The Online Photographer

Look Hard

Do you ever just look hard at the world? Even without a camera in your hand? I saw something wonderful early yesterday morning.

I first learned to "look hard" when I drew from life as a kid. I was good at drawing when I was young, and "artist" was my main identity among my peers for the first 18 years of my life. In the way that kids latch on to simple identities for other kids. I was not so good at painting because my color sense is only so-so at best...you learn whether you have a color sense when you try to paint; it's an acid test for that.

But I was not a true natural as an artist. It's frustrating to be uncommonly good at something yet not quite good enough. I remember reading an article about the guys who make it to Triple-A ball through hard work and singleminded devotion but just don't quite have the gifts to make the majors. Like that.

Trying to draw from life is a good way to hone your observational skills, though, that's for sure. Regardless of how well the drawing turns out!

The fall
I saw something unusual later in the day, too. We had a windstorm—the power went out—and there were big waves and whitecaps on our normally very protected, narrow lake. The neighbors were down on the shared dock trying to keep the tied-up speedboats from smashing against the dock; one guy was trying to lower the flags but the rope had come off the pulley.

I happened to be looking out my window, thinking I might record a short video of the swirling leaves and the thrashing trees for my niece, when I saw a big tree fall. I was looking right at it. It was obvious there was something in the atmosphere passing that spot, because the tops of the trees in the one little area were thrashing around in a frenzy. As I watched, a medium-sized tree—fifty, sixty feet, maybe?—headed for the ground with a sickening crack and a vigorous whump into the ground.

It didn't hit anything except my poor smaller rhododendron that blooms delicate purple flowers in its season. It was pulverized. It's gone. Blitzed.

Speaking of weather, get a load of this completely bizarre weather report:

I've never seen anything like that before. (For those in other parts of the world, 123°F is 50.6°C and 1°F is –17.2°C.)

So here's what I saw this morning. I got up very early, just before dawn. (Not on purpose—in my whole life, I've just never been good at sleeping. I'm better at it now than I ever was, but I still have problems.) Looking out the window, I saw in the half-light of dawn a blustery, overcast day. The windstorm hadn't started yet but an unsettled breeze was lazily tossing the leaves of the trees around. There was still a lot of the dark of night in the sky—the world was shrouded in murkiness. The sky, spitting a little rain, was solid cloudcover, gray with some cobalt blue, beautiful shades of blue, but the overcast was high up so I could see some shape and details in the clouds.

And then, from the sun just rising over the high ground behind me, piercing in from under the overcast, the top of the bluff across the lake was illuminated with a rosy, orangey dawn sunlight.

Mind you, I don't live on the lake, and I didn't get a clear view of this. I saw it through telephone lines and treetops, the line of sunlight on the opposite shore interrupted by a lot of junk in the way. There wasn't any possibility of a picture.

Except in my mind. What if I were at a good vantage point, somewhere where I could see? I could envision the finished photograph in my mind: a darkish, blueish, brooding landscape but with that raggedy line of beautiful dawn sunlight at the crest of the high bluff in an unbroken line, glowing like hope.

As it was, I just stood there and looked at what I could see. The magical light lasted for about ten minutes. Then the sun reached the blanket of cloud-cover and hid.

Sometimes the picture is there, but you aren't.

Still, we get to look.

Mike

[It happened again! Last year a red oak cracked at the crotch between two main branches (they do that sometimes) and half of the upper part of the tree fell to the ground. The other half has been hanging up in the canopy—what loggers call a "widowmaker." They're dangerous because they can come down at any time. So I was out throwing the ball for Butters a few hours ago and there was a loud CRAAACK! from the hillside and the other half of the tree came down with a great clatter and commotion. I knew right away what was happening. It was far enough away from us that I didn't feel endangered, but, just like yesterday, the chances were pretty slim that I'd be standing right there when it came down, such that I could watch it fall and break apart. It's a perfectly still day, too, although I'm sure the wind storm yesterday weakened it and hastened its fall.

I'm glad it's down. Now it can't endanger anyone, not that anyone ever climbs that hill.]

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:

Greg Bolarsky: "To me, photography is a way to share a private moment. But trying to capture it can ruin the very moment I want to share. The fact is, nature has a way of telling you when to put down your technology and simply immerse yourself in the experience. I find that—sometimes—sacrificing a photo for the experience brings much greater rewards. A lot of the time (maybe most of the time), the image I have in my head would never come out the way I see it. If I try too hard to make the image work, I miss the moment. So, I tell a story with words instead of images."

Rob de Loe: "I see much more now than I ever did. I also look more, and notice more. I study the relationships among things, I notice the colours, tones, shapes—all the things that photographers and visual artists who rely on the 'real' take note of. And yet, I photograph what I see less. I don't carry a camera with me all the time. Even when I happen to have a camera, I regularly spend a lot of time looking and seeing, but not making photos. I'm not describing a problem or pathology. I just don't feel the need to make photographs of things I see as much as I used to. Sometimes it's because I've made that photograph before, or because I've seen many versions of that photograph. Other times it's because I have enough experience to know it won't work as a photograph. Often, it's simply because I know that the photograph I could make from what I'm seeing isn't going to add anything to what's out there already. The benefit of being picky is I'm more committed to the ones I do make. I work harder and care more at the taking stage, and I have a clearer sense for what they need at the developing stage. More seeing, and fewer pictures: that's not necessarily a bad thing."

Geoff Wittig: "Just looking hard feeds the soul; nothing quite like being present for one of those perfect little moments. It can be that divine rose light just before the sun crests the hills to the east. Or the dead-calm an hour before sunrise, when the silence and the sharp aroma of wet earth feels like something you can hug. The challenge of distilling that feeling into a photographic print is precisely what I find so compelling about the craft."

PaulW: "One of the best things I've ever done to improve my powers of observation was to take a drawing class. I remember the instructor telling us that to really see the world, draw it. I haven't looked at things the same since. Even though I don't draw much anymore, I frequently pretend I'm drawing something. It's amazing how much more I notice when I do this."

Dogman: "We had a bit of wind recently here in Louisiana. Roofers, contractors, wrecker drivers and arborists are busy these days around town—and I live in the northern part of the State, far from Hurricane Laura's landfall. We were lucky at my house. One big pecan limb fell on our patio furniture, but did not cause much damage, and a smaller limb made a mess of a gutter but missed the roof by inches. I recall hearing the sound of trees and limbs breaking while sitting in the dark due a power outage. Kinda freaky. Kinda scary. Trees can be deadly. Remember Beaumont Newhall's wife and writing partner Nancy was killed by a falling tree while rafting on the Snake River in Wyoming. Our pecan tree drops limbs frequently but this is the first time it did so with a vengeance."

Mike replies: I never knew that was how Nancy Newhall died. I have several of her books. I seem to recall reading that, on average, 150 people are killed by falling trees every year. A friend back in Wisconsin told a truly awful story of a young couple heading home from their family engagement party during a thunderstorm. Only a block from the house a tree fell on the moving car and killed the young man, while leaving his bride-to-be untouched. Truly tragic.

MikeR (partial comment): "There's a weather phenomenon called a microburst. A small parcel of cool air suddenly departs from whatever has been holding it up, and it plunges to the ground. It can affect a surprisingly small area on the ground, and if a tree happens to be there ... (Experienced here May 2019. Two willow trees perhaps 100' from the house flattened, and nothing else. Glad it wasn't 100' closer.)"

Brandon: "I first became interested in digital photography in order to take better snapshots of my kids/vacations and to understand the optics that my iPhone X was trying to mimic in 'portrait mode.' Although both of those goals have been achieved, the more important thing that happened was that I started seeing things everywhere I looked—clouds, graffiti, birds, sunlight reflecting off the lake, even the flowers that grow in my own backyard—that I'm pretty sure I previously knew were there but had somehow never really seen. Initially, I took lots of pictures of these newly-noticed things, but now I often just look hard, even when I have a camera in my hand."

Help, Wow, and Thanks

According to Annie Lamott, there are only three kinds of prayers: Help, Wow, and Thanks.

I don't know what to say. (Me, at a loss for words?) I've been feeling massively grateful over the past two days, to be the recipient of so many kudos. As many of us are, I guess I've been under more stress than I quite realized lately. Demoralized. So Sunday's post and the ensuing affirmation and support was an occasion I'll value and treasure. I don't want it to end. I so much appreciated the outpouring of kind and supportive comments (and am surprised how positive they are), all the new and increased pledges. A great feeling.

I've printed many comments and put them in a folder, to use as a resource and a comfort for those inevitable future occasions when I'll be feeling down in the dumps.

It was more than I deserve, but at the same time just what I needed. Thank you, truly.

Mike

Sunday Support Group: Photo Bloggers Calling It Quits....

"Dance with who brung ya."

—Old American rural country saying

What with Ming Thein moving on, and Kirk Tuck going on hiatus again, and me suffering a bad bout of burnout these past two weeks, I've had to do some soul-searching.

As both of those guys pointed out, the world has indeed changed. Kodak is a shell of its former self; film and the darkroom are quaintly antiquarian; Bronica, Contax, Konica-Minolta (all brands I owned and used) and even Samsung are out of the camera business altogether; Olympus, after hanging in heroically, is headed that way. Digital cameras, among the world's hottest-selling commodities not even a decade ago, are in freefall, blasted by smartphones and the used market as well as by their own sufficiency. Very unfortunately, I can't sell iPhones on my site—that nice arrangement whereby I get a little spiff if one of you buys something through my links still works, but it's not as lucrative as it once was. Prices are way up and unit sales are way down. Canon is talking about market shrinkage of 50% since the peak.

So many paragons of the online photography are gone. Uwe Steinmuller, Michael Reichmann and Roger Hicks had the temerity to up and die; Rob Galbraith, Colin Jago and now Ming have moved on to greener pastures; Ctein departed from here, and Shutterfinger and Imaging-Resource have, well, shuttered. That's just the tip of a bigger 'berg.

And photography is no longer nearly as cool in the culture as it once was. Digital SLRs started out as unobtanium and gradually descended into the realm of the attainable, and everyone wanted one, even people who had never taken pictures on film. Every new development was revolutionary and exciting. Hordes of people were hanging on the news torrent, curious, interested, and ready to get involved. Early on, film-camera veterans, steeped in a mature culture, were admired and respected (sometimes resented, too) by people attracted to the science and convenience of digital. I wrote back then about neomania, the seductiveness of the new. It was a brave new frontier. Invigorating.

All done now.

In 1983 I took a beautiful picture by moonlight. It was a virtuoso trick; I had mastered darkroom craft and I knew my materials well. Walter Elisha, the Chairman of Springs Industries, at the time one of the staunchest supporters of the Museum of Modern Art's Photography Department, requested a print for his personal collection. (It was Walter who provided me with an introduction to the primus inter pares museum curator John Szarkowski.) Last year, my friend Kenny got a new iPhone 11. To demonstrate "Night Mode," he held his phone up and casually took a picture of a moonlit street scene. The tiny cameras (built into a device that will do a thousand other things besides) took a number of exposures and merged them into a single clear, appropriately exposed, noiseless image that was better than I can do with a single exposure with my large-sensor digital camera, much less with Plus-X and D-76.

And how's this now? After years of no problems, recently all of my Affiliate program checks from Amazons in Europe have been bouncing. Or not bouncing, exactly, but they're suddenly worthless. Apparently the issuing banks—the banks the checks are drawn on—are demanding fees to cash the checks in excess of the total value of the checks, or so my bank tells me, so my bank is declining to cash them. Instead, they send them back to me and charge me $35 per check for their inconvenience(!). Amazon in the U.S. tells me to call the Amazons overseas to straighten it out. But I can't call the Affiliate Program of Amazon Germany because I don't speak German. They do speak English in the U.K., but I don't have an international calling plan—on the plan I have it would cost me $125 to make one single call to Europe.

I don't know—I might be reading too much into this—but it seems a lot like Amazon Europe is suddenly saying, "Go away. We don't need you."

Some readers might be saying the same. At least if traffic is any indication. At its peak (which for the record was 2013), TOP was sailing along on 24,000 page views a day. Now, 10,000 is a good day.

And blogging itself is as uncool now as it once was cool. In 2004 it was the happening thing. On a World Wide Web that only a few years earlier had featured single, static pages that never changed, a website that was continually updated with new material was pretty enticing; in the beginning, I got a lot of attention just by existing. That was when internet was spelled with a capital "I," before ads were common, before videos were really possible. Good photo content and information on the web was scarce and valued. And back then, there was a lot of camaraderie between websites—we all supported each other, and sent our readers to interesting things on other sites, which benefited us all.

Now, blog have become...well, not quite antiquated, but old-fashioned. They're very 2010. Competition has proliferated wildly, way outpacing demand. Nothing ever "goes viral" any more—not just because there's too much out there to see and read, but because everybody makes money from affiliate spiffs and few want to lose a reader to another site even momentarily. And all the camera reviews have migrated to YouTube, where independent actors of their own volition act for all the world like PR people for corporate marketers.

Think it can't get worse? Well, it's not just that blogs have gotten outdated. It's that text has. Millennials and whatever the younger-than-Millennial generations call themselves prefer to get their information fed to them through videos. Who reads now? Even the President of the United States never reads anything—not even urgent briefings, apparently. His speech patterns, his very thought patterns, according to experts, are those of a functional illiterate. So he's the leader for our times, then, because the written word is passé. (Tossing French words into written text is double passé.)

So is the handwriting on the wall, my friends? A time of reckoning seems to be upon me. I've thought about it, wrestled with it, agonized over it, and made a fateful decision...

Open Mike: Weird Dreams

[This was supposed to be published on Wednesday. But better late than never, right? Um, right?

"Open Mike" is the anything-goes, grab-all, catch-all Editorial page of TOP. —Mike]

-

Dream cameras: Do you dream about photographing? I do, all the time. Usually, I've lost my camera, or fumble for the controls and miss a shot, or photograph fantastic fast-changing landscapes or something exotic only to realize there was no film or card in the camera, or something equally dispiriting or distressing. Occasionally, I have a dream of successfully photographing something, so there's that. Last Tuesday night in my dreams I had lost my camera (a Leica M6 this time), and my dreams all night were a long sequence of searching for it and of regretting the (imaginary!) loss.

Daddy Longlegs: Anybody know what's up with this? The door to my barn is infested with daddy longlegs (harmless Opiliones). They're all over the door every morning—eight, twelve, or fifteen of them. When I brush them off they make a beeline for the door again. They're not on other doors on the property or anywhere else on the wall of the barn. What the heck is up with that? What's the attraction? I've never seen it before. Any spider experts out there?

Miss this: My biggest problem with the Fuji X-H1 is...wake-up time. I'm sure I could set it to stay on for longer (haven't looked) although then presumably the battery runs down quicker. But I'm always having to wake it up with a half shutter press, and it takes long enough to be an annoyance. Taking a picture the other day I had to stand in the road, and each time I stepped into the road after a car passed I found the camera had gone to sleep. I need to develop a new habit, of waking up the camera before expecting it to shoot.

Know what I miss? A camera that's always on. My old Leica M6 would take a picture instantly if and when I pressed the shutter button. Period. No questions asked. It was never "off" and it never had to be woken up. Simple, dumb, but responsive and obedient. Now, working a camera seems more like a negotiation.

Decision overload: Did you know that's a real thing? I let go of my old pool table because I made a very, very bad decision in the middle of moving house in 2014. Turns out that we tend to have a limited capacity for making important decisions under stressful circumstances—if the need to make decisions comes too thick and fast, we're vulnerable to making poor choices. I sure did on that occasion. Beware decision overload. When pushed for a decision, take extra time.

My butt hurts: My favorite Easter joke is that one with the chocolate bunny saying "my butt hurts," which makes me laugh every year like clockwork. I know, I know, predictable. But one unforeseen consequence of losing so much weight it that my butt hurts. I've lost padding from my derrière and it can be uncomfortable to sit. I got one of those gel-and-memory-foam seat cushions and it was more uncomfortable than the plain wooden seat, somehow. ($25 down the drain.) I have a sit-stand desk and at least I'm standing more often. By the way, despite the fact that I keep crowing about having lost so much weight, I definitely still have a ways to go. Fifteen more pounds at least. It's not all sunlight and roses in Mikey-land.

How not to move a pool table: I dread Winter anyway, but the prospect of the coming Winter under even partial COVID-19 isolation has got me a little, shall we say, concerned. So I'm trying to put in a "pandemic pool table." It's relaxation for me, and it'll help me get through the dark, lonely months.

For the record, if you thought buying a camera was hard...buying a pool table is really hard. And you certainly run across some weird things in the classifieds! Here are a couple of choice examples. I know you don't care, but, hey, you can still be amused.

Made me laugh. There's gotta be more to that story, don't you think?

When buying a used table, you don't know what it's been through. Real pool tables, once set up, can't be moved, even two inches. I have a buddy whose setup was ruined because, when his girlfriend left him in a huff, her brothers moved it three feet to get it out of the way when they were carting her stuff out of his house. Just picked it up and moved it aside. Cost him $350 to get it set right again. A real pool table has to be disassembled and moved in pieces, and then reassembled and set up by a trained, experienced installer/mechanic. Add transport—my guy charges a dollar a mile—and it can be the largest expense when buying a used table.

Here's how not to do it...

Yowza! Ouch. There goes that one.

The other thing I miss: The infinity stop. I have my X-H1 set up for center-spot AF. The other day when a funky antique airplane flew by (there's a small airfield only eight miles from me), I tried to swing the camera with the 55–200mm to the skies and take its picture. Well, wrong setup. I couldn't get the spot over the spot. The focus hunted wildly back and forth. Not that I needed a picture of a random plane going by. And the Fuji can handle that subject if you're ready for it, of course. But on a manual-focus lens, that trick is dead simple: you just throw the lens to the infinity stop and viola, as Phil Davis didn't used to say*. So lately I've been using my pet XF 35mm ƒ/1.4 in manual-focus mode, something I've seldom if ever done with any AF lens. It's actually rather nice, and works well.

No infinity stop, though.

Mike

*He misspelled voilà once, the French word meaning "there it is," as viola, the middle string-quartet instrument. Phil was a stickler with words, so I teased him about that way too much for way too long. He was neither amused nor pleased.

I sure miss Phil. We kept up a daily email correspondence for many years prior to his final illness. Among many other accomplishments, he was a WWII pilot, and he built a nice big house—himself, with the help of his four sons—with the proceeds from the history of photography book he wrote. (Amazon says it was published in 1701. Phil was old, but he wasn't that old.) When he needed speakers for his living room, he read up on speaker design and designed and built his own. Those things were just the tip of the iceberg. Very interesting guy. And only cranky on the surface.

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:

PaulW: "Decision overload has caused me more grief and regret than I'd like to admit, and this is especially true when moving. Unfortunately, moving is one of those times where one needs time to think, but is usually not afforded that time. I have permanent dents in my derriere from all the times I've kicked myself for getting rid of things during a move. It's no wonder the news is full of high-profile, human-caused debacles, that seem to defy reason until you factor in the stress of decision making."

Mark Sampson: "About moving pool tables, here's a comparison. Three or four years ago, when I worked for the Phillips Collection, I was on hand when a crew came to remove the museum's nine-foot Steinway concert grand piano for servicing. That thing is a Monster (with spectacular sound btw). Four guys, ten minutes, fifteen tops- and that included getting it through a standard-width door and down an exterior flight of stairs. Yes, the piano came apart, but still! That team was truly professional."

Mike replies: I bet I've heard that piano! Used to live not far from there and often dropped in for the chamber concerts. Great place to listen to small, intimate concerts.

Mike Plews: "Two months ago I retired after 46 years as a tv news photographer. I used to have work dreams a couple of times a week. They usually involved me being separated from my gear and missing deadline. One of my favorite work dreams involved going out to do a live hit with a CP16 which is a film camera. I sat up and laughed after that one. After I quit working the dreams stopped. Sometimes you don't know how much stress you are eating until you stop."

Geoff Wittig: "Yes! That is precisely my own experience with the Fuji X-H1. It's my go-to camera for long hikes paired with the 'good enough' XF 18–135 mm zoom. You can set it to have a longer lag before turning itself off, but then it goes through batteries like a teenager through a bag of Doritos. I've learned to half-press the shutter button as I raise the camera to my eye, and it's usually ready for me. I presume it's just the downside of the IBIS system."

Michael Fewster: "Now that was funny. I don't think I have ever dreamt of photography before but last night I did. I almost never remember dreams and no doubt mine would have disappeared but you opening line brought my memory to the surface. I was in LR with dozens of versions of the same shot and I was trying to find the original without success. My anxiety was rapidly going off the scale and I feared deleting anything."

Robert Fogt: "My dreams nearly always include cameras and picture taking. I'll share my favorite, since it takes place in a town where I believe we have some shared history. In the dream, I was a young man, finding myself somehow on vacation with my parents. We'd stopped for the night at a small hotel, and in the cold, sunny morning, made our way past our parked car and walked across the town square of Woodstock, Illinois, towards...Kay's Diner, was it? Halfway along, I remembered my camera in the car and turned back to get it, telling my parents that I'd meed them in the diner. As I returned with my camera, I passed the large, steamed-up front window of the restaurant and peered inside. There, in the window booth, sat my Mom and Dad, and every single one of my aunts and uncles, all of them long gone at the time of this dream. They were laughing and talking as the waitress poured coffee and took their orders, and I took their picture through the foggy window. And isn't that, a good part of the time, the reason why we do this?"

Mike replies: Sounds like a great dream!

VSL Lowers the Lights

I got on a call with Kirk Tuck this afternoon and before I knew it we had talked for two hours and 15 minutes...that was a surprise. Felt like 35 minutes.

Kirk is stepping away from his blog again. He's done it in the past, but unfortunately it looks like he means it this time. I understand. Although I won't be joining him.

You can read more from the horse's mouth (so to speak). It was nice of him to mention me in his "see you around."

Check out the bokeh in that second image! I love it.

And one more
Thanks for all the mentions of photo-writers from the past who we miss. Another one I miss, by the way, is Ctein. Just because he didn't have his own site doesn't mean he wasn't adding a lot to the discussion online. I think he wrote almost 350 columns for this site.

I'm happy to say I won't miss Kirk—but I can say that only because I'm pretty sure we'll keep in touch. I suspect he's just starting down a new road, and, given his amazing chops and incredible energy, I can't wait to see where it leads. Kirk Tuck is one seriously accomplished guy. He deserves all the success he has enjoyed.

Mike

P.S. If only he'd see his way clear to get that sports car he wants, so I could enjoy it vicariously!

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:

Rick_D: "Kirk can't not blog. This is demonstrable. And we can't have Kirk not blogging, so the weird forces comprising the internet will intervene and he'll be back, as it was written. I do not understand how anybody endures a Texas summer so understand why, come September, any Texan wants to hang it up and go do...anything else anywhere else. (I write this eyeballing a weather forecast threatening us with 111 tomorrow.) My best wishes to all involved."

Ming Thein Calls It Quits

Ming Thein, whose standout blog was the cream of the crop in the photosphere for most of its existence, is calling it a job well done and will be moving on. He announced his decision yesterday (or was it the day before? The final post doesn't seem to be dated) in a long final post accompanied by an extensive personal portfolio.

I left my own thoughts in a comment to him there.

Bygone blogs
Which now-defunct written-word photo sites do you miss? There are many that have come and gone. I still miss Rob Galbraith, and of course Michael Reichmann, although his site has marched on since his demise. Plus one more which I can't quite recall the name of right now. It'll come to me*.

Ming will be missed by a great many, no question, and we wish him very well.

Mike

*Someone once said that remembering names as you grow older is like you've hired an aged clerk who has to shuffle down to the filing cabinets in the basement to retrieve the information...he'll get back to you, but it's going to be a while. On the good side, blanking on names as you get older is normal and not a sign of incipient dementia, according to experts, so if that's been worrying you, don't let it get you down. I realized there's nothing wrong with my memory when it occurred to me that although names are slower and slower in coming, images still pop to mind immediately. If I'm trying to think of, say, Ernest Borgnine, his face pops up in a split second, but the file clerk gets back with the name after a cigarette break. My memory has always been visual.

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.

You can support The Online Photographer via Patreon

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

Paul McEvoy: "When I got into photography around 2004, photo blogs were all the rage. There were a lot of people shooting 35mm film and scanning it and posting a picture a day. It was a fun time to get into photography. Film was still very much in the mix but digital was starting to roll. I wonder what happened to the photo bloggers but I can't remember their names. Certainly the internet had an innocence about it at the time that's not around anymore."

Stan B.: "There were many good blogs circa 2005, run by many good photographers, and the names will not return no matter how long I may wait.... They created an excellent platform for discussion, connection and community; unfortunately, it was short lived. FB, vacuous vlogs and the fact that keeping an active blog going on a daily basis demands a whole lotta time, energy and commitment sealed the fate of that much-missed era."

Stephen Scharf: "My guess is that Ming is going to focus on his new, and I might add, very successful watch company, Horologer Ming. There's a lot more money in luxury watches than in commercial photography, and Horologer Ming has established itself as a premium brand right from the off, with critical acclaim from all the major watch blogs and websites. One of the smartest and most accomplished people I've encountered on 'the interwebs,' only Ming Thein could move from professional photography to designing a watch that won a Grand Prix D'Horlogerie De Geneve in 2019 with his second watch design."

John Camp: "I once saw Ernest Borgnine driving down Sunset Boulevard in his Rolls-Royce. Vanity plate: Borg-9."

Movie Tone

Edward G. Robinson in The Red House, 1947. Although an outdoor scene, note the rimlight even though the main light is high right. (Another lucky thing about film was that you often had to light it.)

I watched another old potboiler the other night, The Red House from 1947—I'm kind of on an Edward G. Robinson kick. That guy was an amazing actor. One reviewer called The Red House "country farmhouse noir" which about pegs it. Robinson plays a character that has to be simultaneously sympathetic and monstrous, a tough line for an actor to walk. What a pleasure to watch him pull it off. The ingenue is played by Allene Roberts, who died only last year at 90.

As I was searching for cast pictures—I do a lot of image searches because they encompass a nice mix of directedness and serendipity—I ran across this:

The Wikipedia caption is "Photo of Marcia Strassman from the television program Welcome Back, Kotter. Strassman played Julie Kotter, the wife of teacher Gabe Kotter," and the picture is in the public domain. Here's a link to the picture on Wikipedia, which may look better for you than it does here.

The best bet is that this was taken with a Hasselblad on Kodak Tri-X Professional (code letters TXP), using a strobe with an umbrella, high center. It's possible that's wrong, but it is, as I say, a good bet. I just looked, and TXP appears to be available only in sheet film now.

So how can we guess this is TXP? Two ways: 1.) it looks like it; and 2.) that was what most professionals shot back then when they shot B&W. And why a Hasselblad? Because in 1975 when this publicity still was taken it was the camera brand used by a majority of the higher-level professionals in America. Could have been a Mamiya, though. Pros who specialized in portraits also used those a lot. Why an umbrella center high? Because that's what the light looks like, and you can see it reflected in her eyes. Well, sort of—the resolution of the JPEG isn't good enough to be definitive.

Anyway, none of that is what I want to talk about.

Skilled pros
The point I want to make is, when you're learning about B&W tonality, it makes a lot of sense to look at old movies and old professional studio pictures. The reason is that both of those were usually consciously lit, by seasoned professionals who really knew what they were doing, and then exposed properly for the lighting and the balance of tones desired. So you're seeing a report of conscious, skilled work that was the result of deliberate intent.

A significant caveat with old movies is that you need to be looking at a good print. With so many old noirs having been kicking around in the public domain for a long time, that's far from a given. It can be worthwhile, if you enjoy that sort of thing, to dig for the best versions of old movies—many review sites provide information about that. For example, I watched Scarlet Street the other night—a very early slasher film with Edward G. Robinson inhabiting a very different kind of character than the one he plays in The Red House—and Amazon's print is lousy, whereas one I found on YouTube is much better from a B&W tonality standpoint. Even if you do have to put up with interruptions.

Of course, many old movies will never exist in a great print again, just as many old musical masterpieces can never be remastered from the originals...Google "Universal Fire" and you'll see what I mean. Actually, don't Google "Universal Fire"—it's far too depressing to read about.

Naturally, you can find beautiful B&W tonality almost anywhere if you look hard enough. I've seen it in snapshots, documentary photographs taken as records, in old magazines, in museums and historical societies and antique shops. And of course in expressive artwork. Even (gasp!) online. But I wouldn't say it's common under any circumstances—excellence is always a small percentage of all the examples that exist, in anything I guess. And of course different pictures look best with different kinds of tonality...it's hardly a one-size-fits-all-kind of thing.

As you develop a taste in tonality, you'll probably notice that although you have your own preferences, you can also appreciate good examples of other kinds. That's the case with this portrait. There isn't a lot of shadow separation in the hair, and the contrast is bold and clear, and it's not the kind of spectral response I like best. TXP has a sort of dirty, gritty look in the mid-tones, which you can see best here in the area of her blouse and necklace at the bottom of the picture. But overall this works. It's vivid and pretty, and balanced, and the highlight modulation in the skin tones is lovely...something that survives even in the JPEG. (Do click the link to study it more carefully.)

Think of a musical analogy—even though your basic preference might be for a particular genre, classic rock or '70s Brit-pop or '90s grunge or contemporary drums 'n' bass or whatever—you can still appreciate well-done songs or pieces in wildly different genres, even ones you generally dislike.

Of course—back to today's example—tonality doesn't make the picture. It's the personality the actress projects with her lively eyes and nice smile that does that. Marcia Strassman, who played "Nurse Margie Cutler" on some early episodes the TV series M*A*S*H among other roles, died in 2014, of breast cancer. She wrote a memoir before she left us.

A lovely old picture of a person in her prime. Too bad we all don't need to get headshots made at a few points along the paths of our lives.

I'll try to put up other examples of excellent B&W tonality from time to time, for those who are trying to calibrate an eye for it.

Mike

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

Maynard Switzer: "Actually TXP was not used that much in the studio with powerful studio strobe lighting. Richard Avedon used nothing but Panatomic-X in his Rolleiflex in the studio. ISO 32. How do I know? I was his assistant for a year."

Stephen Cowdery: "Looking at old movies for lighting inspirations is a great idea. I recently watched the Criterion set of Marlene Dietrich/Josef von Sternberg films from the early 1930s and the lighting, especially on Dietrich, was spectacular. It was obvious that von Sternberg (who did most of his lighting) was working on some other level."

Huw Morgan: "We were once stranded for a day in New York after our flight was canceled. Rather than go back into Manhattan, we stayed in an airport hotel near LaGuardia. The next morning, we had time to kill and visited the Museum of the Moving Image, a remarkable collection of movie-related materials. They have an excellent collection of publicity portraits of famous movie stars, taken by the studio photographers of the day. The collection is a lesson in lighting techniques and beautiful black-and-white printing. The tones in these photos are to die for and just can't be reproduced with inkjet printers. If you have a few hours to kill, I'd heartily recommend this museum."