The Online Photographer

New Gordon Parks Book

It's been several years since I've looked forward to a book with as much anticipation as I have Gordon Parks' The Atmosphere of Crime, 1957 from Steidl. There are some stone masterpieces among these photographs. Among those I've seen, I mean. The prospect of a carefully curated book from the whole body of work is highly promising.

I'll reproduce the entire blurb for you:

Gordon Parks’ ethically complex depictions of crime in New York, Chicago, San Francisco and Los Angeles, with previously unseen photographs

When Life magazine asked Gordon Parks to illustrate a recurring series of articles on crime in the United States in 1957, he had already been a staff photographer for nearly a decade, the first African American to hold this position. Parks embarked on a six-week journey that took him and a reporter to the streets of New York, Chicago, San Francisco and Los Angeles. Unlike much of his prior work, the images made were in color. The resulting eight-page photo-essay “The Atmosphere of Crime” was noteworthy not only for its bold aesthetic sophistication, but also for how it challenged stereotypes about criminality then pervasive in the mainstream media. They provided a richly hued, cinematic portrayal of a largely hidden world: that of violence, police work and incarceration, seen with empathy and candor.

Parks rejected clichés of delinquency, drug use and corruption, opting for a more nuanced view that reflected the social and economic factors tied to criminal behavior and afforded a rare window into the working lives of those charged with preventing and prosecuting it. Transcending the romanticism of the gangster film, the suspense of the crime caper and the racially biased depictions of criminality then prevalent in American popular culture, Parks coaxed his camera to record reality so vividly and compellingly that it would allow Life’s readers to see the complexity of these chronically oversimplified situations. The Atmosphere of Crime, 1957 includes an expansive selection of never-before-published photographs from Parks’ original reportage.

Gordon Parks was born into poverty and segregation in Fort Scott, Kansas, in 1912. An itinerant laborer, he worked as a brothel pianist and railcar porter, among other jobs, before buying a camera at a pawnshop, training himself and becoming a photographer. He evolved into a modern-day Renaissance man, finding success as a film director, writer and composer. The first African-American director to helm a major motion picture, he helped launch the blaxploitation genre with his film Shaft (1971). Parks died in 2006.

Can't wait. Really looking forward to this one.

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:

Cliff McMann: "I was fortunate to see a Gordon Parks exhibit at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond a few years ago. My wife and I went back twice to see it again while it was there. There were several pieces from the Life crime series. I had been familiar with his early B&W work from my younger days. His color work and portraits of criminal gang members is a large reason we went back. I was so impressed with how he managed to see with a consistent vision in both color and monochrome. Something I have never managed to do. I will buy the book for sure just as I did the museum book. If the opportunity ever arises, I recommend seeing actual prints of all his work, but of the color work in particular."

Hans Muus: "Even the preview (thank you, Kenneth Tanaka) is impressive. And what a relief these telling photographs are not hyped by extra micro contrast, ‘clarity,’ ‘sharpness,’ or ‘HD.’ They have a visual subtlety that moves me, getting their message across in a deeper way. Though I thought I was over buying photobooks (age- and spacewise) I will order this one, planning to circulate it between me and my two sons—artists in their own right, with a keen sociological interest."

The Trouble with Negative Criticism

I had a girlfriend once a long time ago named Nell who was an impressive and interesting person. She was a photographer and a freelance graphic artist, and had dealt with some severe problems—mainly depression—in inventive and resourceful ways. Among other things, she taught me one thing that I've remembered from time to time in the decades since I knew her.

Being insulting and critical, a

position of attack when face-to-face,

is actually psychologically

a position of retreat.

We were talking about the habit of being critical—discussing a person we both knew who was caustically critical (and often entertainingly insulting) about everything. She said she didn't quite approve of that attitude, because it was so safe.

I was surprised by that word, and asked her what she meant, and she said—more or less—that hating or criticizing everything was safe because it meant you never have to take a stand. Liking something means you are opening yourself up; if nothing is good enough for you it's another way of saying you're superior to everything. Very smug, very snug. Being insulting and critical, admittedly a position of attack when face-to-face, is, psychologically, actually a position of retreat.

It's more difficult to be positive—to be clear about why something is good—than it is to be negative. Negative criticism is easy. Positive criticism is hard.

I'm not averse to going negative from time to time. But I do get to feeling a little queasy sometimes when I get into the snarky doldrums—you know, that mood where you're just sort of dissing and dismissing this and that. Very talented people put in thousands of hours and, no doubt, a steep payment in blood, sweat and tears to create something, and then legions of casual commenters like me come along—without any particular expertise, without a consuming enthusiasm, or even much interest—and lazily slag away.

Well. I have the right. I see the world aesthetically, and I have always held that any of us should reserve the right to respond to aesthetic experiences as if the encounter were meaningful to us. How else do you stand a chance to get what's to be gotten out of art, for one thing? Staying open, having your own taste and your own opinions, resisting the dictates of official expertise, inviting growth and personal change—it's a dynamic state, and it's difficult to maintain sometimes.

But just being negative all the time is too easy. Not for nothing is such criticism often called "cheap."

Mike

[Originally published as part of this post, in 2012. I need to take a few days off, so I'm going to be putting up a few posts from the past over the next couple of days. This is from a post that appeared at first blush to be about...car styling, so even if you were reading way back then, you might have missed this bit. I've always thought it's an interesting idea. —Mike the Ed.]

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:

Len Metcalf: "I used to criticise. I taught for years telling people what they did wrong. Error correcting, I told myself. One day, my boss gave me permission not to teach. So I went for telling them what they were doing right. To my amazement and utter astonishment the group's performance skyrocketed. They improved more quickly than I had ever seen before. They also told me they learned more from me in an afternoon than in years of workshops and seminars on leadership and teamwork.

"What followed took me years to learn to change from the critical to the accurate positive. I called it a positivist framework. With practice I got there. When I turned to teaching photography, I was good at it. My students improve so quickly now. I tell them what they are doing right. They love it. Concentrate on it. They notice and see what others are doing right and add that to their knowledge and are soon doing it too.

"Occasionally I get someone who wants to be told what they are doing wrong. I try to convince them to try this other way.

"I am such a firm believer in what you outlined. It’s become our dominant way of approaching the world. It actually doesn’t work very well at all.

"Yes, those that are stuck on it are playing safe and are also gaining self esteem by being right...being uncaring for others.

"Positive feedback is essential for the arts.

"Just my opinion mind you."

robert e: "The cheap kind of negative criticism is bluntly parodied in 'Diva' (Jean-Jaques Beineix's candied cinematic tribute to art, serendipity and innocence) in the character of a too-cool-for-school thug known as The Monk, whose affect-less reaction to just about anything is 'je n'aime pas [fill in the blank]*.' As if to underscore the idea of retreat, the character never removes his sunglasses. Hey, I think it's time for a re-watch!"

[*The French means "I don't like." —Ed.]

Mark Rouleau: "There is a wonderful short story by T.C. Boyle called 'Sorry Fugu' about a restaurant critic who is so insecure about her tastes that she lambasts every restaurant she reviews. (There's another critic in the story who lavishly praises everything, for much the same reason.) Your article reminded me of the story, and I think of it often whenever I read something by any reviewer who seems particularly difficult to please (or is overly effusive in their praise.)"

[The story can be found anthologized in Diana Secker Tesdell's Stories from the Kitchen from Everyman's Pocket Classics. —Ed.]

Panasonic GX9 Review

This isn't actually a review*. It's a brief account of my recent experience shooting with a Panasonic GX9 for 19 days. The GX9 I used was brand new when it arrived as a loaner from B&H Photo.

First, the bad news.
My first impression taking the camera out of the box, I have to admit, was a wave of negativity. I'm a fan of the GX8, which I owned for a year, and I was not a big fan of the GX7, a very different camera which I also owned for a year. Don't get me wrong—the GX7 is a good camera, and has been used to good effect by good photographers I know. (That's three "goods" to drive the point home. You see what I did there.) However, I did not like it. It seemed too small and fiddly, sort of unsorted, and my intuitive sense was that it never worked quite right. I wanted to like it but couldn't. I never trusted it. Didn't bond with it, you might say.

So my first thought was, oh no, not this again. It seemed all too familiar. Like that gnarly little GX7 had returned to haunt me.

...And taunt me, too. Taunt me about the GX8, I mean. I really am genuinely a little angry about the orphaning of the GX8. And no kidding about that, I'm sincerely unhappy about it. The GX8 was of my favorite cameras of recent years, yet it was one which could have used the kind of "refining" Mark II revision that so many cameras routinely get. Not to skip ahead, but, the exact same sort of revision the similarly not-quite-there GX7 has received with this GX9. Why not the GX8? I'm perturbed. As well as, let us admit, petulant.

So my first reaction was twofold: the GX9 wasn't a GX8 II, which was a bad thing; and it really was a GX7 II...also a bad thing. That's why unboxing the GX9 triggered a gut response of dismay, even something close to disgust. 

Finally, ordering a GX9, in the US at least, force-feeds you a kit lens, and I also resent that on principle. I'm a grownup. Not a beginner. I'll pick my own lenses, thanks. Minimum I expect from a camera company: give me the option of buying the kit lens or the body-only. What, you want to discourage as customers people who already own your lenses?!?

Overall, I was pretty grumpy.

At that juncture—in that state—I blatted out a reactive screed of a post and splashed it out onto the blog. Probably a bad idea. Various readers complained, and they were right. I decided not to fix it, but simply to remove it**. So away it went.

Get a grip
Knowing the awkward grip/bulge on the side of the GX7 was one of the many things I disliked about it, and wanting to pre-emptively defend against being annoyed anew, I ordered this for the GX9 from eBay:

It's a very reasonably priced, impressively lightweight handgrip designed for the GX9. I thought it would improve my personal experience of the little GX9. And it did.

After a few days of feeling grumpy and cross and knee-jerk negative—and of ignoring the camera still cradled on top of its disordered shipping materials—the grip arrived. As I fitted it to the camera, I felt a pang of self-recrimination and thought, oh, Mike, grow up. Get over yourself. It's a camera. After all these years, you can use any cam damera under the sun and adapt to it, can't you? Didn't you use an ancient dented Spotmatic with no light meter and a broken lens for a whole year once (c.1998), and make perfectly nice pictures with it? When did you get so picktidious? (That's picky and fastidious mashed together.) At least this thing has a flip-up viewing screen, which you like, and which your precious GX8 didn't have. It's small and tossable, which you say you like. It's got a longer lens than your 12–35mm zoom (the GX9 comes with the 12–60mm ƒ/3.5–5.6 ASPH POWER O.I.S. standard), and you've wanted to experiment with a longer lens. And the kit lens makes the camera a bargain, because the lens alone retails for $498, meaning that they're throwing in the camera for only an extra $300. So just go do your job and adjust to this and shoot with it for a while. Stop being a baby.

So I did. I did a little mental flipperoo, like turning off one switch and turned on another, and started taking the little bugger out for exercise. And that's when the fun started...

[...To be continued...]

Mike

Ed. note: Please hold on to your comments until the conclusion. Thanks!

*I put "review" in the title for the search engines.

**That's happened remarkably few times over the years, actually, although I've done it before. You'd think I'd have hundreds of false starts and rough drafts that never made it to publication, but no, not so; and you'd think there would have been dozens if not hundreds of times that I had put up a bad post, thought better of it, and then deep-sixed it hours, days, or weeks later. But that's not the case either. It has happened, but not very often. It was the same way at the magazines—I wrote between two and three hundred articles that were published in various newspapers and magazines, and only two were ever rejected. (I took note of it when it happened because it was a rare occurrence.) At this point I've written roughly nine thousand(!) posts on TOP, starting at Blogger and now on Typepad, and, with relatively few exceptions, everything I write goes up, and everything that goes up stays up. I have an indulgent editor, though (me).

Sock It To Me

Do you need a pair of socks?

I'm pretty sure you need a pair of socks.

Mike

P.S. These would look perfect with sandals.

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:

Daniel (partial comment): "Nope. Polyester doesn't cut it for some of us. Merino wool or good high count cotton."

Mike replies: Perfect comment for this post! To find a "deal breaker" in the specs...made me laugh.

Kenneth Tanaka: "Re 'Sock It To Me': Do you have any idea how long it's been since I've heard that old Rowen and Martin Laugh-In Show line?! Wow, it's like getting a whiff of a long-ago aroma (ex: bar room smoke). BTW, I actually saw someone wearing those camera socks, or socks just like them, last year in Lahaina, Maui! The guy was wearing shorts and slip-ons but there was no mistaking them. Geeky me, I was trying to see what type of camera they depicted."

Sunday Support Group: My County 'Tis of Thee

The county where I live, Yates County, New York, is more unusual and interesting than I gave it credit for at first. We are the third least-populous county in the State, but the largest wine-growing county in the United States outside of California, with more vineyards than any other New York county. Although landlocked, the county has a large amount of shoreline—no resource seems to be able to tell me how many miles exactly—on three lakes, Keuka, Canandaigua, and Seneca.

How many waterfalls do we have? You know I have one in my backyard. Like the islands of the Philippines, which are hard to count because some of them appear and disappear with the tides and the seasons*, many of our waterfalls come and go, materializing after heavy rains and disappearing in dry times. So the county has uncountable waterfalls.

Nationalists, I suppose, might say we have an immigrant language problem—but it's not Spanish, spoken in the home by 1.5% of the population, it's German (and Pennsylvania German and Dutch), spoken in the home by 5.5% of the population**. They're Wenger Old-Order Mennonites, and they've been in the U.S. for hundreds of years, although most in Yates County have been here no longer than 50 years, having come by way of Lancaster County in Pennsylvania starting in the 1970s.

I originally thought little Mennonite kids were shy, but it's more likely they didn't understand me—they don't begin to learn English until they're around five, I've been told. Tidy and thriving Mennonite farms dot the county, and their horse-drawn buggies and bicycles (in any sort of weather), are a common sight on the roads. There are two telltales of an Amish or Mennonite farmstead: washing out on the line to dry, or no cars to be seen.

I'd love to do a project on the Mennonites, but they don't like having their pictures taken. I'm more concerned with being respectful of people's wishes than I am about getting pictures. I'm sure if it were a certain photojournalist I know, I'd make a forthright appeal to the ruling body of elders, talk a good case, and in no time flat come away with blanket permission to photograph everybody in the congregation, and then in another month be friendly with 20 families around the county and before you know it have 30,000 exposures in the can. But he's him and I'm me, and you know what they say: Oh well. 

One of my first experiences as a wannabe photojournalist was photographing a Vietnamese refugee camp in France. The photographer I was with went around amiably snapping pictures everywhere, but multiple people requested we not take pictures. When we went ahead anyway, some responded with hostility or disapproval, and others would hide their faces, or their children's faces, if they saw the camera pointed at them. It was highly uncomfortable for me. I couldn't do it. After trying for a while in a decidedly half-hearted way, I put the camera away.

As with many things, you're kinda stuck with who you are. (I've always felt that most photographers gravitate to subject matter that's comfortable for them to shoot given their individual personality and psychology. Not everybody can shoot everything.)

I went to town early this morning and saw three Mennonite women all dressed up in their good go-to-meeting clothes, dark blue full-length dresses and bonnets, on bicycles. They were pedaling determinedly between one stoplight and another, side by side, with a car in front of them and a truck behind. From where I sat in my little sedan, going the other way, I was looking up at them as they approached, so my viewpoint made them look slightly imposing, in the way that a lower viewpoint when taking a portrait is meant to make the subject heroic.

It was quite a picturesque sight; but the picture got away.

Mike

*The number is somewhere between 7,107 and 7,641.

**Of course it's not actually a problem, and neither is Spanish. As with all non-English speaking immigrants throughout our history, older newcomers tend to keep speaking the language of their youth, whether it be Russian, Yiddish, German, Spanish, Polish, Mandarin or whatever, but their children born here speak English, whether they also speak their parents' and grandparents' language or not.

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:

Rob de Loe: "Thanks for an enjoyable Sunday read with no fewer than two good personal connections. First, I work in a part of southern Ontario (Waterloo region) where there's a strong Mennonite population with deep roots, so I know of what you speak. My 'tell' for the Mennonite farms is the absence of power lines. Another quirk is local shopping plazas that have sheds for horses; people from out of town have a hard time getting their heads around the concept, but hey, everyone needs groceries. For a second personal connection to your post, I've been working on a project about ephemeral and intermittent streams, and just finished a shot of a tiny intermittent waterfall. It only forms when we've had a major rainstorm that fires up the otherwise dry creek."

Chuck Holst: "Few people think of Lawrence Welk when they think of immigrants—and he wasn't one—but Welk grew up in a German-speaking community in western North Dakota and didn't learn to speak English until he was in school. My father's baptismal certificate is in German, though he never learned to speak it, but his grandfather's gravestone is entirely in German, and therein lies a tale: When my cousin Tim and I were looking for our great-grandfather's grave, all he knew was that it was in Zion Lutheran Cemetery in northeastern South Dakota. He found a Zion Lutheran Cemetery on the map, but we were unable to find any Holsts there. A young woman and her grandmother came by and asked if they could help. We explained what we were looking for, and the grandmother's reply was, 'Why are you looking for a German in a Norwegian Cemetery?' She gave us enough information, though, that we eventually found what we were looking for."

Dogman: "During the Mariel Boatlift of 1980, I was sent to do photos at an Arkansas camp where a large number of the Cuban refugees were being housed. I accompanied several reporters and we spent about four days at the camp. When we arrived there was a bus leaving to take media into the men's section of the camp almost immediately as we walked in. I jumped at the chance to get on the bus but all the reporters wanted to wait until after being briefed. That was probably the wise thing to do for the stories but by getting started with photographing early on I managed to get some pictures that I would not have been allowed to take if I had waited. Oddly enough I didn't have a chaperone to guide me around, I wandered around on my own—probably not the safest thing to do at the time since these folks had not been screened and there were a few guys with questionable histories present.

"I was surprised that most of the people were open to being photographed. There was a language barrier but with a gesture I could ask if it was okay to take pictures. A questioning look would usually get a nod in return. Sometimes someone would shake his head or walk away. That was okay...I had no intention of forcing myself on them. In large groups, I simply pointed the camera and started shooting but gave the subjects time to move away if they wanted to. I also smoked at the time and I handed out cigarettes until my pack was empty. That probably won me favor as much as anything. It was certainly an uncomfortable situation, not being able to communicate and trying to do the job while also trying to respect the subject's wishes. I think the men there recognized that I was trying to accommodate them and that's why it worked out well in the end. That and having cigarettes."

Ger Lawlor: "According to CalcMaps, I reckon (roughly) that you have around 65 miles of coastline! Regards."

Tom Burke: "I remember reading somewhere that at the turn of the 20th century, German-Americans (i.e. non-Mennonite/Amish) were as prominent In the country as Irish-, Italian- and Scandinavian-Americans—there had been significant immigration of ‘German’ people during the 19th century. Many of them were skilled, too (I gather)—they weren’t unskilled agricultural labourers. Amongst other aspects of this immigrant culture, there was an area of Manhattan known as Little Germany. I also read that in the early part of the First World War, the German-Americans supposedly pushed for US intervention on the side of Germany.

I suppose that two wars in which Germany was the enemy persuaded the German-Americans to lose that tag; I don’t think I’ve heard any present-day American referred to as German-American. Can anyone comment as to whether all the above is correct?

Mike replies: Absolutely, as far as I know. I believe Americans of mainly German descent are the largest U.S. ethnic group. The top four in 1776 were as follows: English, Irish, German, then Blacks of all nationalities; and now it's German, Irish, English, and Blacks of all nationalities.

Milwaukee in particular (where I grew up)—there's a great historian of the city named John Gurda. According to him, there were so many German immigrants in Milwaukee that German was the official first language of Milwaukee public schools until 1922, meaning all the way through WWI. The World Wars put a serious damper on Milwaukee's German identity and German pride, but there's a strong German element there still. Many of the kids I went to prep school with had German surnames.

I found this snippet of John Gurda talking about German Jews and other Germans in Milwaukee:

https://youtu.be/-8Cr7RpnITU?t=253

Here, they go on to dissect the Jewish communities of early Milwaukee. He's written a couple of dozen books and made many TV documentaries, and I'm sure he's discussed German immigration in more depth elsewhere.

Tom, I think you would particularly enjoy a great book called American Nations by Colin Woodard. (It was recommended to me by a TOP reader.) He generalizes a bit to make his points, and the reality is no doubt less clean than his theories, but it's fascinating stuff, and it sure answered some persistent questions I've always had about my own country. He's particularly good on the competing visions of what it means to be American and what "American values" are. Again, his explanations are generalized, but he goes a long way toward explaining in part why we have such trouble seeing eye to eye.

Collections

Just curious—do you collect anything?

I saw a video the other day made by a guy who apparently collects Mercedes-Benz cars. (I don't know how to write the plural of "Mercedes-Benz." Benzes?) I met a man locally who has a collection of old postcards, but I never got to see them. I know several photobook collectors and several camera collectors. Andy Moursund collects photobooks, with a special interest in books of photographs that relate to New York City. Rodger Kingston turned his interest in old snapshots into a collection of vernacular photography...I'd sure love to see that some day. A family I met in Wisconsin collected old metal school lunchboxes from the 1950s, '60s, and '70s. Jay Leno collects cars, and does it right. I once bought a Marantz that came from the estate of a guy who collected vintage 1970s "silver face" receivers—he had more than 50, which is a few more than most people strictly need. Elton John collects small black-and-white photographs of the kind I find most appealing. I suppose there's no chance I'll ever get to see that. I'm apparently collecting speakers, because I now have five pairs of them in the house. That's excessive. (Anybody need some speakers?) However, my e-friend the audio reviewer John Potis, before he died, had more than 40 pairs in his house. That consoles me. Somewhat.

I've always known I'm afflicted with the collecting instinct, or urge, or gene, whatever you care to call it. But I've never actually collected anything actively. Oh, I do have to resist it from time to time. For instance, Outdoor magazine published a list of the 25 best adventure books once, and I got almost to twenty before I recollected that I'm not a collector. (Some of them were really good—Touching the Void is the most suspenseful book I've ever read, period. Short, but a terrific read.) I've had to resist collecting cameras my whole life, although Josh and Nick would probably say I just do it serially as opposed to owning them all at once. I bought four pool cues and appeared to be on my way, but I stopped there.

You might think I collect books, but, technically, I don't. I accumulate books. Because books accumulate like snow accumulates to make drifts. I even like reading about collecting!

Every now and then I get antsy to collect something. What I do then is put a damp washcloth on my forehead, pull the shades down, lie down, close my eyes, and concentrate on the sound of my tinnitus—and the urge passes, after a while.

Not really. I'm kidding.

A further question
And if you could collect something, and it could be anything, what would you collect?

It's Friday, and I take Saturdays off. Enjoy your weekend, be kind to others and especially dogs, remember gratitude, and God bless!

Mike

P.S. I'm still laboring on the GX9 review, and it's coming along. It's having a tendency to, er, digress into other things, and I seem not to be in control. So I'm giving myself the weekend. So don't lose all hope. Just yet.

P.P.S. Thanks for all the good advice in the "Two Heads" post. Some great comments, and I appreciated all of them.

Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

Please help support The Online Photographer through Patreon

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Featured Comments from:

Crabby Umbo: "For some reason, I collect 'camp' style pocket knives. Folding only, and the usual: blade, awl, can opener, bottle cap opener; all pretty inexpensive. I think I was "pocket knife deprived" as a youth. I remember oohing and ahhing over pocket knives at the candy store in my neighborhood on the north side in Chicago, around Lawrence and Clark. Just funny, no reason why I do it...."

Mike replies: Does this qualify, or would you call this a jackknife?

Boker Tree Brand Copperhead pocket knife. Illo added by Ed.

Crabby Umbo replies: "More like this:"

Marc Lawrence-Howe: "I accumulate cameras, even old broken ones that people give me because they don’t know what to do with them and 'you’re into photography.' I could say I accumulate pens but it has passed the point of covering a range of use and has headed into 'Ohhh, a pretty!' so I think you could say I collect them. I seem to be accumulating metal tins—not collectors items, just from things I buy, like breath mints and sweets and such—and I’ve no point to that but I like them so I guess you might say 'collect' (I tell myself they might be useful for stationery storage but oddly they remain empty. Hmm). Mundane, I know. My interests, 'special' as they are sometimes referred to by the medical community (Autism Spectrum Disorder), are pleasurable but require a leash. I think metal tins, everyday ones, no 'limited editions'*, might be a safe path down which to let the collections urge go. Fountain pens sure as hell aren’t. (*Well, I’ve a 'limited edition' biscuit/cookie tin with The Simpsons characters on it, but that was a gift.)"

Jeff: "1. Photo books (or photobooks?), emphasis on fine first editions from respected photographers. 2. Vintage silver prints, 20th century. But neither collected actively in retirement, and many prints have been sold. I once envisioned collecting cars, but came to my senses. With greater financial wherewithal, I no doubt would have added paintings and drawings to the photographs, including works from those who excelled in multiple mediums, e.g. Charles Sheeler, Ralston Crawford, and others. My parents likely passed along the gene, once having over 200 antique clocks in the house along with art glass and other art objects. More importantly, though, they passed along art appreciation."

Zack Schindler: "I collect books by the late, great writer Jim Harrison. I have every book of his ever published, most in hardcover and a number of them he signed for me. He is considered to be one of the greatest American writers of the past 50 years. Oh and I have read all of them too.  My collection is above and here's a larger version. Also I collect antique postcards of radio stations but only if they show both the station and the tower. I have a number of them framed."

Rodger Kingston: "Hi Mike, Thanks for the mention. You might be interested to learn that I've sold my vernacular collection to a friend who is donating it to his alma mater, Keene State College, in Keene, New Hampshire. The people at Keene are very excited to be getting the collection, and I expect to serve as a consultant to help them develop and exhibit it, which seems like a perfect next step to me (at almost age 80), like having my cake and eating it too."

RubyT: "I have had many collections over the course of my life, especially in childhood. Probably the most organized was seashells, which I had grouped by type and could natter on about in great detail to whatever hapless person made the mistake of asking me. Right now I mostly just keep eye-catching found rocks and magnets of places I've visited. My ASD daughter, who is also face-blind, has the most unusual collection (outside of that chewed-gum thing!): she collects faces, cross-referenced by name and various other things (she's got a prodigious memory for names). All of this is entirely stored in her head. She adds at least one a day, and currently has 1,468."

Rick in CO: "Re 'Collecting is about what you don't have' and 'collecting is a deliberate process to acquire items of the subject in order to "make a statement" of some sort on the topic':

"Those statements hit the mark for me. I have for a few years now been collecting Linhof cameras for a book on the early pre-WWII Linhof cameras. Started somewhat naively thinking that there could not be very many early Linhof cameras still out there. As it turns out there are Linhof cameras under several different names and several Linhof copycat cameras exist as well. What I don't have is made up for by several trips to Linhof in Munich where they have allowed me the use of photographs of their archive cameras, and to several mostly European collectors who have shared. I agree that the impetus for collecting is that no matter how much you have, or if you think that you've got it all, something new always appears that you've just got to have."

Jeff in Colorado: "I like collecting photo-ephemera in the form of advertising, owner's manuals, and postage- and cinderella stamps."

[A 'cinderella stamp' is anything resembling a postal stamp but not related to government-issued postage. —Ed.]

Sroyan: "I'm averse to owning too many things; my worldly possessions are quite Spartan (just two pairs of jeans, for example, though I wear jeans all the time). The problem is I love vintage cameras. So my compromise is that I have six film cameras (two of which I plan to sell), and then I have a Google Doc called 'Virtual Camera Museum' where I save photos of other cameras I'd like to own, along with short entries on when they were "acquired" and what makes them special. Makes me sound like a loser, hah, but it works for me!"

Mike replies: I should collect pool tables like that! That would work.

You make me think of my college friend Eddie. We all had various amounts of LPs, from several dozens to hundreds—I think I had 30 to 40—but none of us could compete with Brice who had 1,400. Well, Eddie had three. At various times he would talk about adding another, but each time he would decide against it.

Dogman: "I have the collector's gene. When I get started on something, I get obsessive. But I've never been a completist in any of my obsessions. Too fickle, I guess. Anyway, I have boxes of cameras and lenses (of course), shelves of photo books, several handguns securely locked away and a couple hundred knives of all types, sizes and legalities. I used to collect CDs but I quit about three years ago when I realized I'm at an age when I don't have the time left to listen to all of them. Plus streaming is tidier. Most recently, due to the COVID, I sit around and collect dust."

Mark: "Since 2014 I’ve purchased six Porsche (is it Porsches?) automobiles, Macans, Panamera, and two 911s, along with three Ford F-150's, two of which are Raptors, and most recently a 2020 BMW M5, all 600hp of it. But I’ve traded some along way.

"Am I a collector based on that? Not compared to my driving instructor at Watkins Glen. When I mentioned he probably hadn’t met a nut like me who bought six Porsches, he replied, 'oh, yeah? Well I’ve got 11 Porsches.' I replied, 'You've bought and sold 11?' He retorted, 'No, I own 11. I can never get myself to sell them.' I knew I was normal, relatively speaking, after hearing that."

Bob Rosen: "While my modest collecting days are behind me, a friend has certainly entered the ranks of over-the-top collectors of historical objects. Peter Nettesheim is known to many in the world of vintage motorcycle collectors as having arguably the finest gathering of BMW motorcycles in private hands. Besides the collection running to over 100 bikes, Peter has devoted a lot of time and money to creating a venue for the display of these two-wheeled beauties that rivals any commercial museum. His entire herd of bikes is gathered in several beautifully designed outbuildings adjacent to his home in Long Island, New York. The Nettesheim Museum is entirely private and can only be visited by invitation. I’ve enjoyed multiple visits over the years as Peter has expanded his holdings. Recently, I documented some of the museum’s contents for a feature article that has been published in a French language motorcycle magazine. Some of those photos can be seen in my online gallery. The pictures are fun reminders, but nothing beats standing among the real thing!"

MarkB: "A few years back I found I was collecting tripod ball heads, particularly very large ones in the search of 'the perfect one.' I kept saying to myself, 'why are there no good reviews of these to read instead of buying them all?' So, I went and did the reviews myself. Not all of them were from my own collection, but then I found I really like the mechanical and industrial design of ball heads and other support equipment, so I kept on going. After a few house-moves, I've pared the collection down to four tripods and only seven ball heads. I keep one on my desk just to fiddle with it, with no camera on it."

Kye Wood (partial comment): "For the record, I collect days of happiness. My collection is quite epic and yet it takes up almost no room in the house."

Tom R. Halfhill: "I have a complete collection of the original Tom Swift novels for young adults, published from 1910 to the 1930s. (The Tom Swift Jr. series that most people remember started in the 1950s.) But I'd like to sell them. The challenge of collecting is sometimes more satisfying than owning a collection."

David Lee: "When I was in my early 20s, I had a friend that was into vintage aircraft instruments. He was very fond of the DC-6 and he had an amazing collection. He used to show me some drawings of a project he had in mind about buying a DC-6 front section and putting it on top of his house. Well, his parents' house. He had it all planned. One weekend, when they were out of the city, he brought the DC-6 cockpit he bought at the Air Force junkyard, and with the help of a truck with a crane he put it there, right on top of the house. The parents were not amused, but it was too late. He started assembling the whole thing and when he polished the skin, the original name came out. Agne Viking, from SAS. Of course, he contacted SAS and told them the story and SAS send him information about the plane. As far as I know he still collects everything related to vintage airplanes, including books, of course. Amazing guy. They say that to be a pilot, you don’t have to be crazy, but it helps...."

Purple Pepper's Perfect (for Phoneography)

It's kinda funny that I've become a WFPB eater. Growing up I never liked vegetables. I even disliked fruit (too tart). But eat any food for 30 days and you'll adjust; give your body what it needs and that will be what you crave. I've been on my current diet (all plants, time-restricted eating) since last December 19th, and I've enjoyed food this year like never before in my life—even though I'm eating things I avoided all my life long, everything from brussels sprouts to sauerkraut.

And it's funny that I've joined the throng and sometimes take quick snaps of food, too. Foody plants (planty food?) seem like good subjects for the quick visual note-taking of iPhoneography. They're just suited for each other.

When I ran across these at the Mennonite Farm market down the road, my mouth started to water. Looks like it deserves a nursery rhyme, doesn't it? Peter Piper picked a peck of purple peppers....

Here's the purple pepper's fate. I put the additives into the bowl first while the greens wash. A tripartite tip for newbie plant-eaters: you can hide almost anything in 1.) soups, 2.) salads, or 3.) smoothies. Those are my go-tos. If you don't like something, just chop it small and use less. This salad-to-be features pickled ginger, pickled beets, some onion, half an avocado, a handful of three-color canned beans, dried cranberries, and some of that purple pepper. Still to come are grated turmeric root, pepper, freeze-dried salad spices, six kinds of lettuce (bagged, don't think I'm that dedicated), and two tablespoons of dressing. You can get creative with any soup or salad or smoothie, and I'm embarrassed to say how many times I feel the resulting mad-scientist-slash-cook concoctions deserve to be "captured."

But it's one thing phones are for. Heck, I even did a selfie the other day. Who says I'm not hip?

Mike

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Ray Hunter: "Just a wild guess, but with all this chopping I anticipate a Mike Johnston guide to fine knives in our future? Just speculating as another compulsive."

Mike replies: Shhhhh...you might wake it up.

Random Excellence: Jose Luis Gonzalez

Linhof Color monorail, 1960
Photo by Jose Luis Gonzalez

TOP reader Jose Luis Gonzalez contacted me this morning to offer some friendly advice, and in the process I learned of his camera collection and the portraits he makes of his collectibles using light-painting techniques. You can view many examples at this 2016 post on Japan Camera Hunter. Great tabletop photography of a lovely camera collection. Nice, all around!

Mike
(Thanks to Jose)

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Featured Comments from:

Fred Tuman: "That same exact type camera of camera was used every day in my studio from 1986 till 2004. It has bought me my home, paid for my wedding, and purchased five new cars over its lifetime. I paid $450 for it used at Ken Hansen's. When I sold it, with a couple of lenses, I took a trip with my wife to Vienna with the proceeds. Will any of my digital equipment reap the same emotional rewards?"

Peter Komar: "Back when I was shooting medium or large format product photography I absolutely recall the 'Light Wand.' It had many 'light end' attachments and a long tethered fiber optic cable to the base unit. It was quite the rage for a short time and the results were unique as far as product photography was concerned. The images of the classic cameras I would bet were shot using that technique, it was a lengthy process and, as I recall, always shot in very dim light studio settings. Nice to see that technique as I have not seen that in many years."

Paul McEvoy: "That Linhoff Color monorail is the most beautiful camera I've ever seen. I remember lusting over one in my LF days. I don't think there's a better looking camera out there."

Open Mike: Two Heads (OT)

"And you know two heads are better than one."

—Annie Ross, "Twisted," 1952

I raised my son alone. The short (short-short) version of the story is that his mother was a girlfriend who got pregnant by accident and opted not to have an abortion. Unfortunately, she also decided not to tell me. She broke up with me out of the blue, successfully kept her pregnancy secret up to the last minute, and put her baby—which turned out to be my baby—up for adoption. By a far-fetched chain of frankly unlikely circumstances, I got wind of all this right before my son was born. First I had to figure out whether I had anything to do with it, then I had to decide what to do, then I had to do it—and then I had to bring a newborn home, to a brown paper sack of hastily-bought diapers and formula and other baby supplies sitting on the living room floor. All this across the span of just a few days. In the end, plans hurriedly put into place fell apart anyway, and the motley cast of characters—me, her, her mother, the adoptive couple, everyone's lawyers, everyone's friends, a judge at a dinner party, and a newborn baby boy—barreled headlong into full-fledged crisis mode culminating in a dramatic denouement worthy of a movie. Most people have nine months (more or less) to prepare for the arrival of a new baby. I had nine hours.

I mean, I never see things coming anyway. But that was ridiculous.

In those chaotic early days as "the Dad without a clue"—the neonate daycare provider's nickname for me—one of my standard jokes was, "There's a reason God gave parents two heads and four hands. It's because that's how many you need." Believe me when I tell you, my brother, my sister, because I know: one head and two hands often falls short of the minimum required.

I'm feeling that way again lately. I have difficulty making decisions. I'm comfortable keeping decisions open until the last second, and I dislike closure. When people ask me if I might be free at such-and-such a time at some date months into the future, I realize my brain works differently than theirs. I can hardly plan for next week, much less November. People able to plan years ahead sometimes seem like Martians to me.

I'm also an "idealist type," able, with breathless ease, to envision the way things "should be." The downside of this visionary ability is that I'm impractical. I walk around with ideas in my head that really should be "brought into relationship" by being shared with others, so those others can but a brake on the thought patterns that are far-out and essentially fantastic. Bringing others into the loop helps me sort plausible ideas from implausible ones.

Lately I'm having a tough time planning. I've made a series of steps to shed some of those illusions I was just talking about and to view my situation with cold-hearted realism. Trying hard to see things as they really are. 

But you know what the biggest problem is for me, really? Too few heads!

I know that a lot of you out there are married. And a lot of my friends who are "old marrieds" sometimes talk about their spouses with a casualness that seems, to me, to almost border on contempt sometimes. It startles me when I hear it, if "shocks" is too strong a word. I know being married can be routine, sometimes boring, that sometimes it's easy to take the other person for granted, all that.

But from where I sit, y'all ought to be grateful every day! At the very least, every thought in your head stays "in relationship," because you can put it out there to your spouse and he or she can weigh in. It's one thing we humans need—another perspective. It's a steadying hand on the tiller.

And it's just a heck of a lot easier to make decisions with two people than it is with one. I've worked and worked, but I can't figure out logically what I ought to do to further prepare for the years I still hope are waiting in my future. Stay where I am? A local move? An interstate move? Retrain for a new job? (I've been looking at the Nutrition Certification program at Cornell. Should I do that? Danged if I know.) Refinance?—this bugs me, but I cannot even figure out if I should refinance my mortgage. I cannot for the life of me sort out all the numbers. There are too many aspects to all these decisions vectoring in from every which way—including intangibles like sentimentality (I love my house), proximity to loved ones (I'm far away from my son), the possibility of future disabilities (and who ever knows about that?)—on and on goeth the list. Everything interlaces and interferes with everything else. I can't sort everything out.

Well, haven't yet, anyway. It's been distracting me. "Driving me crazy," as the expression goes.

If you have two heads to help guide you on the voyage through life, wake up every morning grateful, is all I can say. Never take that gift for granted. Singletons like me get storm-tossed.

The great husband-and-wife Broadway thespians Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, who always worked as a team and wouldn't take parts solo, used to work out their performances by sitting on the floor facing each other. They'd lock legs and read through a new script until they both understood their own and each other's part, and until they both agreed how every line, every movement, and every scene between them was going to go. Some things you just can't do alone.

It's not like being single is the worst thing in the world, and I'm not complaining. I was talking about it with a same-age friend a few weeks back. He's been through long stretches alone and long stretches married, and he thought for a few moments and said, each one has advantages and disadvantages. That's probably right. But if you happen to be partnered, count your blessings, that's all. From this side of the fence, your grass looks greener than it is over here.

I'll get over this confusion. And, yeah, I'll probably [heaves sigh] make another bad decision. As I say, I have trouble with decisions. I do wish someone else was in it with me.

When I heard the original version of that song, Annie Ross's, on XM Radio the other day in the car—the song was later made famous for my generation, of course, by Joni Mitchell—that line at the end suddenly had a whole new meaning!

Mike

"Open Mike" is the often off-topic, anything-goes Editorial Page of TOP. When everything is going according to the prearranged plan, it appears on Wednesdays.

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:

Geoff Wittig: "Familiarity can of course lead to taking people for granted, but that is certainly not the case for me. My wife and I met in college and this will be our 40th year of marriage come December. We have never been apart for longer than a week...until this year. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, she has been in South Carolina since early May watching our two little grandchildren while my daughter and her husband work full time. Initially day care and schools closed due to the virus. They are now reopening, but the pandemic is still burning out of control through most of the South, so I have advised my daughter not to send her kids into harm's way, but to keep them safe at home. I visited South Carolina the first week in June; since then my wife and I have been physically apart for two months while I work as a family physician not too far from TOP World Headquarters. We talk every night on the phone or via face time, but the separation has been utterly traumatic. I feel like I'm missing half of my person."

Steven ralser: "We can relate to your nine hours. both our children are adopted. With our oldest we got a phone call at 9 a.m., and the adoption agency said they had a three-day-old boy available for adoption. They also said if you all get along (us and the baby's mother) the baby can go home with you that day. We were an hour and half from the hospital. Before we left we got another call asking if we had a name picked out. So there we were driving north thinking about names.

"Everything worked out and we left the hospital with our son. As we said we would adopt a child up to five years old, we had nothing prepared. Some people knew we were adopting, so first stop was some friends in Albuquerque who had been saving baby clothes for us. We made a call to a friend in Socorro (where we lived at the time)—he had an old crib for us; and we went shopping for baby supplies in the local supermarket (on the sly because no one else knew what we had planned, and in a small town everyone knows everyone). So there we were, new parents with less than nine hours notice."

Peter Wright: "It had not occurred to me before I read this, but I am essentially at the other extreme. I make my decisions, including the important ones like which country to live in, where to buy a house, who to marry, which job to take, etc. very fast; usually only a few days. Luckily, I have never regretted any of these decisions. (Looking back, when I have made mistakes it was because I was just drifting and not realizing that a decision actually needed to be made, and I was too dumb to know.)

"I remember some years back being astonished at a colleague who could not decide whether to take a position in the company we worked for that would involve moving to another country. He thought about it seemingly endlessly. 'Don't you just know?' I kept saying to him in exasperation—it didn't seem to help."

"Minor (very minor) case in point. Did you get your audio streaming sorted out? I was expecting to see a post on it by now. When you posted on this about four weeks back, I thought it seemed a good idea, but digging into it I discovered I didn't know a toslink from Twonky, or a dBPowerAmplifier from a Raspberry Pi with a hat. But...I have now had my system up and running for about two weeks and I'm giving Tidal a good workout. Very much enjoying it all! So thanks!"

Mike replies: Yes, people have expressed the same sort of exasperation with me sometimes. Even when the decision is simple I sometimes can't help second-guessing myself. I wonder if children can be helped to learn how to be decisive?

The Cambridge CXN v.2 from B&H is still sitting right here in a box in my office, unopened. I can't decide whether to open it or return it. So, good case in point!

UPDATE Friday: I sent the Cambridge CXN v.2 streamer back to B&H. Not only that, but I made a resolution to never spend another dime on stereo equipment in my life. I listen to music sitting at my computer; my computer system is already extremely good and wonderfully enjoyable; I really just don't need to dabble with anything else. Simplifying involves being happy with what you have—when you can! I am very happy I learned about Roon and Quobuz (similar to your Tidal), though. Both those usefully kicked my enjoyment up another notch.

Terry Burnes: "Well over half of us are going to be alone at the end. Singles certainly but also half of married people. You might be better prepared for that than most of us, especially than a married man who has come to rely heavily on a spouse no longer around. And while you might wish for a partner to help you though the future, the simple truth is that you could end up being the partner who has the burden of helping his spouse through a long difficult demise. Talk about challenging and unpleasant decisions. I try to spend more time appreciating what I have than wishing or scheming for something better."

John Camp: "One of the unusual things about being a novelist is the decision-making process. A reader usually reads a novel straight through and the book looks like one piece. But it's not. You maybe write a thousand words or even a few thousand, representing dozens of decisions about plot, character, tone, balance between dialogue and narrative, and so on. Then you revise, throwing out old decisions, making new ones. Then you write forward again, and revise again, often going back to the first chapters and reworking to account for decisions you made about plot turns and characters later in the novel. I've rewritten the first few paragraphs of a couple of novels as the last thing I did before submitting the manuscript to the publisher. That's after months of work and revisions. I don't consider that an inability to be decisive, I think of it as 'mulling it over.' And I think that applies to life as well as novels—you're sort of groping your way forward, because you really don't know what's coming down the road at you.

"I worked for almost 20 years for a very large newspaper corporation. A huge premium is placed on an editorial manager's ability to make good accurate decisions on an hourly and daily basis, and then doing it again the next day. That carried upward into the top levels of management. To get ahead, you had to be quick and decisive even if you were wrong—in that kind of atmosphere, nobody much remembered the mistakes made a few weeks earlier. Nobody was mulling things over, looking for complicated changes in culture. There just wasn't time...the managers believed. You gotta be tough and decisive, you gotta get on with it. The company never saw the Internet coming. Never saw the cultural changes going on around it. The company no longer exists."

Updates

I'm working on a GX9 article, and it looks like it's going to be a while. For your diversion and amusement in the meantime, a few updates:

• Regarding the sale (or whatever it is) of Olympus, DPReview has published an interesting article covering dire predictions for the Japanese camera industry as a whole from Nikkei Asian Review Deputy Editor Masamichi Hoshi. Meanwhile, elsewhere on the same website, Canon is characterized as believing that "sooner or later the market will settle down and consist solely of users that are particular about imaging." Meanwhile, is it just me, or do a hefty number of recent DPReview posts seem to be about Olympus products?

• Regarding our post about to destruction of Central Camera in Chicago, which I feel a tiny bit sheepish for emphasizing in these pages, it bears mentioning that most Americans probably don't have a very balanced view of what's really been going on in the extensive fallout following the killing of George Floyd. Right-sympathizing media were beating the drum about widespread rioting, emphasizing the tearing down of statues including those of Founders, whereas left-sympathizing media reported mainly peaceful demonstrations with occasional isolated outbreaks of opportunistic looting and vandalism, and the pulling down and/or graffiti'ing of, for the most part, Confederate statues. Thus, many Americans might have somewhat different impressions of what actually went on, usually accompanied with different sets of feelings about it. I tend to see/read/hear The New York Times, The Washington Post (I subscribe to both), Politico, The Atlantic (ditto), CNN, MSNBC, NPR, The Guardian, and The New Yorker (ditto again), so you can diagram approximately where I fall on the AllSides Media Bias Chart. Anyway, here's a story about the return of Central Camera, courtesy of Ken Tanaka and several other readers. No clue where the Tribune falls on the spectrum.

• As an update my various dieting posts, I had to run an encouraging errand a few mornings ago. I drove up to the Windmill, a local craft fair and farmer's market that's only open on Saturdays, to search out the nice blonde German lady who is...into leather. That is, she has a booth where she sells leather goods. I bought a new real-leather belt from her for $42 last summer. I wanted to get her to put some more holes in! I had gotten down to the last hole—on the skinny side, I mean—and my pants were still falling down. Plus, the end of the belt was flapping around because it's too long now. She punched three new holes and chopped four inches off the end of the belt and now it fits fine again. I'd better not gain that weight back again, or I'm going to be out $42.

Back to work I git.

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:

Yoram: "Bravo Mike for your diet results and keeping healthy life ! As a skinny guy (sorry, it's genetics) I really understand about that end-belt-flapping issue  :-)  ."

Dan Khong: "The Media Bias Chart is helpful especially for folks living outside the USA. We are mostly quite blurry about such matters.

"Now at least we know where the news are leaning towards, can tell apart the right hand from the left, and the rear cap from the front cap. Just sayin'."

Mike replies: Except that the Media Bias Chart is only relative to the spectrum in the US. The "Left" US media outlets are not very lefty compared to Europe. Bill Clinton would have had to run as a conservative in probably half the countries in Europe, and France would scoff at the idea that the NYT is leftist in any sense. Case in point: I'm a "leftist" in the US, and I would come nowhere near qualifying as such in any country except one in which the Center is over on the left side! I'm a dyed-in-the-wool middle-o'-the-road Centrist in any sensible context.

So keep the context in mind.

Robert Roaldi: "I remember an old cold war era joke. A town in Siberia wrote to the Kremlin complaining about hard times. The Kremlin replied, 'Tighten belts,' to which the town replied, 'Send belts.'"

Personal Lens Roadmap

The Fuji 55–200mm ƒ/3.5–4.8 on the X-H1

A "lens roadmap," a term which became popular in the 2000s, is the planned release schedule of a manufacturer's system lenses. Josh Hawkins, a photojournalist from Las Vegas, suggested the term "personal lens roadmap" to mean a rationalized acquisition plan for your own arsenal of lenses. A personal lens roadmap keeps you from buying on impulse and from redundancy, among other things. It might include stopgap choices to fill in while you save for a more expensive version. It can give you a plan and put you on a schedule.

And it's fun to think about.

I traded the Fuji 90mm ƒ/2, a gorgeous piece of glass that I don't need, for a lightly used 55–200mm plus a little cash. The latter is a workmanlike zoom of moderate speed (ƒ/3.5–4.8) and very good range, similar to the many 75–300mm type lenses made for many years for 35mm/FF DSLRs. It's much more appropriate for my personal needs than the awesome 100–400mm super telephoto zoom I got to own and use for a year. It was a valuable experience. I really enjoyed being able to familiarize myself with the big zoom over a year's time; it was a new experience for me. I've never gotten to know a lens that long before.

But the 55–200mm is better for what I need a long zoom for. It's an ideal fit for the Fuji X-H1 in terms of weight and balance, and it goes wide enough, while still having more reach than I'll ever need. I've just played around with it so far, but I like it a lot. I feel like it's the one I needed.

I do suspect I'm finding the new, shorter tele to be so effortless to adapt to because of that period in which I "engaged" with learning the longer zoom first.

So I'm very happy now with my four "keeper" lenses, the 23mm ƒ/1.4, 35mm ƒ/1.4, 14mm ƒ/2.8, and 55–200mm tele zoom. I still have various other lenses, and I'm still working on that "personal lens roadmap." Not sure exactly what I'll end up keeping besides those three.

More about the zoom when I get to know it better. But I feel like the my roadmap is coming along fine.

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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Kye Wood: "A gear posting! At last! I kid, because I care. Strange thing about the 35mm ƒ/1.4 Fuji lens (which you own). It took some of the joy out of photography for me. It was too perfect. I know, I know. It wasn't without character. It was just so perfect that it made everything I took with it look like it was a staged photoshoot. I think being able to use ƒ/1.4 without any flaws lead me to bokuse (the abuse of bokeh). Looking at a lot of other peoples work lately led me to realise how overused bokeh is. Even beautiful bokeh gets boring real fast. These days I prefer the Micro 4/3 lenses. So now I have Micro 4/3 systems. Even wide open, you get some detail of the background of the subject. Which gives my photos context and place. Making them lasting and interesting. Not perfect. But far more interesting for it."

Random Excellence: Victor Keller

Photo by Victor Keller

One thing that's dependable on a blog is that one thing leads to another. After I wrote about pool on the 25th of last month, sometime reader Victor Keller sent me a link to a series of pictures he made in pool halls. I guess you have to be a fan to know how cool it is to have, in your portfolio, candid pictures of Efren Reyes practicing...I'd kill for that!

Well, not kill. But you know what I mean. (That's not him in the picture above, by the way.)

Thanks to Victor.

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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Thomas Walsh: "Incredible portfolio, thanks Mike for this post. Keller's work is just plain good."

A Useful Factoid for Car Shopping

Surveys of the membership of Consumer Reports reveals that all of the cars most likely to make it to 200,000 miles (CR identified ten) were made by either Honda or Toyota*.

All I can say to that is, my Acura, which was made by Honda and has a Civic Si drivetrain, has 120,000 to go, and I hope it makes it.

It would be handy if we had projected longevity stats for camera models, too, wouldn't it? I had two early digital cameras that died, but my Fuji X-T1, as I've mentioned before, has been holding up to continuing use better than expected.

Mike

*Source: CR Consumer Reports magazine, August 2020, p. 61

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.

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

Joseph L. Kashi: "340,000 Alaska miles on a 1998 5-speed Saturn SW2 small FWD station wagon, and still going reasonably strong.

"[Sardonic commenting on] of course Saturn went under: reliable, efficient, no-frills vehicles at a fair price, good customer service, and no rip-off [sardonic commenting off]."

Mike replies: I read this great article about Saturn in Forbes, a magazine I seldom see, in a dentist's office in 2010. Very interesting and revealing. GM and the UAW succeeded too well in their original mission, and neither of them could stand it! You'll enjoy this if you've never read it.

Joe Kashi: "Following up on my 340,000 mile Saturn SW2 and other equipment longevity comments, I read the Forbes article that you kindly listed and it mirrored what the people at the Anchorage Saturn dealership told me. We later bought two reconstructed mid-model Saturn VUE AWD SUVs. They're likewise still going strong at well over 150,000 miles. Our 1983 Chevy K-10 Blazer still plows snow reliably but needs a few repairs every now and then—plowing is hard on a vehicle. Our relatively simple 1963 Cessna Skymaster twin-engine aircraft remains capable, safe, and airworthy. It's not as flashy and fast as some more modern aircraft, but several airline captains who have flown with me up in the Alaska mountains preferred it because it was 'real flying, not monitoring automatic systems.' There wasn't a lot to go expensively wrong, such as turbochargers.

"Photographically, I still use several 1926–1928 vintage uncoated Zeiss/B&L Protar VIIa and 1950-vintage Kodak Ektar and Goerz American Dagor lenses along with a variety of modern multi-coated Rodenstock and Fujifilm large format lenses on 5x7. These older top-tier Protar, Ektar, and Dagor large format lenses produce images that are comparable with modern lenses. All of the above are old tech, but capable of modern results. At the end of the day, I prefer practical, non-frilly equipment of all sorts that keeps working reliably and indefinitely if regularly maintained."

Mike: My uncle Cam had a Skymaster. Chosen for redundancy. He was a conservative pilot, and would taxi all the way to the far end of the runway to take off. By the time he passed the tower he would be about eye-level with the controllers. Their standard exchange, repeated every time:

Tower: "Got enough runway there, Cam?"

Cam: "Can't use runway you don't have."

Juan Buhler: "I don't know about cars, but I have two dead Leica M8's and one dead Leica M9, all from faulty parts, like screens or sensors. Is Leica the Maserati of digital cameras?"

Roger Bradbury: "I once heard about a Nikon F5 that went in for a regular service. It had had over one million shutter activations. Allowing for a few activations without film in the camera, a million activations is 27,000 36-exposure films. That's more than twenty rolls of film a day, five days a week, for five years. Wow."

Sunday Support Group: What's On TOP?

Got some feedback from a reader this morning: there have been no thoughtful essays on TOP recently, he said, and way too many gear articles. He reduced his Patreon donation by a dollar. Which is really indicative of how fundamentally decent and thoughtful TOP readers are; he could have cut it off altogether, but he didn't. He also took time to give me his feedback, which was considerate of him. I'll take readers like that.

Funny, though. I kinda thought we'd been talking recently about Bill Jay, artist's statements, and early-in-life accomplishments/setbacks. And not enough about gear.

You're aware that most sites are all about gear, right? There's a good reason for that. It's what draws eyes. People are hounds for gear talk. It's what fires the machine, what stokes the furnace. And what keeps this particular claptrap steamship afloat. Back in the heyday, I could track it: traffic was a reliable bellwether of it. A decline in the daily numbers meant: uh-oh, time to get back to talking about gear.

Ah, shoes!
Maybe I just haven't written anything about the gear that guy is interested in, is all. Gear talk is like advertisements. Ads are just a nuisance...unless you happen to be interested in what's being advertised. Then you're all over it.

The same thing goes for shopping in general, actually. I fell in love with a woman long ago who loved shoes. She had forty pairs of shoes to my three, well on her way to being Imelda Marcos*, and when we were out on the town we had to stop at every shop that carried shoes. This greatly surpassed my interest in the subject, which was H—>0**. So I'd go around saying that I hated shopping. But that wasn't true; all I meant was that I had to spend an inordinate amount of time standing around in shoe stores***. But cameras were another story. They bored her, but if I could tack on to the end of my life the amount of time I've spent shopping for cameras, it would be quite a bonus.

I hated ads on TV so much I got rid of my TV. Haven't had one for seven years now, a fact that my cable provider is completely incapable of comprehending. I resist ads on YouTube as best I can. But if there were commercials for pool tables, I gotta be honest, I'd be riveted. It all depends on what ignites your endorphins, right?

Hubris
So anyway, on the topic of TOP content, just a couple of warnings in advance: someday, I'm going to write an article about how to buy a pool table. This will have 97% of you rolling your eyes (a figure which I will endeavor to reduce to 92% by striving to be entertaining), but it's bound to happen so I'm just giving you fair warning. Sorry! I'm also going to write a post—one post—about the American election before it happens, because I have a thoughtful perspective to offer. That will not violate the rules of the website: the rule is "no gratuitous political provocations," not "no politics" at all. It's a long, well-established principle for the press to endorse political candidates in editorials, and I'm gonna latch on to that even though it's hubris to imply that my little blog is a part of "the press."

My dilemma on that score is that silence is irresponsible, from a civic participation perspective.

But don't worry...there will be only one post about the election, and only one about buying a pool table. And you've already been warned once that they're coming, and you'll be alerted again. Both posts will be well flagged, and both will be hidden behind a page break. You'll easily be able to skip them if you prefer. So neither will assault your eyes or your sensibilities against your will. No harm, no foul.

Oh, and by the way...two other readers increased their Patreon donations today (and thanks to them), so all is well. The claptrap steamboat steams on along down the river, for now.

In the end, a blog's a blog. Don't like something, skip it and wait...something new will always be along. And one thing does tend to lead to another. For instance, this post started out talking about complaints regarding our content, and is just about to end up at...the Bible. Take that, other photo sites.

Of course, there's nothing really new under the sun****, and the good thing that comes along will be broadly similar to what has come along before; it's like the weather that way, in that it changes in innumerable and varied ways and yet the changes are always broadly the same and the same sameness is always coming back around. Same as it ever was.

Enjoy your Sunday! Now then, back to gear.

Mike
(Thanks to David)

*Wife of a now-historical Philippines dictator who notoriously enriched himself from the public treasury. (A term for that is "kleptocrat," a cool word even though it describes a disreputable thing.) When they fled in disgrace the wife famously abandoned a vast wardrobe and 1,220 pairs of shoes, exaggerated in the public stories at the time to 3,000. My girlfriend could relate.

**I shouldn't use terms from calculus given that I'm innumerate. But I think what that means is that you take the distance of a point from zero, divide it in half, and then divide that in half, and keep on doing that an infinite number of times; what you end up with is very close to zero but never precisely zero. Thus, as close to zero as you can get. I learned this in a long-ago class called, no kidding, "Math for Poets," so of course I could be remembering it poetically and not mathematically. If so I'm sure I'll be corrected, which means I'll learn something today.

***And if that woman who liked shoes was still in my life I'd be counting my blessings every day, and I'd buy her a new pair of shoes every month. Every week if I could afford it. I'd squire her to the shoe store and stand around without complaint while she shopped, and even tell her she could take her time. With the passage of time comes gratitude. Not to mention regret.

****If you've never read Ecclesiastes*****, you really should. Seriously. It's wonderful.

*****"Ecclesiastes" is a Latin transliteration of the Greek translation of the Hebrew word "Qoholeth," which means a speaker to the assembled throng, i.e., a preacher.

Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

Please help support The Online Photographer through Patreon

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

Bruce Appelbaum (partial comment): "In 1983, during the Marcos years, I spent some time in Manila for business. The joke going around at the time was:

Q. How did Imelda Marcos come by all her money?

A. Mining.

Q. Mining?

A. Yes, that's mine, that's mine, that's mine.... "

Bill Tyler: "So about calculus—and nothing to do with photography. You're talking about the notion of a limit—something you approach but never reach. Photographically, it's the perfect print—the one you are striving for, but can't quite ever reach. No matter how good the last one is, there's always something that could be better. The mathematical definition is a little subtle. The idea is that for any number you care to pick, no matter how small, as long as it's not exactly zero, the thing approaching the limit will get closer than that. There's a sort of relationship to fractions themselves. What's the next bigger fraction than 1/2? Is it 2/3? 3/5? 17/33? 63/128? 10000/20001? There is no next fraction. No matter what you pick, there's something else in between, closer to the goal."

Peter Wright: "I did a lot of calculus back when I was doing post graduate research. I developed sets of simultaneous non-linear integro-differential equations with six unknowns and time variant coefficients. Once I got the hang of it, solving them was quite straightforward. I didn't immediately recognize your calculus expression, but I knew you meant to say that your interest was asymptotically approaching zero. (When it comes to women's shoes mine does too.)

"Ecclesiastes is my favourite book of the Old Testament. My wife gets it mixed up with Ecclesiasticus (strictly speaking part of the apocryphal or deuterocanonical books that not all denominations acknowledge). But Ecclesiasticus is now renamed Sirach (no doubt to avoid confusing people like my wife). I endorse your suggestion to read Ecclesiastes; it is as relevant today as it was 2,500 years ago. For anyone looking for a good introduction, I suggest When All You've Ever Wanted Isn't Enough by Harold Kushner. (The author is more famous for When Bad Things Happen to Good People.) Kushner uses Ecclesiastes as the foundation for his book.

"That's what I love about TOP. It sometimes covers things close to my heart, that I normally never come across on the internet, least of all on a photography blog!"