The Online Photographer

Random Excellence: Ellie Davies

Ellie Davies, Fires 5, 2018

As you know, the "random" in "random excellence" merely means it's a picture I happened across by chance. I found this, during an image search for something else, at a site called 1stDIBS, self-described as "the world’s leading marketplace for extraordinary design." It's offered as home decor. (Our print offers are too.)

Ellie is a serious and accomplished photographer however, represented by galleries on several continents and possessing a formidable number of awards. For example:

Her Fires series was selected as a Finalist in the Klompching NY Fresh 2019 Summer Show and received a Gold and two Bronze awards in the Moscow International Photography Awards 2019 and Winner in the 12th Julia Margaret Cameron Awards: Professional Landscapes and Seascapes category. Fires was also selected Winner of the 12th Pollux Awards—Professional Fine Art Series category in 2019, Conceptual Professional Nominee in the The Fine Art Photography Awards 2019 and Winner in the Nature, Environment and Perspectives category of the Urbanautica Institute Awards 2019.

"Fires 5" is likely what I'd call a photo-illustration rather than a photograph. To my eye, the angle at which we're looking at the fire seems subtly different from the angle at which we're looking at the forest floor. Of course the literal content of the picture shows very poor firecraft, or perhaps none at all, and that's got to be deliberate! What jumps to mind are issues of contained fires that are useful versus out-of-control forest fires that are destructive; the peaceful beauty of a quiet campfire implies its inherent dangerousness. There's a lot of that tension here.

Her Statement stops short of admitting to Photoshopping in so many words, but that would be a natural part of the toolkit for her stated aims: "...my work explores the fabricated nature of landscape by making a variety of temporary and non-invasive interventions in the forest, which place the viewer in the gap between reality and fantasy ... The forest becomes a studio, forming a backdrop to contextualize the work." And isn't "non-invasive interventions" nice terminology for the kinds of things Steve McCurry got criticized for? We're good with it if it's artwork rather than reportage or documentary photography.

Spots of warm color in cool-color fields, and spots of light in visual fields of darkness, are probably as much hardwired into our eye-brain instincts as our proclivity to see and distinguish human faces: for countless millennia such a sight would have meant safety amid the vast tracts of the cold, cruel, lonely world. So there's a lot to think about in this disarmingly simple scene, but also surprising (if implicit) drama and a lot for the eye to enjoy.

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. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

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Open Mike: Readings, Movies, and Music

[My apologies! I finished this this morning and thought I published it around 11:00 a.m. But apparently I just forgot to click the "Publish Now" button. That's only happened rarely in years of blogging. Anyway..."Open Mike" is the off-again on-again Editorial Page of TOP. Today's is a grab-bag. When Yr. Hmbl. Ed. is caught up with himself, it appears on Wednesdays. Even if only barely.]

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Strange & curious: Been feeling like a hermit lately? You've got nothing on Christopher Knight:

For decades, the residents of Maine’s Kennebec Valley believed that the North Pond hermit was a myth. According to local lore, a hermit had been living undetected in the woods since the 1980s; every so often, he would break into seasonal cabins to steal food and other resources. But no one could prove the hermit’s existence—if he was out there, he had taken great pains to guarantee his isolation.

Then, in April 2013, a man was arrested in the deep woods of Maine. His name was Christopher Thomas Knight. According to societal records, he didn’t exist. For 27 years, he had camped out in the forest, surviving on meager supplies that he’d burglarized from houses in the area. He endured winter temperatures of 20 degrees below zero. Every morning, he watched the sun rise over the foggy valley that he called home. He hadn’t had a single conversation with another person for nearly three decades.

His greatest challenge was surviving the Winters. He would deliberately fatten himself up at the end of the Summer and into the Fall. A night camping in the throes of a Maine Winter is not for the faint of heart; a week of it qualifies an outdoorsman as a tough guy. In twenty-seven years at his encampment in the woods, Knight never slept in anything but a tent. The cold was so intense it drove him close to suicide. He would wake himself at 2:30 in the morning in the dead of Winter because he knew he stood a better chance if he faced the worst of the cold awake. "It's dangerous to sleep too long in Winter," he told the reporter who visited him in jail.

But apart from finding an intellectual who loved to read (and loved Lynyrd Skynyrd!), who knew who the Kardashians were, and was so averse to human connection that he seldom made eye contact, the reporter could get little out of him about the central mystery, "why":

Anyone who reveals what he’s learned, Chris told me, is not by his definition a true hermit. Chris had come around on the idea of himself as a hermit, and eventually embraced it. When I mentioned Thoreau, who spent two years at Walden, Chris dismissed him with a single word: "dilettante."

The first quote is by Emily Buder. The second is from a long article in GQ from 2014 by Michael Finkel called "The Strange & Curious Tale of the Last True Hermit." Fascinating article; recommended if you think you're "isolating"!

Snob about fiber-base: When I was young I was a snob about fiber-base black-and-white papers. They were the traditional material, made the old way. RC paper was "plastic," and was tainted by its early reputation for self-destructing. Good for intermediate prints and prints for repro only. Don't extrapolate this any further than it goes, but I will say this: I have plenty of workprints made on Ilford RC papers from thirty and thirty-five years ago, and they look  as fresh and clean as the day I made them. I can't say if they'll last 70 years, or 200. But I like their chances.

Opinions about Bogart: I'm mildly a fan of movies made before I was born, especially the genre called "Noir," and if you like Noir you'll have opinions about Bogart. In his top three for me (the other two are The Caine Mutiny and of course Casablanca) is a little-remembered suspense thriller about a writer. To enjoy In a Lonely Place you can't focus on the murder mystery, which is nothing but a sub-plot—you have to get into its psychological portrayal of the doomed love affair. Movies that take this tack have to resonate with you in some way or they might not appeal much. But they can be deep and meaningful if they do touch you.

In a Lonely Place was directed by Nicholas Ray, who directed Rebel Without a Cause and influenced Godard and the French New Wave. It co-stars his now little-known wife, Gloria Grahame. Their marriage broke up during the filming but the two kept the breakup secret so as not to jeopardize the project. The script departed greatly from the book, and the director and actors departed greatly from the script—Ray cleared the set and crafted a new, more subtle ending with the two leads when the planned finale, which had already been shot, rang false. The movie creates characters who might now be understood as having what's called an avoidant/dismissive adult attachment style, but with sympathy for the tragedy inherent in being trapped in such a state. Glenn Erickson of DVD Savant put it beautifully:

Relationships are delicate animals—they can be killed by the wrong words, the wrong actions. Dix and Laurel are madly in love with one another, but that trust is destroyed when her terror and his rage go over the edge. It doesn't matter that he's innocent, or that they are both in intense remorse over what happened. It can't be taken back, and the romance is finished. Both will have to go back to their personal 'lonely places.'

Brilliant lines of criticism—so very much on the mark.

Of course another reason I love old Noir films is for the black-and-white. In a Lonely Place was shot by the cinematographer Burnett Guffey, who also did Bonnie and Clyde, a movie whose cinematography is naturalistic and plainspoken. Cinematographers have trouble being artists because they seldom get to pick their projects; the best they can hope for is to become the go-to of a great director. Guffey was a get-it-done pro whose life's list of accomplishments is a motley of good and bad, television and film, the trivial and the profound. But In a Lonely Place is as outstanding in 1950 B&W as Bonnie and Clyde is in 1967 color. A treat. I'd like to see more of his work.

Gloria Grahame and Humphrey Bogart in In a Lonely Place

Carrie Rickey of The Moviegoer considers the performances the best of of both Grahame's and Bogart's careers. The most disturbing thing I've read about the film? Louise "Brooksie" Brooks said that of all his roles, the role of Dixon Steele in In a Lonely Place came closest to the real-life Humphrey Bogart she knew.

As with all old Noirs there are numerous versions floating about. The print on Amazon Prime Video is great, and it's available on DVD and Blu-Ray from the Criterion Collection.  

Young Girl Blues: Like guitar? My good old friend Kim's latest is a lilting and wistful mix of guitars across genres—indie, Brit-folk, blues, alt, folk-rock. It's been raining here for a week, and it's a great hour's listen on a rainy day. I loved the Band of Horses song, which I had never heard before. And yes, the "cover" art of Young Girl Blues is in beautiful black-and-white.

Something I happened to hear on XM Radio in the car: it's a version of Led Zeppelin's "Going to California" with the vocals removed. It's one of those songs I've always loved and never tire of, but I found it fascinating how much the vocal serves as another instrument and another line, and how different the music sounds as an acoustic instrumental. Just a curiosity. Lend an ear if you're so inclined.

Aromatically yours: One final reading. Another of my old friends you've met in these pages before, Jim Schley, just published a review of a new book of poetry, Elizabeth A.I. Powell's Atomizer (Amazon).

Vermont poet Elizabeth A.I. Powell's way with words is daring, sardonic and ingenious. She enjoys mixing registers and realms—pop and literary culture, consumerism and religion, self-help and sacrament.

That just makes it sound like something I would enjoy.

The structure (or "scent and architecture," as Powell puts it) of Atomizer is fascinating. Along with its zany variety of forms, the book has a powerful through line, investigating the ancient, arcane and insidious role of perfume, tangled in seduction and deceit. The three sections of the book are named for terms used to categorize layered qualities in synthesized scents. "Top Notes" are "that which evaporates most quickly"; "Heart Notes" are "the distinctive aspects, most...charming, most intelligent"; and "Base Notes," the poet avers, "stay the longest...heavy and deep."

I liked the little tastes and teasers so much I had to order the book. Jim's reviews do that to me every so often. Here's Jim Schley's review of Atomizer, at Seven Days.

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. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

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Featured Comments from:

HR: "With regards to your comment about RC papers I am reminded of this.  :-)  'We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it and stop there lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove lid. She will never sit down on a hot stove lid again and that is well but also she will never sit down on a cold one anymore.' —Mark Twain"

Mike replies: Thanks! Yes, that. In this case I can only personally recommend Ilford RC papers. I used several others too, decades ago, but they're gone now.

David Evans: "I'm really loving Young Girl blues. I'm not familiar with Mixcloud—is it possible to see individual track information?"

Mike replies: Only if you sign up for a Premium account, which is $8 a month. But there's another way for most cuts. Download the Shazam app from the App Store. It allows your phone to listen to music, compare it to a database, and identify it. Kim will fool it sometimes because his mixes sometimes include extremely esoteric and rare music, but most of the cuts it will identify. I'll ask Kim if he can provide a set list for Young Girl Blues.

Kim was a legendary disk jockey at WHFS in Washington DC back in the station's heyday.

Bob Curtis: "Michael Finkel expanded the article into a book, The Stranger in the Woods [Amazon]."

scott kirkpatrick: "My favorite Bogart has always been Treasure of the Sierra Madre, which captures the bottled anger in 'Nobody puts one over on Fred C. Dobbs!' But I wasn't aware of In a Lonely Place, which leaves out the humorous touches and the sentimental ending, and thus is truly terrifying."

David Comdico: "In a Lonely Place is my favorite Bogart film. It peels beneath the surface of the Bogart character. On the other hand, Johnny Guitar [Amazon Prime Video] is my favorite film by Nicholas Ray. He was a real American original."

Keith B.: "Burnett Guffey's outstanding lighting in Bonnie and Clyde may feel naturalistic, but is actually fairly romantic in style. Naturalistic cinematography (no theatrical lighting, existing light taken as found) was then, and is still, considered too ugly to be employed for commercial narrative motion picture storytelling. There are exceptions, but not many."

Andrew Bearman: "Thank you for turning me on to Mixcloud and to your friend Kim's sets. I am now willingly lost in the woods of great music! And that Bogey still captures a look that only an experienced, weary cat like he could give. A look not too far from how many of us have felt at least a few times during this pandemic. Off to watch In a Lonely Place."

johnbabineau: "Hunch re KK’s Mixcloud: Handstanding athlete on diving board is the actress Doris Day. KK’s comedic gifts endure...."

Animesh Ray: "Your post made me remember a funny experience. I used to do extensive black-and-white printing for work when I was a grad student in the late 1970s–early 1980s. This was related mostly to printing of black-and-white photomicrographs and autoradiograms, for which we were supposed to print on multigrade silver gelatin papers. After that period I did not do any darkroom work, because most of those tasks was taken over by Polaroid for B&W or Kodachrome slides for color.

"Some 30 years later, in 2003, I wanted to do B&W printing as a hobby, so I went to the local city recreations department, which had a darkroom for the photo enthusiasts. The deal was that the use of the darkroom was free if you passed a test; otherwise you would need need to take a two-week course on printing. So I thought I would take that test. As it so happened, I had never heard of RC papers until that time, as I had only used fiber papers in the past—in fact we never called it that! We just called it a printing paper of a certain grade. All the test questions had to do with how to print and process RC papers, so to my utter disbelief I ended up failing the test. In science, we often feel like hermits stuck in lonely towers."

New Old Lens for the Wista (Continued)

For those following along, here's my 4x5 with the new-old lens on it. (The camera is a rosewood Wista 45DXII, the lens a Calumet Caltar II-N 135mm ƒ/5.6.) I got the lensboard off eBay. You have to get one with the right sized hole—this lens has a Copal 0 (zero or zed) shutter, so (naturally) I got one with a Copal 0 hole.

For those who might know little to nothing about view cameras, to mount a lens on a lensboard is simple. The rear cell of the lens unscrews from the back of the shutter. Then you remove the retaining ring.

Clockwise from front: rear optical cell; plastic lenscap; retaining
ring; and the rest of the lens, here set
down with its front cell facing down

Simply seat the lens on the board, fix in place with the retaining ring, tighten with a lens spanner wrench (here's one of those on Amazon). Actually what I do is just hold it in place and rotate the shutter itself a little until tight, taking care that the retaining ring isn't riding up on one edge of the hole in the board. Then replace the back cell.

Rear cell of lens on board, showing retaining ring

By the way the lens board is a "board" even if it's made of metal. And the hole is said to be "drilled" even if it wasn't, as in, "a Technika metal lensboard drilled for a Copal 1 shutter."

There's a lens in there. Chien ancien in background.

The camera folds up with the lens on it! Which is not necessary and not something you can do with most lenses because they're too large. Normally you'd remove the lens on its lensboard and put it in your bag. But setting up and knocking down the camera in the field is a process you might go through many times in a day or half-day of shooting, so eliminating steps saves time. So it's nice.

Keiichiro Nagaoka
You might recall our posts on Nagaoka cameras, handmade in Japan, here and here. The first was called "Last Man Standing." Alas, the last man is perhaps no longer standing. I have not been able to confirm the news through journalistic channels, but we have heard multiple rumors now that Keiichiro Nagaoka recently passed away. We heard from a friend of a friend of a friend that he entered the hospital, where he was unable to receive visits from his family due to the cursed COVID-19, and never came out again. Deep respect to Nagaoka-san and his family. His work lives on. He lived his life doing what he wanted to do!

Old view cameras never die, but they do migrate
While I'm still on the topic of old view cameras, our friend Ned (the retired President of Pentax USA) recently gifted his old Kodak to our friend Christopher (whose print I critiqued here—I'm going to do more print crits soon, by the way)—and Christopher decided to use his old Kodak lens with it and shoot Kodak transparency film, for a spiffy all-Kodak outfit. Without pictures it didn't happen, so here's the picture:

Photo by Christopher J. May

Sweet!

Mike
(Thanks to Ned, Chris, and the many readers who send news)

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. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

Thanks to all our Patreon contributors!

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

David Dyer-Bennet: "I'd never really considered the process of mounting a lens on a view camera lens board before. Now that you've laid it out so clearly, I'm startled that the positioning of the rear cell is sufficiently precise! I would have expected the distance of the rear cell from the front cell to be critical to the usual sorts of optical tolerances, and I wouldn't have thought screwing down a nut, even metal-on-metal, would be sufficiently precise. Learn something new every day! (On consideration, probably the precision needed in large-format lenses is somewhat less than miniature formats, for one thing.)"

William Schneider replies to David: "The front and rear lens cells are precisely spaced, but the shutter retaining ring has nothing to do with it. Here are some illustrations that show how the retaining ring and rear lens cell attach. That should demonstrate how precision is achieved...

Mike adds: Yes, and the cells do have to be precision calibrated to each individual shutter, which is why shutters aren't considered user-interchangeable. Old lenses can be mounted in new shutters, but only by specialists, for instance by S.K. Grimes, "The Photographer's Machinist."  These days you would also have to have a donor shutter, as Copal stopped making new shutters in 2013. I don't know whether Compur shutters are still made or not.

Bill Tyler replies to David: "The positioning of the two cells is quite precise. The retaining ring holds the front cell in place, but neither the retaining ring nor the thickness of the board interfere with the rear cell as you screw it in. There's enough of the front cell's rear that extends past the board so that the two cells mate precisely. And yes, for most lenses, that spacing is critical. Incidentally, lens boards are quite easy to make for most view cameras for anyone with a modest supply of tools. They're just square pieces of wood or metal with a hole in the middle, except for some camera, like the Graphics, for which the lens board actually has a lip around the edge."

Rob de Loe: "I've mentioned previously in these comments that I'm done with film. That's it! Done done done. Never coming back. But...someone introduced me to Portrait Pro and Portrait Body Pro software over the weekend. I knew this kind of thing existed, but I didn't really know if you know what I mean. I thought 'Sky Replacement' was bad. After checking out Portrait Body Pro, I actually felt ill. I hate everything about what this kind of software is doing, and will do, to photography. And so while going for a walk to shake off the queasy feeling, I thought to myself, 'I guess I'll have to go back to film after all.' Nope, not doing it! But really, within a decade, at the outside, film will be the only way to make a remotely authentic photograph. So good for you, Mike, for getting ahead of the curve!"

Mike replies: I advocated in the 'nineties for letting the word "photography" and related words stand for old-fashioned optical-chemical photography as it was understood up until the digital era, saying we should use "digital imaging" and related words for the new technology. Alas, digital had low status in the beginning, which inevitably led to the co-optation of the word "photograph" for its results, the better to claim equal status for it. Now that it has more than equal status, it's too late to go back to terminology that makes the sensible distinction.

Look What Else Came

The package arrived from Paris so I knew what it would be...the first time I've seen Peter's newest book. I can't do justice in a few words to this tonight, and I haven't read the text (of which there's a fair amount) yet. Two things I can say. One is that it's almost amazing that it's been barely more than half a year since Peter began the shooting for this book, and yet here the book is in my hands already—and almost every picture is one that I would have been very proud to shoot in this difficult year and in these dangerous circumstances. And my second thought is that this book is about humanity—in peculiar straits and dire circumstances, yes, but it's curious how the work can be so somber and dreadful and yet still show the spirit of so many people coming through so clearly, with forbearance, stoicism, sympathy, grief, helpfulness, unity. Even, in glimpses here and there, joy. Through the pictures, I really do feel the connection with the people Peter photographed.

I'll have more to say about it in the future but I wanted to get this up tonight. The book is barely out and the entire press run is almost half gone already. If you're a fan of Peter's work (there are many here), you should get one before they're gone. Here's how to order. It's an impressive and important piece of independent photojournalism, unquestionably.

My friend Peter Turnley with his book of 2020. Photo by Carl Westergren.

Have a nice Sunday! It's 10:45 p.m. Saturday as I write this and I've had quite the stressful couple of weeks. I'm taking tomorrow off, and will be back on Monday. Goodnight....

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. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

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Sunday Support Group: Look What Came

I'm always impatient waiting for deliveries...but look what came. The official "COVID Annis Horribilis" future pool room / photobook library. It's unfinished inside, so there's a lot of work left to be done, but it sure is nice to have it in place. Now I can get the electrician in here and start making plans for the interior finishing. Inside, a pool table goes in the middle, and bookshelves below the level of the table-top can go on all four walls (all I need is clearance for the back of a cue at table height. Below that level I can put furniture or bookshelves). This will finally enable me to get my photo reference library out of the boxes where they've been slumbering, inaccessible, in the barn for the past five years. I don't know which of the two I'm looking forward to more. 

The purpose of the pool room is to get me through "isolating" this Winter. I'm sure I'll be fine, but I've really been dreading it. Like everyone else, I sure can't wait for this contagion to either go away or somehow have its teeth removed.

Eventually I'll put up one of my little documentary photoessays about this whole process—I've been taking pictures right along. The delivery yesterday was really interesting. Daniel Yoder jockeyed the box into position by himself, using a trailer that had its own retractable wheelset that he controlled with a remote control like a kid with a drone. He was able to delicately set the box on a dime, right where it was supposed to go.

I'm off to Geneva (New York, not Switzerland) to look at things like flooring, ceilings, insulation, and wall paneling.

This is "Sunday Support Group" for this week because I'll be taking tomorrow off instead of today.

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. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

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Peter Wright: "You appear to have bought the 'anti-gravity' version, so you will need to get the pool table in soon to anchor it down."

James: "Very nice! But won't it be difficult to level the table with that much tilt to the building?"

Rangefinder News

So you thought your Z7 was expensive?

This looks like a crummy beat-up old camera, but in fact you're looking at the most expensive Nikon ever sold. Let's just say if you wanted to trade your house for it, you'd better live in a pretty nice house. Two customers connected by phone to the Wetzlar Camera Auction (WCA) at the Wetzlar Hotel Bürgerhof on October 10th got into "an exciting bidding war," and the hammer fell on this old Nikon L, an early prototype rangefinder from 1947–48, at a stunning-to-normal-folks price of 397,900 euros. Come on! Who's the no-cash-having piker who lost that contest? Nikon at the time was working out whether to go with the Zeiss Contax bayonet mount or the Leica M39 screw mount (it went with the former). More generally, collectible cameras, mostly Leicas, have reportedly been doing very well lately.

Mike

[CORRECTION: I am having a bad day! An earlier version of this post discussed a rumor that turned out to be very old—I forgot to check the date on the article. Wiping egg off face! Very sorry for the rookie error, which has been removed. —Mike the Not-So-Good 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. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

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Featured Comments from:

xf mj: "Do rumors ever stop being rumors if they never come true? I'd like to think not. I'm more than happy to keep hoping and wishing for an RD-2."

Mike replies: And the funny thing was, as I was typing that up, I was thinking wow, just like before. I actually remembered back to when the rumor was new.

Greatest Gifts (Don't Deny Yourself the Best Apertures)

Just a note about the Fuji 35mm ƒ/1.4 R, which is "fast" becoming my main lens (fast, yageddit? Oh, I am funny*), because it and the 18mm are with the X-T1 in the car. The bokeh of this lens is at its best wide open to my eye. So I've progressed to shooting this lens either wide open or stopped down to ƒ/5.6 and smaller, the latter in pictures where blur isn't important. This is not a recommendation necessarily, it's just what I do.

With any lens, you need to learn its foibles. Or should I say, its specific performance as it relates to your own visual tastes. Say for instance you have a lens with blurry corners at the widest apertures. It's just something you become aware of. On the (probably rare) occasions that you need the corners to be sharp, you know to stop down a few stops...because of course you know at exactly which aperture the corners sharpen up. On pictures with central subjects where the corners are "back in the bokeh" anyway, you know it doesn't matter if you're opened up.

Things like that.

One thing I wouldn't recommend is something I see all too many people doing in this new era—shooting a fast lens wide open all the time. Not a good idea! Yes, you paid for all that "bokeh" the maximum aperture can give you, but that doesn't mean you should apply it indiscriminately to every shot. (Many pictures I see are ruined by not enough depth of field—things that should be in focus aren't.) Wide open is only the best aperture for some shots, not all of them.

Even though today's lenses are highly corrected for decent sharpness wide open, many, especially faster lenses, are better still stopped down. With the Fuji 35mm ƒ/1.4R (Amazon.com, B&H), for instance, ƒ/5.6 and ƒ/8 are where it really sings (in my opinion). Don't deny yourself the wonderful performance of a lens like this in the middle apertures, because that's where it will give you some of its greatest gifts.

Mike

*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. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

Thanks to all our Patreon contributors!

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

s.wolters: "Here’s Alex Drummeroff from Kiev who shoots wide open all the time. Not a good idea? Click on the images twice to enlarge."

Mike replies: I think he makes it work very well for most of his work, don't you? Although it's a very specific type of shot that he makes over and over (and nothing wrong with that; as I say it works very well). But there are even a few examples of what I'm talking about, for instance this one. The littler (darker-haired) boy is clearly out of focus wide open—but not enough out of focus to make it look intentional. So that's one example of using too wide an aperture.

Of course I wouldn't pick on him for just one shot on a sharing site—I'm only pointing it out because we're talking about it. I enjoyed looking at this work; thanks for posting it!

Dan Khong: "I actually bought it for the bokeh, and ƒ/1.4 is where it sings. So I actually use it 99.9% of the time wide open. In the past, Leica glass boasted that 'all' their lenses are usable wide open and I tend to agree. So when the Fuji 35mm ƒ/1.4R came to pursue the holy grail, I was initially sceptical but am now a fervent convert. And at $499, the price sings too."

Albert Smith: "Re '...I've progressed to shooting this lens either wide open or stopped down to ƒ/5.6 and smaller...': Me too. I learned this maybe 30 years ago in an article from Roger W. Hicks in Shutterbug when he was explaining his love of the pre-aspheric 35mm Summilux M. His reasoning was that at ƒ/1.4, it was clear that distinct selective focus was what you were going for. If you went to say ƒ/2 or ƒ/2.8, then all you have is slightly more d-o-f, but it could just look like a slightly soft image...things aren't quite blurry or sharp. After ƒ/5.6, lots of things in the frame are sharp.

"I am so glad that I bought the 35mm ƒ/1.4 Fujifilm lens. I fought the urge for three years doing just fine with the excellent ƒ/2 lens. Went I gave in and got it I put the ƒ/1.4 lens on my camera and didn't change lenses for thousands of shots. The hype is well deserved for this lens regarding the rendering. One tip...set your shutter operation in your menu for mixed mechanical/electrical so that you can freely go to full aperture in any light. After 1/8000th, the shutter goes electrical and you can shoot at ƒ/1.4 on the sunniest of sunny-16 days."

New Old Lens for the Wista

The new old lens for the Wista 4x5 arrived last night. Here it is, with the guard dog at his sentinel post in the background.

It's a six-element Caltar II-N 135mm ƒ/5.6 in a Copal 0 (zero) shutter. "Caltar" was Calumet Photo's house brand. In this case it's a relabeled Rodenstock Sironar-N. It takes 40.5mm filters and tilts my gram scale at 185 (six and a half ounces). That's well off the published spec of 210g, but I don't have another gram scale to test it against. It has a circle of coverage of 200mm (7.87 inches) at ƒ/22 focused at infinity. This shutter has seven aperture blades; some Copal 0 shutters (whether earlier or later I don't know) had five.

This is a section of a lens-circle coverage chart from Schneider. The "Optical axis" is the center of each rectangle of film; the quarter-circles represent the coverages of various types of lenses. Although the 200mm image circle is not marked, you can easily see where it is from the scale on the bottom. As you can see, a 200mm image circle is plenty for 4x5 if you're just doing general shooting. For specialty purposes like architecture you would ideally want a different lens type with significantly more coverage.

I haven't mounted it on the camera yet but part of the reason I chose this one is because it's small. Smaller even than many other 135mm plasmats for 4x5. Hopefully I'll be able to leave it on the camera when the camera's folded up.

Rodenstock
I really don't know (or can't remember) why, but Rodenstock was "my" brand for enlarging lenses and large format lenses. I'm not an expert on either type of lens, but each time I tested a handful of lenses against each other, the winner was usually a Rodenstock. They give nice results.

The Sironar-N line was Rodenstock's line of everyday all-purpose lenses. At some point, when the word "Apo" (for apochromatic, corrected for all three colors, vs. achromats which are corrected for two) briefly became all the rage, the name of these lenses was changed to Apo-Sironar-N and the lenses were given a silvery-whitish racing stripe around the front part of the barrel. But Sironar-N's and Apo-Sironar-N's are identical. Except that Apo-Sironar-N's are a bit later...and cost more on the used market.

A deluxe line, called Apo-Sironar-S, was a further development, and they are different. And I don't mean just the red racing stripe in place of the white one. First, they're more apochromatic, meaning the correction for the third wavelength is better. Second, they retain good sharpness further out on the imaging circle, meaning they have more effective coverage—75 degrees, vs. 72° for the Sironar-N's. The 135mm Apo-Sironar-S has a image circle of 208mm vs. my lens's 200mm, for example. And third, the optimum aperture is one stop wider. The optimum aperture for my lens is ƒ22, and for the Apo-S it's ƒ/16.

Oh, and there's a difference of about a thousand dollars—this lens cost $300, more or less, and an Apo-S will be more like $1,300. (A Rodenstock-labeled Apo-N with the white stripe, although identical to mine optically, would run about $450–500.)

Unless you're pushing any of those parameters, however, there's very little difference in actual photographs—at least that I can see. Probably less difference than that caused by sample variation.

The standard lens for a 4x5—in the fine-art world, anyway—is 150mm. It's roughly equivalent to 45mm on FF. The new-old 135mm is a little wider than that. The only lens I ever had for my old Wista was a 210mm Sironar-N (equivalent to approximately a 65mm lens on FF), and although it was a lovely lens and good for three-quarter length portraits, it was too long for general shooting for me. I'm hoping I haven't gone too far the other way this time (a fixed feature of human nature being to overcompensate). Time—and time spent shooting—is the only thing that will tell.

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. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

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Lynn: "I remember reading a long, long time ago that when buying a lens for large format it was a good idea to buy a wider lens designed for the next film size up, in order to have a larger image circle that allowed plenty of leeway for camera movements. Is that good advice?"

Mike replies: Hmm, well, I'm no expert on LF, but I think I've only heard that advice applied to enlarging lenses, not taking lenses. In any event, it's not good advice, because non-specialists don't need as much coverage as all that, and because the coverage of lenses depends on the lens design as well as the focal length. For instance, 6/4 plasmats have larger image circles than Tessar-types, and longer lenses of the same design have more coverage than shorter ones.

It even depends on usage. It should be obvious that the closer you focus, the wider the circle of coverage: if you visualize it, the lens is casting a "cone" of light, and moving the front standard forward (as you do when focusing on something closer) "pulls" the narrow end of the cone farther away from the film standard, increasing the diameter of the cross section of the cone at the film plane. So the 200mm image circle spec on my new old lens is a worst-case spec, because if I'm focused any closer than infinity the circle of coverage will be larger than that. If you really like overkill, you might get a wide-field lens for the next format size up, but it's generally not necessary.

One exception might be where the 6/4 plasmats get wide enough to limit their coverage, around 100–120mm. In that range the coverage might be tight enough that it makes sense to get a "wide" version of the focal length for the next film size up. Any shorter than that (a 90mm is a bread-and-butter lens for an interior photographer, for instance), and you pretty much have to go for a dedicated wide-angle design like a Grandagon (Rodenstock) or Super-Angulon (Schneider).

Perhaps people who know more about this than I do will chime in!

Tom Duffy: "Congratulations on the acquisition of a Sironar-N. Years ago, before I retired and became poor, I bought a a new Linhof Technika. It came with a rangefinder coupled Sironar-N in a recessed lens board which I declined, since the Apo-Sironar-S was already available. I've been kicking myself since. The lens and lens board allowed you to leave the lens on the camera when you closed it up. Now I have to attach a lens every time I open up the camera to take a picture."

Ilkka: "I have the 150mm Apo-Sironar-S. When I bought it 15 years ago new, the shop had an offer on the S but not on N. So the S was about the same price as N. At normal prices I would have got the N. Great lens."

Hugh: "My Schneider Apo-Symmar 135mm ƒ/5.6 arrived a few days ago. Loaded the first ten sheets of Tri-x last night. Last time I did this was 40 years ago. Good fun."

Open Mike: Exemplary Badness

["Open Mike" is the often off-topic Editorial page of TOP, when Yr. Hmbl. Ed. gives vent to his impulses. It appears on Wednesdays.]

As far as photo sharing sites go, I hang out on flickr for the most part. Social media, as if anyone has not noticed, has been descending into a sort of Babel; people communicate by different means and share via different channels, and some people are into one channel and others another. I have friends who are all into Facebook, which I don't use because each time I learned it they changed it, which annoyed me. Other friends are deep into Instagram, but to me, the pictures on Instagram just seem too small to see. A photo on Instagram just creates this nagging itch in my brain—I'm looking at it, while at the same time I'm wishing I could see it. Some are into Twitter; some like texting. Facebook has something called "Messenger" that has caused many friends to think I'm ignoring them. And email, which has long been my preferred way of Internet communication, has been rendered almost useless by the avalanche of spam, advertising, politics and PR that swamp everything else. I try to look over my incoming email carefully but I still miss important communiques because they're lost in the confusion like the proverbial needle in the haystack.

One condition of sharing is that people should have things in common. The more fractured and atomized the Internet gets, the less shared experience there really is.

Anyway, I like flickr because people often (but not always) give information about their pictures that's potentially useful to me. Camera, lens, processing. To get a seat-of-the-pants sense of how a certain lens renders, or how a certain film looks, I'll search it just to see what I can see.

I run across some great pictures that way...but I also notice some really bad ones. I found myself looking at one particular picture this morning (I woke up today sort of angry at the world, which I'm trying to work on), of a picture of a liquor bottle on a small table. As I was looking for the telltales of lens performance, it struck me that the picture had about every flaw it possibly could have. It was poorly organized, badly balanced visually, and taken at too wide an aperture. The tonal scale was ugly, harsh and with depressed midtones. The massing of the out-of-focus blur was awkward and had probably been sharpened, which sometimes makes the blur sort of sickness-inducing. The picture wasn't even straight. And to top it all off, the label of the bottle was mostly but not entirely visible, creating words that my brain sort of wanted to read but couldn't.

It wasn't just a bad picture, it was a sort of model of a bad picture. Exemplary badness? If the assignment were, "take a competent picture of a bottle and a glass on a table outdoors," it would have earned an F.

As I was musing about whether there were any mistakes that could have been made that weren't, I lazily scrolled down to the comments. There were only about six, but they were all positive and congratulatory. Almost as if the exercise were to stick to the old adage, "if you can't say something good, don't say anything." One said, in effect, "You got the bottle in focus! Nice!" to which the photographer had replied, thank you. So I guess that's one mistake that could have been made that wasn't! Made me laugh.

Anyway I was feeling rather grumpy and wicked, as I said, and it occurred to me that it might be amusing to post some deliberately bad pictures to photo websites to see what kind of comments they might get. And yeah, I know there are lots of ways that deliberately "bad" pictures can be good—but I'm not talking about that. I mean just plain bad bad pictures.

Maybe people are just being courteous, or encouraging, or mindful of how they'd feel if their own pictures attracted negative comments online. But I think if it were me, I'd prefer honest criticism—cordial and sympathetic, yes—not just insulting—but honest all the same.

I guess the status quo is greatly preferable to the opposite—it wouldn't be pleasant if everyone were viciously insulting each other's photographs no matter what. So I shouldn't complain.

It's a fool's errand, of course, the whole business. There are millions of photographs uploaded to public view every hour, and one guy could comment on them all day every day and never make the slightest dent. And besides, nobody asked me for my opinion. So I have every reason not to pipe up. I kind of miss the old culture, though, when less was shared but we all had more of what was shared in common.

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. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

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john cecilian: "I recently posted a liquor bottle photo on Flickr, and I was worried you were critical of my photo, but then realized that nobody had commented on my photo, so I figure it wasn't me. Felt better. Haha."

Eolake Stobblehouse: "Re 'contest to come up with a new name for me, one that's more unique. Like Eolake Stobblehouse or Engelbert Humperdinck.' On behalf of myself and Engelbert, I beg you to not use our names. I suggest Wombelfort Timlybuht. Oh; one downside I did not predict when I made the name up 30 years ago is that so many would ask how to pronounce it. Eee o lake. —Eolake Stobblehouse."

Random Excellence: David Vestal by Larry Angier

David Vestal at the Al Weber Rendezvous, by Larry Angier

After I posted the excerpt from David Vestal's newsletter GRUMP the other day, in the post titled "Predictions from the Past," I asked if anyone had a photo of David. Numerous people either sent their own photos or linked to various published ones in print or on the web, and thanks to you all.

This one is by Larry Angier, who also spun some delightful tales of the Monterey Peninsula "in crowd" and the Al Weber Rendezvous "(gathering of photographers to swap stories, lies, fellowship, annual portfolio presentation…)," where David, seen here, was the featured speaker in 2012. A stylish shot of David doing what he liked to do.

Here's Larry's Web page.

Mike

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Is Fuji's X-S10 an Admission that the X-T4 is Too Big?

You must be aware that Fuji has released a new camera model. It's a "Really-New-Not-An-Update" introduction, which puts it in a special class of news these days; many new introductions are refreshes or revisions of previously existing models.

(That isn't a complaint. We approve of refinement—it's one thing that helps make cameras great—and we're spoiled for choice these days. It's not like we don't have enough variety to choose from.)

According to Camerasize.com, the X-T4 is 7% (8.6 mm) wider and 9% (7.7 mm) taller than the new X-S10, and weighs 31% (142g or 5 ounces) more. As you can see from the visual comparison at the link, it's a significant difference. 

It's significant because Fuji is one of the few cameramakers that provides a full range of compact lenses for its lensmount, rather than a smattering of token offerings. (I love the word "smattering.")

It seems to be human nature to "improve" products by a.) adding features, b.) adding expense, and c.) adding size and weight. Have you ever seen an original Honda Civic?! They're about the size of a beachball. I exaggerate, but they're Mr. Bean cars for sure. (In America we ride motorcycles that are bigger than the original Civic.) The current Honda Civic is larger than the original Honda Accord that came to America in the 1970s. The Accord was a "compact" then. These days, after decades of incremental bloat, Honda seems to be struggling to keep the Accord within the "mid-sized" category.

Personally, I settled on my "Goldilocks" ideal size long before digital was a gleam in Fuji's eye. It was easy—some cameras felt too big, and some cameras felt too small, so I just figured out where the middle was. Of course it's all individual. Whenever I use my original X-T1, though (I temporarily added the large grip just to see what it felt like and never took it off again), I'm struck anew by how "right-sized" it is. Not too big, not too small. The X-T1 with the smaller Fuji lenses is right there for me.

The X-S10 makes perfect sense for Fuji's lineup, though, which is nothing if not logical. The company seems to like pairing "rangefinder-styled" and "SLR-styled" digital cameras at every market segment. One way you can think about the new body is that the X-S10 is simply the SLR-styled counterpart to the X-100V.

I wonder, though, if the X-S10 might also be Fuji's implicit acknowledgement that the X-T[x] series is becoming a victim of incremental bloat. And maybe feature-creep too.

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. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

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David L Glos: "Bloat is the short answer as to how I ended up on Fuji's doorstep. Like many, I started with a Pentax K1000, but my first camera love was a Nikon FM2, received as an 18th birthday present. Simple, extremely reliable, and compact, it was a faithful companion for many years. Eventually I started into Nikon's APS-C digital options, and finally ended up with a D800, which is everything an FM2 is not. Despite tremendous image quality, I just never bonded with the beast. Modern Nikon DSLRs, and companion Wunderlenses, are of a size and weight that I am no longer willing to schlep around for enjoyment. My current Fuji X-T20 based kit is a modern riff on my old FM2 kit, and has become a most agreeable companion. Surprise, I like my cars smaller, simpler, and fitted with a manual transmission too."

RubyT: "If they ever get these fires under control I might have to drive down to Boulder and handle one. It piques my interest, although if they'd give my X-T30 the Classic Negative simulation I'd mostly be tempted by the new lens, for hiking, which takes us back to the fires. Ah, well. It will help keep my holiday budget in check."

Wiki Loves Monuments 2020 Contest

Photo by MichaelDPhotos (CC BY-SA 4.0)

There must be a lot of historic sites near anyone that they don't know about.

Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons are having a contest to encourage contributions. You can provide fresh photographs of historic sites in the U.S. to help them in their mission. There are a few modest prizes, but I suspect the prize money is not why anyone would do this—it's more that it's a fun way to get out and look around, a way to provide a purpose for photographic jaunts. Sort of a general assignment to give shape to your activities. I have a friend who does this, and it's been motivating and involving for him. He's in an area of the country that's new to him and his wife and they've found it's a nice way to explore their adopted community and the surrounding regions.

Here's the contest page. You can read about it there, but basically you're tasked with finding recognized historic sites local to you and photographing them for the database.

Sounds like it could be fun. A new way, perhaps, to get out and explore your area. The contest lasts through the end of the month but if you enjoy doing this, there's no time limit on contributing to Wikimedia projects.

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. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

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Richard Tugwell (partial comment): "For folks in the UK (or England anyway) Historic England has a feature allowing users to contribute images and other things to the Listed Buildings archive. No prizes though, but quite rewarding."

Geoff Wittig: "I got excited by this idea since I know there are quite a few historic rural buildings near me. I got more excited when I saw one of the sites was an impressive and unusual barn quite close to my home. Surely I could photograph it in perfect light looking its best.... Then I remembered. This barn was photographed by David Plowden, as part of an entire book of beautiful barn photographs. Plowden gave a presentation about the project at George Eastman Museum about 15 years back, and I got to talk to him about it. He was exceptionally polite. Pretty unlikely I'll take a better photograph than David Plowden did."

Mike replies: But do they have a good photograph of the barn on the existing Wikipedia page? If not, then yours might still be needed.

MikeR: "Following their proffered link, I found a list of historic sites in Pennsylvania's Montgomery County, and was surprised to find that I live near, or near enough, to at least a dozen of them. In some cases, I already have the images."

Sunday Support Group: Woo-Hoo! Past the Impasse (OT)

I've thrown my back out. Day three.

Everything that goes wrong is an opportunity to learn or practice how to handle it. You can have gratitude in the face of anything if you look at it in the right light. (Sometimes it's difficult, yes.)

In this case, it revives my compassion for people forced to live with chronic pain. Never-ending pain must be wearing on the body, but also on the soul and one's peace of mind and mood; it must make it doubly difficult to maintain a steady, mild outlook and a pleasant frame of mind. As in the famous "Chinese water torture," I imagine it might not take much; what would get to you is never getting any relief, never getting a break. I've had renewed sympathy for those suffering such afflictions over the past few days. I'm grateful I don't have to live with pain all the time.

I've been through this before with my back. It's so difficult to remember not to lift things, especially off balance or out of symmetrical position. You're right there, the job is in front of you, it needs doing, and you feel fine. So you just do it.

With me, at least, the trouble might follow a day or two later—I'll do something innocuous and blang! With a sudden, familiar, unmistakable twinge, my back's out. It's very distinct when it happens. I remember once playing frisbee once in the park in D.C. for hours one Sunday. The next day I was standing talking on the pay phone (that dates it) down at the 7-11, and shifted my weight. That was all it took. Crutches, then a cane, three weeks in all. Or was it six? Maybe it just seemed like six.

Weighty matters
Meanwhile, some good news. I'll be doing a deep dive into my 2020 eating experiment on the 19th of December, which will be the experiment's one-year mark. In the meantime, though, a little update on the weight front—

I learned last year that, in empirical studies, researchers found that those who lose the most weight weigh themselves twice a day, morning and night. So that's what I've been doing. (You can do whatever you want to, so don't feel obliged to defend yourself to me. I'm not the boss of you.) It's interesting data. One thing I've learned is that weight loss is a matter of fits and starts. I'll lose some pounds, then hit a plateau and stick there for a while.

Anyway, most recently I've been stuck at just above 200 pounds for almost two and a half months, the longest plateau I've experienced yet. My body just wanted to maintain that, and seemed to be sticking to it doggedly.

In reading about it, I learned that in most cases, compliance is to blame. We think we're still 100% on the diet, but actually we've started to cheat a little, and then a little more, and then a little more. Strengthening compliance is what's needed then. One key for me was getting rid of added table sugar in my morning oatmeal. I couldn't find a way to eat oatmeal without sugar. I just never liked it any other way. I tried banana slices, but that didn't do it. And although I eat blueberries every day, I don't like them in oatmeal.

Finally I learned the trick. In a separate bowl, I mash a ripe banana with a fork. The more you mush it, the more liquified it becomes. When it's good and soupy, mix it with the cooked oatmeal along with a quarter teaspoon of cinnamon. (I use old-fashioned Quaker Oats, mixed 1+2 with water and microwaved in a much larger bowl for six minutes.) Along with six ounces of a berry and mango smoothie with lots of goodies in it (ground flax, a little turmeric root, a few whole walnuts, etc.), it's a nice, easy, enjoyable breakfast.

Anyway, if you've been trying to "healthy up" your eating and your effort is in the doldrums, try evaluating your compliance. Look at everything carefully and figure out if you're getting lax or have given yourself permission to cheat in some way. For example, maybe you decided to eat meat once a month but you've slipped into indulging three or four times a month. Maybe you tell yourself you're walking three times a week but when you study your records you find that sometimes you do it only twice or even just once. I suspect I'm going to need to "tighten up my program" every so often like this as I go forward.

I first saw 1xx on the scale a few days ago, and I've seen 196 once. I really hope I've left the 200's behind. Back on track again!

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. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

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MikeR: "Back out = six weeks. At least it is for me. But, as you say, each time it is a lesson...some folks live in pain every day. One thing it does make me feel is old. Even when I was forty or fifty, having to use a cane and shuffle along and walk gingerly made me feel as though I were eighty.

"I'm keenly interested in your diet exposition, having been fighting a similar fight. I'm finding that it is very easy to kid oneself into believing that one is eating what one says one is eating, and not getting the exercise one is proclaiming that one gets. ('one' happens to be me.) Best wishes on the back spasm recovery."

Mike replies: Thanks. Heating pad right now.

Dan Khong: "You said, '..those who lose the most weight weigh themselves twice a day, morning and night.' That describes me. I thought I am the only obsessed one. Thanks for the thumbs up. Without a weighing machine—a cheap one will do—weight management is impossible by guessing."

Mike replies: You need data!

John Camp: "I broke my upper right arm on July 24 and since then, the pain has been diminishing, but constant. It's not bone-break pain—the bone has healed—but the scar tissue around the torn muscle and surgical incisions. I have to stretch that tissue out, and work on that daily, or I'll never have normal range of motion, which is pretty critical if you're right handed. (If you want to throw a ball, or swim, or lifted things off shelves above your head.) The physical therapy itself creates the stress that results in the pain. I've been told that a couple of more months of PT should do it, but the inability to escape the pain, even with fairly heavy doses of painkillers, drives me crazy. Even sitting absolutely still, unmoving, in the most comfortable position, and I still hurt, not terribly, but in a nagging sort of way. I didn't whine too much the first month, because I figured, you know, break your arm, it's gonna hurt. I may have whined a bit more the second month, because it was really starting to drag me down. Now, I don't know how my wife lives with me—I'm grumpy all the time, I whine, I make excuses for not doing things that I really probably could do, because of 'the arm.' Chronic pain sucks."

SteveB: "Good luck with your back, Mike. I've had occasions when my back went out. The first time it was just bending over to pick up a tie I had dropped getting ready for work—bent over and there was no way I was going to straighten up—had to shuffle over to the bed and sit. Went to the doctor and he said time was the main thing—I had to grab both sides of the cubicle I worked in to stand at work for a while but in time it went away. Then I had back pain for years; it just kind of grinds you down over time. In the end it turned out it was from a kidney stone; after having the stone blown up and it passing, I haven't had that kind of back pain in years. But just the other day I did have another back pain/spasm that took about a week to work out.

"My wife has had rheumatoid arthritis since she was 19 (we're both 68) and that's a constant and sometimes debilitating pain she's lived with. She says you just do things in spite of the pain, otherwise you wouldn't be able to live. She has had both shoulders replaced and one knee. She's an amazing woman."

Mike replies: There was a girl in my photography program whose mother suffered from chronic back pain. I never met the mother, but our friend described a semi-invalid who was "grumpy all the time" as John says, never in a good mood, always angry or needy, and who was sometimes in agony. It sounded like the pain was almost a fourth member of the family, another character in the drama. Pam's description was vivid. It made me really appreciate the difficulty of living with chronic pain. 

Nigli: "I've had back issues on and off since I was about 23. What has worked best to prevent it from reoccurring is going to the gym, 2–3 times a week, and doing core strength work. I takes about an hour to an hour and a half per sesssion. I could do many of the same exercises at home, but I don't. So to the gym it is."

The Most Popular Large Format

Why was 4x5 (called 5x4 in Britain) the most popular large film format? There are two reasons.

First, and far and away foremost, it was the largest film format that could conveniently be enlarged. Four-by-five-inch enlargers were common and made by many manufacturers; they were competitively priced, although you wouldn't call them cheap.

Enlargers that could handle 5x7 and larger sheet film were greatly less common and considerably more expensive. Long ago in antediluvian days when punk rockers walked the Earth, I worked on an 8x10 color enlarger owned by Northern Virginia Community College, where I was teaching at the time, and it was a formidable beast. Floorstanding, yet towering over my head (I'm 6'2"—or at least I was then; now I'm 6' 1 1/2"), it was given its own room in the Photo Department. It was said to have cost $10,000 back in 1984, about $25,000 today. At around the same time, I bought my first 4x5 enlarger for something like $800.

Me at about the time I was teaching at NVCC and working on that 8x10 Durst. I almost threw this picture out the other day, by mistake! And it's the only print that exists. Photo by then-girlfriend E.H., who is now a doctor in San Francisco.

Ansel Adams had a homemade 8x10 enlarger. When asked what camera he used, he liked to answer "The biggest one I can carry!" He photographed with an 8x10 for years, although eventually a Hasselblad became the largest camera he could carry. His final assistant, John Sexton, last I heard, uses a 4x5 Linhof Technika and enlarges his negatives (only so much—he's a great craftsman and his technique is highly optimized) using Saunders/LPL enlargers.

Second, the cameras are small, light, and handy. You can even handhold them (see: press cameras, for example the famous Speed Graphic and Crown Graphic made by Graflex we were talking about a week or so ago). Everything can be smaller, lighter, easier to carry, less expensive, and handier to use. The lenses can be shorter (50mm on a FF camera is roughly the same angle of view as a 150mm lens on 4x5 and a 300mm lens on 8x10). Of course each sheet of film is cheaper. Consider just the difference in weight and size of carrying six film holders for 4x5 vs. 8x10!

As a consequence of the two factors above and its resulting popularity ("popularity" relative to the LF world, that would be), 4x5 was more plentiful and more ubiquitous, easier to find, and cheaper to buy, and the film was more readily available and produced in greater variety.

Larger large formats
It should be remembered, though, that 4x5 was a compromise, if an intelligent, considered one—the balanced, just-right solution in the middle. It really is a good, viable option to get a larger camera and then contact print, which was my nefarious plan with the old Single Use Device (which I sold in 2015, I believe, although I still have the lens). For most of his life as well as for the lion's share of his famous photographs, Edward Weston used an 8x10 camera and made contact prints.

Here's a video showing Edward's simple darkroom:

I don't even think he owned an enlarger. By the way, notice that in the video at a little after 9:00, it shows Edward in the passenger's seat of a car, scanning the landscape. Legend has it that Edward never got a driver's license because that way, he never had to share driving duties and was always free to look out the window. (Also by the way, when the film was made that those clips came from, Edward was already suffering from Parkinson's and having trouble with the disease's "masking" of facial expressions. I imagine that's why he appears to be somewhat less than normally animated.)

If you scan your negatives anyway, that's another argument for going ahead and shooting 5x7 or 8x10. A V600 is the same scanner regardless of what size neg you slap on it. [This is wrong I guess; you need a V850. Ouch! LF is expensive.]

Incidentally (I'm kinda rambling now, sorry), the most Edward was ever paid for a photography in his lifetime was $250, and the client was Eastman Kodak Company. He sold seven (color!) images to them at that price. If he were alive today I'd ask him to do a print sale with us! (Okay, made myself laugh, and that's half the battle.)

Mike
(Thanks to the reader who mentioned that YouTube video)

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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Tom Duffy: "Another nice advantage of the 4x5 camera compared to anything larger was the ready availability of preloaded film packs, which allowed you to shoot 16 pictures in fairly rapid succession. You could then swap out film packs in daylight and keep shooting. The film base was very thin so developing was more of a chore than shooting with real sheet film and you needed to use a glass negative carrier in your enlarger to keep the film flat while enlarging."

Greg Heins: "Surely another compelling reason for the appeal of 4x5 (or 5x4) by the 1960s was the fact that the various Polaroid options existed in this size with a film holder that slipped into the camera back almost as easily as normal film holders. I remember going off to an Adams workshop in 1968 with an 8x10 and being surprised to find myself the only person among the dozens of photographers there with anything larger than 4x5. But the learning value of being able to examine and discuss Polaroids, even with their various deficiencies, was made very clear to me as I watched my colleagues that week. Not to mention the fact that pulling Polaroids was a part of every commercial photography process, even to the extent of using a 4x5 and Polaroid to nail down the lighting (and often the client approval) before replacing the back and lens to shoot 8x10 film."

Larry Angier: "That video was nice! I had the honor and pleasure to teach with Kim at the second Al Weber Mission Portfolio Workshops at Mission San Miguel years ago. He was a pleasure to work with and had such high energy! His wife Gina accompanied him. Besides the legacy and having to walk in the footsteps of his grandfather Ed, Kim took his own road. He worked for years as a carpenter and contractor and transitioned into photography on his own terms using film and traditional photography to create his own legacy. A few years after, Kim, Gina and their son Zach had a major show at the National Steinbeck Center in Salinas showcasing four generations of this photographic dynasty. It was quite a show and the opening was well attended with many influenced by so many decades of great work produced by them all."

Richard Man: "Re '...the most Edward was ever paid for a photography in his lifetime was $250...': There is a YouTube video of the Weston 'kids,' filmed not long after Edward passed away, if I recall correctly. They were saying something like 'Wow, the collector's market really has driven up the prices of Edward's prints!' and they were talking about how they had gone up to $600–$700.  ;-)  "

Mike replies: Maybe ten years ago, the curator of photography at the Art Institute of Chicago mentioned that you really couldn't get a good Edward Weston print, printed by Edward, for less than $800,000. It might have changed since then, too.

G Dan Mitchell: "While I cannot speak for John (nor his wife Anne Larsen), when I met him in the Yosemite backcountry a few years back they were using Hasselblad medium-format cameras."

Mani Sitaraman: "One of the now almost forgotten (and then little-known) uses for an 8x10 enlarger was to make a 2x enlarged 'contact sheet' of a roll of 135 or 120 film onto a single sheet of 16x20 paper. I have seen one from a roll of 35mm negatives, and it was unique and, well, beautiful. I expect an enlargement from a roll of 120 film would have been even more striking. I'm struggling to recall the title of an exhibition in the 1980s(?) that displayed a series of 16x20 'contacts' by some famous photographer."

Mike replies: William Klein?

Predictions from the Past

I was going through some old papers today, and I happened across a loose page, crumpled, from GRUMP, a newsletter "published informally and occasionally by David Vestal," the late photo-writer (he preferred "photographer") who died in 2013 after a long and productive life. I'm going to venture the liberty of reproducing this in toto, because I was David's editor for years and I'm virtually certain he wouldn't have minded. This is from GRUMP 34, dated June, 1994:

it's gaining on us

This is based on too little evidence to trust, but enough to provoke.

In 1984, according to to a study published in a magazine devoted to electronic imaging, high-resolution 35mm color-slide film could hold information equivalent to 18 or 20 million pixels (digital units of electronic visual recording). Average this and you get 19,000,000 pixelishes per 35mm slide.

A 1984 Sony still video camera delivered 250,000 pixels per picture, or 1/76th as much information as 35mm film.

In 1991, a Sony still video picture had 720,000 pixels, a big improvement, about 1/26th as much information as 35mm film. The rate of increase was 2.88x in seven years.

If we assume, ridiculously, that this rate will stay constant, then future still video pixels at seven-year intervals will be:

1998: 2,073,600 (leaving film with a 9.16x advantage);
2005: 5,971,968 (leaving film with a 3.18x advantage);
2012: 17,199,268 (leaving film with a 1.1x advantage);
2019: 49,533,891 (leaving film behind).

This far-too-simple projection puts the catchup year at 2013, but technology does not change evenly, and I think it will probably happen sooner. Or it may never happen: predictions are iffy.

Photographers have always resisted change, so in the 1880s we cursed those damned dry plates because, we said, they lacked the "bloom" of wet collodion. And so on. In our reluctance to change we are mistaken. Don't worry: if and when this change comes it won't kill us: to the extent that we use it well, it may help.

Pretty fair for 1994! Using DPReview's historically important public records, in 1998 most consumer cameras had one megapixel, but the Kodak DCS520/Canon 2000 and the Kodak DCS315 had two. In 2005, the Nikon D200 and Sony Cyber-shot DSC-R1 had 10 megapixels, but most consumer digital cameras had six or eight. In 2012, sensors ranged from 12 MP to 24 MP, but 16-megapixel cameras like the Pentax K-5II, Olympus OMD E-M5, and Sony SLT-A37 were common, while the Canon EOS Rebel 4Ti and EOS M had 18. Finally, in 2019, the Leica SL2 had 47 MP, and the Hasselblad X1D II 50C had 50.

Of course, things did happen a little more quickly than David's model predicted...just as he predicted (ha!). After all, 2012 was the year of the 36-megapixel Nikon D800, and 2019 the year of the Fuji GFX 100 with its 100,000,000 "pixelishes." And there was a 6-MP Kodak in 1998. Was that the one that cost something like $30,000 and was only purchased by news organizations?

In the same stack of old papers, though, I found a private letter from David (actually it was a fax...he loved the fax machine, and kept using it far after it was outdated. When it first came along it relieved him of having to climb the basement stairs to answer the phone). Dated just before the turn of 1999, in it he writes, "Prediction: in 2009 digital phot is the norm and silver-halide phot lives on as art and as commercial quaint (like handcoloring now)." He lived to see that one come true. 

(Does anyone have a picture of David we could post? I don't think I do.)

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. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

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psu: "This is a great story. Here is...maybe?...a different angle: I think the real impetus for the shift from film to digital capture was not on the capture side, it was on the consumption side. It turns out that if most people are suddenly using computers and a computer network to look at pictures, most people will want the pictures to be captured in a format and on a device that makes that as easy as possible. So I think the Internet accelerated the general switch to digital cameras by some amount. Because really, no one likes scanning film. It also turned out that most people ended up not missing whatever the theoretical loss in image quality was when going from 35mm film to 'low resolution' digital. I think in practice 6 MP turned out to be on par with most uses of 35mm film even though you might estimate it to be a lot worse. But, that whole discussion is fairly academic now."

David Dyer-Bennet (partial comment): "[Something] David Vestal overlooked, probably because the information wasn't widely known when he projected his catch-up year for digital imaging, was that it takes fewer directly captured pixels to make an image that looks good than it does scanned-from-film pixels. The direct-digital pixels are much cleaner than the second-generation scanned pixels."

Ted Davis: "I saved all of David's articles in your magazine in a thick binder. Brilliant and straightforward, I love re-reading them and I keep it by my bedside. I learned the finer points of printing/subject matter/timing/attitude from him which has followed through to my digital work today."

Dave Levingston: "Re 'Photographers have always resisted change...' I started out with a Nikon F (no meter) and a Luna Pro. People said, 'No professional photographer would use a 35mm "miniature" camera.' Then I got a Nikkormat Ftn. People said, 'No professional photographer would ever use a built-in meter.' Then I got a Nikon FE and people said, 'No professional photographer would use automatic exposure.' And on and on, so forth and so forth. Today I advise everybody that 'P' is for 'Professional.'

"When I went digital in the late 1990s I had a 3-megapixel camera. I was shooting beauty stuff for some national magazines. I wanted to shoot a job with the digital camera. They reluctantly agreed, but insisted I also shoot film. They were chea...ah, concerned about expenses. I sent them the results and they suddenly discovered that with the digital files they didn't have to pay to have separations made. That saved them more than my fee. They never let me shoot film again. They ran one of those 3-MP digital photos double truck, across two pages in the magazine. It looked just fine, no observable difference from the film photos in the same magazine."

It's Expensive Because It Was Cheap!

This is one of the odd features of buying old stuff on the used market: sometimes things become expensive because they're cheap.

Let me 'splain. Sometimes things are great bargains on the used market. They become popular and sought after because they're great bargains. Influencers recommend them as good bargains, and the echo chamber parrots the recommendations until it's common knowledge. People follow along, and seek these bargains out. And then, with market forces working in their usual way, competition for these great bargains...drives the prices up. So then people find themselves competing to pay a lot for something that, originally, everyone wanted because it was cheap.

Weird.

Here's a similar thing. There was a CD/SACD player, I seem to recall, that sold by the bushel because it was good and also very cheap. But then what could the company do as a follow-up to its success but produce a more deluxe, expensive player? At which point people were saying, wait, I only wanted one of those in the first place because they were cheap; why would I want "the same thing only better" if it's also more expensive? (The company went out of business. No room to move, I guess.)

Sometimes companies do such a good job of branding themselves in their chosen niches that they have trouble moving out of them. Volkswagen once tried to create a luxury car to compete with Mercedes-Benz, and from what I hear it did a good job—the car was called the Phaeton, an old word once applied to certain kinds of horse-drawn carriages. (Before that, it was the name of the ne'er-do-well offspring of a water nymph and the sun god, who was given the keys to the family car and drove the chariot of the sun off course, scorching Earth. Maybe Phaeton's driving that chariot again now, who knows.) VW evidently failed to consider why anyone buying a high-prestige car would want one with an "everyman" nameplate. Kia ran into the same problem with its K9, a car that tried to hide its doggy associations by having its name disguised as the K900 in the US. (No one was fooled. I like dogs, so I would have preferred the straight-up "K9." I'm usually in the minority about things like this.) It's apparently a nice luxury car. But one little problem: it's a Kia.

Sometimes there's a more basic, stripped-down version of a desirable product that's sold as a "good enough" budget version for students or beginners. "Entry level," they're sometimes called. Fewer of such budget models sell, so that, later, when neither version is made any more and perhaps the company is out of business altogether, the budget version is scarcer. And scarcity drives the price up.

An example of this is the Bronica SQ-B medium format film camera. The "B" was for "basic." It was originally an entry-level, less fully-featured variant of the SQ-Ai aimed at students and newcomers to medium format, sold as a kit. Well, now they're more rare, so they go for higher prices than the SQ-Ai.

All versions of the Leica R4 are cheap now, but when people still wanted them, the simpler, stripped-down R4s, originally prized because it was more accessible to people who had less money, actually became more desirable than the fully featured R4. The value-to-price equation flipped upside down.

Related to this is the upside-down valuation of some collectibles. Imagine a book author. Her first book sells poorly because it isn't very good. Later she hits her stride, writes masterpieces, and becomes famous. Enthusiasts collect her works. The problem then becomes that a collection can only be complete it if includes all her books, including her first, unpopular one—which are scarce because nobody bought them when they were new. But there are lots of collectors, and now all those collectors need that first book. Again, scarcity in the face of demand drives up the price, until that author's worst book is selling for ten times the price of any of her other books.

That's the reason why some early Japanese Leica copies—originally cheaper knock-offs—sell for more than the real Leicas they copied.

And then there's the "latest is best" phenomenon. A product is introduced, achieves success, runs its course, and is superseded. Eventually, all of the models of a given line or product type become outmoded and old. But then the used market still prefers the latest version because it's assumed to be "the best." It had the latest revisions, right? And the last models remain the newest. I haven't checked lately, but for a long time you had to pay more for a Leica IIIg because it was the last Leica screwmount camera.

But c'mon, it's a screwmount camera. They're all ancient now. The IIIg was discontinued the year John F. Kennedy was elected President. Does it really matter if something is 60 years old vs., say, 68 years old? But "latest-is-best" seems to survive in peoples' minds even as time goes on.

Still, of all these little weirdnesses, and others like 'em, "expensive-because-it-was-cheap" seems the strangest.

So when you encounter something in the used market that seems to be popular and selling for high prices, don't just assume that it has to be good because the price is high and/or it's in demand. You also need to do enough due diligence to figure out why the price is high and why it's in demand. It might be for some reason other than what you assume.

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. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

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hugh crawford: "OK here is an example.

"In 1955, '56, and '57, Porsche decided that they needed to sell a low-end car. Cheap paint, no side windows, no carpets, cheap seats, a joke of a roof that was a collection of sticks and a tent to go over it, optional hubcaps, even a cardboard interior I think. They called it the Speedster. They also sold a Coupe with lux everything. Fancy adjustable seats made of leather stuffed with horsehair, wool carpet, glass windows, chrome bumpers and hubcaps. Every attempt to make it look expensive and a list of options that goes on and on.

"Here is a comparison of the prices when new and what they sell for now. Note that the Coupe is listed with no options which is sort of a joke because I have never ever seen one with no options, and the Speedster was not offered with any options.

1957 Porsche Speedster
Original MSRP $3,215
Low Retail $179,600
Average Retail $255,000
High Retail $439,800

1957 Porsche Coupe
Original MSRP $3,665
Low Retail $58,500
Average Retail $95,600
High Retail $151,200

"As you can see the cheap one was the one to buy. Even today collectors are wary of no-sunroof 911's from the '60s and '70s because they are worth enough more that people have the sunroof welded shut when they restore them.

"P.S. I often am astonished at the Pentax K1000 selling at higher prices than the much much nicer K2."

Crabby Umbo: "I'm with Hugh! As a Pentax 'fan,' I'm amazed how a camera as rough and clunky as the K1000 costs more than the more refined KM and K2. Sure, I get that it was the camera of choice for people in college learning photography, but that means there are zillions of them out there! I have a few, but I got them cheap/free. I've always maintained that if you had a SP500 (which I see all the time on eBay for 50 bucks in mint shape) or other Spotmatic, you pick up a K1000 and say: 'what happened?' I.e., the Spotty's being butter smooth and the K1000 being loud and clunky. The 'now cheaper' KM has a shutter closer to the old Spotmatics, hence much smoother, it seems. Go figure...."

Robert B: "Anecdotal saying about the Phaeton here in Germany was that it was constructed around a perfect air-conditioning system because one of the owners of VW, Ferdinand Piëch, late offspring of the famous Porsche family, was extremely shy of cold air drafting over his bald head. Seemed to be a bad selling story for a Veblen good. But I know some professional drivers who loved that car especially for long distance rides, not least because of its comfortable, electrically driven massage seats...."

hugh crawford: "More about that VW Phaeton.

"Ferdinand Piëch was chairman of the executive board of Volkswagen Group in 1993–2002. He was also the grandson of Ferdinand Porsche. And before he was kicked out of Porsche by his cousin (you could write a book. Several have already been written), designed the 917 among other things.

"He wanted to build a really nice car that was better than Bentley, which VW owned. The Phaeton is basically a Bentley Flying Spur, built on the same production line, with a nicer interior. The air conditioning vents disappear behind the wood in the VW when not in use. Not particularly utilitarian, but it shows how determined they were to make the interior not look like a pinball machine.

[Comparison of Bentley Flying Spur and VW Phaeton]

"Mr. Piëch generally got what he wanted. He had 12 children including two with his cousin's ex-wife, which gave him more shares in Porsche than the cousin that kicked him out. Then he married the nanny.

["The Porsche Story: A Fierce Family Feud" from Der Spiegel]

"He was also responsible for the Bugatti Veyron. But the Phaeton was the real poke in the eye to the rest of the automobile world. Because it was a VW, not a Bentley, Lamborghini, Audi, or Bugatti.

"I met him once. Scary guy."

Older Readers (Blog Note)

People in the USA are...tense right now. Let's just put it that way.

I don't see much of it, but I've noticed that the frequency of various accusations flung across my bows has ratcheted up. I don't think I'm doing anything differently than I ever have, but tense people are maybe a little...short, as in short-tempered? Is that a mild enough thing to say to indicate what I mean?

Anyway, one of the occasional accusations leveled at TOP is that it's a site for older readers.

Usually stated like that's a bad thing.

I don't look at it that way. Don't get me wrong, I'd love to write for young people in virtual hordes—I'd write for teenagers if I could!—and photographers of any age or description are more than welcome. But, if anything, I target older readers. Who wouldn't? They're experienced, they're wise, they're interesting. They have stories to tell. Their culture includes a broader swath of recent history. They get my references. (When T.S. Eliot died, Ezra Pound said, "now who will get my jokes?") They tend to not get all hot and bothered about angels dancing on the heads of pins. They put things in perspective. There's a reason they're called "mature."

Herman (hover your mouse over image)

I like the company of people who know more than I do. About something, possibly including photography, even.

Speaking of which, unless I am mistaken, our Official Oldest Reader (as well as Punster-in-Chief, but don't provoke him), Herman Krieger, turned 94 yesterday. Ninety-four...that's a good start. (I think I know more about his life than I know about my own.)

Happy Birthday Herman! Are you still riding your bike Friday?

So to the next person who says TOP is for gray heads, not gearheads, my response is: I hope. None better.

Mike

Reply from Herman: "Yes, I'm still riding my Bike Friday recumbent. I'm now waiting for a Swytch electric pedal assist kit to install on the bike. Now if only they made a shutter assist kit to make it easier to take photos."

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. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

 Patreon

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

Mike Hurd: "I was just going to say—well I'm young and I've been enjoying your blog for years but then I realised that I'm 43 and I need to start remembering that I'm not actually young any more...."

Mike J. replies: I remember sitting in Phil Davis's workshop studio—he developed Beyond the Zone System and was the de facto technical editor of Photo Techniques—complaining about how old I was. He immediately admonished me (he did a lot of that), telling me that I was still very young and I should realize it. I believe I was 42 then.

CR: "Twenty-two-year-old here enjoying your blog nonetheless. I like the literary references, and the fact you know so much more about photography (and other things) than me is probably exactly why I keep reading."

Mike replies: Welcome CR, good to know you're here.

Aaron Hines: "From where I sit, I do not think you target any audience other than those interested in photography in its many forms. The 'old' part seems to come from the fact that younger generations do not have as much interest in dedicated cameras at the moment, while those of us that have been photographing for a while don't see smartphones (and social media) as having entirely usurped all other cameras or completely devalued photographic history. At 38, I am sure that many here do not consider me old...though, that's always a matter of perspective, isn't it? My 11-year-olds think I'm ancient."

JG: "One point you didn't make, but probably could (should?) have, is that older readers are much more likely to be...well, readers, not watchers. A couple of years ago, I stumbled into a mentor role wherein I've been casually teaching two high-school age kids (children and grandchildren of friends) about the basics of photography. (They are particularly interested in using film, which I find amusing, as I was equally happy to be rid of it.) While they claim to be interested in learning, if I forward to them a link to anything text-based, they won't read it. No way, no how! However, they will happily watch videos, even poorly made ones that are chock full of errors and inaccuracies and are intended to be consumed as entertainment, not education. Not surprisingly, the primary outlet for their photography is Instagram via an iPhone and they love using filters when post-processing their photos. While they would no doubt benefit a lot from regularly reading your blog, there's zero chance they will ever do so, because it's simply not the way they have been primed to acquire knowledge or entertainment. I've repeatedly tried to gently nudge them into being more open-minded about this, but no such luck so far! Anyway, based on this small sample set, at least, I suspect if you ever do try to cater your blog more toward younger readers, your business model will fail spectacularly!"

Mike Plews: "I suspect a convention of TOP readers would be a gloriously fascinating event but would also be over by 8 p.m.

"I am into my third month of retirement and hit 71 in November which should establish my geezer bona fides. Most of my friends are about the same age and some have shared nuggets of wisdom about this time of life, a few worth sharing:

• You know you are really old when you ask your date 'are those your teeth?' and you aren't asking if they are dentures, you are asking if they are paid for.
• You know you are really old when you are less concerned about running our of Viagra than stool softeners.
• And finally, you know you are really old when you can remember when 4x5 was considered medium format.

"Good lord I miss DuPont papers—that sort of says it all."

Mike replies: I was just thinking I wish Kodak still made Verichrome and Medalist. Or at least Plus-X.

Chris C: "I think in the modern world, 'readers' is enough to imply 'older.' The younger generations are more into watching video as their source of information. My teenage son is a prime example—'why read the book when I can watch the movie?'"

Mike replies: Anecdotal evidence, but my 27-year-old son is the same way. And he's a good reader; he just doesn't enjoy it. On the other hand, I was researching the book marketplace the other day and adolescent fiction is a hot category.

Bob Feugate: "As always, a thoughtful and interesting post. And I was delighted to learn that Herman Krieger is still alive and doing well. He has led an extraordinarily productive life and deserves to be better known. His pages of visual puns 'Essays in Black and White' are endlessly amusing."

Joe Iannazzone: "Mike, I've got a couple of years on you and have been reading your columns since the Luminous Landscape days. To pick up on Mike Plews' anecdotes...'You know you are old when the motivation for dating a younger woman is that she can see to drive at night.' Just to be clear, I am happily married and can see well enough to take photographs in the daytime."

Chan: "Started reading your blog from my late 20s. Its been more than a decade now. By the way, I'm waiting for your post about iPhone 12. LoL."

Mike replies: I requested one from Apple today because of your comment here. I don't even know if they provide review samples, but it never hurts to ask.

Ken W: "I'm in my 30s, and I drop by this site every day (and drop a bit in Mike's Patreon while I'm at it). Mostly lurking, and happy to read and learn from many who have made photographs for longer than I've lived so far."

Then and Now

I love it when this happens—a "then and now" pair.

Zander with Lulu, 2007. Photo by dad Mike.

Xander (he spells it differently now) with Ziggy, 2020.
Photo by girlfriend Alyssa.

Unlike Ze Frank's "Young Me / Now Me," this wasn't done on purpose at all—Xander and Alyssa sent me the lower picture, and it reminded me of the upper one. Xander had remembered the similarity too.

I've always had a particular fondness for then-and-now pictures. You can see changes over time. I liked Richard Linklater's movie Boyhood, created as the actors aged naturally over time. A book I've always admired but never owned is Second View: The Rephotographic Survey Project (Amazon Canada) in which several photographers including Mark Klett revisited the tripod-holes of various 19th-century pioneer photographers of the old West.

Ziggy, a rescue who loves to cuddle, is a new addition to the family. Lulu, who was also a rescue, is just about to turn 14. She's still well and getting along okay, and she lives with me—although that might not be her first choice!

Mike

Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

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

Patrick Murphy: "Here's a then and then and now you might like. I'd do another one this year except we haven't seen our son at home due to the pandemic since last Christmas."

Mike replies: That's just really great.

Andrew Lamb: "Love those photos. At the end of the day, it's about photographing nearest and dearest. This stuff matters. By the way, I think you'll find it's now spelled Xiggy...."

Jeff: "Just pulled my copy of Klett’s Second View: The Rephotographic Survey Project, and hadn’t remembered that he signed it. I like when that happens. I also have a number of fun ‘then and now’ city-themed books. But my favorite book tracing changes over time is Nicholas Nixon’s well known work documenting the Brown sisters."

Mike replies: Here's a page with that, although not up to the latest.

Kenneth Tanaka: "Priceless. This is one of the jobs photography does better than any other medium. Wonderful. Thanks for sharing, Mike."

Douglas Chadwick: "Mark Klett is just amazing. It's one thing to find those tripod-holes, it takes me a long time to do it. But Mark Klett can be walking down the street and spot a Walker Evans over his shoulder. Maybe he had done a bunch of research beforehand but I doubt it. It sure impressed me in Morgantown, West Virginia, a number of years ago.

"Another person who can do that is Chris Rauschenberg (one of the three founders of Blue Sky Gallery in Portland, Oregon, and yes, son of...). I remember a phone call with him when he was telling me about finding and re-photographing a whole bunch of Atget scenes in Paris from memory—not intentionally, he just kept running across them. It later turned into a project, but to hear him talk it started out with just stumbling across them walking around the city, and without the reference books to back it up."

Sunday Support Group: Scores

The Wista arrived on Thursday, and I thought I'd show you a few pictures of it. It does not have a lens yet.

They're surprisingly small and delicate in person, which is hard to convey in pictures.

Like a '30s leading lady, this Wista has a "good side." The KEH description did not mention wrinkled bellows, and this camera's bellows are not wrinkled on one side, but are wrinkled on the other side! I've never seen that before. I don't even know how it's possible.

The ground glass has markings for medium format backs.

It even has a red dot. And an extra one for good measure. Just kidding. These are the the index marks to show you the neutral position for the front standard.

Now that it's here, it's dawning on me that this is going to be hard to pull off without a darkroom. I could have someone else process and print the film, of course, but where's the fun in that? Maybe I should have worked this out earlier....

Sometimes I'm not too smart, but just can't help myself.

Oh well, forge on, let the chips fly, we'll cross that bridge when we come to it, and other clichés along those lines.

Look what else I scored yesterday! Right out of the ground. Steamed or roasted, yum. This will keep me in crucifers for several days.

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:

Richard Man: "We all must do 'not too smart' things sometimes. I took just a dozen photos with the 8x10 in Yosemite last weekend, and while one thinks that all possible photos in Yosemite have been taken, I really like how much control I have with the camera. I used movements in almost all images, most of them just slight amount, but the results are so satisfying. By the way, this is taken with the lens that you highly recommended—the 12-inch Gold Dot Dagor. It draws beautiful images with portraits, landscapes...anything I throw at it. Thank you."

Mike replies: That's beautiful Richard.

Mark B: "Holy crap that's a pretty camera!"

tuco and STEPHANE

[Ed. note: This is an extra post written on my day off, because I know I'm writing too much about large format. There are a few more to come, too. If you don't like these discussions, don't worry; the weather always changes on a blog, eventually.]

-

First a quotation. I've been doing a lot of roving about the internet (now, is it supposed to be capitalized, or not? I've lost track of the arguments) looking into large format stuff. I wanted to share two small things I ran across. One comes from a thread on flickr (I believe that's not supposed to be capitalized), and was written by one STEPHANE GUILLAUME, who wrote his name using all caps. STEPHANE wrote (I've edited his punctuation here, including changing "sinar f" to "Sinar F"):

Film does have a learning curve. I use a Sinar F and a 135mm lens. Scanning is done on a V700. I develop and scan all of my shots. Best advice I can give, start with one camera, one lens, one film type. Film is all about finding just the right light. You can't just shoot anywhere and have amazing shots. You have to find good light to shoot in.

As they say in Baltimore, true dat. He puts it nicely, in fewer words than I could have. (I evidently have too many words—I've been getting them out for years, yet there are always more.)

The second comes from someone named tuco, and we're back to no caps again. tuco (oww—how painful it is to an editor to begin a sentence with a lowercase letter!) found a model who would work for peanuts. But there was a downside. Models are so demanding, aren't they? Have a look and read about it.

That model's furious expression makes me smile. Cute little guy.

I like tuco's technique, too. Here's a picture of an old camera like the one he uses. These are not folding field cameras; they are called self-casing cameras, like my Rochester Optical Pony Premo. The difference is subtle; it has to do with the word "folding." You don't have to fold up a self-casing camera. It just retracts directly back into its box. Note too that both tuco and STEPHANE use lenses of the same focal length—135mm, which is about like 40mm on a FF camera*.

Reversible back, on my new old Wista. Left, portrait/vertical
orientation, right, landscape/horizontal orientation**

The difference between a Speed Graphic and a Crown Graphic—both were made by Graflex, Inc.—was that the Speed had a focal-plane shutter and the Crown didn't. Hence, the Crown was a little lighter and simpler. To get a cheap view camera (Graphics are press cameras), people used to "hot rod" Crowns by removing the rangefinder and some of the less useful appurtenances. Their real limitation as tripod view cameras is that the back isn't "reversible," meaning you can't switch it from horizontal, also called landscape, orientation to vertical, or portrait, orientation. The reason for that is that Graphic shooters would simply crop if they wanted a vertical. They were newsies—photojournalists—and their work was cropped ruthlessly all the time anyway, by editors showing only what was relevant and by compositors fitting the pictures to the column.

Cropping to a vertical is what Martin Munkácsi did with "Three Boys at Lake Tanganyika," which we saw here the other day. Martin liked to talk as if he were a 35mm shooter—the coming thing in his time—but mostly he preferred to shoot with larger formats and then crop, sometimes radically, to pluck out of his frame some part of it that he considered a strong composition. Sometimes he made pictures of surprisingly small bits of his originally much larger negatives.

My now 16-year-old niece, Hadley, does this instantaneously and reflexively with the pictures she takes on her iPhone and iPad. Her fingers fly so fast you can hardly see them as she works the screen of her iPad. She'll look at a picture and, zoom zoom, crop it the way she wants it with a few finger-flicks. She probably doesn't even realize it, but her cropping skills are practiced and fluent.

If I were a photography teacher now, I'd send students out to do this on purpose. Find a smaller composition within a larger one, take it with the wide or normal view of the phone camera module, then crop it down to what they visualized, to see what it looks like. Exercises like this help our seeing. Once you've got the knack (or so I believe), you've got it.

Mike

*The correspondences aren't exact, but, to convert 35mm (FF) focal lengths to those for 4x5 (5x4) inch or vice-versa, multiply or divide by 3.3. That gets you about as close are you're going to usefully get. Remember that the image on a 4x5 negative isn't exactly 4x5 inches, it's a bit smaller (and you don't know by how much, because film holders aren't standardized), and that the aspect ratios are different—meaning that precision is impossible. (Let's not argue that, okay? It's supposed to be my day off.)

**There are two ways you can tell these were shot with an iPhone. Can you spot both?

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

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

Scott: "1.) We can see you taking the picture in the reflection 2.) You seem to have used Portrait mode, as things in the same plane show different degrees of in-focus. Did I win?"

Mike replies: Yes! You win.

Crabby Umbo: "Tuco? Like Eli Wallach in The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly? 'When you have to shoot, shoot, don't talk.' Now that's advice for a photographer!"

AlanH: "Yep, good light is certainly wonderful, but I prefer to follow something Brooks Jensen said, 'Find a subject that fits well with the light you have.' That's probably not a correct direct quote, but you get the idea."

Mike replies: That's good advice too. It came to me one day during the time I was wandering around DC every day with my Exakta 66. I was bemoaning the overcast skies and the lead-colored landscapes one day when it came to me that the light was perfect for portraits! Nice and soft, no hard shadows.