The Online Photographer

Will There Ever Be a Super-Simple Digital Camera?

So I got to thinking the other day. I keep kvetching about the absurd complexity of dedicated cameras these days, something I certainly was thinking about as I was parsing the Fuji X-T4 and comparing it mentally to my X-T1. The X-T1 is purer, maybe. A little.

I've been working in the trenches, in daily contact with real, live photographers and photography enthusiasts, for a more than three decades now. (My first magazine article was published in 1988.) One thing that really surprises me is that throughout the entire era of digital cameras so far, the desire for a digital camera that's as simple and straightforward as a workmanlike film camera has never entirely gone away. It's been through different phases now (which I could describe), and it's muted now, but I still hear it. Even at this late date.

And even though it's never going to happen.

One of the reasons I want to shoot a little film again is—I admit it—that the cameras are different. No one is ever going to make a simple but high-quality digital camera that feels like a simple film camera. It doesn't fit the marketing needs or the commercial requirements of today's business models, or the customs in the culture now.

So what would a truly simple digital camera actually look like and how would it work?

Picture this
Imagine a full-frame digital SLR of ideally small size and heft (weight doesn't matter so much, but heft is important). It would take manual-focus lenses, of which there are maybe all of five—say a 21mm, 28mm, 40mm, 85mm, and a 100–200mm ƒ/4 zoom. You can see focus on the groundglass, but the only focus aid is a small red square in the center of the visual field that turns green when focus is achieved at that spot. There is nothing else in the image field of the viewfinder except what you're pointing the camera at. The viewfinder is big and clear and shows 96% or more of what the camera will record. There are only two metering patterns: averaged and spot, with the spot corresponding to the focus-indicator rectangle and engaged with an on-off button near the shutter release. When the spotmeter is on, the focus rectangle blinks*. On the left side of the viewfinder window (where the shutter speeds or apertures used to be on old SLRs) is an elongated histogram that responds to changes of the shooting controls.

And what are those? The only shooting controls are the shutter release, an aperture ring on the lenses detented in full and half stops, a shutter speed dial on the camera in full and half stops with an "A" setting, an ISO dial with only six ISOs in full stops (100, 200, 400, 800, 1600, and 3200), and an exposure compensation dial (also in full and half stops). How it works: set the shutter speed to "A," and you're in aperture-priority mode (in which the camera will select intermediate shutter speeds); set both aperture and shutter speed to chosen values and you're in manual mode.

Other controls on the camera are a depth-of-field preview button, lens release button, and a small LCD with an exposures-remaining counter and a battery charge level indicator. There's only one card slot. There's no viewing screen. There's no flash or accommodation for flash. The camera will take pictures as quickly as you want but each exposure requires a separate shutter-button push. There's no viewing screen on the back of the camera. It records only raw—no JPEGs.

There are no menus. Well, maybe one. There's no video, no AF patterns, no Wi-Fi, no GPS, no rapid-fire mode, no film simulations, on and on.

Each file comes out of the camera marked only with the number of that shutter actuation. The camera is quiet but audible to the person with his or her head behind the eyepiece. But it's of high build quality, and the sensor quality and image quality are high.

That would be a simple digital camera.

What's the point? Instead of a camera that will do anything, that's for everyone and for any purpose, it would simply be intended to get completely out of the way so a photographer can see the world through it without distractions, and take pictures, at normal angles of view, one at a time. And so the photographer can be in complete control of every parameter at all times. And be assured of complete mastery of every control on the camera every time he or she picked up the camera.

Too much to ask?
Will anyone ever build an affordable digital camera like that, though? The answer is emphatic: no, never. It can't and won't happen.

There are two problems. First, it completely goes against the "kitchen sink" culture of camera design today. Although most camera makers would be technically competent to create such a thing, it would be so radical in the context of their corporate cultures that it would completely flummox the whole organization. They would literally not have a clue how to design or market it. No one would have any idea of what was important and what wasn't; no one would be competent conceptually to take a guiding hand with a device like I described. They'd have no basis on which to make decisions. Probably, no one in any of the companies would even understand the mission, even if they did have the pull to get it through all the committees and reviews, which no one would. The culture in camera companies, almost entirely (Leica is the sole exception), is to put every feature they can think of into every camera, and then respond as best they can when mavens suggest even more features. The result is always as many features and as much complexity as feasible.

I'm not saying that's wrong, either. All I'm suggesting is that it would be nice to have an alternative as well.

Consider the Nikon Dƒ. That was Nikon's attempt at making a simple retro camera! It was a strange ugly-duckling of a hybrid, like a modern house ham-handedly built by an amateur to look "Victorian." It wasn't a bad camera, actually. It just "did retro" startlingly badly. That's what camera companies perpetrate when they start out trying to make simple cameras.

The Nikon Dƒ was an attempt to make a digital FM3a. How'd they do?

Of course, all Nikon really wanted was to make a body for people who owned lots of old manual-focus lenses. In that, they did fine.

But there's a flip side: the other problem is that a simple camera like what I just described wouldn't sell. Customers wouldn't know what to make of it. It's true that carmakers build SUVs because people buy them, but it's also true that people buy SUVs because carmakers make them...and because other people buy them. It's not appreciated that fashions in product categories are cooperative efforts, not just the "demand" or the "supply" side inflecting the other side. They grow symbiotically, reinforced from both sides. As cameramakers have kitchen-sinked their products, consumers have been conditioned to look for and to ask for—to want, in short—the very things they're being provided with. We critique the products, but we do so only within the basic cultural assumptions under which the product is created and provided. Whenever I say I don't want a camera with video, people just look at me like I'm strange; first, why wouldn't you want it if you can get it for nothing? And second, a camera without video? That'd never sell. And third, just don't use it if you don't want to. In short, they don't even grasp the mindset of someone who would wish for simpler cameras. They don't get it.

When a product is too radically different, too out of step, too far from the average, the demand for it is slumbering or has withered. It hasn't been nurtured and brought along. It is not, for lack of a better term, understood. The offbeat product concept, when it is sprung on people unexpectedly, seems to come out of the blue. They don't know what to make of it.

There will never be any simple digital ILCs, at least as we conceive of ILCs now and as we have conceived of them since maybe 1959. It won't happen not because it can't but just because it won't. Sorry. If you want a camera similar to a digital Leica M6, Olympus OM-1, Pentax MX, or Nikon FM3a, the closest you could come would be...to get yourself a Leica M6, Olympus OM-1, Pentax MX, or Nikon FM3a!

Mike

*Why a spot-metering function on a super-simple camera? Only because when I came up with this I was conceiving of it as a "digital Spotmatic." :-D

P.S. Have a nice weekend! I'll be taking the day off tomorrow as usual. See you on Sunday.

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:

Terry: "If they ever were to make such a camera I would never buy it. You lost me and my astigmatic eyes at manual focus. The further I read the less appealing the whole thing sounded. I can fully imagine throwing the thing to its death out of frustration at its lack of capabilities. Sorry."

Mike replies: Well, couldn't you just buy a different camera then? Like, one of all the cameras currently made? There's no requirement that every camera be equally appealing to all people (although that's arguably one of the cultural assumptions now inside the corporations that make cameras—that if it doesn't appeal to everyone—or as many people as possible—then it's a no-go).

Bill Pearce (partial comment): "Photography has been hijacked by what we used to call 'advanced amateurs,' but I will now call 'technical hobbyists.' Folks fascinated by the technical aspects of the process, the lenses and the cameras. They live for complexity and are distant cousins of computer hobbyists. In my entire career I never wanted the sharpest lens ever; I was happy with decent sharpness. I never wanted to bracket my exposures in 1/3 stop increments much less even smaller."

[To see the full text of "partial" Featured Comments, see the full Comments section. —Ed.]

psu (partial comment): "We can wish and we can hope but the reality is that the forces against this kind of innovation are stronger than the forces that could push it forward."

cecelia: "I set up my OM-D E-M1 Mark II to be a simple camera. Aperture priority, fixed ISO 200, spot focusing, auto IS. I just have to decide my aperture, turn the exposure compensation dial as I see fit from the EVF, and set the AF spot location. Everything else is off or avoidable. I usually keep the screen hidden too. With a small prime, it reminds me of my old film camera experiences, but with the ability to verify I got the shot if necessary, and raw files for digital post-processing."

Cleber Figueiredo: "This is the camera of my dreams. I'm still hopeful that a small start-up will come out of the blue and put up a product such as this for sale."

Peter Wright (partial comment): "Now that the race to master the higher complexity and have the latest techno gizmo is beginning to fade, many are wanting basic, high-quality tools. As camera volumes decline into niche levels, and makers go looking for what might actually sell, I think you may indeed have a chance to get just what you are describing. (Five years out?)"

Jamie Pillers: "I'd buy that camera in an instant. I'd happily sell off all my Fuji 'kitchen sink' gear and replace it with your concept camera. And to the manufacturer of this camera: I don't need fast lenses. ƒ/2.8 lenses are fine. Maybe the 50mm-e could be an ƒ/1.4. Lenses should be smallish; not like the behemoths being forced on us today."

Jeff: "Other than cost, is there some reason you’ve omitted the Leica digital M cameras, notably the versions that either don’t have a back screen, have a real ISO dial and/or shoot monochrome? All manual, with 50+ year old native lenses if desired.

Mike replies: Other than cost, no, but cost is the reason. This is "economic parochialism," but I can't help myself.

hilm: "Well, Mike, you've come pretty close to describing the Leica M-D (Type 262). Your mythical camera has a couple more bells and whistles, like a histogram and a fancy-schmansy red-dot/green-dot focusing contraption, though."

Mike replies: Well the M-D Typ 262 has a coincident rangefinder patch! Not much different than what you call my "focusing contraption."  :-)

Samuel: "'No, never'? Already done: Point camera, press red button, look at photo! There's a good reason that Apple is a trillion dollar company with its ultra simple-to-use camera, the market dominating iPhone. (Plus lots of other companies that pirated Apple's inventions.)"

John Camp (partial comment): " The problem with cameras-as-computers is that the control system—the computer—is so flexible that you can do almost anything with it. [...] The most obvious current example of this IMHO is the iPhone 11 pro, one of which I have. All I want is snapshots. But what I'm getting, most of the time, is a series of shots, or movies, or the flash goes off when I don't want it to, because the controls are awkward and honestly, I haven't bothered to study them. All I want is a button and lens for snapshots, and the iPhone cameras are becoming just like other cameras, a mess of complications."

Henning Wulff: "As you know, Leica makes cameras that come very close to what you're asking. Unfortunately, the only SLR that meets many of your criteria is the S3, which is fairly small for a medium format, but still.... And the price is kinda like a Leica.

"After dallying with the movie thing, the M10 and M10M got rid of that. It's not an SLR, but it does a good job of being a digital M7, if not M6 or M2 or M4 (my favourite M). And the price is still ludicrous. On the other hand, since I've shot with Leicas now for just shy of 60 years, I have lenses and the cameras fit my hands and muscle memory like no others. So I'll sell some stuff and get an M10M, because no one else has made anything like it, and especially, no one has made anything as straightforward and simple. It's just too bad that you have to pay so much to get so little. [The M10 Monochrom body costs $8,295. —Ed.]

"If camera manufacturers are reading this, they may want to take note that they may add many features, offering them all at no additional cost, but I'm willing to pay a lot more to have a lot fewer features.

"I would write more on this topic, but I have to get back to reading the 'FRIEDMAN ARCHIVES GUIDE TO SONY’S A7R IV' (750 pages) and the 'A7R4 Manual' (698 pages) and figure out how to configure this camera to do approximately what I want. It's a decent camera and can produce wonderful images, but it's like Adobe Photoshop: capable of nearly anything, but you'll never live long enough to find out how."

Mark Berman: "This would be my dream camera. If it is not feasible, how about the idea of implementing into a regular camera the option of turning off any menu item at user's will effectively making it a Super-Simple Digital Camera? In this case there will be some unused controls but I could live with this."

Tom Judd: "You're right. It would never sell, partly because it's your camera and not mine. How about this: let me painfully go through the options on my camera, setting it up as I like. Some custom settings would be nice. Then give me a way to turn off all of the menu settings. If I sold the camera, or changed my mind, I could reactivate the horrible menus."

Ben Shugart: "Model number: MJ-TOP-DMD-Mark II?"

Mike replies: Made me chuckle. At least I'm consistent!

mark r in colorado: "I would give some serious thought to buying the camera you describe, but I agree that it's never going to happen. It would take some guts for a camera company to go against the feature-laden trend, and I don't think there's that much corporate bravery in declining markets. Ideally, I would want it to be monochrome also, an even smaller niche!"

Ricardo Silva Cordeiro (partial comment): "Even if the current cameras' complexity doesn't bother me at all, I would sure be very interested in your simple camera just for the experience of shooting with it."

Geoff Wittig: "I'm happy to use a complex digital mirrorless ILC with endless menus (currently an X-T3) as my 'walking around camera' because all that complexity can be ignored. I just use those delightful mechanical controls (aperture ring on the lens, shutter speed dial, ISO dial) and pretend it's a film camera. I leave it set for raw capture. I never dive into the menus. I have never shot a single frame of video. It's like a car that can do 150 MPH; I'll never use that capability. As long as all that useless complexity is out of sight and out of mind, I guess it's okay if the marketers feel compelled to include it. Too bad we have to pay for it, though."

Bokeh Is Not a Stable Characteristic of a Lens

I ran across a nice example yesterday of the same lens exhibiting both "good" and "bad" bokeh. I was looking through pictures taken with the old Olympus OM-Zuiko 50mm ƒ/1.8, a fine little lens (identical in design to an earlier generation of Leica Summicron, by the way) which is widely available for very little dosh. Take a look first at this lovely portrait by Konstantin Konduktorov, taken with the old lens adapted to a digital DSLR. Although there isn't "lots" of bokeh evident in the picture (I've always considered that a bit of a harebrained concept anyway, cf. "The Dog's Nose"), the blur is very smooth and gentle and provides just enough contrast with the sharper image of the woman's face.

Konstantin Konduktorov, detail. Soft blur and not too much
of it, with good coherence.

In general the old Oly "nifty fifty" renders bokeh quite nicely, among its other attributes. Fifty millimeter lenses are problematic in terms of their rendering away of the plane of best focus; not very many of them are always free of ugliness. While we're at it, note how smooth and subdued the in-focus image is, too, in this picture, despite being very sharp.

It's a nice old lens, and although prices are going up—I bought one for $10 in the '90s—you can have one for anywhere from $30 for a beater to $100 for one "new in box" when you can find it. And you can have it in single-coated or multi-coated flavors, too*—Japanese lens mavens prefer single-coated lenses for B&W film work. Note that this lens isn't good wide open. It cleans up nicely by ƒ/2.8, and is as sharp as it gets by ƒ/5.6, but I'd never shoot it wide open unless I really needed the speed.

This "new in box" sample of the Olympus OM-Zuiko 50mm ƒ/1.8
sold for $99 on February 16th

Now on to the negative example. Here's another shot by the same photographer with the same type of lens—probably the same exact lens unless Konstantin owns two samples. That ugly mess at the top, where the bright light comes through the trees, is very distracting. I might have cropped that out. 

Konstantin Konduktorov, detail. Ouch! That's not getting out of the way
like good blur should.

I should note also that you can "fix" bad bokeh in Photoshop to a certain extent, by reducing contrast and adding Gaussian blur, blending it into the picture with a layer mask. This would "step back" a little better, and draw less attention away from the subject.

Without correction past whatever the photographer applied, though, the two pictures are a nice demonstration that "bokeh" is not a stable characteristic of any lens. It can change with aperture, focus distance, whether the blurred object are in front of or behind the plane of focus, how much blurriness there is, and, especially, with what's being imaged. So we can't really talk about "the" bokeh of a particular lens, except generally.

Mike

*Here's how to tell. Older Zuikos had a letter code for the number of elements in the lens that preceded the word "Zuiko" (then and now Olympus's name for its lenses) with a letter and a period. For instance, "F," being the sixth letter in the alphabet, denoted six elements. When you find one of these 50mm ƒ/1.8's marked "F.Zuiko," that's a single-coated lens. Lenses marked "MC" are always multi-coated. Some have neither marking, but when you see the words "made in Japan" on the ring around the outermost element, that's also a multi-coated lens. (Those were later lenses after they stopped single-coating altogether, and the letters "MC" denoting multi-coating were deemed to be superfluous and were dropped.)

A "made in Japan" sample

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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Featured Comments from:

Michael Fewster [responding to another commenter, not the post —Ed.] wrote: "It always amuses me when people talk about 'natural bokeh.' There is no natural bokeh. It is an effect created by the lens and varies from lens to lens. Bokeh created 'artificially' by software in computational images as done in some camera phones or with post-processing software is every bit as natural.

"Of course, we might find some bokeh more pleasing than other bokeh but that is a question of aesthetics, not 'naturalness.' Computationally applied bokeh is not artificial. It is every bit as valid as that created by a lens."

Andy F (replying to Michael) wrote: "I don't think I've ever seen people talking about 'natural' bokeh, but I've certainly seen mention of neutral bokeh—that is, blur discs with neither overly hard nor overly soft edges.

"Incidentally, there is natural bokeh—your eyes are simple lenses, after all, so by focusing on something close up, things far away go blurry, and you can examine your eyes' natural bokeh. Mine isn't that pretty to be honest."

Mike J. replies: I think we can use any adjective we like to apply to bokeh, since they're just descriptive words. So you could call it "businesslike" or "prissy" or "craven" if you imagine those words will communicate your meaning. When trying to describe something, the words you choose are up to you.

Behind that, though, is our understanding of how the overall image communicates. Anything about bokeh (and everything else, really) relates to the effect it has on how the viewer understands and responds to the picture. As an extreme counterexample, take those attempts at pleasant portraiture that happen to catch two animals humping in the out-of-focus background. The humor comes from the dissonance between the putative subject and what the photograph accidentally shows. Also from the fact that the photographer failed miserably to put the viewer's attention or emphasis where he or she intended to put it.

You'll notice that several times in the post I did apply value judgements, though. I said that bad bokeh doesn't "get out of the way" and that it draws attention away from the subject, when it should "step back." This acknowledges that the child on the log is the subject of the second picture, and you want the rest of the picture—the "setting"—to set that off. With many good photographs of all kinds, many different elements of the picture contribute to the overall impression it makes. I've always been of the opinion that "bad" bokeh isn't a technical matter; it's just a question of how the out-of-d.o.f. areas contribute to or distract from the overall impression. The softest and most technically appealing bokeh in the world doesn't matter if the dog's nose isn't in focus—the picture is spoiled anyway. (That dog could be the brother of my Lulu, by the way. And any dog person would know instantly that that poor fellow is uncomfortable!)

Matt Kallio (partial comment): "Just as there are different qualities of bokeh, there are qualities of sharp too. The portrait is so sharp it takes me aback— yet it is pleasing in a way that my own over-sharpened images are not. Maybe Mike is reveling in his new eyesight and seeing everything that sharp, so he doesn't notice it. In normal life I never see anyone that sharply, particularly from the distance we're at in Mr. Konduktorov's portrait. Every hair...."

Peter Wright: "How I enjoyed this post! In a world seemingly obsessed with world stock market decline, virus outbreaks, climate threat, and of course, certifiably insane politicians of every stripe, it is so refreshing to come to a site on the Internet where the topic of discussion is the out-of-focus characteristics of a popular lens from last century! And I do mean that with total sincerity. Of course we need to consider the above problems (that we probably have little control over), but we need to leave room for that class of 'issues' that pose no threat, but seem to feed the soul, if we think about them."

Mike replies: That's TOP—incisive, insightful, irrelevant.  :-)

Stephen Scharf: "Andrew of the 'Danae & Andrew' YouTube channel did a really nice video back in October, 2018 of how viewers felt about different photographs shot wide open with fast lenses, or somewhat stopped down, say, ƒ/4 to ƒ/5.6. The link is below, but the bottom line is that viewers are much more concerned with the sharpness of the subject of the photograph than how out of focus the background is, and many viewers prefer to see some of the background behind the subject that helps tell the story, or provides a sense of place or context. Of note is his comments, 'what is in focus is always more important than what is not in focus,' and 'the average person cannot tell the difference between photos taken at difference of couple of aperture stops, even when looking for differences....' Link here (very insightful survey)."

Mike replies: His conclusions line up with my beliefs very well. Of course, it's mainly because I grew up in the era of lenses that performed more poorly wide open than today's lenses tend to do, but I've always recommended stopping down two or three stops for best optical quality.

Fourth-Generation Fuji X-T4 Is a True Redesign

Best of both: new Fuji X-T4 combines desirable features of the
X-T3 and X-H1, with a new twist

Usually, new versions of existing cameras are "refreshes," improving (sometimes "improving," quote-unquote) a few features and changing a few things so they can draw a new round of reviews, and/or enable a price increase, and/or attract customers who have a desire to own the latest and greatest. (Thom says the new Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark III is being derisively referred to as the "E-M1 Mark II Mark II," which I think is  funny if a little mean, and Nikon fans were scornful of the paucity of changes on the D6.) Occasionally, however, the opposite happens: a new iteration of an existing camera model is actually a complete redesign hiding in a similar-looking body with series naming and similar controls. To name one, that was the case with the Olympus OM-2S, a film camera manufactured from 1984 to 1988. It featured mostly new innards inherited from the newer flagship camera in the range at the time, in a then-familiar older-style body, retaining the old name.

Although based on the successful and very popular X-T[x] series and retaining its naming heritage, the new Fuji X-T4 is also a completely redesigned camera. It should really be thought of as a different camera altogether.

The takeaways:

• The shape and weight have changed: it's bigger and heavier.
• It uses a new battery ($70) that has almost double the capacity of the old one (but no cross-compatibility with older cameras either). This has resulted in the add-on battery pack / vertical grip ($329) being quite large.
• All-new shutter is quieter and faster than on older cameras, with spectacularly improved durability: it is said to have double the expected life of the old one, to 300,000 actuations. That's deep into what used to be considered professional-camera territory.
• IBIS (in-body image stabilization) inherited from the high-tech, high-tolerance X-H1. But with even better specs.
• Flip-out articulated viewing screen, abandoning the two-way flip-up screen that Fuji had previously brought to near perfection.

Those are far from the only changes, but those are the biggies. The short take is that this is a fundamentally all-new camera that strongly resembles the X-T3 (and shares its sensor). It combines the X-T3 and X-H1 into one. 

Fuji X-T4 big rig. Photo courtesy B&H Photo.

The feature that betrays the new camera's fundamental identity is the flip-out screen. Accurately or not, the audience for cameras like this considers IBIS to be primarily a videocentric feature, so the X-T4 follows suit with the viewing-screen style most favored by video shooters. This will probably be the biggest thing to get used to for people whose muscle memory is grooved to older X-T[x] cameras.

Another change is that the Still/Movie switch has been moved to a collar underneath the shutter-speed dial:

It's changed by way of a front-facing tab.

Otherwise the controls should be broadly familiar to most X-T3 shooters.

The Fuji X-T4 has a price at introduction of $1,699 and will ship in the Spring. It's available in black or silver and can be pre-ordered now.

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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Featured Comments from:

Kenneth Tanaka: "I have been on a bit of an X-system buying craze this winter. I'd be embarrassed to give details here but I will say that I have owned the X-T3 since it was introduced. (I also admit that it's not my most-used X camera.) Having disclaimed all that, I have to admit that I just don't see the X-T4 as a good value at $1,700 today. Yes, Fuji appears to have made many changes and enhancements that their X-T3 customers have requested and I salute them for that. But it's a different market today. $1,700 will buy you a much more capable full-frame camera system today, especially on the lightly-used market. Hate to say it but it just might be a little late for the X-T4's features on an APS-C camera."

Edwin: "The X-T1 originated from an idea—a smallish footprint, real shutter speed dial, ISO and exposure compensation dials, nostalgic design (it was trying to distance itself from other DSLRs) that looked like old film cameras. The last point resulted in a camera body with a very shallow hand grip and other odd ergonomic issues. It was a hit for people who like a camera different from the then 'normal' DSLR.

"However, as Fujifilm tried to cater for the need of more people, they are adding features and capabilities to the camera while trying to maintain the original design theme. When people picked up the X-H1, they realized that that should be the real deal instead of the weird design theme of the X-T[x] series. Now Fujifilm listened, so they're putting a lot of X-H1 goodness to the X-T4, but in order to be true to the original design theme, they came up with this compromised body. Yes, it's like a newly designed camera, but not from the ground up! They should have ditched the 'old film camera' design and came up with something more than a 'huge upgrade.'"

Bill Tyler: "Like a few others, I disagree about the flip-out screen. I shoot a lot of macro, often of small living subjects in situ. A flip-out screen lets me, among other things, shoot for portrait (vertical) orientation without craning my neck into knots. The flip-up screen is fine if you never want to rotate your camera 90 degrees, but as soon as you do, it's nearly useless. Unfortunately, I also agree with whoever noted that the hinging mechanism seems more prone to breakage with the flip-out screen. Sigh."

Mark: "Well, they lost me as an upgrader with that screen redesign. I already skipped X-T3 because I didn't feel the improvements made it worthy compared with the X-T2. Now Fuji add something I really, really wanted, IBIS, but throw in a back screen redesign that is great for videographers but awful for stills photographers. The tilt screen in previous X-T[x] models allowed to use the camera unobtrusively for shooting from the waist. It was also really useful for overhead and ground level shots. The new design makes the camera more conspicuous, more awkward to hold, and less intuitive for framing the shot because the screen is now off-axis. Since I use the tilt screen in my X-T2 a lot, I'll have to pass on this one. That's two X-T[x] models I skip in a row. At some point I may come to realise I won't find in Fuji cameras what I need, which would be a real shame."

Mike replies: Speaking personally, the screen change also loses me. I just really don't care for that kind of design. I've owned several. The last one I liked was on my Olympus digicam from 2003, when I was experiencing a moveable screen of any kind for the first time.

Not only does it do away with what I thought was a perfect design—ideal functionality, ideal implementation—but in some ways it seems like a betrayal of existing users. The screen was an integral part of the X-T[x] series cameras' identity.

Of course, as a writer for others I'm happy for people like Bill who like the change. It's not all about me.  :-)

Robert Newcomb: "I just upgraded my Leica M4-P with a $250 CLA. No screen or battery or firmware to worry about and it’s probably good for another 20 years. 😀 "

Stephen Scharf: "A note of interest regarding the X-T4 release: Patrick at FujiRumors conducted a poll, asking X-T1, X-T2, X-T3 and X-H1 owners if they planned to upgrade to an X-T4. By statistically valid margins of approximately 2:1, X-T1 and X-T2 owners do plan to upgrade to the X-T4. Conversely, by margins of approximately 2:1, X-T3 and X-H1 owners do not plan to upgrade to the X-T4. Looks like we're at the point where most end-users can skip generations. This of course, will significantly impact sales over the longer term."

Mark Myers: "Instead of offering silver and black bodies, why not offer versions in the 3 way tilt and articulating styles to suit the user's needs?"

Mike replies: This makes great sense, and I've always wondered why cameramakers don't go for it. I suppose because it compounds the difficulties of the supply pipeline and retailer's stocks, and doesn't immediately or obviously result in more income. Speaking of simpler cameras, I've always thought camera makers should offer de-contented versions of their higher-end cameras. They used to; the Spotmatic SP500 was one; the Leica R4s and Bronica SQ-B were decontented versions of the R4 and SQ-Ai that now sell for more than the more feature-laden versions. 

Blog Note: Gratitude is the Attitude (OT)

Tom Lovell (1909–1997), Surrender at Appomattox.
Painting commissioned by National Geographic in 1965.

It's my birthday. (George Harrison's too, so go listen to "It's All Too Much." One of the greatest of all psychedelic-era songs, if you ask me, not just of the Beatles' efforts in that genre).

Birthdays, to me, are like Halloween trick-or-treating...great and memorable fun when you're little, and then you try to hang on to the magic until you're maybe fifteen, when you're past the right age for it and it's starting to get a little, let's say, awkward. You're too cool for a costume and your voice is breaking, if you're a guy, and if you're a girl you don't even want to be a ballerina or a princess any more, and you're almost as tall as an adult and...well, all right, kid, here's your candy. But grow up. You don't get to go backwards.

After that, birthdays make nice excuses for family get-togethers and a good reason to connect with friends you like and don't see much, but it's not really necessary that they be all about the person who's turning whatever double-digit age. For many of us, many birthdays go by as just another day, and that's okay. They're just mileposts on the stretch of highway we get to travel, whether it's fifty or seventy or ninety miles long.

That's one of the best things about birthdays now. I know my stretch of highway gets to be at least this long! Increasingly, every year that passes is a little tiny...victory. At 63, it's worthwhile for me to remember that this age was the average life expectancy for American males in 1944, which was just a few blinks ago in galactic time. Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant, who both survived the Civil War, each died at 63. And, save one eye-drop every morning, I don't even have to take any medications. Almost no matter what event you're considering, you can look at it with gratitude if you try. (Isn't it weird that no one thought to have a photographer present at the surrender at Appomattox?)

I don't think time is linear anyway. Scientists rationally space years as if they're all equidistant regular points on a graph line, but I look at it this way: years feel like whatever percentage of your life they are. They're 1/10th of your life when you're ten, then eventually 1/30th, then 1/60th and so on. So this past year was 1/63rd of my life and it cracked past pretty quick. Months feel almost like weeks used to. I don't worry any more about having to wait for things, for instance—time passes fast, and whatever you're waiting for will be along. Going to a concert next month? That day will arrive before you know it. Waiting for a lens from Japan? No worries, just keep living your life and voilà, it'll be at the door.

And some periods of your life are full of intense living, and others are place-holders, like the filler around the hits on a great old vinyl album. In 1976–78 I lived as much life as I have in other periods of my life that lasted a decade, by the clock. 1993, when my son was born, packed in many years' worth of drama.

Every day
This isn't a bad time of my life. I wake up every morning and pray, which is an odd thing for a former rationalist materialist atheist to be doing, but it makes me feel better. The longer I do it, the more of my morning prayer is taken up with thoughts of, and blessings for, others—I also pray every day to be relieved of the bondage of self, so what better way than to be praying for other people? I had a salad for breakfast today, and I won't eat after three, just like every other day. I have a standing date to play pool at the bowling alley this evening, before my meeting.

And gifts? well, I'm blessed—I get gifts intermittently throughout the year. I don't just get to talk to my son on my birthday, but all through the year. I wrote about my new glasses and my repaired eye the other day. What's a great picture but a gift, for that matter? It's like we're fishing and we catch one. I had two runouts in one day the other day (in the game of 8-ball, a runout is when you sink all seven balls of one set, stripes or solids, plus the eight ball, in one turn). I've never done that twice in one day before; that was a nice gift. A reader named Fred Morrison, out of the blue, sent me a wonderful care package of old equipment he doesn't need any more. He thought I might like some of it. And I do. It's wonderful, and it might even change my life. This past year a reader named Jay Burleson gave me one of the nicest presents I've ever gotten. And I have 815 Patreon supporters! How awesome is that? (Thanks to every one of you.) I have readers, who care enough to read what I write. That's a gift right there, for someone who calls himself (somewhat egotistically) "a writer." It's more than Emily Dickinson or Franz Kafka had.

No, I'm grateful every day. Gratitude is the attitude that helps you be happy.

Anyway, I'm going to take the day off. My brother's family and I used to have what we called "sushi blowouts" for my son's and my February birthdays, so, in honor of them, I'm going to drive to Corning and ceremonially indulge in a little animal protein in the form of bits of raw fish and other ingredients cunningly crafted into delicacies. Sybaritic and self-indulgent, God knows, but hey, today's a milepost on my stretch of highway, so I'm going to rationalize and indulge.

Back tomorrow, same as always.

Mike
(Thanks to Fred, Jay, the 815, and all my supporters, commenters, and readers)

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Henning Wulff: "Have a great day, and even more so, a happy, healthy and satisfying next year. And remember: You're now too old to die young. When you think about the things you can/might/should be grateful for, you find that there are an increasing number of things to be grateful for as you go on. An additional reward for being grateful. It also tends to keep you from being that guy who yells 'Keep off my lawn!' at kids."

Robert Stahl: "Wonderful article, Mike! One of my favorite quotes on gratitude is by the 13th Century German mystic Meister Eckhart: 'If the only prayer you ever say in your entire life is thank you, it will be enough.'"

Marten Collins: "A happy birthday old fruit, there is something rather pleasant about getting older! Seen it before, eaten it before, heard the promises before and got over it before. Enjoy."

The Very Modest Film Commitment

When I asked the question about film the other day, I was stung a bit by my friend Jack's comment: "I predict you will walk away from it in days if not weeks, just like you did with your full plate experiment."

Ouch, but okay. Fair's fair. I have a sordid history of "bailure." (That's a word I made up for a failure that involves bailing out...you know, like marriages that end within weeks. Bailure!) I shot a few pictures with the full-plate camera (the "Single Use Device"—search if you want a refresher) and I already knew enough...I realized it wasn't going to be my future.

It's going to be a little more difficult to do that with this experiment, but what I've decided to commit to is...no drum roll please...twenty rolls. Will I know by then if it's something that scratches the itch? That cures what ails me? Don't know, but at least that's a reasonable, achievable goal, a not-very-ambitious ambition I can hope to complete.

Twenty rolls in a month is a bit optimistic—that's one and a half days per roll—so I'm going to give myself three months to complete the objective. We'll check back in with this topic by May 25th.

And I really hope I will have avoided bailure, because am I ever gonna get some kinda #$@% if I fail.

Mike

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Not THAT Ross Cameron: "LOL, in the theoretical and highly unlikely event of bailure, I dare say all would be forgiven if there were a TOP article outlining it all written with humour, a touch of nostalgia and heartfelt mea culpa. Although TOP readers would reserve the right to a good ribbing, and maybe one I-told-you-so, but anymore than that would be unsporting. Hope you have fun!"

Nigel: "Mike, As one of your Patreons, I am always delighted by whatever you do. It's a license for you to take whatever tangents, go down every zig or zag, write about pool, food, post controversial cartoons, really, whatever. You won't get shite from this corner if you don't make a self-set target."

Clifford Gwinn: "I bottomed out with digital and needed a reboot so I turned to film. I shoot 35mm, medium format and digital at any time and in no particular order. I also started using my iPhone more. Instead of passing judgements and judging quality, I realized I just like making images. Each tool has its “'itness' and I enjoy that. I try to maintain a consistent look with moderate success. It is all good because foremost, I like making images and different tools keeps me fresh. Mike, load the film and enjoy. Never say I could have shot this on film or digital. Every image has its own merit."

Alex Mercado: "'Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.' —Samuel Beckett. Sometimes taking a step backward can be useful for understanding how far one has gone forward from what is remembered a classical or romantic time. You’ll likely revert to an older workflow, but rethink parts of it with a modern bias, as well as question some of your current digital train of thought. I think with a project like this, bailure would not be a failure in a detrimental sense; you will have only failed better."

Dogman: "If I were a betting man, I would wager the majority of that brick of film will still be intact come May 25."

Andrew Lamb: "Not so modest. Twenty rolls by 25th May is a steep target, IMHO. If I was on a film kick, I certainly wouldn't have shot 20 rolls in that time. Why bother with an arbitrary date? One polite suggestion is that you shoot twenty rolls, without a deadline, and see you how feel at the end of the project."

Kirk Decker: "When I started shooting film again, after a four- or five-year absence, the thing that surprised me the most is that it was not at all like it was when I shot film on a daily basis. The casualness, and comfort, of photographing hundreds of weddings and portraits on film without instant feedback was gone, replaced by a powerful uncertainty as to what was actually being recorded by the camera. For a while I took a digital camera with me to check exposure and composition. (Steve McCurry did the same thing when he shot the last roll of Kodachrome.) I made the same mechanical mistakes I had made as a kid when I was learning how to use a camera—shot two hours worth of macro flowers in a light rain without making sure the film was engaged in the take-up spool—popped a camera back open with film still inside. That said, I enjoy shooting film. I enjoy the Miata like feel of a Hasselblad or an F2 in my hand. Film isn't some magic thing; it is not instant art. But, for me, the act, itself, of shooting film, the way it has changed how I experience imagemaking, has been an artistic experience on a personal level."

David Dyer-Bennet: "I rather like your coinage 'bailure' (the word, I mean; not so fond of the actual thing it describes!).

It sounds to me like you're somewhat struggling with your ideas of yourself as a photographer. That's exactly the sort of place where trying something can be highly informative. And, if you bail after a dozen rolls and know something important you didn't know at the start, it's not a failure. (As a blogger and rather good writer, your personal struggle here can be good pay copy, of course; you pretty clearly know that.)

"Apologies if I've told this story before. In 2001, I'd been bothered by going through contact sheets of portrait shoots and finding sequences of very similar expressions and poses; with little point to the multiple shots. This was for me still the film era, so wasting shots that way was especially annoying. So I set myself a project; I took the studio lighting and backdrop to a party being held in a couple of hotel suites by my local SF club, and the 4x5 camera, and set myself the task of shooting portraits of a bunch of my friends using only one film-holder each (two sheets, two shots). The results were productive; some portraits I thought were actually good, plus no pairs of sheets that were nearly identical  :-) . I was reasonably effective directing the subjects, and taking my time (my basic photographic habits are documentary; directing things like that is not what I mostly do). I even think I've benefited some in my work since then.

"So yeah, sometimes a weird experiment, or trying something different, can help you get over, under, around, or through a block in your work."

Sunday Support Group: So Nice to See

I yam what I yam and dat's all what I yam.

—Popeye the Sailor Man, my favorite
cartoon character when I was five

Followup on the film question: I've finally gotten up to date with all the comments from Thursday. That took a while—not because there were so many, but because there were so many good ones. Thank you for all the thoughtful and interesting responses. I'm sure I got more out of that post than anyone else did!

I agree with the commenters who suggested that it might be a matter of printmaking (I don't currently print black-and-white). As the issue has sorted out in my mind, I've provisionally decided that it comes down to whether I want to a.) make B&W prints the old fashioned way, with an enlarger, or b.) commit to mastering B&W digital printing. I don't want to do both. (Well, maybe when I retire. But "my retirement plan is to keep working.")

I need to let it percolate some more in my brain. In the meantime, I accept the advice I got that getting out and shooting is critical at this point. I need that input. Recall the Mark L. Power Principle: "Think, Shoot, Think." That is, you first conceptualize your working method and your ideas or project (think); then get out with the camera in your hand and engage with the world, guided by your ideas (shoot); then appraise your results and edit and redact and shape the work you actually got (think again). Rinse and repeat.

Mindless random shooting alone doesn't work. But "think think" all by itself doesn't work either.

Thank you for your support: I only make a direct appeal for support once in a while. My birthday is coming up, so here goes. Skip this part if you like. No, actually, please don't.

I guess we all go through life with the aspiration or ambition to be someone else, or to be ourselves, only better. But we are what we are. I'll never write novels. (Every kid should want to be an athlete or a dancer when they're young, so they can learn how to give up unrealistic ambitions. It's good practice for later.) What I do is serve photographers and photography enthusiasts by writing for you, attempting to entertain or inform or enlighten you or at least be thought-provoking. That's who I get to be. In 2005 my ambition was to write something almost every day for one whole year, and that ambition seemed preposterous, far-fetched, highly unlikely—as unrealistic as many of my other idealistic pie-in-the-sky notions. And I've been doing it ever since. Not too shabby! I've written the equivalent in word count of 15 full-length novels here since 2005, and published countless wonderful comments from you and your fellow readers. That's a lot of words in virtual ink on screens. It requires a certain doggedness from me, and an interactive, responsive audience in you.

If you'd like to support me and these efforts, you can start a recurring donation through Patreon, or increase the amount of your current donation. Would you consider the price of a Starbucks coffee every month, or a magazine subscription, or a pack of cigarettes a day? That would be extremely kind of you. This whole shebang would sink like a big rock without you!

Me. New glasses again. February 2020.

Sight and other miracles: I got a birthday present!

I'm excited. My newest glasses just arrived—in time for my birthday (number 63), so I've decided they're a birthday present. They're real old-fashioned glass; I guess my prescription is too wacky for Trivex. My old prescription from six and a half months ago had been drifting so far from accurate that I didn't know whether to leave my computer glasses on while I worked or take them off. Either seemed uncomfortable, but in different ways, so I would continually take them off and put them back on all day long. My one eye has continued to improve (and the other has continued to deteriorate) since I got those last August.

These new ones are AMAZING. At reading distances everything snaps into perfect crispness! I can see each pixel on my monitor. Reading an actual printed book is a joy. It's the clearest and cleanest and sharpest I have seen the world in many a year. 'S wonderful.

There's a small fly in the ointment I guess...suddenly everything rectangular is a trapezoid. And not subtly, either, but emphatically enlarged at the right side. It will be interesting to see if that goes away as my brain adapts to it.

But (as long as I'm deploying old aphorisms) I shouldn't look a gift horse in the mouth. Not only do I no longer need glasses for driving, even at night, but with my right eye, my surgically fixed eye, I can see the beautiful optical viewfinder of the old-fashioned Contax RTS II perfectly with no glasses and no correction. How lucky is that, to have young eyes as I'm getting old?

Very lucky. And I'm very grateful, too—to God, science, Obamacare, Dr. Holly Hindman MD MPH, the deceased person whose cornea I get to use (God bless your soul, anonymous friend), good fortune, all of you who have supported my writing and this site...and anything else that might have played a part.

It's so nice to see.

Mike

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Featured Comments from:

Dave Hodson: "I wonder if digital killed the art of photography. Must be something about the age. I hit a similar funk at 65 (I'm 69 now). I still have my digital stuff but managed to scrape together a darkroom and some large and medium format film cameras. Turns out I like learning new (old?) processes a lot more than actually taking photos and it didn't take long to discover alternative processes like kallitypes and salt prints, glass plate negatives, homemade paper and film, pinhole cameras...there's no end of re-discovery and every day's a new gem. Amazing what we used to be able to do and how many people are out there doing much of the same. I don't think I have the time left to master any of this but I'm happy to get at least to a functioning level. Good luck with whatever you do."

Bruce McL: "I think most people here want to see you deeply committed to your own photography, not just to photography in general. For you to write about photography without writing about what you are doing in photography is not enough, in my opinion. If what you really want to do is to shoot with an Instax SQ6 Taylor Swift Edition camera, then embrace it and tell us about it."

Clay: "I've been thinking about this dilemma for a while, and to me it boils down to analyzing the image-making sequence and determining which part brings you the most satisfaction. In my specific case, I decided that I really liked to deep dive into the end-product of the print. More specifically, I love to make ink and paper photogravure prints with polymer plates. So I have attempted to streamline all the intervening parts of the imaging chain to allow me to maximize the time I spend either making images or printing them on a press. From there it was a no-brainer to decide to go almost all-digital at the front end since it shortens the shoot-instantiate-evaluate-shoot-again cycle and keeps the inevitable deceleration from occurring quite as rapidly as it might if I were bogged down in intermediate steps that bring no joy."

Happy Birthday Photoshop, and Thank You 'Star Wars'?

Just as I've learned that I might finally have to leave Photoshop for good after 26 years, because Apple (not Adobe!) broke my CS6, I learned that yesterday (well, they think) was Photoshop's 30th Birthday. As near as can be reconstructed, Photoshop 1.0 began shipping on February 19th, 1990.

Here's a very nice article about it, by Jeff Schewe. It even includes a 7-minute demo of PS 1 by Jeff! Fun stuff.

Mike
(Thanks to Jeffrey Schimberg)

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Blog Note: Adobe Don't Take My CS6 Away (Sung to the Tune of 'Kodachrome')

Quick software question, while I'm working on all the comments from yesterday: Is Catalina going to break my CS6? The only "Legacy Software" I have that's 32-bit is all Adobe, and includes several things I don't recognize at all as well as something called "CS6 Service Manager.app."

I get grumpy about stuff like this...(let me do my work and leave me alone!), but it was really the same way in darkroom days. Manufacturers wouldn't tell you what was in their proprietary chemicals (an amateur chemist named Patrick Dignan who wrote for Darkroom Techniques was renowned for "reverse engineering"—reverse formulating?—popular proprietary formulas), and I recall that when the supply of Oriental Seagull was interrupted—Seagull was a cold-toned graded Japanese photo paper prized by many printmakers—a number of veteran photographer/printmakers were tearing their hair out. Curiously, I can't recall now what caused the interruption, but the American importer got so desperate that he flew to Japan, stuffed as many suitcases as he could with boxes of paper, and brought it back to the United States as personal luggage on the plane! (I should have written down more of such "inside stories" when I remembered them better.) Eventually the supply resumed and you can still buy Oriental papers here today, but many longtime devotees had switched to new papers by the time the supply of imported Seagull resumed.

Anyway, if anyone could answer my Adobe question or point me to the answer, I'd be grateful. My Nik plugins are already broken. (If you can believe it, one reason I decided to get into photography in the first place was that it had nothing to do with computers, because I knew I have no aptitude for computer stuff. Sheesh.)

Back to comment moderation.

—Mike the Computer Non-Geek

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Vince: "Technically, no one broke your CS6. It still works perfectly well, and will continue to work perfectly well, on Mojave and prior. It might even continue to work on Catalina; you just can't install it on Catalina. (Although I thought PS6 came in both 32- and 64-bit? Is it the installer that's 32-bit, like LR?) But if you want to blame someone, Adobe is the one to choose. Apple has been saying for years that 32-bit was going away, and Adobe decided to not go full 64-bit until they had their subscription hooks into those willing to pay the subscription. Try the free trial of Affinity Photo. It will do most of what most people need from Photoshop, and it's only $50 if you decide to keep it."

Dalvorius: "I made the choice to stay with 10.14.4 on my iMac. I like my software and much of it won't run in 64 bit. To check what you'll lose, go to About This Mac —> System Report. Then scroll down and click on Applications. Once it opens mine shows a list of all apps with a column for 64 bit. The 'no' apps are the ones that will stop working should you upgrade."

Open Mike: To Be Or Not To Be

["Open Mike" is the Editorial Page of TOP, wherein Yr. Hmbl. Ed. is sometimes detectably more self-indulgent than usual. It appears on Wednesdays, which I can say because today is Wednesday.]

 

"Retire from what?"

—Willie Nelson, when asked by Paul
McCartney if he ever intends to retire

I had a big, fat, beautiful post all ready to go this morning, two hours' work, and I went off to fix my breakfast...and came back to find myself staring at a blank page. Once the cat's away, the mice will play: acting on its own, my computer restarted itself to install an update. I've gotten lax about saving (again!) because TypePad has an automated "Restore Content" feature now. But the Restore Content feature didn't work through the restart.

That's what it's like to work on computers. "God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change...." Maybe it was a sign from the heavens that the post should have been shorter and sweeter. I'll leave out the digressions this time.

I really just what to get your opinion on something I'm struggling with (again):

Do you think it would be bad if I went back to shooting film?

Obviously I can do whatever I want to as a private individual. But I'm not a private individual where this is concerned. I make my livelihood on TOP, and I don't want to hasten my own irrelevance. (That will happen on its own anyway*.) I'm a writer, not a photographer, and I can do a lot of my work without my personal photography having any effect on the writing one way or the other. On the other hand, though, the way I practice photography can't help but sneak into the blog.

To be honest, which I try to do even if it makes me look bad, my own photography has been in the doldrums these past few years. Apart from wandering around testing cameras or lenses or recording the various happenings in my literal backyard (like this or this), I haven't been doing a whole lot of anything.

But I don't want to indulge in nostalgia and I don't want to become an antiquarian. Readers over the years have urged me to engage with whatever was new and upcoming at various times: Flickr, smartphones, Instax, Facebook, Lightroom, Instagram, video, whatever it might be. I try. But for better or worse, I love B&W and I love prints made with light. Looking at a lot of those old Magnum prints yesterday just made me pine for home.

I really just want some way to get the endorphins firing again. If you're a car nut or a music nut, then cars or music is what gets your juices flowing. Pursuing whatever grabs you creates fuel and gives you energy. Where creativity is concerned, that energy is how you'll know you're on a good track or not. I was talking to Keith Davis a while back (he's another person who likes photographs that are objects), and I heard myself saying to him the odd words, "...I kind of miss photography." I'm not out of it, at all, and yet still, it seems, I'm struggling to find a way back in. How weird is that? But we do only have one life, and time, despite rumors among the young to the contrary, is short. We have to strike some balance between supporting the heart and supporting the hearth.

What I'm worried about is that people will say, "Sure, do whatever you want," while thinking, ...and I'll just go somewhere else to get my daily photography fix. Could be bad for you and hence for TOP. Or, this could be just another passing phase (or faze, as Internet would spell it). I do get these flareups periodically.

What's your slant on such thoughts?

Mike
(Thanks to Fred Morrison)

*Except to my favorite writer, George Orwell, who was prescient.

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Edward Taylor: "I will not stop visiting T.O.P. if you start shooting film. I was a quick adopter of digital photography, but having been a professional photographer in the film era, I too thought it would be fun to shoot film again. I especially liked film cameras. I used Canon F-1's as a pro, and still had a new one in a box. (New 45 years ago).

"Anyway, I did it. I went back to film. Basically my efforts only ruined my memories of film. Everything about the experience was a pain in the neck and not very much fun.

"But beyond that, after all that effort, the results are so inferior to modern digital images that God forbid if I got an image I loved and wanted to do anything with it. Even the better images from a technical point of view would have been considered complete failures if taken with even an average digital camera. Film is simply an overwhelmingly inferior technology. As soon as people stop fondly remembering the film days with rose-colored glasses, no one will argue that film is a reasonable alternative.

"I know I will get a lot of blowback for this comment—maybe even from you, Mike— but I always tell my friends who say they love the look of film to go and look at photos of JFK taken with the best film cameras of the time by pros, and see if they can find any with technical quality that would be acceptable to any digital photographer today.

"If you look at some of the greats, part of their success is based on how amazing their work was, considering the limitations of film photography. Now, you can go on Instagram and if you spend enough time, you'll find amazing digital works routinely.

"Film may work well in some very limited circumstances, but its use will greatly reduce your options and your ability to get that decisive image."

Ms. Jen: "Your writing on this blog is what encouraged me to pick film photography back up in 2015 after a 15+ year hiatus.

"You wrote about the one camera, one lens, one print per day challenge for the digital age in Nov. or Dec. 2014. In that same post, you wrote how you used to do it with one camera, one lens, one film and at least one photo per day.

"My brain lit up with joy at the idea of using film again. I had/have a lovely Nikon FM3a with a 50mm ƒ/1.8 lens that was sitting my in closet and with that blog post, I trotted over to Samy's Camera in Santa Ana to see what film was available.

"I altered your challenge a bit and shot a new roll of different film for each month. It took me until 2017 to work through all of the 35mm films still available at Samy's and B&H.

"And I am still shooting film along with my camera phone and my DSLR. I am very excited to announce that I just got four rolls of Film Ferrania P30 in the mail and can't wait to finish my current roll of Ilford so that I can start.

"As for your current quandary, be it digital, phone, or film—it is photography. Follow your joy, write about what is exciting and we will still find things in your posts to challenge or excite us."

Bob (partial comment): "Follow your joy, indeed. As for the loyalty of your readers, I think you needn't worry. If there is one thing I have happily learned in my time here, it is that you cannot be depended upon to write on one topic forever! Like the old adage about Chicago weather: 'If you don't like it, wait, it will change.'"

MarkB: "I should send you a t-shirt that says 'Life is short: shoot film and listen to jazz.' I'm sure one exists, given the hipsters I saw in NYC."

Cliff M (partial comment): "I think digital was a huge advance in color photography, but an impediment to good B&W."

Sroyan: "I would unreservedly, unabashedly encourage you to return to film, if that's what you feel like doing. Speaking for myself, far from going elsewhere, I'd read TOP with even greater enthusiasm than I do now. I say this for two reasons.

"First, while I am deeply interested in photography as art regardless of how it was produced (digital, film, wet plate...), technology-wise I am far more interested in film cameras—especially film cameras from the 1950s to 1980s—than in digital cameras. I have a Nikon D5200 which I bought in 2012 and have never felt any serious desire to upgrade, while I am constantly on the lookout for new (old) cameras to try—borrowing from friends or older relatives or using eBay as a 'camera library.' I take more photos on film cameras (not counting phone pics), not because I think analogue is somehow superior, but simply because I enjoy it more. I am also more interested in developing and printing than in, say, Photoshop or Instagram. (I'm not above posting scanned negatives inverted in Photoshop on Instagram, but I see them as tools; like with digital cameras, I have no emotional bond.) As a millennial who shot film as a kid in the early 2000s, went digital and then came back to film about 10 years ago (and discovered analogue printing less than two years ago), I find that the occasional TOP posts about vintage cameras and lenses, darkroom techniques, etc. are an invaluable source of information and inspiration—much more than, say, YouTube tutorials on 'Split-Grade Print Like a Boss' (I just invented the title, I'm not defaming anyone), posted by someone who is as new to it as I am.

"Second—and this may be connected to my aforementioned indifference to the latest digital whatsit—I personally read TOP mainly because I enjoy your writing and your perspective on the world of photography (and the world in general), not to find out, to use a recent example, what the Nikon D6 offers that the D5 doesn't (I read that post with interest too, but it was the bit about the F series cameras that held my attention). And I think when you write about something you're more interested in—which at the moment may be film photography?—that enthusiasm comes through in your writing, which can only make it more (even more!) engaging."

Pepperberry Farm: "It could be a phase...or not. No real way to tell unless you work that out.... I tried going back to film a year or so ago—and immediately was reminded why I didn't miss film at all.... I think most of us will stick around for your film faze...."

Matthew: "Would I just go somewhere else to get my daily photography fix? Quite the opposite, possibly. At least where I am film is increasingly popular with the younger photographers, and despite not being one of them I too am heading that direction as well. For example, I’m back to using the Zeiss Ikon rangefinder and 35mm ƒ/2 lens that I once read about here. Returning to occasionally discussing film here might keep TOP in regular rotation alongside Emulsive, 33mmc, and other places that have become my go-to resources."

Zack Schindler: "Try this to get reinspired. Keep a digital or film camera and tripod in your car. You might be surprised how often you will find something to shoot during your drives.

"For instance I was driving home from work one day and heard on the local AM news station that there was a factory fire just north of my home. Since I keep a camera in my car I drove to the fire and got this shot which I am proud of."

Ben Rosengart: "I have little interest in shooting film myself, but finding an exact mirror of myself is not what draws me to your writing. My advice to you, for your sake as a photographer and mine as a reader, is to do whatever makes you feel inspired to work."

robert e: " Two cents worth from a nobody who dabbles in both film and digital: .01) For me, TOP's unique mojo, despite all the delightful geekery, is less about specific gear, process, or social or market environment as it is about how The Photographer interacts with those specifics to realize her/his work/art/vision. Because what's revealed in that story transcends the specifics and gets at the ineffables of the art and craft, and of living, too. Film, digital, print, screen, hybrid...that's all McGuffin, no matter how weedy and fascinating in themselves. .02) For some reason, film has become a medium for young artists and hobbyists winging it and figuring things out for themselves, which is all well and good, but I feel like the Internet is crying out for some grizzled veteran/guru types to dust off their chops and show the kids just how good it can get (and share the wisdom).

"The kids might teach them something, too."

Chip McDaniel: "Your blog is not as gear-oriented as many. You engage with aspects of photography that go way beyond gear. I think that rather than diminish your blog or channeling it into a nostalgic dead end, it would enrich your content, if shooting film refired your passion for seeing and making photos. That will carry over into the broader photographic content of the blog. Maybe it will even improve your pool game too ;-) One caveat on these thoughts: I was originally a film shooter in pre-digital days, went 100% digital for awhile and am now back to 90% film. So I am not objective about film."

Rod S.: "Mike, please go back and shoot film. It's obvious to me that your photography has been in the doldrums these past few years. It shows.

"We all need an emphasis. In our lives, it allows us to get things done. In the public arena, it allows others to place us; to categorize us. It's good marketing. Think Michael Reichmann. His readers could categorize him. It worked. Where, in what box, do you want your readers and potential readers to place you?

"Currently, we (your readers) know you as the past magazine editor and teacher who once shot and developed lots of film and made lots of photographs but then abruptly gave it all up and confines himself with difficulty to digital photography, but longs for great black-and-white prints. It doesn't seem to make sense.

"Then there’s the matter of the way you’ve been thinking about it: Back to film? Why not on to film?

"Yes, of course, for you it will be going back, but it isn’t for a whole lot of younger readers and potential readers. They want to try film, or having tried it and saw something, want to get better at it. You might see it as an opportunity. It's just the blockage you have in your mind. You said it yourself: 'I don't want to indulge in nostalgia and I don't want to become an antiquarian.' Surely the best way forward for a person of your enviable print-making experience is to pick the best tool for the particular job at hand. Perfectly good and enjoyable tools, techniques and results don’t have to be tossed away for fear that others will see you as engaging in nostalgia.

"Like many people, men particularly, you delight in gadgets. Cars, hi-fi gear, coffee machines, and more. So, feel free to do your thing of shooting film and making prints and talking about it, and mix in articles about the new gadgets, such as new cameras, that delight you.

"The difference will be that your thirst for substance will be quenched and that will inspire you in all sorts of ways. Your readers will be able to categorize you. Your emphasis will make sense. And that will bring opportunities to inform new readers seeking practical help and insights."

Xf Mj: "Mike—your post is timely. Today I came home to find the new Jeff Parker album, as a vinyl LP, on my doorstep. With subdued delight, I unwrapped the thing, pulled out the record and in its sleeve, unsleeved it, and cued it up on my '70s Pioneer turntable that still works just fine and sounds good enough, and mostly warm to my not-so-precisely-discerning ears. I then poured myself a beer, and sat listening to it for 20 or so minutes, and in a state of familiar-but-new bliss. When the right time came, I got up, flipped the record in that ritualistic way many of us know, and got it going for side B. I poured the second half of my beer in my glass. I sat down, doing whatever, reading whatever, and of course experienced about 20 more minutes of a calm and steady feeling of satisfaction and bliss.

"I've downloaded, band-camped, Spotified, iTunes'd, and YouTubed around for many years now. There are charms to instant access, sure. But this was like seeing an old friend, staring them in the eye for a quick moment, and then jumping right in to an easy conversation about how they've been, and learning everything's just fine, all things considered. Maybe worse for the wear, maybe doing better, but just like old times. In short: shooting film sounds good to me."

PhotoDes (partial comment): "I go a different direction during the gray winter months. As dull as it is reputed to be, I refresh my enthusiasm with still life / table-top photography. Many artists have produced time-honored still life works and, as a photographer, I find it challenges me to improve my understanding of lighting, color, and composition."

Victor Bloomfield: "What draws me to photography is its engagement with the world around us, its uniqueness as an art form that ordinary people like me can practice, the stories that it can tell, the history that it conveys. I read your column each day because you, more and better than anyone else, communicate these various facets of the culture of photography. Whether you shoot film or digital is totally beside the point."

Tom Devlin: "Mike, I'll tell you what I miss about film. Absolutely nothing."

Malcolm Myers: "I still enjoy film photography so I'm fine with you writing about it."

James Chinn: "I find a good road trip or workshop revives my creativity and excitement for photography."

Bill Tyler: "Of course use film if that's what you love. It won't make a bit of difference to my interest in reading what you write. The choice of film or digital is entirely secondary to the core of photography—making images. There are plenty of sites I can visit that delve into the minutiae of digital devices, as though making images was about nothing but technology and getting the last pixel of resolution out of a piece of silicon. None of that has anything to do with what makes an image good or bad, or whether the image will resonate with a viewer. And that second part is a large part of what you write about, and what makes TOP worth reading. Use film, or make Daguerreotypes, if you like, just keep writing.

"If you do go with Daguerreotypes, make sure you have a good fume hood to keep the mercury vapors away from your lungs."

Joe: "I readily see that my digital images are so much better than film. But I have more fun with film. When I take out my Super Graphic, and load up some film for a shot I feel so much better. Or taking any of my old camera collection out for a drive. lately its been the Rollei 35s, and the Super Ikonta loaded with Portra 160. I develop all my own B&W and then print some of the keepers. Frankly, working on a digital image in Lightroom doesn't give me the same satisfaction.

"Many great photos of yesteryear were great because of content, not because they were a perfect image. So I don't stress about the sharpness, or color, or tone. I want an image that is interesting to look at."

Three Things That Are Good to Look At

'What you lookin' at?'
Inge Morath, A Llama in Times Square, New York, 1957 ($2,000)

1. Llamas. Magnum is having a sale of New York prints by its members that includes Inge Morath's "A Llama in Times Square." The prints are signed and editioned, signed, or estate stamped, and prices range from $1,250 to $15,000. Included are some very famous pictures indeed: Dennis Stock's iconic (I use the word advisedly!) portrait of James Dean in the rain, Elliott Erwitt's fabulous picture of the man/bulldog (a personal fave), Leonard Freed's wonderful photo of the black kids playing near the fire hydrant, Elliott Landy's photos of Jimi Hendrix, Thomas Hoepker's portraits of Andy Warhol and Keith Haring, Eve Arnold's photo of Marilyn Monroe reading James Joyce's Ulysses. And more.

A lot of the lesser-known ones are good to look at too—car buffs will love Erich Hartmann's George Washington Bridge picture. You could hardly put that together for a big-budget movie today! (Disclosure: Erich's son Nick is a good friend of mine, although we live too far apart now to meet regularly for lunch like we used to.)

Really fun to look at. I already knew many of these pictures, of course, but re-acquaintance is fun and I had a blast immersing myself in these for a couple of hours.

2. Cheap old lenses on expensive new cameras. Jonas Rask had a loopy idea. Well, what would you do if you had a medium-format Fuji GFX50s to hand? Probably not what Jonas did. He discovered that you can put many normal and longer 35mm film camera lenses on the mirrorless digital camera with the larger sensor and the image circles will still cover (sometimes with some correction, but still). So he got the bug for adapting old Minolta Rokkor-X film lenses to his big Fuji.

I'd wager not many photographers are looking to put things like $55 lenses on $5,500 cameras, but the results are wonderful and speak for themselves.

It helps that Jonas is one of the few "testers" whose "test shots" I genuinely enjoy. Even if they're only family 'n' friends portraits, he has a style and a point of view and I like it. Good to look at. I love the silhouette one. That is a heck of a fun post.

3. Two mice having a street fight. Wildlife—or West Side Story? "Sam Rowley's 'Station Squabble' has been picked from more than 48,000 images to claim a wildlife photography award from London's Natural History Museum, voted for by the public," writes Rob Picheta at CNN Travel. I like the public's taste! Nice to interpret "wildlife" so broadly, with a soupçon of double entendre thrown in for spice. You can see the nifty winning picture at the link. Wild life indeed. Musta been Saturday night.

A mice....er, nice idea, and good to look at, too. And that never hurts!

Mike
(Thanks to Nico Maijer and Charles Heuer)

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Globules: "A few days ago the CBC radio show 'As It Happens' interviewed Sam Rowley about his winning picture."

Mike replies: Thanks! Here's the link.

Neil Swanson: "I’m in. XF to Minolta adapter ordered. Cheap eBay lens on the way. I have been wanting to try things like this anyway. Oddly I don’t seem to be terribly interested in trying any of my Nikon lenses on the Fuji but maybe after this experiment I will.

"I’m glad you know about, look at and follow Jonas Rask and his reviews and work. I think I’d really like to meet that guy."

Stan B.: "OK...something I'm really not getting here, so I'm (reluctantly—very) putting myself out there to be the royal grand idiot deluxe who stands to be corrected. That is: Just how much in the 'vicinity' of the GWB was that photo taken where all the cars have their steering wheels on the right hand side? Signed, Already Woefully Embarrassed (and nevertheless thankful for the enlightenment)."

Mike replies: Many readers seconded your comment—the JPEG was reversed laterally (and maybe a print too? This can happen when you put a negative in the carrier upside-down). I contacted my friend Nick, the photographer's son, hoping he would contact Magnum, and you'll notice that the photo is right way 'round this morning! So you fixed it, Stan.

The New Nikon D6

Nikon just announced its new pro flagship, the D6.

Although you probably won't see this mentioned much on the Web and in the forums, this brings to parity the number of top-end film F cameras and pro digital D cameras. There's a slight disparity in the time it took to get there: the original Nikon F was introduced in April 1959 and the F6 began shipping in 2004 and can still be purchased new (or rather, out of what's called "new old stock," NOS, with outflow regulated to a trickle by a high price [UPDATE: This appears to be wrong! See Sal Santamaura’s comment in the Comments section. —Ed.]). Let's call that 45 years (1959 to 2004). The 2.7-megapixel, crop-sensor Nikon D1, a landmark in the development of digital imaging, arrived in time for the Millennium—June 1999. So the analogous span of time is 21 years, let's say—less than half the time it took to get to the sixth flagship film camera. Makes sense, considering the faster pace of development in digital.

We really should compare the D6 to the D1 for perspective, and the F6 to the F, but I just received a lovely Contax RTS II as a donation/gift (big thanks to Fred M.), and what strikes me about the new camera is the tremendous distance between it and the RTS II's near-exact* Nikon contemporary, the F3. I was in D.C. when the F3 was current. Many amateurs owned one, and far more wanted one. The richest kid in my second-year photo class had two. My studio partner (after I graduated), even though he did most of his work with Hasselblads, shot with one—he had the big motor drive for it and gave it the fond nickname "Darth Vader." (Click here to see a camera much like Darth.) I would occasionally see one draped on a besuited lawyer-type on the streets of the city. I wanted a top Nikon enough that I saved for, and purchased, a Nikon F4s when it was the latest thing (Paul called it "Luke Skywalker," of course). When it was new I was besotted with pride of ownership. 

By contrast, I can't see many passionate amateurs wanting a D6. The things it does well are just too specialized: 10.5 FPS in live-view mode; 105 focus points which are all selectable and cross-type; AF at the center point down to –4.5 EV; extensive GPS and transfer options and capability; and so on. To name just one feature that pros might value but amateurs wouldn't, the new Priority Image Transfer gives you the ability to move particular images to the front of the download queue. I can't imagine many amateurs getting lathered up at the mouth over that.

The astonishing abilities of the D6 "imaging computer" make a camera like the F3 look positively quaint. With the F3 you had to focus the lens yourself, which was primitive. If you didn't own Darth's motor drive or a motor winder, you cranked the film from one frame to the next with thumb-power. The biggest difference in my view is that the D6 will "process" your pictures in nanoseconds and transfer them to your computer (and thence on to your client) wirelessly, whereas Paul and I used to have to make 50-mile(!) runs in the car—often daily—from our studio in Maryland to Chrome, the custom lab we used in D.C. (25 miles one way). If a client wanted to pay for rush processing, we could get images in his or her hands sometimes within 24 hours. But that included two Chrome runs.

Perfect for...?
The D6 costs $6,500 and weighs 2.8 pounds (1270g). It might be cruel to say something like "Nikon has made the perfect sports and assignment photographer's camera, while appearing not to notice that newsrooms and magazines are withering around the globe, their staffs and budgets shrinking..." etc. Don't fix what ain't broke, sure, but the niche this camera evolved for might be changing under Nikon's feet. It might still be true to say that pros who need the D6 need the D6, although I can also imagine many pros thinking that they'll just continue to get by with their paid-for D5's or lesser Nikons, given, you know, the climate out there. As another bellwether, DPReview has let the D6 announcement pass with little fanfare but is all over the new Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark III.

After a year with the F4s, I reverted to using two N8008's in the '90s. For all its felicities, the F4 turned out to be unlovable—too big, too clunky, too heavy, and it chewed through batteries like a hungry pygmy shrew. I used to say that you could always tell where I was because Luke left a trail of spent AA's in its wake like Hansel and Gretel left breadcrumbs on the floor of the forest. But then, I'm prone to exaggerating.

That was the last top-end pro Nikon I was personally interested in. They're just not aimed at the likes of me, and, if you ask me, arty enthusiast amateurs coveting top pro Nikon bodies is probably a thing of the past. If I wanted a Nikon I'd want a Z6.

Just one opinion. YMMV.

Mike

P.S. I'm very behind on the comments and I promise I will get to that later today.

*Nikon F3: 1980–88; Contax RTS II: 1982–1990.

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TerryM: "In defence of the F4: at least the MB20 battery grip cut down the weight and size to four AAs. I found this gave me plenty of battery life for slide film. And I can’t think of a single frame where the meter didn’t nail the exposure. I could focus on stars with a hard infinity stop lens and open the shutter in the dark just by feel...can’t tell you how much better than with a mirrorless camera. I’d still be using it if I didn’t ruin it by dust and moisture, and sort of regret going for the lighter weight of a FM2N. Long live the F4!"

beuler: "All the negative D6 reviews boil down to using the same sensor as the D5. It seems to me the D6 is the direct equivalent of the F6: the flagship of an obsolete fleet. It's no bad thing; the F6 is a fabulous camera. It's just that nobody needs it is all. Expect the Nikon Z flagship to smoke the alpha 9 in every way except price, whenever it comes out. The question is: will it be too late?"

Mike replies: A couple of months ago I started doing a post on the term "flagship." It was really interesting and I got pretty deep into it. The term comes from the ship occupied by the commander of the fleet, who flew his pennant to indicate his presence aboard. This led to the secondary meaning of the word, in that the flagship was also often the grandest and largest ship in the fleet.

Flagships in that latter sense have often been costly. The worldwide arms race c. 1900 centered around battleships: Japan won, with the Yamato class, c. 1938 (there were only two, Yamato and Musashi—a planned third was converted on the fly into an aircraft carrier). We all know where that went. The Sovereign of the Seas in 1637 was both a vanity project of Charles I and a political statement intended to symbolize the English crown's claim to the oceans, against the interests of the Dutch, who wanted the seas to be free for all. Sovereign of the Seas, later renamed Royal Sovereign among other names, was encrusted with lavish carvings covered in gold leaf, and cost so much that building it contributed to the financial crisis that helped fuel the English Civil War. During which, of course, Charles lost his head.

Stern of the Sovereign of the Seas, from a painting by Peter Lely

Of course this really had nothing at all to do with so-called "flagship" cameras, not even by analogy, so I abandoned that post. (You should see TOP's graveyard of abandoned post ideas...pretty wacky, all things considered!)

Severian (partial comment): "Re: Flagship, I (and Nikon) certainly hope that the D6 doesn't become the kind of flagship which is used as a metaphor / cautionary tale! Consider the Swedish ship Vasa."

Mike replies: Totally. Everyone should know about that. I think the first full-frame DSLR, the Contax N Digital, might have been a case of Vasa syndrome.

Sunday Support Group: Roger Angell

I've been on a reading kick lately.

Some while back I read a book called The Thing About Life is that One Day You'll Be Dead, by David Shields. The book is a vigorously morbid catalogue of all the possible predicaments of being trapped in a deteriorating infrastructure. It's chock full of interesting facts about aging and the ages and stages of life. I can't say it was good to read, but it is good to have read it, turns out. Aside from being a bit of a horror show, it's very interesting and engaging, and I still remember and regurgitate many of the facts, which are fascinating. You've got to look at it the other way, though: you should be grateful if you've lived long enough to suffer some of the insults of aging and still have the wits to complain about it. Shields was cheating on that account, it turns out. He's only a year older than I am, and the book came out almost exactly 11 years ago, meaning he wrote it before he was 52. That's not that old.

I've got some great counterexamples in my life. The other day I was playing pool with some friends, and, as he sometimes does, Kenny hit the cue ball so hard on the break that it flew off the table, rolled across the floor, and landed in the corner of the room, way back under a triangular table that supports a big screen TV. Our friend Norm went to fetch it. Norm leaned down, supporting himself on one hand and, like a contortionist, reached way back under the table with the other hand and came up with the ball. No groaning, no moaning, no complaining—just reached way back under the table and popped back up. Nothing to it.

Which would not be remarkable except that Norm just turned 95. He's the guy I told you about who can still drive a golf ball 200 yards and score less than his age. I want to be Norm when I grow up!

I thought of this because of an essay by a writer I admire that I wanted to point you to. Roger Angell is the son of Katherine White of The New Yorker and of Ernest Angell, and the stepson of E.B. White, the essayist and author of Charlotte's Web and Stuart Little. Back when he was only 93 he wrote a lovely essay about life in his nineties called "This Old Man." And you know what? In it, he says he was more obsessed by death when he was David Shields' age, when David was writing his book I mean, than he is at 93. Hmm. Maybe death is more of a big deal in midlife than as it approaches. The essay is long, but it's better the second time through. It's a bit spiky on the first pass and flows better the second time around. Good reading for a lazy afternoon.

Roger will turn 100 this coming September 19th. I hope he's here to celebrate it. I hope I remember to. I want to be Roger when I grow up, too.

Mike

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Portfolio App for the iPad?

Carl asked me what I use as a portfolio app for picture presentations on the iPad and it's one of the (many) things I just don't think I know enough about to speak of. Anyone have any favorite ways of presenting pictures on the iPad they'd like to share?

Mike

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kirk tuck: "I second the use of Portfolio but I wanted to step in here for just a second and bring up one little thing: Everyone keeps mentioning 'slide shows' and when I hear that I presume that the slideshow plays through the images at a fixed pace. But that's not at all the way ad agency people want to see images; either on a screen based portfolio or in real life. The don't want an automated slide show. They want to be able to spend as much or as little time as they please on each image. They want to control the pace. Always. Slideshows are great for unmanned presentations but are not what people should be looking for in a portfolio app for an iPad."

Mike adds: I concur completely. The user needs to be able to control the pace through the presentation, preferably by swiping or with a fixed, non-moving arrow. (It always annoys me when I'm clicking through images and the arrow moves under my cursor and I have to reposition the cursor.)

The Day (Music Notes)

Song for the day...Transvision Vamp's "Bad Valentine." It's got a sort of louche, low-fi slow-drag vibe I've always liked. Don't know the band or any of their other music—pretty sure I bought this as a vinyl single and never listened to the other side!

Mike

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New Toy!

I've owned many Apple devices since I began writing on the original 128k Macintosh in 1984. The one that's least necessary is also the one I like the best: the iPad.

I bought my iPad Air, the original one, in 2013 (which does seem like a long time ago) because I thought they were cool and I was feeling flush back then. At first I couldn't figure out what to do with it and I barely even touched it for the first six months I had it. Within a few years it became my favorite Apple product and the one I'm closest to in everyday life. I watch movies and videos on it, read email on it, even answer the phone on it (although it's Wi-Fi only, it links to the iPhone when a call comes in). I take it to bed with me, where I read books on it before falling asleep. It's my alarm clock. When I get up in the morning I check the time on it and read the AA Daily Reflection. I read on it while I eat breakfast. In fact I do almost all of my newspaper and book reading on the iPad—it's been so long since I used my actual Kindle device that I don't even know where it is any more. (It took me a while to get accustomed to reading on the iPad screen, but I've adapted. Now if I have a paper book I really want to read, I'll buy the Kindle version too so I can actually read it. On the iPad, every book is a large print book.) If I'm eating alone at a restaurant and only have my phone, the book I'm reading is also on that, and the devices keep track of where I am in the book.

And by the way, it's the best way to look at portfolios. You can pass it around like an album and let people swipe from one picture to the next at their own pace. Pictures are an ideal size for reading distances, and have all the resolution the screen size calls for.

To this day there's nothing at all wrong with my old iPad and I'm not dissatisfied with it at all. It works perfectly well and it's all I need. Unfortunately, however, it's a 16GB model and that's its downfall...I've been getting "storage full" warnings for a long time and I have nothing left to throw away to make room. I don't think I've done an IOS update in quite a while, because I don't have room. A few days ago I found myself deleting apps I would really rather keep, and thought, okay, enough.

The one thing I hope the new toy does better is pick up the Wi-Fi signal in the back room...the old one doesn't do that very well, even with my fancy alleged range extender.

At least I've gotten my money's worth out of the 2013 iPad. I've paid about a hundred dollars a year for it. A bargain, considering how much I use it. And how much I like it.

Gift cards seem like free cash
Every year B&H Photo gives me a gift certificate to thank me for being an affiliate, and I had several of those piled up. So I used them, plus some cash, to buy a new (early 2019) iPad Air. I splurged (gift cards seems like free cash) and bought the one with 256GB of storage for about $160 more.

Do I really need 16X more storage? Well, I don't know, but over the years I've owned a great many Apple products, and the thing that often seems to push me to upgrade or update is a shortage of storage space. I suppose sooner or later I would have upgraded all those old things anyway, but I think I would have saved money over the years and kept most of my devices for longer if I'd had the foresight to max out on storage as a matter of course. I know I'd keep my current iPad with no complaint if it weren't for the storage problem. Probably a fool's economy to scrimp on storage.

But then I might not even need an iPad at all. I could probably get along fine with just my iPhone 7 Plus and my Mac Mini. The iPad is arguably the device I need the least. And yet, as I said, it's the one I like the most.

And now Xander gets the old one for free! I'm looking forward to when the new toy gets here, but there should be more life left in the old toy yet.

Mike

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Random Excellence: Giants?

Might call this "random interest" rather than excellence, but it's curious. You might want to look at the picture carefully before reading on.

We were talking about the novel Giants in the Earth the other day, and I ran across the old snapshot above on a site called Ipernity. The original poster, Alan Mays, was given it as a Christmas present. A few different elements conspire to create a visual illusion. The small size of the tractor and the boy driving it, the looming hill in the background, and the fact that we can't see the adults' feet can make it read as though the adults, who are actually standing on the far fender of the tractor, are far behind the tractor...and about sixteen feet tall!

Can you see it that way? I have a strong "reality bias" in my mind, and I default to an assumption that adults are adult-sized, so I had to work a little to see the illusion. But it's there, all right. And once I want to see it, I can.

Here's something this made me think of: someone told me last night (my pool league team won 8-1 last night and we're still in first place) that the pool genius Efren Reyes likes to watch amateurs play. The reason is that professionals are so methodical, and know exactly which shots work in which situations (not to mention that they can do every sort of shot) that they're predictable to a degree—they're not often forced to get inventive or creative. Amateurs, on the other hand, get themselves into all sorts of odd or awkward dilemmas and then take highly unconventional routes to try to get themselves out of trouble—and watching them do so is entertaining for Efren.

Analogously, interesting snapshots are rare, perhaps, but I really love them, and for similar reasons—they show all sorts of whimsical and serendipitous oddities and surprises that more practiced photographers know to avoid. I have what amounts to a mini-library of books that feature "found" snapshots.

There's a good book available of early photography from the plains, but I can't find it. And the only pioneer photographer I can think of is Solomon D. Butcher. Population has been in decline on the great plains for years, as people move to places where life is easier.

Speaking of Giants in the Earth, it's been nice to hear that so many readers have indeed "engaged" with works of literature, such as Wayne, who said: "Among my favorite things to experience over and over are Lawrence Durrell's exquisite Alexandria Quartet and just about any Leonard Cohen music. Open to any page of Durrell or set the needle down on any track of Cohen, and I'm done for the day."

From The Alexandria Quartet (I'll just note that the Folio Society editions [OoP] are all illustrated with photographs):

As for me I am neither happy nor unhappy; I lie suspended like a hair or a feather in the cloudy mixtures of memory. I spoke of the uselessness of art but added nothing truthful about its consolations. The solace of such work as I do with brain and heart lies in this—that only there in the silences of the painter or the writer can reality be reordered, reworked and made to show its significant side. Our common actions in reality are simply the sackcloth covering which hides the cloth-of-gold—the meaning of the pattern.

By the way, while we're on quotes, the "Giants" title is from Genesis 6:4 in the KJV: "There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown." There's a sequel to Giants, called Peder Victorious: A Tale of the Pioneers Twenty Years Later.

Mike

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Open Mike: Rereading and Anne Fadiman (and an Aside)

['Open Mike' is the often off-topic, anything-goes Editorial Page of TOP, wherein Yr. Hmbl. Ed. rambles afield very slightly more than usual. It appears either on Wednesdays, or when I get it finished.]

-

In response to this, a couple of days ago: "I loved C.S. Forester's Hornblower books...and read the whole series through twice," Stephen Gilbert commented: "You only read the Hornblower books twice?"

Made me smile. But to answer seriously, I'm not actually a big rereader.

I've gotten to the age, however, that it's become a valid topic. I wanted to recommend a wonderful—well, promising—little book called Rereadings by Anne Fadiman. Her 'Introduction' alone is worth the price of admission. I'll use that as my justification for breaking the Pinker Rule.

The book is a compilation of the best essays from a feature in the journal American Scholar from the time Anne edited it, also called Rereadings, in which authors and writers would reread a favorite book from earlier in their lives and write an essay about their relationship with it—how they themselves had changed since the first reading, how the book changed for them upon rereading.

Which books were influential and important to you in early life will be different for most everyone, of course, but there are a few that I think could particularly benefit from rereading. Alice In Wonderland, for instance, is a truly weird little book, and you don't really get that when you're a kid and your reading tastes have been formed by Batman comic books and the gentler fantasy of things like James and the Giant Peach. A particularly valuable book to reread in adulthood in my opinion is A Christmas Carol, which might be the most celebrated and vivid depiction in classic fiction of a spiritual awakening and the changes in thinking that necessarily precede such an awakening. You need to be a reflective adult to read it that way, not just someone sopping their bread in the gravy of Christmassy effusions. Counterculture classics from the '60s and '70s like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and Herman Hesse's Siddhartha (a retelling of Buddha story) benefit from revisitings. Most especially, Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter begs to be reread as an adult, since its action (if not necessarily its themes) are adult by definition. If you haven't yet reread Joyce's Dubliners, that's an experience.

Many great readers and literary critics are famous for revisiting touchstone books. Susan Sontag famously read The Brothers Karamazov again and again, and Clifton Fadiman (Anne's father) estimated he had read Moby-Dick five times. Harold Bloom (who died just this last October) reread Shakespeare again and again, and show me a real Jane Austen fan who has not reread at least one of her books! Following the advice of my great friend Jim Schley, a writer on poets, what's important is not who you reread but that you reread someone, because it's important to your personal intellectual culture to engage at a deep level with at least one great author. On account of you cannot engage at that level with everyone.

A book that comes to mind that I've reread is O.E. Rolvaag's Giants in the Earth, the 1927 translation into English of the Norwegian I de dage, published by H. Aschenhoug and Company of Oslo in two volumes in 1924 and 1925. The Nation called it "the fullest, finest, and most powerful novel that has been written about pioneer life in America." I read it as a young teenager, and at the time it struck me as a serious, adult book, and I was was proud of myself for reading it all the way through and finishing it—it seemed as bleak and featureless as the prairie, as serious as breaking the earth with plows to survive, and very long. On rereading it a few years ago I was surprised at how short and full of action it actually is! A great book either way, and a classic of the literature of America (although it's not American literature).

Anne Fadiman. Photo by Gabriel Amadeus Cooney,
compliments of MacMillan Publishers.

Anne Fadiman is a recent discovery, but she's a gem, a minor treasure. She can write. Fun fact: her family's dog is named Typo. She hasn't written much, so I intend to read it all. (Hey, I can intend.)

As an aside, as I was browsing through Clifton Fadiman's New Lifetime Reading Plan—chock full of entertaining little thumbnail reviews—it crossed my mind that I no longer have enough life left to read all the books he discusses. That's one of life's tragedies I can feel: "Life is Short, Books Long." Choose wisely!

Mike

UPDATE Wednesday: As usual with book posts, this one has cost me money! And the last one too—I had to buy By Brooks Too Broad for Leaping, the selected writings of automotive journalist Denise McCluggage, which turned out to be quite expensive, and Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, which I've never read. Al C., hugh crawford, and JimH all mentioned Denise, and Martin D recommended Magic Mountain—thanks to them.

It was costly in time, too—I had to spend an arduous hour rummaging in the attic of the barn where my library is now kept (and where it is gradually being destroyed by insects) looking for the copies of The Brothers Karamazov I know I have (didn't find them), and spent a number of hours comparing translations of several books from other languages.

There are so many fine old photography books up there in the attic of the barn. I just don't have room for them in the house. I was blinded by love when I bought this place—the next house I buy will have room for a pool table and bookcases, dammit Gumby!

By the way, I have to say that Amazon does a poor job with translations. You can look for just the translation you want, then click the Kindle e-book option on the proper sale page, only to find that the Kindle version reverts to a different, older, rights-free translation. There doesn't seem to be a way to get the Grossman translation of Don Quixote or the Woods translation of Magic Mountain as e-books, for example. In the case of The Brothers K., you can go the P/V translation, click Kindle, and the order page still says Pevear and Volokonsky...but the file you get if you order it is not the Pevear and Volokonsky translation at all but the old Constance Garnett translation. In the scope of the world's troubles this isn't much I suppose, but it's frustrating. At the very least, they should inform you which translation you're buying when you buy a Kindle version.

I did find my hardcover copy of The Scarlet Letter, the one with Barry Moser's illustrations, which I bought, according to the mark, as a remainder.

UPDATE #2: I had to laugh...just after I posted the above, this comment came in:

Richard Nugent: "MIKE! You have to slow down on these literary 'Open Mike' essays!! Between your recommendations (or mentions) and those of the commenters, I wind up ordering two, three, or even four books with every essay. I have a stack of eight unread ones on my table right now and I just now ordered three more through Amazon. I may have to give up eating and sleeping (and maybe talking with my wife) to keep up. Have some mercy, man!"

At least Richard knows now that I suffer because of the same problem too!

 

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Lance Saint Paul: "Rolvaag's Giants in the Earth reminded me of Faulkner, but more lyrical, flowing (he's a better poet in his prose than Faulkner). I first read it about 15 years ago (way late by the way)—I look forward to another reading in the future. Beautiful and harrowing. My roots are there, too."

Clayton: "Only two books that I remember reading several times—Love in the Time of Cholera by Garcia Marquez and The Tunnel by Ernesto Sabato. Some Kurt Vonnegut books got two or three readings. Seems I am drawn to hilarious tragedy."

Mike replies: Then you might enjoy The Brothers Karamazov.

Robert Roaldi (partial comment): "I read Catch-22 three times, saw the movie twice."

Mike replies: Did you ever read any of the books that purport to tell the true story the novel is based on? Such as The Bridgebusters: The True Story of the Catch-22 Bomb Wing by Thomas Cleaver. Looks like an interesting book to read alongside the novel.

Eric Peterson: "Put me down for rereading Anthony Trollope. The more things change, the more they stay the same."

DavidB: "I'm in the process of rereading many of the fiction books I've held on to for many years. Of these, the one I have reread the most is Robert Heinlein's The Past Through Tomorrow. Some of those futuristic science fiction short stories are happening now."

ChrisC: "I made the mistake of rereading Orwell’s 1984 a year or two back. It was much more scary this time round."

Darin Boville: "I re-read book occasionally but not as any particular philosophy of reading, just whenever the mood strikes me. I’ve re-read Moby-Dick, yes, five times seems right. I keep a copy on my vehicle’s dashboard so I can ask people who ride in my FJ Cruiser for the first time to open to a page at random, read whatever sentence their finger strikes upon, and then treat that as a sort of fortune cookie. (It works.) I’ve re-read Lord of the Rings, all 1008 pages, including once out loud to my young daughter as a bedtime story (in many parts!) when she was too young to read.

"In my mid-40s I was having a long spell of bad luck with book, movies, music and culture in general. I started to wonder if maybe I’d discovered all the good stuff, touched on all the mountaintops and that maybe the rest of my life would just be filling in the nooks and crannies of my cultural map. But then I picked out Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy. I’d never heard of him. I read the book, finishing as I lay in bed, closed the book, stared at the ceiling a bit, then re-opened it to the first page and read it again. I'd never done that before, read a book twice in a row.

"For some reason that experience broke the spell."

Jeff Thompson: "For me, it was Steinbeck's Of Mice And Men, Cannery Row and The Grapes Of Wrath. Prescribed reading at school when I was 15 or 16 years old. Tedious reading then, but I reread them as a 'knocked around by life' adult and loved every word."

Alexander P. Schorsch: "William Faulkner said that he reread Don Quixote every year."

Mike replies: Setting aside holy books, Don Quixote is believed to be the number-one bestseller of all time, with an estimated 550 million copies printed and sold in a great many languages over its 415-year lifespan. There is a fine recent English translation by Edith Grossman that has received very high praise. Carlos Fuentes, writing in the New York Times, said this about it:

[I] celebrate the great new translation of 'Don Quixote' by Edith Grossman. Nothing harder for the traduttore, if he or she is not to be seen as the traditore [the Italian words mean "translator" and "traitor" —Ed.], than to render a classic in contemporary idiom yet retain its sense of time and space. Up to now, my favorite 'Quixote' translation has been that of Tobias Smollett, the 18th-century picaresque novelist, who rendered Cervantes in the style proper to Smollett and his own age. His 'Quixote' reads much like 'Humphry Clinker,' and this seems appropriate and, even, delightful. The family relationship is there.

"Edith Grossman delivers her 'Quixote' in plain but plentiful contemporary English. The quality of her translation is evident in the opening line: 'Somewhere in La Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember, a gentleman lived not long ago, one of those who has a lance and ancient shield on a shelf and keeps a skinny nag and a greyhound for racing.' This 'Don Quixote' can be read with the same ease as the latest Philip Roth and with much greater facility than any Hawthorne. Yet there is not a single moment in which, in forthright English, we are not reading a 17th-century novel. This is truly masterly: the contemporaneous and the original co-exist."

Larry Wilkins: "I read The Sun Also Rises for the first time when I was in high school, and then re-read it several times over the next decade or so. I picked it up again in my late 20s or early 30s—and was appalled. For the first time, I understood an essay topic that a college English professor proposed, 'The only pity that you can find in a Hemingway novel is self-pity.' On finishing the novel, for the last time in my life, I felt like a needed a shower.

"And I second Stephen Gilbert's comment on the Horatio Hornblower books."

Martin D: "I first read Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain as a young man, when I was at university. This is the novel to end all novels. I immersed myself into its world. The book changed my life forever and it keeps a clear presence in my life today. It's a long novel, a fat volume, and in those innocent days of my youth I read the book cover to cover three or four times within a few years. In the decades since, I always have a copy lying around somewhere in the house, and not a month passes where I don't pick it up and read a few pages.

"I have the advantage to be able to read it in the original German; Mann's complex sentences don't translate all that well into English, but I have coaxed many of my English friends into venturing into Magic Mountain land, and they didn't reproach me for it!"

Jimmy Reina: "In the early 1950s, I stumbled upon a used bookstore in the block where my father had a business. In those days, such stores also carried secondhand comicbooks and magazines, and I was injected with a drug that took 40 years to withdraw from. For a reader that loves books with pages, I can't think of a more indulgent pleasure than Anne Fadiman's Ex Libris. Now, when I haunt used bookstores, I buy all the copies I can find, and give them out to fellow book lovers."

Robert Stahl: "It doesn't get any better than rereading good and compelling poetry. A few favorites: Rumi, Emily Dickinson, Rilke, and Mary Oliver."

The December Car Magazine Massacre

Motor Trend Group and TEN Publishing (formerly The Enthusiast Network), publishers of many car and truck magazines including Motor Trend and Automobile, announced in December that 19 of its automotive newsstand titles would be transitioned to digital-only, ending the paper versions of all 19. The most prestigious of the magazines affected was Automobile, founded by David E. Davis in 1986. 

Folio reports that MotorTrend Group president and GM Alex Wellen announced the move in a memo to staffers on December 6th. "We need to be where our audience is," Wellen wrote in explanation. "Tens of millions of fans visit MotorTrend’s digital properties every month, with the vast majority of our consumption on mobile, and 3 out of every 4 of our visitors favoring digital content over print."

Still up in the air in December was whether all of these magazines would continue to be published in electronic format. Well, I just received a notice that Automobile will be "combining" with Motor Trend and that my remaining subscription will be fulfilled with issues of Motor Trend. What does "combining" mean? I dunno, but probably that Automobile is being killed but that a few of its staffers will be picked up by Motor Trend. So obviously not all of the 19 magazines being downgraded will continue to be published digitally.

Indicative of the general climate is that in January, Road & Track closed its offices in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and put its digital editor in charge of the publication. Car & Driver recently laid off 13 staffers.

Kim Wolfkill, editor of Road & Track from 2016 to 2019, told MediaVillage that ad agencies have become entranced with digital/social media, influencers, and TV. "Wolfkill also pointed out," MediaVillage said, "the willingness of many young writers on digital platforms to work for very little money—with free test cars and trips to exotic locations as the payoff. [...] The writing quality may not be high, but the information is there instantly when a new model is announced."

He didn't include "photo quality," but you can check YouTube for yourself....

Only three of Motor Trend Group / TEN Publishing's 22 titles will survive in paper format: Motor Trend, Hot Rod, and Four Wheeler.

Statista reports that in 2017, 27% of 18- to 29-year-olds said they never read a print magazine.

Mike

ADDENDUM: In a blip that seems somehow related, one of the last stories I read in Automobile pointed out that EV (electric vehicle) sales surpassed sales of cars with manual transmissions for the first time in 2019, with 1.6 and 1.1% of U.S. car sales respectively.

But hey, you can still buy a Leica MP new and you can still buy a Mazda Miata convertible, approximately three-quarters of which are bought with stick shifts (the RF version has a lower but still substantial take-rate for manuals). And Road & Track still has 600,000 subscribers and Motor Trend and Car & Driver have 1.2 million each, and all three continue to be available in print versions. So there! Go, survivors.

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BW Jones: "I remember the very first issue of Automobile where they had the temerity to compare a Ferrari 308 with the Toyota MR2 on the cover! Automobile had gorgeous paper, ink, fonts, and the photography! Oh, the photography. Under David E. Davis, then Jean Lindamood Jennings, it was in my mailbox every month and I savored every issue. I got the same announcement as you, and sorta expected this when they were acquired. A sad day for me to be honest."

William Cook: "As a onetime subscriber to many magazines, I’ve now gone to the dark side—electronic mags. More specifically, Apple News + Magazines app. Not that I get a penny hyping this service, but it is particularly good. For $10 a month, there are hundreds of magazines available. I just counted 17 auto magazines alone. All the most popular photography mags are there too. Other top shelf magazines are available as well, such as Architectural Digest and Fine Woodworking. I just checked out of curiosity and I ‘subscribe’ to 57 magazines that I read monthly through this Apple app, all for the one monthly price. As much as I hate the demise of printed mags, it’s hard to knock having them all available on my iPad to read anytime and anywhere I desire."

Weekes James: "OK I am 73, so fall out of any relevant demographic, but here are the thoughts of a lifelong car freak who is tired of most of the magazines. Automobile was very good for the time Davis and then Lindamood ran it. It slowly lost its way, for me, about ten years ago. Car & Driver faded a bit during the last staff turnover. Also the snarky, snotty 'Ed.' remarks in the Letters column are tiresome, at best. Road & Track seems to have descended into only talking about cars that are on posters in teenage boys' bedrooms. Their daily online mag is all about 700HP and up supercars and sound bites of these cars peeling out. Oddly, Motor Trend has evolved into a pretty good informative magazine that tests cars that people actually buy. I still get the print editions of MT and C&D, but will let the latter go this year. Don’t get me started on television car shows."

Matt Kallio: "Turning the stats around, I find it remarkable that 73% of 18-to-29-year-olds say they read a magazine occasionally!"

paul in AZ: "Re '27% of 18- to 29-year-olds said they never read a print magazine': This quote is only partially accurate. Delete the words 'a print magazine' and you have a more complete assessment. Kids just don't read. Everything has to be in YouTube or some other video format."

bryan willman: "I'm 60 and never read physical print magazines anymore, either."

Jon Porter: "Very sad news. I enjoyed reading their JP magazine (Jeep content) each month, along with other magazines. It was so nice to read an article away from a monitor without the intrusive clutter of ads and click bait mixed in with the text."

Mike replies: It's funny in a way that you say that, because when periodicals were newer, they were the ones criticized for having intrusive ads and distractions, and "Continued on page [x]" breaks.

Benjamin Wilkes (partial comment): "Automobile's forte was in long-form, descriptive pieces that gave the reader the experience of both the vehicle and the journey, rather than just engineering details and performance numbers."

Bill Pearce (partial comment): "Another step in the decline of our society. Combining Automobile with Motor Trend? This would be like combining The New Yorker with The National Inquirer."

Jim K.: "I'll just be curmudgeonly and comment accordingly:

1. I drive what I believe is the last manual transmission Volvo (a C30, affectionately known as my Fjord Focus). 287K miles and counting.

2. I shoot Sigma cameras because I like making prints and love taking my time both shooting and 'developing the film' (Sigma Photo Pro on my 2010 iMac is quicker than a darkroom. But not by much).

3. I love drinking craft beers and whiskeys...but I've become enamored with Mike's daily 'Vin and Tonic' recipe....

4. I've taken to baking my own sourdough bread, which I do at least three times a week (both for me and for friends and family).

"What do these things have in common? None of them are digital! I suppose you could argue that the Sigmas are digital...but that'd be a stretch.

"And as a further aside, I will disclose that I write really great software for internal uses at my company. So I can do digital. I just choose not to all the time...

"Wrapping this comment up, I will say that I miss print. I'd subscribe to the paper versions of our local papers (Chicago Tribune, Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel...but they don't deliver out by me."

Steve Biro: "Mike, remember when Popular Photography folded and many of us felt kind of sad about it—but admitted we hadn't found much to read in it for perhaps a decade or more? That's pretty much the case with car magazines.

"I ended my print subscriptions of Automobile, Road & Track and Car and Driver a few years ago. I picked up the last two titles again this past year because they literally begged me—offering both for $7.99.

"But the truth is, I don't find much in them to interest me these days. There's a bit of racing content in Road & Track that's nice. But I don't know that it's enough. I suspect that I won't be renewing.

"It doesn't help that cars aren't very interesting these days—certainly not for those who truly enjoy driving. It's all about technology and connectivity these days. I knew C/D was in trouble when it made an editorial switch from recommending that 'driver assistance' technology be turned off and that drivers—you know—watched were they were going, to listing such technology as pluses. I mean, you have to be able to answer your phone and look at the big eight-inch screen in your car, right?

"As for Motor Trend and the rest of the former Peterson publications, I haven't looked at them in over 25 years. Okay, once in a while I check them to see if there's anything interesting. There hasn't been.

"The cars we are being offered today—at least the ones most of us can afford—are certainly competent. But they are as joyless as the society that's buying them. And that society can't wait until it gets full autonomous driving. No wonder the enthusiast publications are going down. It's not just the advertising industry's fascination with digital—although that's part of it. It's that there are fewer and fewer auto enthusiasts with each passing year.

"It's hard to take for this ex-Formula Ford racer. But I suppose, as with photography, I should be thankful that I was able to enjoy the hobby during its golden years."

Sunday Support Group: Be Prepared...For Any Old Thing

I was a Boy Scout when I was young. It was a valuable experience; I was besotted with the Civil War and the Napoleonic Wars and all things related to antiquarian wars and soldiery when I was a boy (I loved C.S. Forester's Hornblower books particularly, and read the whole series through twice), and a fortune teller gazing into her crystal ball might have presumed I was headed for at least a stint in the armed forces. The Boy Scouts demonstrated conclusively to me, however, how peculiarly unsuited I am to a military way of life. I surprised myself by being more or less a total f---up in the Boy Scouts, with no patience whatsoever for the rigors and the conformity the organization strove to impose. I remain grateful for the lesson. A joke in earlier years was that I had to give the Boy Scouts their due, because I never earned a single merit badge, and if anyone ever could have finagled an unmerited merit badge out of the Boy Scouts it would have been me. Pah-dum-pah.

Anyway, the Boy Scout motto is "Be Prepared." By intention, those words have the same initials as the last name of Robert Baden-Powell, the British officer who founded the Boy Scouts for the paramilitary training of boys. (His sister founded the Girl Scouts.) When Baden-Powell was asked the question "prepared for what," he answered, "why, for any old thing." This is the reason I have aspired to have a backup camera for virtually my entire life in photography. You keep a backup because any old thing can happen. If and when it does, you're covered.

Lots of snow
We had a fine snowstorm a few days ago, and any old thing actually happened. Snowfall is highly variable across my area, so I can't speak generally, but in my back yard I measured 8 1/2 inches on the top of the picnic table. It was the Winter's first...well, Winter. This brightened my spirits—this area is so grim and gray in the Winter when there's no snow on the ground. I agree with the young Mennonite girl at the local market, who said, "I like a lot of snow, or otherwise I just prefer it to be warm." A thick blanket of snow transforms the landscape from something bleak and depressing into a thing of beauty everywhere you look.

But...

Ruh-roh

Not only did my snowblower fail to work yet again (snowblowers are deficient, insufficient products as a class, in my opinion—is there such a thing as a good one?), but my snow shovel broke, too. Seriously. Just snapped right off. I've had the thing for years and it never failed to fulfill its brief before. Can't say I ever thought about it twice.

Somewhat to my amazement, though, I had a backup. An older snow shovel I like less well. It has a scooped shape and a metal leading edge that scratches surfaces like the planking of decks. But there it was, slumbering in a corner of the barn, so I pressed it into service and got the front porch and the pathway to the garage shoveled. Backup to the rescue!

As for the defective snowblower, although my friend Eric had been up since 3 a.m. plowing—one of his many businesses—he came by after dark and got the driveway cleared for me. With his truck. We don't need no stinking snowblowers.

Backup body
For once, I own a backup camera, too, albeit sorta by accident. What I now call my main camera is the X-H1. But so far I haven't sold my 2014 X-T1. Haven't gotten around to it. (And I'm still, well, attached.)

I only pursued professional photography for about seven years, and during that time I did have a backup. After a false start for a year with an F4, I used two Nikon N8008's for the remaining years (that shows you how long ago that was). I wore one out and was on my third when I quit the business. But not once did one of those N8008's ever fail. I do recall that one of the reasons I migrated away from Leica (my next camera after the Nikons) was that I couldn't foresee being able to afford a second M6 as a backup. Did I really need one? I just assumed I should have one. But actually, aside from my seven years as a workerbee pro, I've very seldom had a backup camera body. Always aspired to one, always agreed with the reasoning, always thought I "should"—just seldom have. On the occasions when I've bitten the bullet and bought one, it never seemed to stay in the inventory for very long. When you're either cheap or poor, it's excruciating to have a valuable camera body sitting around doing nothing.

When I think back on it, there's actually not one time in forty years that I've ever needed a backup camera body and had one. There have been times I've had one, but I haven't needed it; and there have been times I've needed one, but didn't have it.

So it was kind of nice to have the principle of the backup play out with the snow shovels. Not sure how much credit I can take for it, but I was prepared. Shades of Baden-Powell.

So I guess I might keep that X-T1 around after all. You never know when any old thing might happen.

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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Featured Comments from:

James: "You would be nuts to let that X-T1 go! As someone who must have a backup because I can't trust myself to change lenses in the desert or a snowstorm, my backup gets used almost as much as my main camera. Usually two Nikon bodies."

John Krumm: "This year we had a deep and wet snowstorm that took the city a week or so to dig out from. It gave me time to order a better shovel. Now I kind of look forward to tackling the pile the snowplow leaves at the front of the driveway. For light snow the cheap push ones work well, but this high quality scoop shovel should last a lifetime."

Carl Weese: "Sometimes you need a backup without knowing it. Back in the '80s, doing industrial location and Shelter magazine work I always worked with a pair of Nikon bodies. Every subject or 'set' was always shot with both bodies. Sometimes with different lenses, sometimes switching to keep the same lens. The two camera bodies were unloaded into two different film bags which were then processed separately. More than once a roll of Kodachrome or E-6 was damaged in processing, but there were always backup chromes from a different roll. Once the shutter on one camera failed without giving any sign of trouble (the film advanced normally and of course there was no chimping) but the chromes from the other camera carried the day."

Rob L.: "Well, I've used some of your lessons as inspiration for teaching Photography merit badge, so, we'll claim you—Once a Scout, Always a Scout!

"As for backups, in film days I agree with the above comments that a second or third body was as much about saving loading time or different capability as well as redundancy. Especially when the lenses I could borrow were of a different mount than my primary camera! But shooting for just me, I hate to see equipment unused, which leads to having a 'backup' camera that's IR-only or some other incredibly useful all the time scenario, because I can only justify keeping the stuff that's unique."

Mike replies: Thanks Rob—I did give a pretty one-sided view of my Scouting experience. I went on numerous hikes, biking trips, and camping trips as a Scout, and a number of those were a lot of fun and quite memorable, and I did learn a lot. I grew up thinking of myself as an outdoorsman, which is something I have not been as an adult. I'm very grateful I had all those experiences in my younger years.

It's also been my observation that being an Eagle Scout does indeed carry over into adult personalities, for what that's worth. Although maybe that's confusing cause with effect.

John from Australia: "What is this ‘snow’ that you speak of?"

Luke: "A backup camera is an excuse to buy another camera when you know the one you have is perfectly suitable."

Joe B: "My backup camera is located on the back of my car. Shows me what it looks like when I'm going backwards. Progress is like that sometimes."

Fuji Plastic Fantastic '50'

Fuji's new "plastic-fantastic" XC prime

Sorry about the three Fuji posts in a row—it's not all Fuji all the time here—but if the theme is "threes" it kinda fits.

Canikon have long had in their lineups "nifty fifties" or "plastic fantastic 50s"—inexpensive but competent normal lenses made mostly of plastic. I was interested to learn that Fuji will soon have a "plastic fantastic 50" of its own. You will soon have the choice of three 35mm (~50mm-e) primes at three distinct pricing tiers. There's the original XF 35mm ƒ/1.4 R that I've written about several times, for $600; the weather-sealed (that's B&H's term), snout-nosed XF 35mm ƒ/2 so-called "Fujicron" at $400; and now the new XC 35mm ƒ/2 plastic-fantastic at only $200 brand new.

The new lens supposedly has the exact same optical formulation and construction as the Fujicron, but features a mostly plastic barrel construction and lensmount, doesn't have an aperture ring, and isn't weather-resistant. On the plus side, the new lens weighs even less than the Fujicron version, at 4.6 ounces (130g) vs. 6 oz. (170g). I suspect the coatings might be more basic on the cheaper lens as well, as the Fujicron specs lists "Super EBC coating," Fuji's longtime term for its best multicoating, among its features, and the new XC lens doesn't.

Announced on January 23rd and set to ship on February 27th, it's the fourth lens in the XC series and the first prime.

Mike
(Thanks to Kevin Ford)

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Featured Comments from:

Arg: "For an instant there, I thought I was looking at a photo of my PanaLeica 25mm ƒ/1.4!"