."
Arg: "Reading your introductory words, I thought you were picking on me for my tendency to say, 'I like every genre of music, because, in my experience, there is great music to be found in every genre.' I usually find myself saying so in reply to the not-uncommon pronouncement along the lines, "I hate (e.g. rap) music.' But then I realized that you were ridiculing a position by taking it in extremis, which includes 'the most literal possible interpretations.'"
Mike replies: Yep. Guilty as charged. Vince laid out the real situation well in his comment. As far as greatness in every genre, I like the art critic Peter Schjeldahl's stance—when faced with art he doesn't like, he asks himself, what would I like about this if I liked it? My friend Kim will engage with music he hates until he's satisfied that he can separate the good from the great from the bad. It's as though his goal is to understand it. Then again, he can really only listen to music a few times before he has to move on. My own goal is to find high points...I'm a connoisseur, not a critic and not catholic. For example, I love "Every Picture Tells a Story" but no other Rod Stewart album, "Post-War" but no other M. Ward album, and "'Sno Angel Like You" but no other Howe Gelb album. My approach would be anathema to many music lovers and I know that.
"O untimely death!" cries Oswald, slain by Edgar in Act 4 of Shakespeare's King Lear. The disembodied cry recurs at the end of "I Am the Walrus," the masterpiece by John Lennon, himself the victim of just such an end forty years ago.
The United States as a nation was shocked yesterday at the news of the death of nine individuals in a helicopter crash in California that included basketball legend Kobe Bryant and his 13-year-old daughter Gianna, known as Gigi. They were reportedly traveling with another player and parent to an away basketball game for the girls.
Every NBA-level basketball player is a superlative athlete. The ones who stand out in that world transcend their sport; theirs is a special glory, yet one in which we feel we can all take part. Say "Kobe" to virtually any American, even those who don't follow basketball and aren't fans, and they'll know who you mean. Athletes are particularly easy for all of us to celebrate. They belong to us, in a way. They live our daydreams.
Kobe was retired as a basketball player but in his prime as a man, a mere 41 years old. His loss is bad enough, but seeing the photographs of a happy Kobe as a proud father with his adored daughter by his side is truly heartbreaking. One can only pray that neither of them fully realized what was about to happen to the other when the end came.
Similar tragedies happen every day across this country and the world, but we hear about them, and feel them, when they happen to larger-than-life, high-profile people. Those deaths stand for all the others that happen in silence and that pass by without public notice. Our sympathies and condolences go out to the Bryant family, and the families and loved ones of the other seven people aboard that ill-fated helicopter yesterday, and indeed for all those loved ones who are lost with shocking suddenness before their time.
For those reading this, may your death be timely, and may the deaths of those you love be likewise.
Mike
Coverage of Kobe's death is being offered to visitors for free today at theLos Angeles Times.
Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.
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William Lewis: "Good piece, sir. Your last line reminded of an old zen story. A wealthy samurai goes to a well known monk and calligrapher. At the end of his visit, he asks for a scroll to hang in his house. The monk thinks for a moment and the writes in his most exquisite hand 'Grandfather dies. Father dies. Son dies.' The samauri is deeply offended and reaches for his wakizashi (his shorter sword, worn indoors). The monk calmly says, 'If your lives are like this, you will be greatly blessed. For everyone will have lived out their time and passed away in the proper order. This is something all families should hope for.'"
I suppose a lot of people don't. It's a middlebrow conceit to say "I like everything!" in a chipper voice, which to real music aficionados means that music isn't very important to that person. Nobody who loves music likes everything. Their likes are strong, and their dislikes are strong too—they have what we call opinions. The only way everything can be equivalent is if one doesn't have much discrimination, which is another way to say taste.
I have a friend who has devoted a lot of his life to his love of music, and he once had to quit a job because the background music they piped in over the intercoms annoyed him so much. He'd mention it to his co-workers, and they'd say, "what music?" They weren't even hearing it. My friend couldn't not hear it.
Hank Jones in 1985. Photo by Brian McMillen, CC BY-SA 4.0.
There are two ways we come to things that are central to us in life—by birth (meaning, through the culture in which we are raised, which doesn't always apply just to the values of our immediate families), or by volition or conscious acquisition. I can never remember who it was—some French intellectual, I think—who said that when he discovered Buddhism for the first time, he realized he had been a Buddhist all his life. It became his religion by volition.
I was born in 1957, was a child through the '60s, and grew up on what's now called "classic rock." The first record album I owned was Something New by the Beatles (which included "Komm, Gib Mir Deine Hand," which was "I Want to Hold Your Hand" sung in German—in both mono and stereo, no less). In my 20s I taught myself to like classical music, which had figured very little in my upbringing, although my mother professed to like Chopin and had a lot of Chopin records, which I never knew her to listen to. My father bought a Philco console for the kitchen / breakfast room. He liked trumpet music—Al Hirt, a popular trumpet virtuoso, was a particular favorite. He also liked what's sometimes called "schmaltz"—one name I remember was a band called the Percy Faith Strings, which I did not like at all.
Radio radio My life changed when I discovered FM radio. My father had a beautiful radio, a Zenith Trans-Oceanic 3000-1, which he let me listen to but not commandeer; it was self-casing and had an antenna in the handle, a really beautiful thing. I had a little Japanese portable transistor radio that was a little larger than a pack of cigarettes, a dull orange in color. No memory of the make or model. I used to fall asleep every night lying on my side with with it balanced on my ear, listening to rock and pop at low volumes on the local FM stations.
But I came to realize late in life that although many of my musical touchstones are rock and pop, and rock and pop accompanied me through much of my walk through life, I don't actually really like it all that much. Yes, there are many things I love. But I would pick and choose among bands and musicians and then pick and choose among their work, and I finally realized I was never really engaging completely except in fastidiously choosy ways (for instance, I loved Neil Young's music but certainly not all of Neil Young's music). I usually felt a little apart from it. I have some friends now who are really into rock, and they're much more wholehearted about it than I ever managed to be.
My brother Scott, in the 1980s, introduced me to my real love—jazz. Specifically, American jazz centered on the years around my birth—call it 1955 to 1959 give or take. Although I'll listen to any jazz from the earliest beginnings to the present day, and have great favorites scattered throughout the canon, there is something very special about late 1950s hard bop that just hits me where I live. It's a halcyon period, an historical high point in my opinion that's the equal of the high baroque or the classical period of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert. The great albums released in '55 to '59 (and many of the albums released in years before and after) includes a cornucopia of masterpieces, and the standard in general is very high.
If I had to exclude any of it, I'd be very unhappy. But as for favorite musicians—among all musicians, not just jazz musicians—I have two. Hank Jones is one and Coleman Hawkins is the other. Both lived long lives and were remarkable in their sustained artistry.
Hank, a pianist of surpassing mastery and impeccable taste, was active from the late 1940s (he was Ella Fitzgerald's accompanist beginning in 1948) until his death in 2010. You could base a whole record collection around his solo albums (more than 60!) and the albums on which he played, which are innumerable. His Great Jazz Trio records with Ron Carter and Tony Williams are especially treasurable, although my favorite is Bluesette. (My only problem with Bluesette is that I have to dole it out to myself, listening no more than once a year, if that, because I want to keep it fresh.) Much of his original material and master tapes were destroyed in the catastrophic 2008 Universal fire. But we have a great deal of it on existing recordings.
Coleman Hawkins, who was known as "Hawk" or "Bean," played mainly tenor saxophone. He was active starting in 1921 and was enjoying a spectacular autumnal flourishing late in his career in the late 1950s, recording Coleman Hawkins Encounters Ben Webster and The Hawk Flies High (with Hank Jones on piano) in 1957. He had a great interest late in life in new styles and younger musicians, and adapted to the changing times when many older swing-era musicians couldn't or didn't want to. A prime example is that he played on Thelonious Monk's great masterpiece Monk's Music with Wilbur Ware, Art Blakey, Gigi Gryce, and John Coltrane, a high point not just of of Monk's catalog, not just of jazz, but of the music of the Western world. Hawk's solos on the record (coincidentally, Riverside's first stereo jazz album) are sublime.
As for Hank, here's a nice little introduction to hm, recorded late in his life, with some rare interviews:
It's curious that neither of my favorite musicians are singers. That must be relatively uncommon. How about you—do you have a particular favorite musician or singer?
Mike
Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.
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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.) Featured Comments from:
Soeren Engelbrecht: I have been a music fan for longer than I have been doing photography. So when the opportunity came around to shoot an album cover, I was over the moon. Here's the result:
"For non-Danish readers: The lyrics of the title track has elements of two nursery rhymes, one of which has the line '...his head facing the wrong way round.'
"To answer your original question: My favourite musician is a Scottish singer called Fish (http://fishmusic.scot) who split with his band Marillion (http://www.marillion.com) in 1989. Since both are still very prolific, I now have two favourite acts. :-) "
Henry Rinne (partial comment): "I rarely think in terms of 'favorite' player. These artists have all made great statements in their music, and I feel that I can listen and accept them without worrying about whether I like them or not, much less trying to decide which one is my favorite. I would always tell my students to leave the 'like' question at the door. Don't even ask it. Open your ears and try to understand what the artist is trying to say. I would approach visual arts the same way. I can learn from so many photographers and painters. The ones that speak to me the most (or the clearest), I will try to internalize and allow their work to influence my own. Great post and as always much appreciated."
mike plews: "Tried to pick a favorite and I just can't. Doc Watson or Jim Hall, just can't do it. But I can drop in a link to seven of the nicest minutes ever seen on network TV:"
Mike replies: That's wonderful. Oscar was a TOP reader, did you know? He was quite a photography enthusiast. Michael interviewed him on L-L.
Dave Millier (partial comment): "What is it about certain genres of music that leave some people rolling orgasmically on the floor in thrall while utterly turning others off? It is idly dismissed as 'taste,' but what does that really mean? Is it what you heard when you were young? (I dismiss that line in my case.) Is it what you've grown used to? (I find that dubious, I grew up listening to a type of music that was all I heard and it left me fairly cold and uninterested in music but the first seconds of hearing early Blondie tracks instantly changed everything about music for me.) Some people get snobbish about it and claim it's to do with musical virtuosity and complexity but that is nonsense for me: I could never stand Led Zep or Deep Purple and they were far more accomplished than the music that moved me). It's a deep puzzler for me: why do some styles of music drive you insane, while others are manna. 'Tis a mysterious thing, musical taste."
JOHN B GILLOOLY: "For me the answer is simple, and in many ways, very important to me. In 7th grade, age 12, early 1984, I succumbed to my cousins' intense personal fandom of U2. They were one and five years older than me and had been fans since the 'beginning'—the Boy album in 1980. (I'm going to play that right now!)
"We were still 3–4 years from Joshua Tree and the band's explosion in popularity. For those years, it still had the cultlike feeling of 'my band.' As kids in their formative years often do, I attached myself, and my brand in a way, to that band. I can still recall where I was and how I listened to many of the later albums, especially Joshua Tree and Achtung Baby.
"And I can honestly say that my 'relationship' with U2 changed the course of my life. I read the U2 books. That got me interested in Irish history and Ireland. One thing leads to another and I'm attending the University College Cork for the 1991–1992 school year. In the fall of 1991, I ride my bike down to HMV in Cork City at midnight on a Tuesday evening for the release of Achtung Baby. I remember listening to it exclusively for months. For me, it rendered all other music outdated.
"Now 36 years later, some 50+ concerts attended, mostly with my cousins, they are still very important to me in that strange way. They were/are one of the few constants in my life. That music has always been there. When I hear it, moments and experiences from decades ago just appear. And to me, that music was just bigger than other music. It was more important. It was important to me in a way that is difficult to describe as an adult? And I have many friends and acquaintances with whom that is the primary thing we share—our mutual 'relationship' with U2.
"In 2015 the story came full circle to an amazing climax. I am at the Boston Garden show in July with my cousin Mike and his family—maybe Mike's 80th show. Bono pulls Mike's 13-year-old son Brian on stage to play guitar for a couple of songs. When I looked at Mike, he had tears streaming down his face. At the end of the second song, after playing side by side with Edge, Bono and Adam, Brian took off the guitar and handed it back to Bono. Bono hesitated—and told him it was his to keep. Here is the sequence of images from that special moment.
"Very happy I had a camera! In this case the Olympus OM-D E-M1!"
A. Dias: "Stunning Hank Jones video/performance!"
Nigel Voak: "I was born in 1957 too, and before I joined the herd listening to the all-conquering Rock of the seventies, I loved the Glen Miller records that my father had. My musical tastes eventually headed back towards Jazz thanks to Pat Metheny. Pat Metheny is my favourite musician. I can still remember vividly the moment in my squalid London flat, listening to a radio program where Phil Collins was playing his favourite music, hearing 'San Lorenzo' by Metheny. The beauty of this track just left me spellbound. The next day I had that record and subsequently all the others too. It also started a musical voyage of discovery concerning this genre.
"Perhaps his later discs do not have that same magic as the ECM recordings, but they are still head and shoulders above much of the music that passes for jazz that gets put out. Of his later productions the two solo guitar albums stand out as does a strangely inspired disc he made with a Polish pop star. I had the chance to speak to my musical hero in Ravenna some years ago when I managed to wrangle a photo pass to a concert. I only had the courage to ask if I could photograph the rehearsal. What do say to one of your heroes? When he plays here in Italy, I always try to catch a date, as his concerts are always wonderful."
As of Saturday morning at 8:30 I've just belatedly posted all the comments for the "Benoit Paillé," "Magic of Photography," and "View Cameras" posts, below, including Featured Comments. Have a look if you're interested. And apologies for my tardiness.
Have a nice weekend!
—Mike the Still Somewhat Sick and Also (I Cannot Lie) Sometimes Somewhat Lazy Comment Moderator
Or not so random—this is the portrait of William Gibson that adorns the article I quoted yesterday. It breaks every rule of portraiture, and it's brilliant. It looks splendid as a full page of the New Yorker print magazine. I can't stop looking at it there.
The head is placed just subtly northwest of dead center in the frame; the flash implies a brief moment of lucidity in gloom; the heavy foliage in the lower right anchors the picture in chaos from which the man emerges, as if previously hidden, and the eye is led further back in space by the perspective distortion of the hulking dark house; everything leads back to the blank dark twilit sky which reveals nothing. The faux "cross-processed" color lends an otherworldly air, and the soft spottiness all over everything—you'd like to think it's snow, but who knows—looks alien. The figure leans in quizzically. The facial expression is enigmatic, blank, but accepting.
Perfection in imperfection.
Paillé has been on the road living in a camper since 2013. His bio informs us, or rather does not inform us: "Of a disdainful nature, he yearns to be excluded from any renowned circle. Despite his international recognition, Benoit remains humble and open to others. He has the ability to intrude easily in the authentic life of people to wreck and corrupt their traditional habitat with technology. When children ask him what his THC vaporizer machine is, he lies and tells them it’s an asthma device. Wishing to step apart from institutionalized biographies, Benoit is making a lot of efforts to break through. Ambitious he masturbates only once a day. Either way, he’s putting a lot of energy in transgressing conventions. Art sustain him more than leftovers hot-dogs." (Translated, one assumes, from the French.)
Whoever at the New Yorker got the idea to hire Benoit to do the illustration for this article, a pat on the back and big kudos to that person, and to his or her boss or bosses. Inspired choice. Paillé is the ideal portraitist for the enigmatic, influential, cerebral science fiction writer. The portrait alone makes me curious to read Gibson's books. And to see more of Benoit Paillé's work. You will find him on gbuffer, Instagram, flickr, Lensculture, 500px, and elsewhere.
I keep going back to it and it looks more imperfectly perfect every visit, like a jazz piece that is opaque at first and reveals itself only on repeated hearings. Trés bon.
Mike
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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.) Featured Comments from:
Andre Y: "I read that article when it first came out, and really enjoyed it, especially for revealing the catholicity of Gibson’s life and tastes. He does seem to be living the artist’s life many aspire to.
"I believe the colors as they are, aside from contrast, saturation, etc. adjustments, were captured in-camera instead of being shifted in post processing. There were probably two flashes placed on either side of the camera, one with a green gel, and another with a magenta gel. Where light from both flashes, of complementary colors, hit appears without color cast (e.g., his face), but where light from only one flash misses, like the shadows cast by Gibson, the light from the opposite flash then colors the shadows. You can see that shadows, as well as the snowfall, on one side of the photo are green while the other side has a magenta shadow.
"When I use this technique, I’ll often use the white balance control to make sure my white light is white, and then let the other colors fall where they may. And this technique isn’t as exotic as it sounds, as many photographers and filmmakers have done a more subtle version with white balancing a tungsten key light which drives the shadows blue. It’s a cool technique that is effective in certain situations and this portrait is certainly one of them!"
Sree ram Chandran. S: "The pic looks like a snapshot taken with a dinky camera set to auto and then push-processed for revealing the background which unfortunately over-exposed the subject. I apologise, but I cannot see anything great about this photo."
Mike replies: No need for an apology. Your response is as valid as mine.
Nick: "Gibson's books have gotten quieter and more cerebral as he's gotten older, and as much as I loved Neuromancer and Mona Lisa Overdrive when I read them about a decade after they were printed, his more recent stuff appeals to me far more now. His 2014 book The Peripheral is a fascinating take on a mode of time travel, with a look at a distant future that follows an entirely too plausible near future. The sequel to it, Agency, has just been released, and I am very much looking forward to it."
Don McConnell: "Wow, thanks for the tip! His Instagram feed is worth a look and I really like his series of images of a lit cube (or what looks like one) in the landscape. Trés bon, as you say!"
[These next two comments came in next to each other:]
Sharon (partial comment): "To me, this portrait is off-putting and I would not want to read this guy's books. I found the photographer's bio to be even more off-putting. But I am allergic to artist statements so there is that."
Zack Schindler: "Easily one of the best bios I have ever read. I burst out laughing whilst reading it. I find that a great photo too. His work on flickr is very different."
Tom Burke: "I like the portrait. William Gibson writes unconventional fiction so it seems appropriate that the portrait should also be unconventional. Actually, I'm intrigued by that smile—is he mocking the viewer ('suckers!')? Being polite ('let's get this over with...')? Or being mysterious ('I know something you don't!')? Given that his persona as a writer has always been removed from that of the typical writer, the mystery and the portrait seem appropriate. Actually, when I say that he writes unconventional fiction, it's probably truer to say that it was unconventional in the 1980s. Today, his style is a mainstream choice, largely because of his work. The portrait reflects what I have always seen as his nature—'Here's what I do, and I'm perfectly relaxed as to whether you like it or not.' The portrait seems to me to transmit at least some of that relaxed attitude. (You may have gathered that I'm a fan.)"
Mike Plews wrote: "If you go to places where photographers tend to gather (like national parks) pulling out a vintage piece of film gear generally strikes up a nice conversation. If you break out large-format gear and get under the dark cloth you will attract a crowd of both photographers and non-photographers alike, and inviting them to take a look at the ground glass is an excellent way to generate a little positive energy in a time when we could use some. After all, as every TOP regular knows, half the fun of photography is talking about it with people."
That's something I forgot to mention yesterday about my long-gone old Wista view camera. I used it extensively when teaching photography classes. It was always a big day when students lined up behind the camera for a chance to go under the dark cloth and look at the image on the ground glass. There were always exclamations of amazement and delight from under the shroud. It didn't hurt that the camera looked so exotic and old-fashioned, beautifully crafted of beautiful materials. High spirits were the order of those days. They were events.
I even used this to get out of a potential mugging! One day in DC I emerged from the dark cloth to find myself closely surrounded by three inner-city teenagers, who must have been purposely stealthy as they came up to me. As soon as I saw them they began to talk threateningly about why a white guy like me thought he could wander around in that part of town and how much a camera like mine might be worth if they were to sell it. I stammered awkwardly for a minute or two about how there's no market for old cameras, then remembered an article I'd read: if you feel threatened, the article advised, make friends. People don't attack friends. If you feel a cop is about to penalize you for something, for instance, ask for his help with something—it transforms you, in his eyes, from a miscreant requiring correction into a member of the public requiring assistance. It changes his own conception of his relationship to you. I ended up showing all three of those guys the view on the ground glass, and explaining to them why the image was upside down and how photographs are made and so forth. As soon as the first guy saw the ground glass and exclaimed "Wow! That's so cool!" in an excited voice from under the dark cloth, well, then the other two couldn't wait to see it too. We were all quite friendly by the time we parted ways twenty minutes later.
As far as I'm concerned there are, or were, three magical aspects to photography. The first was what we're talking about—seeing the world on the ground glass. The image is at the same time remarkably precise and yet completely transformed. Movement becomes magical. It's Alice-in-Wonderlandish, somehow, literally topsy-turvy, both this world and an alternate world, at the same time. It's like it renders the world into an abstracted scale model of itself. Sometimes I would stare, transfixed, at the ground glass for many minutes on end. Sometimes I'd set up the camera just to watch the world that way. Photographs were, if not superfluous, secondary.
The second is the emergence of the image on the photo paper in the developer tray. There was something wonderful about a solution that looks like water under the safelight revealing an invisible latent image you'd just created with nothing but light. The magic of that might recede with repetition but it never entirely got old.
Remnants The third is more complicated—it's the way photographs are physical impressions of the past which are always changing in their relation to the present. If you're walking in the woods and you find a bearprint in the mud, that's a physical impression of an actual bear—the real bear had to have made it, meaning she'd been there, in the spot you're standing, not long earlier. When you find an arrowhead or a Civil War Minié ball in the woods, it's not the objects that are magical in themselves—one's a bit of chipped stone and the other's a lump of lead. But each is a physical remnant of the people who made them and used them, and the objects are direct connections to a fundamentally mysterious past.
In an article about the science fiction writer William Gibson written by Joshua Rothman, I read this:
The ten novels that Gibson has written since [his first, Neuromancer, in 1984] have slid steadily closer to the present. In the nineties, he wrote a trilogy set in the two-thousands. The novels he published in 2003, 2007, and 2010 were set in the year before their publication. (Only the inevitable delays of the publishing process prevented them from taking place in the years when they were written.) Many works of literary fiction claim to be set in the present day. In fact, they take place in the recent past, conjuring a world that feels real because it's familiar, and therefore out of date. Gibson's strategy of extreme presentness reflects his belief that the current moment is itself science-fictional. "The future is already here," he has said. "It's just not very evenly distributed."
Couldn't something very similar be said of photographs? In fact, every single attempt to capture the present becomes a picture of the recent past. Human beings are most comfortable with what feels familiar (it's the secret to how we actually choose mates or partners, for example), and conjuring the recent past with photographs is comfortable because it's familiar. But photographs continue to change as they continue to move away from us, receding in time. Soon they become un-replicable and then they grow more and more unfamiliar. Finally they pass out of living memory (defined as experiences or events remembered by people who are still alive—the experience of buying a new Ford Model T, for instance, has recently passed out of living memory). As they do so, they simultaneously become both more and less valuable to us. Historical photographs are physical connections to irretrievable people, places, and things, but "antiques" stores often features tables of old photographs no one really wants.
It's like the old Mitch Hedberg standup joke: "One time a guy handed me a picture. He said, 'here's a picture of me when I was younger.' But every picture of you is a picture of when you were younger. 'Here's a picture of me when I was older.' You son of a bitch! How'd you do that? Let me see that camera." Michael Lesy's cult classic Wisconsin Death Trip was an early book that explored this aspect of photographs. Very briefly summarized, Lesy's insight was that sooner or later, all photographs of people will be photographs of dead people. This tension is a part of almost all photographs, in my view. A picture which is meant to be "read" and consumed right now, a reflection of the present moment, will always have some aspect of tension with the fact that the pictured moment can no longer change. I can't get too far into this here, but one thing I love is that the characteristic styles of the present moment tend to be invisible to us while the pictures are new, but are revealed much more clearly as the pictures age.
Joel Baldwin, Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash, from the pages of LOOK magazine, April 1969. A photo which was intended at the time of publication to simulate a then-present moment. June died in the Springtime of 2003 and Johnny went to join her not quite four months later.
Whether you tend to value or dismiss aging photographs is up to you, of course. But all photographs are of the past, and personally I'm with The History Guy: "history deserves to be remembered." For me that's true of the comfortably familiar very recent past or the unknowably mysterious distant past. For me, that connection, like the ancient arrowhead nestled in the leaf-mold of the forest floor, always has been the essential third aspect of photography's magic.
Mike (Thanks to Mike P.)
Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.
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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.) Featured Comments from:
SteveW: "Thank you Mike, I enjoy your blog quite a lot, but I think today's might be the best one you've written, at least that I've read. Please feel free to wax philosophical any time."
Mike replies: Thanks Steve. I got into quite a bit of hot water this past week so it's nice to hear a compliment!
Soeren Engelbrecht: "Interesting how the mast vajority of photographers (or, at least, people taking photographs, if you will permit that distinction) today will never get to experience two of your three magical aspects of photography. From my perspective, your aspect #3 is by far the most important one—and the reason why photography was invented in the first place, I would argue. Preserving moments. Personally, I would add another one: The joy of sharing photographs with others while they are physically present. Print, books, screen—it's always rewarding when you get to see people's faces or hear the words/sounds they make. Far better than the quasi-anonymous 'likes'...."
robert e: "Well said, Mike. So, in other words, a photograph (or a bear print, arrowhead, or musket ball) can engage our knowledge, imagination, and feelings about time, life and death, self and other—about being, really. Puts an interesting perspective on the making of photographs."
Paul Bien: "Here is an 8x10 I took of my younger son Trent about four years ago. Taken with a hundred-year-old Kodak 2-D view camera and developed using an original 8x10 BTZS film tube in my bathroom, it is still one of my most cherished images. Digitized by shooting the negative with a Nikon 750 and printed via inkjet printer. The tones one can achieve with large format can even be appreciated by non-photographers."
DavidB: "Re '...But all photographs are of the past....' Especially true if you do astrophotography!"
I've been at least low-level obsessed with view cameras since I started in photography seriously in 1980. I used to go by Ferrante-Dege, an old-line camera store in Cambridge, Massachusetts (I loved and miss old camera stores), to "visit" a resplendent Deardorff 5x7 they had on semi-permanent display (it was for sale, but didn't sell, so it was there for a long time). It was profoundly beautiful—well, to my photogeeky young self it was—and also profoundly unaffordable, which made me covet it all the more.
My second major purchase (after my first Contax of sainted memory, and 50mm Zeiss lens) was a rosewood Wista 45DXII that I bought from a guy in Chatham, in Upstate New York, who ran a small business called "Fields and Views." It cost more than $600—an extravagant purchase.
Wista 4x5-inch view camera in rosewood, identical to the one I owned
I only really used my Wista for two projects—for one, I shot color film in the "Tip of the Mitt" region in Michigan, around the lakeshore; and for the other, a different summer (on a faculty grant, woo-hoo), I shot Polaroid Type 55 P/N (positive/negative) film in the same area, everywhere but home. My conceit was that I was going to drive over every single road in Charlevoix, Emmet, Cheboygan and Presque Isle counties. I came pretty close. I loved that camera and I wish I still had it. Current Wistas are not nearly as well made as they were then.
The Wista, which turns 40 this year—it was first available in 1980—has been made over the years in numerous iterations, and in Japanese cherry, Japanese rosewood (shown), ebony, and a few other woods. Various versions have distinct features such as back shift and removable bellows. All share the strong family resemblances imbued in the camera by designer Sadamu Yasutake. The bellows have changed from leather to synthetic over the years, although ten years ago I was told that leather bellows could still be special-ordered in Japan. Don't know if that's still true. Rising prices in the U.S. and much more advantageously-priced newer Chinese cameras such as those from Shen-Hao and Chamonix overshadow the Wista now, and I'm told it gets very little mindshare among LF shooters these days. I owned one from 1984 to 1989—had to sell it because of financial hardship—and have always remembered it with inordinate fondness. It will always remain a sentimental favorite with me. I would have loved to be the type of photographer who could use a view camera for life, crafting beautiful traditional silver prints in the darkroom.
Not con However, "we are what we are," and there's no getting around that. My two projects with the Wista should have been enough to demonstrate to me that I'm not a view camera photographer. It didn't suit my temperament and personality.
Also, I got an early reputation as a view-camera hater that dogged me for years and years. The story, which I'm sure a few of you have heard before, is that I was told by my editor at Camera & Darkroom magazine that they were planning a "pro and con" article about view cameras, and they wanted me to write the "con" piece. The "pro" article was supposed to be written by Ron Wisner, of Wisner Classic Mfg. Co., now out of business but at the time a bespoke maker of opulent Edwardian-style view cameras. Unfortunately, however, Ron never submitted his "pro" piece (I later learned, when I was an editor myself, that this was typical behavior for him). Against my protests, the editor decided to run my "con" piece anyway, by itself, as a stand-alone article. So, without even meaning to, I authored a long, well-debated article about view cameras that was—yikes!—entirely one-sided, taking the negative position. (As I recall, Ron did write a short counterpoint, which might have been published as a Letter to the Editor? I would get my assistant to look that up if the fellow were not so lazy.) The fallout has died down now, but I'm sure, with my luck, that there are still LF people out there with elephant memories who still think I'm anti-LF.
And of course then digital came along, and large format moved down one thick layer deeper in the strata of niches.
So, view cameras: I'm not good with them, don't use them, have a reputation as someone who dislikes and disapproves of them, and they're obsolescent...
...None of which has dimmed my love for view cameras or view camera photography one bit. I still think they're lovely, fascinating devices, and I love work done with them. A circa 1903 Rochester Optical Pony Premo No. 6, a beautiful old "self-casing" whole-plate camera made not far from where I live, in a splendidly preserved state, is the first thing that greets visitors when they come into my house from the porch. I've never taken a picture with it.
Mike
This is a "TOP Classic" rerun, a pastiche of posts from 2010 and 2016.
Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.
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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.) Featured Comments from:
JH: "The 'manual transmission' of cameras."
Merle Hall: "That reminds me. If you're anywhere near Sanibel, Florida, do not miss the Clyde Butcher exhibit at the Ding Darling Wildlife Refuge. Simply phenomenal large format black-and-white prints as well as his Ron Wisner 12x20-inch camera. More information about the cameras he uses are on his web site. The show is not up for much longer (either February 5th or 15th; there seems to be conflicting information as to which)."
Carl Weese: "I've always thought the 5x7 Deardorff is the most beautiful view camera ever made. However, 8x10 format was what I felt I needed to work in and I found a solid Deardorff in that format about forty years ago (I think mine was about thirty years old when I bought it, making it about as old as me) and have used it ever since. I find the design incredibly elegant. Some people seem to have trouble learning how to use it but all of the control systems have always seemed perfection to me. But it just never has been as pretty as the 5x7 version."
William Schneider: "Because this is a 'memory lane' post, I thought that I'd make available the Fields and Views literature from 1982. That's about the time that I bought my own Wista. I had written to them to request information.
"That should start a reverie, especially seeing the price list in the PDF."
Mike replies: That brought back memories! Much better was the color brochure for the Wista from Japan, which had some of the funniest, most treasurable examples of "Japlish" I've ever found. Wonderful thing.
Gary Nylander: "I bought a beautiful old 4 1/2 x 6 1/2-inch view camera circa 1910 or so from an antique store in Victoria, B.C. around 1978. It had a Cooke lens of about 8 1/2 inches, and it came with wooden film holders a clip-on tripod and a well-worn leather case. I used it a little bit but not much as I had to cut down 5x7 film to use it.
"In 1985, I bought my next real serious view camera it was a 4 x 5 Tachihara which looks remarkably similar to the photo of Wista that you have included in your post. It saw the Tachihara in a local camera store in Kelowna, B.C. where I live. It came with a 150mm Schneider lens and half a dozen film holders. I think it was about $600 (CDN) It seemed like a lot of money, but it looked really cool and I really wanted to use something a bit more 'modern' than my old 1910 view camera. At first, I didn't use it a whole lot and it mostly sat on a shelf in the closet of my apartment. A couple of years later I gave myself the challenge to shoot with it or sell it. I ended up shooting with the Tachihara for over 20 years.
"In 2009 the Tachihara was getting a little worse for wear so I thought I would upgrade to an Ebony RW45, I loved the titanium fittings. It was the entry-level basic model. I always shot mostly black-and-white film, and some years I shot as many as 800 sheets a year. I also bought a Tachihara 8x10 view camera in 1991 that I still have, but it was not as convenient and practicable to shoot with. I preferred the 4x5. It's something I could backpack on many of my hikes.
"I still shoot with the Ebony view camera but in the last year I have slowly been migrating over to digital. I needed a Nikon D850 camera for some of my commercial freelance photography. Of course, I had to make a few comparisons between my 4x5 and my newly acquired D850. I was pleasantly surprised at how good the digital camera is and I now I am happily exploring what I can do with the digital D850 in terms of creative output."
["Open Mike" is the Editorial Page of TOP, in which Yr. Hmbl. Ed. lets his neuroses out to romp in the yard. It usually appears on Wednesdays, and is very often late, and very rarely early.]
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An ecologist once explained a formula for the conservation of wetlands. He said that the loss of the first 30% of wetlands was inconsequential; the environment could absorb, and adapt to, that much loss. The survival of the middle 40% was provisional and could be up for discussion, or taken case-by-case. But the survival of the last 30% was absolutely crucial for the ecology as a whole, essential for a great variety of reasons, and needed to be preserved at all costs.
Hold that thought. We'll circle back around to it.
When the Internet came along and people were able to share pictures, there was a whole new crop of photographers who enthusiastically embraced the new medium, and who showed their work online without restraint. Many of these people weren't fastidious about their pictures being shared. As a consequence, many of these photographers "grew followers" and began to become better known.
Meanwhile, many already established photographers listened to dire warnings that their work would be stolen and misused if they posted it online. Many "name" photographers severely limited the number of their pictures they posted online, and posted only quite small JPEGs, and were strict about their rights and privileges. As a consequence, they weren't known on the Internet and, eventually, a whole generation of photo enthusiasts grew up not knowing who those previously famous photographers were or what their work looked like.
Two examples: there was a photographer who I wanted to publicize. I wanted other people to get a sense of his work and I wanted to discuss his work. But his website (or web "page" as we used to say, since, back then, entire websites sometimes consisted of just the landing page) was rudimentary—only eight pictures were shown, and each one of those was tiny, maybe 300 or 400 pixels wide. When I suggested that his website was outdated and needed to be expanded and enlarged, he explained that he had gotten someone else to make it for him and he didn't care about "all that" either way. He'd drop off his portfolio at museums and work toward gallery shows and try to get his pictures published in art books, but he didn't see any point in sharing his pictures for free on the Internet.
In the other case, I wrote about a photographer and included two quick snaps of his pictures from a book. The snaps were obviously book pages, with distortion from the bend of the paper and flare from the lighting. Soon he contacted me a state of high agitation, demanding that the pictures be removed immediately. Of course I complied—I always comply with takedown requests even if I feel I have a clear right to use the pictures under Fair Use, because we support photographers. He explained that his photographs were his livelihood and that he never, ever allowed them to be posted online under any circumstances, because people would steal his pictures and make prints from the JPEGs that would compete with his own print sales. I didn't point out the technical impossibility of that...it was his business, and his call. That photographer (he's deceased now) was otherwise quite savvy about publicity, and avid for fame. I doubt many younger people have ever heard of him.
Their reasons for doing what they did were sound, but the overall effect was a negative one: they limited their own publicity and effectively "walled off" their work from the online audience. Granted, both those examples are from the late '90s / early 2000s, and not everyone understood then how pervasive the Internet would become. They earned their bones under the old rules, and they don't want to adapt to new conditions. On the other hand, you still see the old attitude in place with some artists—their only online presence is a few small JPEGs at a dealer's site.
Paywalls are walls after all... I worry now that traditional, established media are now doing a version of the same thing. Again and again I find myself researching stories and coming up against a paywall. It's quite reasonable for a newsgathering entity to want payment for their work, and I do pay for the sites I visit regularly. But often I'm researching, and I simply don't have the budget to pay full subscriptions to get one random article from each of five different outlets, none of which I visit regularly. The default is simply to revert to free sites—which might not be nearly as scrupulous, factual, or ethical.
Good news sometimes appears to me to be ghettoizing itself in much the same way that old-line photographers did.
I suspect that the diminution and decline of our media could be described along the same lines as wetlands: the first 30% we can let go; the middle 40% we can talk about, and pick and choose; but the last 30% are absolutely crucial to functioning Democracies, to civil society, and the informing of a well-educated populace.
Where are we now with media? Well, we're no longer at 100%, that's for sure. We're almost certainly not still as high as 70%; too many good publications and TV and radio stations have gone down (although the tabloids still survive, and those pustular boils on the ass of society sure should go away ahead of a lot of other entities). And yet we're probably not down to the crucial final 30%, either.
It would be great if there were some systemic solution, some way for content to be available but supported, and not behind walls. Barring that, it's going to be increasingly important for individual citizens to support the enlightened news media outlets of their choice.
Mike
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nextSibling: "There have been attempted solutions and some are ongoing. The keyword is 'micropayments.' The concept is a seamless way to enable you (via your browser) to make small, seamless contributions to content providers as you browse the web. The most promising current example is Brave Micropayments in the Brave browser. Although even they admit we're a long way from widespread adoption."
Geoff Wittig: "I would argue politely but strenuously that here in the U.S. we are rapidly losing that last 30% of our traditional, professionally researched and written published journalism. Wikipedia, Facebook and Twitter are not a valid substitute.
"Not to go all 'get off my lawn,' but I grew up in Buffalo, New York, in the 1960s. At the time Buffalo supported two very well-sourced and well written daily newspapers. One of them was originally edited circa 1870 by a guy named Samuel Langhorne Clemens. (Look him up, kids.) They sported full sections on local news including politics, a business section, and so on. By 1980, both papers were pale shadows of their former selves. In 1982 one closed. The other is down to a small broadsheet, just a ghost really.
"It's even worse than it looks. Print media are far more hospitable to complex ideas and nuance, the lifeblood of democratic societies, than broadcast media. They are simply deeper by nature. Video and on-line media are by contrast great at conveying emotion and outrage—free of context, history, or nuance. This tectonic shift in the media landscape is a large part of our escalating polarization and political rage because video is much better at conveying heat than light.
"The large cities are losing their solitary surviving newspapers left and right. The bedraggled remainders are often entertainment-oriented McPapers."
Clayton: "In Venezuela all reasonably honest newspapers have been eliminated by the government. The good news there is that many of the honest journalists have continued to publish online. I would love to support more of them than I do, but the Venezuelan fiasco also destroyed my bottom line. Important news finds a way."
Eolake Stobblehouse: "Yes, yes, yes, probably, yes, absolutely, I agree, yes, and yes. I’ve been on about these things for over twenty years. I’ve been saying that putting postage stamp-sized pics only online is like a greengrocer pouring gasoline on the wares he puts on the street. I participated in a big micropayment platform years ago, and it worked for me, to a degree. But ultimately it failed. I honestly thought, along with usability guru Jakob Nielsen, that micropayments would be the savior of the commercial web. But people don’t like it. I’d love to pay everybody, but like you say, I simply can’t pay ten dollars to fifty different web sites, each of which I rarely visit."
John Krumm: "For news, I think the world is ready for some kind of reporter-driven, publicly funded independent 'wiki-media.' I would like that. All media has a bias, and I occasionally cancel my NYT subscription because I tire of their centrist-elite bias that you can read in the political and international reporting. Then I resubscribe in a month or two because I feel like I'm missing out. I prefer reading articles from Jacobin magazine, which is a quarterly but publishes free material daily on the internet, and has a great podcast as well (I do pay for the quarterly and podcast). It has a strong left bias, which I prefer. But for good, fact-checked reporting of breaking events and more in depth stories, I think some kind of cooperative Wiki-Media model is past due."
Hasselblad has come out with "my kind of lens" for its medium format X (again with the X!) camera system. Described as the smallest and lightest medium-format lens, the upcoming 45P is meant to be the system's "pancake." It's an 11-ounce, 9-element ƒ/4 lens that's only two inches long. The full-frame angle-of-view equivalent is about 36mm. The lens has a leaf shutter and has been designed specifically to be quiet in operation.
Doesn't that look like a sweeeeeeet package? Mmm-mmm. Hasselblad's lead optical designer is Per Nordlund.
The thing that interested me and that leads me to comment is that it's been described as being extremely inexpensive for a medium-format lens. This is certainly true in the Hasselblad lineup—it already had a lens of almost identical focal length and maximum aperture (ƒ/3.5 being only negligibly faster than ƒ/4) for two and a half times the price.
Perhaps wiser heads (Eamon? Ned? Roger? Thom?) can school me, but I can't see any actual reason why lenses for larger formats need to be more expensive in the first place. There's only one actual reason I can think of: economies of scale. If you can manufacture a run of 30,000 lenses, each one will be cheaper than if you have to manufacture a run of 3,000. And medium format always sells less than smaller formats.
It always mildly amuses me when I see lenses conforming to a price scale based on sensor size. There's really no reason why lenses for Micro 4/3 "should" be cheaper than lenses for APS-C, or why lenses for medium format lenses "should" be more expensive than FF lenses. Apart from materials costs, which can't be very significant (and are all over the board anyway—there are bigger lenses for smaller formats and smaller lenses—as in this case—for larger formats), it's just as expensive to make a smaller lens as a larger one, all else being equal. I really don't see any rational reason why a 9-element 35mm-equivalent lens for Hasselblad needs to be as expensive, much less more expensive, than an 11-element 35mm-equivalent lens for APS-C. Except that Fujifilm presumably can sell many times more of its XF 23mm ƒ/1.4 R than Hasselblad will sell of its new pancake.
It's really just down to what the market will bear, and what seems "reasonable" in consumers' heads, isn't it? Bigger = you pay more.
But never mind. I applaud the new lens, and agree it "lets creatives go physically further with their creative visions" (i.e., it's more portable easier to carry).
Mike
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That view camera cartoon by Siné I linked to turned out to be the most controversial thing I've published in months. Since the link went up I've been called more names than a blind ump at a baseball game. A couple of people cancelled their contributions and one person said he'd never come to the site again. Several people (most complainants are men) have written multiple messages to explain their positions in greater detail (no need—I get it), and the messages kept coming this morning even though the post is no longer at the top of the heap.
Limpets. Limpet teeth outperform spider silk as the strongest biological material.
It was just filler. I'm sick. (Day 13 today, if you can believe it—this bronchial thing hangs on like a limpet. I first noticed it Monday before last. Yes, I'm tired of it.) I just figured I'd throw up a few things to keep y'all distracted so I could take a little time off. You see, I'm a bit low on energy and needed a rest.
It wasn't meant to start a fire.
To anyone who was offended or put off or simply didn't find the d*mn thing funny or clever: I apologize. I sincerely didn't mean to offend anyone.
Mike (Photo by Tango22)
[UPDATE: Given some of the responses to this post, I'd like to reiterate that my apology is sincere. I don't want to make anyone feel offended or unwelcome, or unheard, or disrespected. Seriously. I certainly don't want people who objected to the cartoon to be offended anew. I do respect everyone's reaction, and I do appreciate feedback. It always helps me to further "calibrate." —MJ]
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There is quite a bit of "outrage about the outrage" in the comments to this post, so I'll tell you what I've chosen to do...I'm going to read all the comments, and then I'm not going to publish any. Except these five, which show the diversity of opinion but not a lot of the...er, crosstalk. Hope you don't mind this solution, but I have fanned the flames with this post and I didn't wish to do that either! —Ed.
John: "Get better, Mike. I honestly have no idea what the excitement could be regarding that view camera cartoon. It is funny!"
David Dyer-Bennet: "I was worried; I was hoping I was wrong (and, it was already published by then of course). You at least knew it was high-risk, right?"
Craig Wilkinson: "I have never commented before. I thought it was very funny. Hope you get well soon."
Ken: "That cartoon was sophomoric humor beneath the level of the typical discourse on this blog. I groaned when I saw it, shut the browser and went on with my day."
Neil Clarkson: "Sh*t Happens Buddy. Nobody died. It's all good. Get better. Cheers."
Politically you could have any of a range of reactions to the story, but let's not go there. In a nutshell, a traditional delicacy for wealthy people is banned in New York City as being gratuitously cruel to animals, echoing many other such bans worldwide, but the poor people who produce it—some of whom have had a dreadful odyssey to reach safe haven—are going to have their lives upended. The article tells the story from every perspective. I guess it touches me a few ways, as I live in rural Upstate New York, and my investment banker grandfather (d. 1993) happened to love duck liver pâté.
But...to the pictures.
They're the work of a young photojournalist named Desiree Rios (right). From the opening montage (I watched it several times through) to the inline illustrations, it struck me as a excellent job of photo-reportage. The pictures don't cry out for attention and don't insist on some forced signature style—they tell the story. But they're beautifully done all the same, and they work in concert with the written story. Words and pictures are full partners, you might say—something I look for, and like, in photojournalistic work.
As far as technique goes, they made me reflect that digital is finally coming of age, not looking like film but not overburdened by the old digital nasties either. And (importantly for me) not looking too much like photo-illustration, all fakey and manipulated. The opening picture ("Vacant buildings...") is perhaps the exception, the weakest picture in the set, too dark and too saturated and with too much perspective distortion, but let your eyes rest for a while on the picture of the duck food mill ("Last year, Cochecton Mills..."). An atmospheric photograph, informative but visually elegant.
Photojournalism is difficult. You have to put the story above your ability to pick and choose what works best visually.
"Desiree Rios (b. 1991) is a Mexican-American photojournalist and documentary photographer from Fort Worth, Texas. She received a Bachelor of Science in Photojournalism at St. John’s University in New York and a Master of Fine Arts from the San Francisco Art Institute. Rios is currently based in New York City and Dallas-Fort Worth." That's lifted from the "About" page of the photographer's website.
Nice work. She made a difficult task look easy.
Mike (Inset photo by Ricardo Mexia)
*A.K.A. "the world's best photography magazine." Regular readers will recall that I recommend subscribing for the rich and varied photographic content. [UPDATE on this: see Ken's Featured Comment below.]
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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.) Featured Comments from:
Kenneth Tanaka: "Re '...it struck me as a excellent job of photo-reportage. The pictures don't cry out for attention and don't insist on some forced signature style—they tell the story. But they're beautifully done all the same, and they work in concert with the written story.' I heartily agree with your opinion of Ms. Rios' work, Mike. More generally, I highly recommend that all hobbyist photographers, from 17 to 70 years old, study featured story work in the NYT. It's about as good as it gets. But, more to the educational point, study how the images hold together. Light. Gesture. Context. Color. Figure spatial relationships. Damon Winter produces much of my favorite humanist work. But the NYT has many of today's best photogs producing a variety of work for them each week. It beats a workshop, at least in my book."
Gary Nylander: "Good to see that young photojournalists like Desiree are being championed and that the NYT is willing to give new talented photographers the recognition that they deserve. As an ex-photojournalist who was laid off due to declining revenues on a small daily paper, it makes my heart glad to see there is some photography work out there for these photographers."
Dave Millier: "Photojournalism is an interesting field. This series tells a great story. But it also shows that journalism always comes from a particular perspective or slant; it can't be objective, and the selection of the images demonstrates that.
"I have every sympathy for the livelihoods of the people involved in the production of this food product. Having their entire product line come under threat with minimal warning must be devastating. On the other hand, it is hardly unique: many, many, businesses close all the time with the commensurate misery to employees.
"Imagine if this photojournalism had been done from a different perspective, to tell the stories of the food animals rather than the workers. How would the photos have differed?
"People are cruel enough to one another but the cruelty dished out to animals in the food industry usually has to be hidden away safely from the cameras. A lot of people might by put off their lunch if they were forced to face up to exactly where it had come from and how their enjoyment came at the expense of, in some cases, some pretty extreme suffering.
"I've been a vegetarian for 25 years—at some personal sacrifice, because I do love my food. But one day when my then-flatmate saw me making meat food with carefully homogenised and disguised meat, he pointed out how hypocritical I was to eat products that have been designed to hide from me their true nature. I reflected on that and came to the conclusion it was true. I liked the taste of meat, hated where it came from and bought products that hid the truth from myself and thus circumvented my conscience for entirely selfish reasons. So I became a vegetarian.
"The food industry uses some pretty horrible practices and does a lot to hide this from consumers. A parallel story from the animals' perspective would make a useful counterpoint to this human interest story and demonstrate how story telling is always from one angle or another...."
Mike replies: I'm not sure journalism is ever supposed to be objective, truly, because what we are looking for from it is not an ethical stance or judgement. What it's supposed to do is present a coherent picture of the facts, which I think this piece does. What interests me about this piece is that the ethical and political issues are so complex and interwoven that a clear and plain values-based interpretation is impossible to arrive at quickly and surely. What's important to me about journalism is that I be made aware of the slant or bias of the journalists, so I can take that into account when digesting the information they're presenting to me—I don't have any problem reaching a personal conclusion that is opposed to that of the journalists.
Kenneth Tanaka adds: "With special regard to Dave Millier’s featured comment, readers may enjoy a recent essay by Jacqueline Lopez, an intern at the Art Institute of Chicago’s Department of Photography."
Mike replies: Jacqueline's essay is good and on point, but the "context" I'd like answered is: who is the white guy really and what was his actual relationship with the black men sitting behind him? Who is the white person on the extreme left who the white man on the right appears to be talking to, and what were they talking about? Dorothea has already forced the issue somewhat with her image title, making all of them stand for something other than just themselves. But even so it's we the viewers who assume any relationship at all between the white man on the right and the black men. The word "plantation" is possibly leading, too (in 1936 people would have been widely familiar with Uncle Tom's Cabin in which the word is also used). One feature of photography, however, is its insistent specificity: those were actual people, and presumably they have actual stories. For instance, consider these imagined scenarios:
—The white man is a local farmer who is at the store hiring day laborers. He bucks the local trend by hiring black workers instead of poor whites who also want the work. They men behind him were hoping to be hired but the ones he hired are already seated in the car.
—The white man is an overseer at a huge local cotton plantation and has 75 black workers under his direction. He is known for being ruthless and a stern disciplinarian. He has a high position in the local KKK. The black men in the picture, who work for him, know they are safe in public but feel cowed generally by the power he has over their lives.
—The white man owns a local plantation but the black men behind him have nothing to do with him—they're local guys who often hang out at the store loitering on the steps. They're just listening to the white people talking only because that's what happens to be going on at that moment.
See what I mean? We really have very little context except that which is supplied by the title in concert with our own prejudices and assumptions. Which could be right or wrong. Dorothea was a truth-teller by nature and conscientious by the standards of the time, but we know there were others among her pictures where she got the title or caption substantively wrong.
I suppose the real details are lost to history, but it's what I'd want to know about that picture.
This is very slightly school/work inappropriate, I guess, so a mild NSFW warning. However, if there was ever a cartoon that TOP readers are more likely to "get" than the average population, this is it.
Let me know if you don't get it! I'd be interested.
Mike (Thanks to JG)
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Pierre Charbonneau: "Humor on photography, I love this one too."
Mike replies: Ha! That's great. I should buy that and put it up on my wall....
robert e: "OK, I got it and laughed, about which I feel both a bit ashamed and a bit affirmed as a photo nerd (for better and worse). Regarding my relief that the subject wasn't a man in a kilt, I'm not so sure."
Hans Muus: "Assuming TOP readers have film roots. I still find it hard to realise how much of what I regard as basic photographic knowledge is unnecessary in the digital age. As an enthusiast relative of 35 recently asked when we were talking photography: ‘Hans, please tell me—what is a negative?’ (Whereas he helped me out with Photoshop already more than a decade ago.)"
hugh crawford: "Funny, the first thing I thought of when I saw this was this classic Penn and Teller bit—and when I saw that broadcast back in the '80s I thought of my view camera."
Mike replies: I love how connections are made on the Internet. I had never seen that Penn and Teller performance before—really clever. And then, later that night, it led me to this old Bravo Profiles show about Penn and Teller from 2001, which I found fascinating in several ways, from the tours of their weird houses in Vegas (Penn is really quite an odd fellow) to the insight of Penn's that they are just famous enough to be able to interact with their fans—famous but not too famous. I was interested in both the link you suggested and the Bravo Profiles piece too. Theirs is a very unique act with lots of layers—more than meets the eye indeed.
Peggy C.: "I don't know which is more funny...the fact that I 'got it' right away or that I seem to be the first female to comment on it. LOL. Here is the photography comic I love. This strip ran from 2006 to 2016 but I still love them."
Mike replies: You weren't actually the first, but the comment moderator has been sick and dragging his feet...for which, sorry!
"The gift of seeing, feeling, and the joy of response!
"We live in a world full of immense challenges—often personal and maybe more often, generalized challenges to the spirit presented by the major forces at play all around us—politics, economics, ideology, attitudes, and environmental realities. In the midst of all of this—among the daily blessings and joys that offer so much amazing life in the present moment—is the opportunity to go out, and use one's eyes, heart, movement, and presence to not only see, but to feel, and respond by registering with a camera, our very personal now. For many of us, it is not only photography, but more importantly, this opportunity to exist and live in the present among all that life can offer daily, that is an essential nourishment for the soul. And, it all starts by simply being out, present, and alive, by seeing and feeling. This opportunity is such a blessing for us all."
—Peter Turnley
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Mike Plews: "What an enchanting photograph! It is a great picture but it also perfectly illustrates the relationship between image sharpness and clarity of vision. If every element of this picture was tack sharp it would would be much less charming. A solid hit right over the center field fence. Well done."
I apologize, but I'm going to take a few days off. I'm into Week Two of a respiratory bug of some sort—it's going around where I am. A cough, low energy, and a headache. (At the window at a doctor's office yesterday I saw a sign that said "If you have a cough, please put on a mask," and I thought, well, they mean me.) I almost never get headaches.
Rightly or wrongly (I admit I have no way to tell), I believe my good plant-rich diet is helping my immune system fight the virus. I've been struck by how much worse other people are reporting feeling with this. They say it's a really bad one. I haven't been feeling all that bad. In fact for the most part I've just continued with my life—I've been aware I was sick, but I've felt like I was getting away with it.
But today I try to work and keep going around in circles. I need to rest for a day or two. It happens from time to time; I'm used to it.
I will keep working on the comments for the previous post.
Back soon! Sorry again...this is one of the problems with being a one-man band. When the drummer gets sick....
Many lenses that are popular (at least aspirationally) these days are big, heavy, expensive and fast (BHEF for short, if you'll tolerate it).
It's downright odd: when I started photography I shot Kodak Plus-X, which had an ASA/ISO speed of 125, but which I rated at an exposure index (E.I.) of 80. On top of that I used a medium yellow filter, which cut out another 2/3 stops of light. And my two "prime" (single-focal-length) lenses had maximum apertures of ƒ/2.8. When T-Max P3200 was introduced (with a true speed of ASA/ISO 1000—the "P" in the name stood for "push"), I found I could rate it at an exotic E.I. 800, and I went crazy shooting in what I considered very poor light. A wonderful experience.
Now, most cameras with decent-sized sensors have no trouble with ISO 1600, and many do well at ISO 3200 and even 6400. ISO 3200 means they need two stops less light than my old P3200! And nobody uses filters any more, so you don't lose any light that way.
You'd think we'd all be shooting with ƒ/2.8 and slower lenses now, and in a sense we are—or most of you are, anyway. You shoot with zooms. The good ones tend to have constant maximum apertures that are the same as that of my old Carl Zeiss lenses. But primes? For some reason, where those are concerned we feel we need lenses of exotic specification. ƒ/1.4, the former standard for a very fast lens, is boring and not fast enough.
As I say, odd.
Regarding d-o-f: for most of photography's history, photographers always wanted more of it. Lately, photographers want less of it. Why? I believe—my opinion—it's because large sensors and BHEF lenses are high status.
Most photographers are human beings (there are exceptions—see selfie by Slater's macaque in the inset illustration!), and human beings are highly influenced by status and standing. We are always trying to display wealth, specialness, and privilege. It's just the way we're wired as social animals. I have an 19th-century book about the old West called Beyond the Mississippi by Albert D. Richardson. In it there is an account given by a pioneer about an encounter with an Indian brave. This "noble savage" [that idea is a construct of the 18th-century Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau] spent a good deal of the interview bragging about how many wives and horses he had, unfortunately not in that order. He also brags about how generous he is in gift-giving, because that was a major status-marker in his tribe. I was struck by how clearly that guy thought he had it all goin' on. And doubtless he did, for his time and culture. His attitude struck me as being little different from that of a spoiled son of a billionaire bragging about how many Lamborghinis and b-----s he has.
In case you want to achieve shallow depth-of-field (i.e., lots of "bokeh"), there are other, more efficient ways to do that than buying a big, heavy, expensive lens of large maximum aperture. (Which of course you can do if you want to.) That lens only gives you less d-o-f / more bokeh than a slower lens of the same focal length at the same focus distances. That is, "if all else is equal."
Beyond the Mississippi, published in 1867
But, to quote Ctein, "all else is never equal." Just as there are some cases where you want to use the exact same standpoint and get more d-o-f, there are many cases where you can adjust. So if you're just after that lotsa-bokeh look, you can plan to do one, or both, of two things: either get closer, or choose a longer lens.
Re the first, getting closer: in theory, cameras with rigidly fixed lenses focus on a geometrical plane that is parallel to the plane of the sensor (the reality departs from this somewhat). Depth-of-field scales to how close or far that plane is to the sensor, which can be roughly understood thusly: if you get four feet of d-o-f when focused at 10 feet, you'll get four inches of d-o-f when you're focused at 10 inches. (It's not actually that exact, for various reasons, but this is roughly true). Go look at a bunch of macro pictures of flowers or bugs on Flickr, for example. They'll all have gobs and gobs of bokeh everywhere, because they're all taken close up. Then go look at pictures of distant landscape vistas. Most of them have no bokeh anywhere, right? That's because at distant-vista focus distances, there are huge amounts of d-o-f.
The other thing you can plan to do is just use a longer lens. Insofar as d-o-f is a property of aperture and focal length, it's identical regardless of the size of the substrate (film or sensor). Take a 300mm lens for 8x10 film and a 300mm lens for 35mm film. On 8x10, 300mm is a normal focal length, and provides a reasonably wide angle of view. On 35mm (24x36mm, same as FF), a 300mm lens is a long telephoto with a very narrow angle of view. But, from the same camera position, aimed identically, if you superimpose the small rectangle inside the big one, the image from both will overlap, and the d-o-f will be the same. It's just that it will appear to be much more on the larger film and much less on the smaller one because of what else is in the frame of each. So if you want to get more bokeh, just pick a longer lens—even if it doesn't have a large maximum aperture—and move back. Voila! You've just achieved the bokeh of a shorter BHEF lens with a slower lens.
Granted, the pictures are somewhat different because of the different standpoint, but there are infinity pictures available. You can usually make do and choose one that works for the different standpoint.
For more bokeh, get closer or shoot a longer lens or both. In real life, you don't get any extra credit for having super-fast apertures on any given focal length. Unless you really insist on having the dog's nose out of focus...and maybe even the cat's.
Mike
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Al C.: "As we bear witness to the dawn of computational photography, how much longer before your favorite LR, C1, or DxO workflow will include a bokeh slider, a de-nervous check box, and maybe a bokeh-ball clone/repair tool? Can't be that hard. My bet is Topaz will be first with AI-bokeh.
"All the heretofore expensive qualities of a lens—contrast (macro and micro), color rendering, distortion, vignetting, CA etc.—can mostly be corrected/enhanced in software with minor adverse effect on IQ. Soon, that will be true of bokeh. Would be great fun, actually.
"Odd, then, to see the latest glut of ridiculous cost-, weight-, and size-no-object lenses. Might this be the last gasp, as when a tree seeds like mad before dying?
"Unlike bokeh, one critical optical defect which is impossible to correct is flare resistance. Ironic then that many of the recent BHEF lenses sport stellar MTFs (look at the new Nikon Z mounts) but are very middling and disappointing regarding flare resistance. Not surprising, considering their ridiculous optical formulations and umpteen surfaces on hand for reflections."
"Aperture" come from "apertura," which means "hole" in Latin, and refers to the variable opening in the lens. The f-numbers, as they're known, are odd and appear mysterious to the uninitiated:
Photographers find it helpful to memorize this sequence.
The sequence is "an approximately geometric sequence of numbers that corresponds to the sequence of the powers of the square root of 2" (Wikipedia), but you don't need to know that. What's easiest to remember is that every other one approximately doubles or halves. Each single one doubles or halves the amount of light that the aperture allows to pass through the lens: that is, ƒ/1.4 lets in twice as much light as ƒ/2, ƒ/11 lets in half as much light as ƒ/8, and so forth.
The aperture is defined (Wikipedia again) thusly:
The f-number of an optical system (such as a camera lens) is the ratio of the system's focal length to the diameter of the entrance pupil ('clear aperture'). It is a dimensionless number that is a quantitative measure of lens speed, and an important concept in photography. It is also known as the focal ratio, f-ratio, or f-stop. It is the reciprocal of the relative aperture. The f-number is commonly indicated using a hooked f [like this: ƒ] with the format 'ƒ/N, where N is the f-number.'
The f-stop is a measure of lens speed, "speed" in this case referring how much light is able to pass through a particular lens. The f-ratios of a lens are stable properties of that lens when you hold it in your hand when it's attached to nothing...and they do not change when you put the lens in front of variously-sized recording substrates such as sensors or film.
Generally, spherical lenses, and most aspheres, perform best—and the resulting pictures look best—when you use middle apertures.
Konica T3 viewfinder diagram: What do those funny "Aperture Scale" numbers mean and where should I put the "Meter Needle"?
It was one of the very first things I learned in photography. Shooting with my Dad's shutter-priority Konica T3's, I wondered where the aperture needle in the viewfinder should fall and what those odd numbers meant. Dad's friend Arnie Gore, a commercial studio photographer from Milwaukee (you can read the great story of his Nikita Khrushchev picture here), told me the needle just needed to be "somewhere in the middle," and to avoid the top two numbers and the bottom number. Crude, but it's actually still pretty good advice. The reason to have a wide aperture lens is so it's there when you need it (and, in the old days, to make an SLR easier to focus)—not to shoot at that aperture constantly and unthinkingly.
With most lenses, for best
performance, stick to
middle apertures
Two things happen theoretically with lens performance in the case of most lenses. First, aberrations diminish as you stop the lens down. Then, diffraction begins to soften the image as you stop down too much. So with most lenses there is an "optimum aperture"—that's the aperture at which aberrations are not further improved by stopping down more, but at which diffraction is not increased needlessly. Another way of saying this is that it's the widest aperture at which diffraction is the limiting function. A lens that's so good that this pertains at its widest aperture is said to be "diffraction limited."
You don't need diffraction-limited lenses for pictorial photography. In fact, as I said in the post "Bazooka Joe," you don't need good lenses for pictorial photography: artistic expression can potentially be achieved with a lens that has any kind of properties.
As a rough rule of thumb (assuming you want what is misnamed "optical quality"), the optimum aperture on fast lenses (ƒ/1.4 and faster on FF, let's say) will be two or three stops from wide open (ƒ/2.8 or ƒ/4 on that ƒ/1.4 lens) and it will be about two stops down for a slower lens (so, say, ƒ/5.6 on an ƒ/2.8 lens).
Does that mean you should always shoot your ƒ/1.4 lens at ƒ/4? No, because you're also thinking about depth-of-field and how much light you need to pass through your lens given the ambient lighting conditions prevalent at the scene. Also, in practice, the middle apertures of a lens are so close in terms of optical performance that there's not much visual performance difference between, say, ƒ/4 and ƒ/8 on our fast lens. Yes, the optimum aperture might be theoretically best, and yes, you might be able to discern the difference while pixel-peeping—but if viewers can't tell the difference between pictures taken at the optimum aperture and pictures taken at the two apertures next to it, then—if you're considering only sharpness in the plane of focus—it doesn't really matter which of the three apertures you choose.
Basic rule o' thumb, then: for best lens performance, stick to the middle apertures. But among all the apertures, choose the one that will give you the depth-of-field you want or the exposure value you want. Among the middle apertures, the optical performance between the various choices will be so close as to make no easily visible difference.
Depart from the middle apertures when you need to or when you want to; the middle apertures are merely a convenient default.
Mike
Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.
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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.) Featured Comments from:
Trevor Johnson: "ƒ/1.2, ƒ/1.7, ƒ/6.3 or ƒ/7.1 are oft encountered in today's world: plus others."
Mike replies: The scale I gave are the whole stops. The ones you list are intermediate values. ƒ/1.2 is one-third stop faster than ƒ/1.4; ƒ/1.7 is a half stop, midway between ƒ/1.4 and ƒ/2; ƒ/6.3 is one-third stop slower than ƒ/5.6; and ƒ/7.1 is one-third stop faster than ƒ/8.
I'm not sure if this is still the case, but in the '90s lens apertures were only accurate to within about a sixth of a stop, so listing apertures in thirds of stops was a bit suspect. But ƒ/1.8 sounds faster than ƒ2, so it's good for marketing. Yet if it is only accurate to within a sixth of a stop then it could be only 1/6th of a stop faster than ƒ/2—a difference most people cannot see—and still be within tolerances. Modern Photography used to list the real f-stops of lenses they tested, and they often weren't quite the same as what the labels claimed.
Greg adds: "Manufacturer's f-stop designations for photographic mirror/reflex are the worst. My 500mm ƒ/8 Nikkor is a half of a stop slower than ƒ/8, and my 600mm ƒ/8 Vivitar Series 1 is actually 2/3 of a stop slower than ƒ/8. Ironically I've found that the f-stop designations for telescope reflex lenses (way smaller market out there for these lenses) are totally accurate and right on."
marcin wuu: "First thing I do with all of my fast primes is take a piece of duct tape and tape the aperture ring down on its widest setting for good. I ain't buyin' those shallow d-o-f monsters to stop them down, damnit."
Mike replies: I initially hoped you were kidding, then I read Jeff's comment in the Comment section. So maybe you aren't.
Luis Aribe: "Just for the record, the Latin is 'apertura,' from which the English 'aperture.'"
Mike replies: Thank you Luis. Fixed now.
Gordon Buck: "Mechanical devices work best in the middle of their design range."
Mike replies: Yes. And to "stress" any such device—and coincidentally to reveal their quality—examine the extremes of those design ranges.
Peggy C.: "Re 'Basic rule o' thumb, then: for best lens performance, stick to the middle apertures.' As someone else pointed out, and the way I heard it, lo these many years ago, was 'ƒ/8 and be there'."
Mike replies: The old photojournalist motto.
s.wolters: "Good statement! But there are exceptions to this smack dab in the middle rule. I am a lucky owner of the Olympus 17mm and 25mm f1.2 lenses. These are designed to be used wide open. Both lenses peak around ƒ/2 to ƒ/2.8, so very close to their widest aperture. But even with these lenses I prefer to start with ƒ/4 to ƒ/5.6 rather than ƒ/1.2. Usually I’m more interested in my subjects than in blur."
Mike replies: True, and that's why it's useful to know your lenses' optimum apertures. Lens designers can optimize their designs for specific f-numbers and specific focus distances. Many lenses are, indeed, being optimized for wider apertures these days. A few, as Scott K. pointed out in the Comments section, are diffraction limited and thus are at their best wide open. It's not necessary to know, but it helps to know.
Still working on that book roundup. Sorry, I've been "sick-ish" this week (sort of skating above it, merely in danger of falling through) and short of energy. Taking naps. And of course such projects can be expanded to fill any available time. I don't work as fast as I used to.
In the meantime, I wanted to address an issue that came up under this post, the one about my resolution not to resort to my phone camera so often.
Two reader comments—
SteveWwrote: "I'm loving reader comments on this one. Ah, good ol' TOP! I think I can channel some MJ here: the camera you have fun shooting with is the one to be shooting."
Julian Behrisch Elcewrote: "My goodness, everyone—the condescension here is very unpleasant, not to mention that not one of you knows what the people you’ve granted your approval do in their spare time or use in their artistic efforts. I really hope that this space will be more generous in the coming year."
The two comments came in right next to each other, and I'm always amused when two diametrically opposing reactions are coincidentally juxtaposed like that.
And I usually don't publish comments like Julian's in this case (he's written many valuable comments otherwise) simply because I don't allow readers to judge each other—that's how disputation gets kindled, and on this site I discourage what were called, in the '90s, "flame wars."
But I do want make something clear, again. What you want to carry is the camera that makes the files, negatives, or transparencies that fit the way you're visualizing your pictures. Condescend? I don't view gear in terms of status. Didn't I recently recommend a classic book of pictures taken with a toy Diana, a camera made of plastic, with a plastic lens, that cost (if I recall correctly) less than $20 when the pictures were taken? For Camera & Darkroom magazine I wrote a feature—a cover feature, at that—on a Massachusetts photographer who did an entire body of work with a "Sun-Pet," an even cheaper plastic toy camera—the only way to get one was to mail in ten "Bazooka Joe" bubblegum comics and 70¢! (For those of you who don't know or don't remember, those little slabs of pink bubblegum came with a tiny printed comic inside the wrapper, and you could send in various numbers of the comics as "proof of purchase" along with small amounts of money to claim various prizes.) Mary Kocol, who worked in a color lab at the time and printed her own negatives when the lab was closed, would take color Sun-Pet negatives and blow them up to huge sizes such that they fell apart in interesting ways. Here are some of Mary's more recent toy camera pictures.
The point in that post was not that the smartphone camera is not an adequate camera. It's just not the camera that gives me what I happen to want at the present time, that's all. Any camera can be not only an adequate camera, but the perfect camera, if it's what the photographer wants and needs for his or her work! What you want is the right camera in your hand, not the wrong one, for any value you choose to assign to "wrong" and "right." My friend Christopher Bailey did some wonderful work with a Nikon that had a stuck shutter—only the "B" setting worked—and a lens with a giant crack through the middle of one element. He was devastated when it was stolen, because it was irreplaceable. Sally Mann did some work with very old uncoated lenses that flared badly—she got in touch with me wanting to know if any films that had no anti-halation backing (she wanted halation!). Daido Moriyama's signature look was created with both film and digital point-and-shoots. And of course a number of photographers produced artistically successful books of pictures made with funky early cellphone cameras. I've written about some of them too.
Henry Wessel photographed until his death with a 1950s Canon screwmount lens on a Leica. Why wouldn't he switch to a more modern lens? Because the old lens gave him the look he wanted. Was it a "worse" lens than a modern lens? Not for him. Or for his pictures.
The main blindness in modern amateur enthusiast photography as it is expressed and discussed online, in my opinion, is the conflation of "image quality" with good photographs. Enthusiasts have chased analytical perfection to a point of diminishing returns, while seeming utterly oblivious of the almost nonexistent relationship between technical imaging perfection and visual expressiveness. I've always been of the opinion that anyone can do anything he or she wants with his or her photography, as long as no laws are broken and no one gets hurt; so obviously I can't blast anyone for wanting the biggest and greatest, the most expensive, the supposed "best"—it's their business, not mine. But neither have I ever despised anyone who uses what some would consider a "bad" or "cheap" camera such as a toy Diana, a homemade pinhole camera, an early, poor-quality cellphone, or anything else they can make work for their work.
Power to them. Power to us all. When it comes to expressiveness, excellence is available to anyone. And yet cannot be bought.
Have a good weekend! Good light.
Mike (Thanks to Steve and Julian)
Original contents copyright 2020 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 throughPatreon
(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.) Featured Comments from:
David Littlejohn: "Best post in a while! Thanks!"
Fer: "Your post about the phone camera resonated with me so much. After being laid off in 2015, I took a trip of several months across Southeast Asia to figure out a new direction for my life. At the time I didn't know I'd end up deciding to give photography a try as a profession, simply because I thought it was too hard to even contemplate it. My main goal for the trip was to relax and enjoy the travel experience to the fullest, not taking top-quality photos. So, while I brought my X-E1 and a couple of lenses with me, I ended up taking an inordinate amount of photos with my smartphone, about 40% overall.
"I can't tell you how many times I've regretted this, looking at the questionable quality of many of those files."
Andrew "Thick Skull" Lamb: "Wise words. This is a message I need drummed into my thick skull on an alarmingly regular basis. The weather is improving here, in London; time to take more pictures."
Dan Khong: "My Leitz Summar gives me the looks that I want. On top of that, since it's manufactured between 1932–1939, there is much history that goes with it."
2019 saw the publication of another crop of excellent, engaging photobooks. Frankly I cannot imagine nominating any of those I’ve seen as “best.” But if I had to choose a few most likely to be of interest to my fellow TOP readers it would be these.
Let’s start with two books associated with museum exhibitions. 2019 was the year that photography’s first commercial format, the daguerreotype, got new and deeper looks. The Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City and New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art each produced superb 2019 exhibitions that highlighted the earliest roles of daguerreotype photography in various documentary work.
The California Gold Rush of 1848-1855 was inarguably one of most significant social, political, and economic events in 19th century American hisory. Today such events (or even our lunch plates) are covered by photography in every imaginable (and unimaginable) way. But in 1848 photography was brand new. There were no conventions or best practices for its use. And yet dageurreotypists soon “became the mediators of the world’s truth.” They quickly learned to weave a contiguous visual story fabric from what otherwise seemed like utter chaos.
Golden Prospects represents a remarkable body of curatorial scholarship on a foundational moment in photography’s history. It also represents an eye-opening view of just how good photography became so quickly. Considering the cumbersome nature of producing usable dags at all, it’s astonishing to see so much work from so many collections gathered to put such clear focus on such a big moment.
Golden Prospects is not technically a photobook. But it is a mesmerizing deep stare into one of photography’s earliest opportunities to construct a big story for the rest of the world.
Here’s the basic setup for Monumental Journey: Girault de Prangey, a rich 37-year-old single guy from northeastern France with some formal art education, becomes obsessed with the new daguerreotype photo tech. About 1842, just a few years before the start of the California Gold Rush (above), he begins three years of travel throughout the Mediterranean region, where he extensively and methodically photographs landmark sites and scenes he visits. Upon returning to his home he meticulously labels and organizes the roughly 1,000 resulting plates and stores them in custom-made wooden cases. He writes a few articles on his work and even self-publishes a book of some of this work, but his work is largely ignored. So eventually the wood cases are stashed in his attic, not to be re-discovered until long after his 1892 death.
There is a long, somewhat sinuous story between the rediscovery of this work and today. Some pieces were lost and nearly a century of neglect have not left this work in pristine condition. But it still shines as among the most thoughtful and skillfully-created collection of amateur dauguerrotypes in existence. Many of Girault’s images represent first-and-only records for many archeological sites and subjects which have since been lost to time and change. Additionally, since Girault had no need to conform to commercial practices (i.e. standard enclosure sizes and aspect ratios) he could make his plate exposures according to the needs of his subjects. So we see far more panoramic and vertical plates than are usually seen in other collections.
Like Golden Prospects, Monumental Journey is not a photobook, per se. It’s an exhibition catalog and a body of scholarly work. But Girault de Prangey’s work represents one of the first and most earnest efforts at architectural and archeological documentation with photography.
And here is one standout book not about daguerreotypy:
André Kertész: Marcher Dans L’Image (Walk in the Picture) [French only] Cédric De Veigy André Frère Éditions, 2019 Link to the exhibition website
If you’ve admired André Kertész’s work as long and as deeply as I have you may imagine you’ve seen everything there is to see. And then something like this comes along to make you realize you’re not there yet.
Drawn from scans of Kertész’s archive negatives in Paris, Marcher Dans L’Image is a largely passive analysis of how Kertész made his framing and composition choices for a variety of scenes he shot with his Leica between 1930 and 1936. I can guarantee that most of the images and scenes will be new to your eyes, as most have never been published.
If you’re someone fascinated by looking at famous photographers’ contact sheets you’ll be over the moon with this book. Images, all beautifully printed, are not presented as raw contact sheets but rather as page layouts showing series alternatives.
Do note that the book is entirely in French. No, I don’t really read French. But due to the magic of the Google Translate app and my iPhone I can read just about anything. Mercifully, there is relatively little text to translate as the presentation is mostly visual. So no need to fear that you’ll not understand the material.
Marcher Dans L’Image is only available from the publisher or on the secondary market. It accompanies an exhibition, open until February 9th, 2020, at the Robert Doisneau House of Photography, 1 rue du Division du Général Leclerc, 94250 Gentilly, France.
Ken
Longtime reader and occasional contributor Kenneth Tanaka has been actively engaged in photography and the arts for many years. His own recent book To Build, a lyrical look at the accidental beauty of large-scale construction sites, was recently published on Blurb. It was distilled from approximately a dozen years of working. It's expensive in paper, but you can see all the photos in the preview at Blurb—and I recommend you do that! —Ed.
Original contents copyright 2020 by Kenneth Tanaka. 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 throughPatreon
(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.) Featured Comments from:
JOHN B GILLOOLY: "Just purchased the Kertesz book and really look forward to getting it. This is a perfect intersection of my photographic interests. He is one of my favorites and I'm always very interested in the editing process employed by various photographers. Thanks for the suggestion."
hugh crawford: "Thanks for the pointer to Girault de Prangey. I can't believe I missed this up until now."
Moose: "Re 'His own recent book To Build, a lyrical look at the accidental beauty of large-scale construction sites, was recently published on Blurb.' It's only half January, and I'll bet Mr. Tanaka's book will be my photo book of the year. Not my sort of subject, other than a few abstract reflections, but I was mesmerized. The colors, shapes, perfect moments in human motion, are wonderful. But the compositions! What a masterful eye. Also a great sense of order and facing page selections. I've enjoyed some of your work before, but none has grabbed me like this."
