The Online Photographer

Competition from Used

In the nineteen-teens, Henry Ford sat atop the automotive world, but a formidable new competitor gradually emerged over those years: himself.

In 1908, each Model T took twelve and a half hours to assemble and cost $825 (about $18,000 today). It became so popular that Ford eventually didn't even have to advertise. By 1920, three out of every four cars on American roads was a Model T. Ford kept driving the cost down and improving the efficiency of manufacture. By 1925, each new Model T took 93 minutes to produce and cost $265 (about $4,000 today).

No matter how far he managed to drive down the cost of the Model T, however, Ford had to compete with used Model T's. They became, for a while, a serious competitor to new ones.

So, consider what I stumbled across yesterday. Go to this page, and at the top of the page under "Navigation," click on "Sample photos on the Nikon D700 (FX)." Take a look at the samples. Even with all the caveats that might apply to online JPEGs, and regardless of what you think of them as pictures, I think you'll agree that they're pretty passable images technically.

Then, consider...those pictures were taken with a $92 Chinese lens on a 13-year-old DSLR.

A Model T with a 1917 New Jersey license plate

It's almost like we're in the exact opposite situation of the one we were in at the turn of the millennium. Along with all their other problems these days, camera manufacturers have to compete with their own older gear on the used market...a lot of which is surprisingly capable, and proving formidable as competition to new gear. 

Mike

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ASW: Well then, I feel pretty fancy today since I bought a lightly used D700 in 2018 and it remains my main camera. I thought the D700 was a great camera when it was introduced in 2008(?) and, to be honest, my photography goals (pictures for myself and family; limited printing to 8x10-ish) haven't changed all that much since then so what more do I need? Sure, I enjoy reading about the new technology and would love to have a D850 or Z7II, but then I would convince myself that I had to have upgraded lenses and would require an upgraded computer. I don't think I could make the return on investment work out, especially since I would have to sell my car and at least one kidney in the transaction, so I'll stick with what I have."

Ian Goodrick: I was using a D700 from the day it was released until I moved to a Z7II about 6 weeks ago. The D700 was and still will produce results that exceed the demands of a vast majority of clients. Never had an image rejected because the quality was not good enough, but you did have to know it’s limitations regarding High ISO noise and dynamic range. I also submit to picture libraries and have never had an image rejected due to lack of resolution, sharpness or any technical reason associated with the camera. Missed dust spots is another issue.

"Still finding the limits of the Nikon Z7II but could not be happier with what it produces. So far I really love the lightness compared to the D700."

Tam: "I do almost all my work with dozen-year-old DSLRs. The magazine editors just want the photos, they don’t care what camera was used to shoot them.

"Some older stuff is even getting a little cult-y. D700 prices have actually gone up since I bought mine a couple years ago."

Mike replies: When I polled readers five or six years ago, the D700 was most-named as the favorite digital camera new or old.

Dan: "This is absolutely true, and the proliferation of full-frame cameras will drive that reality even more. The psychological advantage of 'full frame' means that a very old ff camera like a D700 will sell for more than a technically more capable, newer, small sensor camera. We have reached a point where 'below average' is way better than we really need."

Jim Simmons: "My favourite Henry Ford story: He used to go to junkyards to inspect the parts of Model T's at the end of their lives. People thought he was inspecting parts that had failed, but he was inspecting parts that hadn't failed, because he figured he could make those parts cheaper. His ideal car would be one in which all the parts would reach end of life at the same time."

Moose: "I take your point. In fact, I have photos taken with an early '60s Canon 58mm ƒ/1.2 on the original Sony A7 that I think are first rate.

"The metaphor isn't bad, especially for photographers like you, whose photographic interests largely lie in the 35—135mm equivalency zone and whose preferred subjects are people, dogs, houses, yards, landscapes, and so on.

"It appears that there was little technological change in the automobile market over those years, at least at the bottom.

"On the other hand, for a photographer like me, there has been tremendous tech/capability change over the 13 years you reference. The D700 came out in 2008. The Oly E-M5 in 2013.

"That camera, and the other Micro 4/3 mirrorless ILCs that followed, completely transformed photography for me. I own too many camera bodies now—and not one is a DSLR. Yes, I also have FF bodies, but mirrorless.

"Then let's look at what they can do:

"Freesia is a plant that flowers sequentially along the side of a long stem—super 3D. This photo uses the depth compreession of 800mm equivalent to make the blossoms of much the same size, rather than diminishing with distance. Then, in-camera focus bracketing gives the DoF for them all to be in focus.

"Leaving aside the fact that Nikon didn't even have an 800mm lens until 2013, it weighs four times what the lens I used for this shot does, and is commensurately longer and heavier. I could not have casually carried it out into the yard and taken this perspective and framing. And, of course, focus bracketing wouldn't be an option.

"So, this shot couldn't be made with any 13 year old camera. I know, you aren't into flower photography, or model trains, or any of the others sorts where this stuff makes possible what wasn't possible before. But a lot of us are.

"Another example, from this week:

"Olympus 100–400mm lens, with 1.4x teleconverter = 1120mm equivalent. ProCaptureL on the E-M1 II body gave me a series of shots to choose from.

"Yes, there were roughly equivalent photos taken even back in film days, with huge, exotic gear, heavy tripods, endless preparation and endless patience. Now, I can do it along the way on a day trip, when I happen to see a Great White Egret, grab camera on the back seat, point it handheld, wait a few minutes until it does something photographically interesting and track it as it flies.

"These at only some of the tech changes in capabilities that have shown up in cameras and lenses in the last 13 years that vastly increase the range of photos that can be made.

"My first SLR was a Nikon FTn, but it, a used Model T or a D700 doesn't do it for me today.  \;~)>  "

Mike replies: You make good points. But you reminded me...remember this guy? He drives Model T's. I hear he has a number of them—three, maybe? I was gassing up the car two summers ago and he pulled in opposite me at the filling station in one of them.

Rob L.: "Having just purchased a used Z6 instead of a Z6II, and shooting F-mount glass instead of Z lenses, I might resemble this remark."

Three Pictures Under Discussion

So let's look at a few actual pictures. These all come from the same sharing site and several are made with the same lens, but there's no need to read anything into that.

A digression first
Before I start, though, I just wanted to comment on one thing in passing: in looking for a deliberately soft lens that doesn't go for the analytical/clinical/forensic look, I happened across one of those very cheap third-party manual-focus lenses (I sometimes jokingly call them "fourth-party" lenses—you know, sorta like "off-off-Broadway"—but nobody gets the joke). It only costs around a hundred bucks, and it looks like it might be quite nice for intentionally less-than-sharp portraits.

So then what does the first review say? "This lens is total crap! It's soft at every aperture!"

...Which seems unfair. He's criticizing the fact that the $100 lens he bought is not the same as a $500 lens. Whose fault is that though? His, if you ask me. If you insist on a lens that renders like a $477 Nikkor, then save your money for a bleepin' $477 Nikkor, ya broke-ass, no-cash-having jamoke. Leave the soft $99 lenses to those who are looking for soft lenses.

There, now I feel better.

Picture 1
Okay, now on to the pictures. When you open this first picture, just look at it sitting a normal distance from your screen, without being critical. Pretty standard, right? And looks okay. At a glance, you know what's going on: sharp, in-focus blooms in front, fading into progressively more blur in the distance. So now take a look.

But zoom in by clicking to enlarge it two times, and we find to our astonishment that virtually nothing in the picture is sharp, save a few leaves on the left-hand side of the frame. None of the blooms are sharp, not even the one at the lower right which seemed like the prime candidate at first glance.

But remember 3R prints, the once-ubiquitous standard so-called "drugstore prints" that were 3.5x5 inches in size? This would look fine at that size. Those 3R prints were optimized to mask slop and imprecision of many kinds. It was a system designed to routinely make silk purses out of sow's ears.

Picture 2
Or take this one. Now, in my humble opinion at least, this portrait (which gets the important things right, the expressions and what it implies of the relationships—and it's a nice enough composition, too) has a few more pressing technical problems, specifically a tonal scale that's way too short and what looks to me like a virtual green filter (you can see it in the gums, which should be a much lighter tone that doesn't draw attention, and that characteristic mottling of the skin tones. Light skin often has slight reddish mottling which is nearly invisible, or rather inoffensive, to our eyes, but it's highlighted in an unpleasant way when you make the reddishness darker with a green filter). But again, if you look at it uncritically at the original screen size, it looks fine. But, enlarged, the boy (middle figure) is clearly less sharp than the other two and the face on the left is less sharp than the face on the right.

When I was a custom printmaker (I always said "custom printer" but that was before a "printer" was a black plastic box made by Epson), I would often call clients to inform them that a certain negative would only go to a certain size. My clients were mostly photographers, and they would almost always assume that I was talking about technical parameters. They might reply something like "I've enlarged Tri-X negs from the Hassie to 16x20 before and they looked fine." Sometimes I was indeed talking about technical parameters, such as the size at which a slight touch of camera shake became too obvious. But I was usually using my judgement about the size at which that specific image would most effective. For example, if I were printing this picture, I might suggest a smaller size as the max, to avoid drawing attention to the disparity of sharpness between the three faces. Printing it overlarge would just draw the viewer's attention to the differences in sharpness, and those differences are absolutely immaterial to the picture.

I might even cheat a bit and actually soften the sharpness of the face on the right. Have to be careful with that, though, because that would never be something you want to call attention to.

Picture 3
It's actually not easy for non-specialists to detect very small amounts of blur, whether it's out-of-D-o-F blur or camera shake. I'm more sensitive to it than the average bear*, but I can't claim to be infallible. Sometimes you almost intuit its presence depending on how large you're seeing the image. On this third and final picture, there are three women dressed in blue T-shirts front and center. Look at the middle woman first when you open the link.

She looks fine, right? Comma, at that size. But, again, after you enlarge this and look critically, you can see more easily that she's actually not at the plane of best focus. The woman on the left, with the tiara and the portrait of the photographer in her purple sunglasses, is the most sharp. The smiling woman on the right is now clearly out of the depth of field, even though she's in the D-o-F at the smaller size.

I would probably have simply placed the focus on the middle of the three women and stopped down one more stop. That can sometimes be a bit risky, of course, and I'm betting you know why: because if you misjudge and get the woman closest to the lens—the woman with the tiara—a little too soft, you draw too much attention to that. (As a general rule, subjects closest to camera position need to be sharp, and it can be distracting if they aren't.) Hence the extra stop of increased D-o-F, as a safety margin...assuming I'd have the presence of mind to adjust in the heat of the moment, which I probably wouldn't. But those are the things that experience teaches you to judge.

(Oh, and that "portrait" of the photographer in the sunglasses? I'm betting it's the other photographer. It seems to me that the three ladies are looking at someone taking their picture, and it's not the guy who took this picture. Because of the angle of their heads, I'm betting we're seeing the other photographer in the sunglasses, the one who they're looking at. Just my interpretation.)

How to evaluate your own pictures
So how can you start to get a sense for the optimum sizes of your own pictures? There's actually a pretty easy way, although it takes a fair amount of experience. Assuming your eyesight works for the distances involved and your room is big enough, just fill your editing monitor with the image, and stand up and back away from the monitor! As you move farther and farther away, notice how the image subtly changes and how the level of visible detail gradually diminishes. If you study what you see and learn to "feel into" the image and how it works, you'll start to get a sense of how much each image can take of enlargement, and the way different degrees of revealed detail "work" for that particular picture.

As mentioned above, though, I'd encourage you not to look at mere technical parameters, but rather to look at how the specific image is functioning in terms of content and meaning. All of what we've been discussing is a judgement call, a balancing act, based on what in the picture you want to call attention to, and what would be a distraction that would detract from the picture if it is spotlighted too much. This is influenced by technical parameters but is not a technical issue at root. It depends on each specific picture, and how you want that picture to work.

Mike
(Thanks to Junpei, Jim, and Glen, the photographers of these three pictures)

Ed. note: The second link was missing when I posted this. Gah. Sincere apologies for the inconvenience.

*That's actually a Yogi Bear reference, and if you even recognize that name you're showing your age as badly as I am.  :-)  Five life points if you know who the cartoon bear was named for.

ADDENDUM: Here's some truly trivial trivia for ya. Do you know why Yogi Bear had a collar?

The answer, says Wikipedia, is because it allowed animators to redraw only his head when he was seen speaking, and not have to redraw his entire body. This was a cost-cutting measure by Hanna-Barbera, the studio that produced the cartoon. It reduced the number of frames needed for a cartoon from ~14,000 to ~2,000.

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Gavin Paterson: "It’s Yogi Berra, baseball player, but I do have an advantage, as I worked for the Australian subsidiary of Hanna Barbera in the '80s, when we still produced animated series for USA networks, such as the Flintstones, Scooby Doo, Yogi Bear, and the Jetsons—now that’s showing my age!"

V.I. Voltz: "Yogi Bear was named after Yogi 'You can observe a lot by just watching' Berra. My kids watch YouTube; we had to make do with cartoons, which, at first, were in black-and-white."

Rob de Loe: "You can do as many of these posts as you like...."

hugh crawford: "I got the bear reference, but you missed the opportunity to call out your Boo Boo. Did you know there is a Daws Butler stream on Spotify?"

Mike replies: I never knew his name before! Thanks for that.

w98abee: "The Yogi Bear reference was like deja vu all over again."

Guy Couture: "Thanks, Mike, for this clear explanation. I think it's the first time I see it explained this way. No doubt you're a good teacher."

Mike replies: Gracias Guy.

Jim Kofron: "Photography is 90% mental, the other half is camera gear...."

Steve Renwick: "The bear's namesake might have said, 'Most pictures are not as sharp as they look.'"

Lawrence Huggins: "Why would you bother to devote any of your time to writing about three such unexceptional photos?"

Mike replies: Because they are...

Cary Talbot: "Nice examples to illustrate your point, Mike. Reminds me of something I read in a photography book by Scott Kelby. He was stressing the importance of zooming in on your image when 'chimping' it on the back LCD to make sure you nailed the focus because 'everything looks tack sharp on a 2.5-inch screen.'"

Mike replies: Yes. And, in like wise, just as with the old 3R prints the small size of a smartphone-as-display masks a multitude of sins.

John Robison: "Ah yes, 3R prints. I well remember an ad by Keystone Camera for a cheap 126 camera, comparing results from it to a Hasselblad. Of course, in a magazine reproduction at a 3R print size, there didn’t appear much difference.

"When working at a camera store, more than once customers would bring in a strip of 35mm negatives with the sample 3R print and ask for a 8x10 enlargement. Grabbing a 10x magnifier would often reveal that the neg was just not up to that degree of enlargement. It was surprisingly hard to explain this to customers. Some would insist that we send in their order anyway. Once a year, at inventory time we always had a box of enlargements refused by customers that were written off and discarded.

Mike replies: They never want to take your word for it, do they?

Blur Never Sleeps

Internet, that big fellow with the scattered brain, seems to think that bokeh or out-of-D-o-F-blur is a fixed property of a lens. It's not.

For starters, the higher the resolution of your system (lens + sensor + processing treatment + presentation method), the more will be out of focus and the less will be sharp.

Let's say these lines represent distances from camera position, which is off to the right somewhere. You are precisely focused on the "10" in this graph, meaning that's the plane of best focus. The numbers stand for higher or lower resolution.

Camera position —>

|                |             |         |      |    |    |       |         |            |            |    

5               6            7        8      9  10  9      8         7           6           5

If you're using equipment and methods capable of a resolution we're calling "10," then you can distinguish between 10 and 9, and the 9 from the 8 and so on. Only a small area around the 10 looks sharpest, and the 9 and 8 look progressively less so.

Now just imagine you're using a system that's only capable of a maximum of "8" as its highest resolution. Then, the area of highest resolution in your picture now appears to have expanded—it goes all the way from the one 8 to the other 8, because you can't distinguish any difference in blurriness vs. clarity within that distance range. Furthermore, the 7 distance is now closer to the zone of best focus, so there is more more depth of field. Sounds strange, but the lower the system resolution, the more depth of field there is in the picture.

So the higher your system resolution, the less will be in focus for any given aperture.

This would predict that photographers should be using smaller apertures now. But they're not. Encouraged by advancements in optics that enable high center sharpness at wide apertures, plus the current fashion of photographing everything with the lens wide open no matter how it looks, photographers tend to use wider apertures now rather than smaller ones.

One oddity this has led to is that photographers who are trying to make an isolated central subject "pop" off the background are going too far and not getting all of the central object in focus. So you'll see things like a single flower against a blurry green background, but the flower petals closest to and farthest from camera position will be slightly blurry, which reduces that sense of "popping" off the background. Oh well: having as much as possible out of the D-o-F has evolved into a status marker, showing that the photographer can afford big sensors and fast lenses. Photographers even say this in words sometimes, protesting that they're not going to shoot something at ƒ/2.8 when they paid for an ƒ/1.2 lens.

Unwelcome comments
Additionally, system resolution is highly dependent on another factor that has nothing to do with the lens, aperture, focus distance, and the sensor and its resolution: namely, degree of enlargement, or how many pixels in the file you're using to look at the image. I'm sure we've all had the experience of looking at an image small on our screens and thinking it's fine, only to enlarge it to 100% and realize that more areas than we first thought are unsharp.

This is not merely an illusion. Throw away enough pixels, and you're effectively reducing the system resolution; and as you do, more and more distances from camera position will be in the zone of best focus. In the terms of our illustration above, let's say you reduce the system resolution to what we're calling "7." What that means is that everything in the picture with a resolution of 7 or above will appear to be at peak sharpness. It's not just the peak sharpness that you can see; it's the peak sharpness that exists in the small rendering.

There was a time when most digital cameras did not have enough pixels—I can recall when "a million pixels" was considered an impressive landmark of progress. Now, though, almost all digital cameras have an excess number of pixels for common uses. So you can demonstrate the above claim for yourself. Simply find a large file that has lots of subtle differences in focus when viewed at 100% (closeups of flowering plants with multiple blossoms work nicely for this) and reduce its size progressively. As it gets smaller, differences in degree of blur you know are there will be masked, and more and more will look "sharp." 

At some sharing sites you can now enlarge posted pictures so much that it's easier to see when the photographer has missed focus or used too large an aperture. Sometimes it makes me wonder if some photographers now even recognize what slight misfocus looks like! I saw a picture the other day—a full length portrait of a woman on a beach—where the entire figure was subtly out of focus. Looking at the sand she stood on, it was clear that the plane of focus had been placed about two feet beyond the woman, and, then, such a large aperture had been used that the woman's face and body were not within the depth-of-field.  At smaller sizes, though (such that the entire vertical frame could be seen at once on my 27" monitor), the picture looked fine. Only when it was enlarged was the incorrect focus revealed.

Many is the time I'm tempted to leave a comment on some poor stranger's picture saying, "you do realize this entire picture is out of focus, right?" But "restraint of tongue and pen" is a helpful maxim to live by. He or she doesn't want to encounter that among all the other comments saying "fantastic capture" and "great pic."

It's tempting to make blanket condemnations that begin with "photographers these days...," but it's easy to be critical. Let's be real: photographers have struggled with focus and D-o-F in every era. It's one of the basic issues of what we call technique. Maybe it's easier to see these days, but it's always been an issue we have to contend with, and one of the choices we have to try to control.

Mike

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Mani Sitaraman: "Re: 'Internet, that big fellow with the scattered brain, seems to think that bokeh or out-of-D-o-F-blur is a fixed property of a lens. It's not.' The internet has created a large circle of confusion about the topic. Information online about depth of field tends to be unfocused and so, details are imprecise."

John Hufnagel: "A digital discussion of the 'circles of confusion' concepts I learned back in the mid 1970s. I've tried to explain this on various internet forums and mostly failed; no one is as blind as one who refuses to see."

Mike replies: I actually refuse to discuss it most of the time. For some reason, out on the wilds of the internet, those who are armed with partial knowledge, part of which is untrue, act like attack dogs on this subject. The reason is probably that there are a number of coherent-seeming misconceptions out there which feel persuasive to people even though they are wrong.

Plus, once you hash through the subject and exhaust yourself bringing the crowd up to speed, that crowd dissipates and a new one forms, a new one as contentious and belligerent as the first crowd was at first. It's neverending toil, like the rock of Sisyphos.

Bill Tyler: "The idea of low resolution yielding large depth of field reaches its ultimate in a pinhole camera. Everything is equally out of focus. And it's an interesting look, for some subjects."

David W Scott (partial comment): "I have learned not to judge other’s photos by close inspection. That lesson came from attending an exhibition of large prints by Yousuf Karsh. Standing nose to nose with Ernest Hemingway (one of Karsh’s most celebrated portraits) you could immediately see that Hemingway’s eyes were out of focus—the actual plane of sharpness was somewhere forward in Hemingway’s beard and his fisherman’s sweater. It spoiled the picture for a moment...and then I backed away from the print and let myself enjoy it!"

Mike replies: I've actually used that very picture as a teaching tool on this subject. There are also several H.C.-B. shots where the main subject is subtly out of focus which made for good discussion.

Gaspar Heurtley: "On one hand, you’re absolutely right. Period. On the other, about the picture of the woman on the beach: maybe the photographer knew that the picture was slightly out of focus but posted it anyway because he/she knew that no one is ever going to see it at 100% (let alone print it). I suspect many pro photographers share their work exclusively online and have learned that they can widen the margin of error, based on where their target audience is going to see the pictures (mostly cell phone screens and poorly calibrated monitors)."

Mike replies: Yes, and if Henri Cartier-Bresson can do it, why can't she?

Random Snap: Days of Spring

This is the wrong light for this, so please ignore the photographic aspect. I just wanted to point out what the picture shows. There are a few days every Spring when the later-leafing trees are still bare, and the earlier-leafing trees are starting to bud and have that delicate light yellow-green color. So the opposite shore of the lake is dotted with pale green cotton balls against the gray-brown of the bare trees we see all Winter. This transition doesn't last long. You might notice it a few times and then bang it's gone.

It looks best in late-afternoon overcast light when everything's wet, with a storm-dark sky behind it; but, when the light was right I was on an errand and couldn't go back to the place with the view. This sort of gives you the idea, but isn't "the" shot.

The older I get, the more I love the turn of the seasons. And I've always loved it, so the love is deepening. I would never want to miss April here where I live.

By the way, I just bought a new lens. Can't wait for it to get here! More on that later.

Mike

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Wonders Awaiting

I descended the stairs this morning to find poop all over my office, which is part of caring for the older doggie. Poop happens. In my spiritual program we learn acceptance along with patience and tolerance. Crucial to happiness and contentment. I work on acceptance every day. And I need to, apparently.

The poop is all cleaned up now. All has been sanitized and sanity is restored. Welcome, bright new day.

On firing up ye wheezy computer I was presented with a come-on to pay $5 a month for something called Mozilla VPN. It has something to do with my browser as Mozilla is the entity that makes Firefox, which I've used for years...without having any idea whether that is a good idea. I can't remember why I started using Firefox. Just one of those things that I do. (After a while, trudging the road of happy destiny, lots of things silently and inevitably morph into just something one does.)

These days, you have to be careful. Some people are trying to offer you something useful and helpful; others are trying to work their grimy fingers into your wallet, not to mention sometimes your soul.

So I'm hoping some expert out there on computery things (internetty subset) will share and school: what be a VPN? Do I need such? Is Mozilla's the one I should get? Is it worth yet another poxy $60 leak per annum? (My bank account is now riddled with such tiny leaks. Drip drip.)

Don't ask
And by the way, this has been a pretty consistent issue in blogging over the years. When you have access to a crowd, especially a crowd of such exceptionally wise heads, it's always a temptation to ask about anything that is outside of one's own sphere. Legal questions, medical questions, questions put to pilots or investors or spelunkers or gardeners or what-have-you, or just things I'm curious about. Because when you open that magic window, you never know what is going to happen. For example, long ago I mentioned an obscure Australian photographer, and, months later, a rare volume of his work arrived in the mail from an Australian reader who was moved to seek it for himself and happened to find two copies instead of one. Or, once I mentioned A&E's show "Deadliest Catch" about crab fisherman in the Bering Sea, and what did we get but a comment from a reader who is a crab fisherman in the Bering Sea who loves TOP but can only catch up with his reading when his ship is within internet range of Dutch Harbor. Or the time we were talking about Irving Penn's platinum/palladium prints and we got a comment from Irving Penn's former platinum/palladium printmaking assistant.

Gold. You just never know what wonders await. Ask and ye shall receive.

Anyway I have a guideline for myself...try not to ask readers-plural for help with stuff that doesn't have to do with photography. That filters out about 80% of these impulses. Some off-topic "asks" sneak through however. I allow computer questions to wiggle their way in as being sorta-kinda related, although that's questionable.

Anyway, if anyone could help educate me in re VPNs off the top of their heads it would save me some time, time that could be better spent writing, which is the thing I do.

Mike

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Sunday Support Group: On Hard Work and Consistency

After I replied to John Y's Featured Comment in the "Worst NBA Player" post, I got curious and did a little calculating.

John, who is a programmer, noted that the conventional wisdom in his field is that top programmers are ten times more productive than average programmers. He adds that in many professions the top 20% of the people do 50% of the work.

I simply wondered, idly, if that's also true of blogging. Back when blogs were the hot thing, I witnessed many people trying to start one. Most started out with big plans and an admirable flurry of effort but couldn't stick it out.

Day in, day out
So here are the numbers.

Turns out 5,634 days have gone by since I started The Online Photographer, and there have been 9,425 posts. Rounded, that's an average of 1.67 posts per day, seven days a week.

Or, there have been 4,023 weekdays since then, so the average is 2.34 posts on every weekday...for fifteen and a half years.

But I do tend to post on the weekends, too.

Well, written blogs are getting to be rarer these days*. Times have changed. Content has migrated to videos. For me, it's easier, more efficient, and more pleasurable to get information from writing that from video. I've been trying to watch The Founder, the movie about Ray Kroc, the smarmy salesman who built McDonald's into what it is, and I'm having a hard time with it...it just seems to be moving so slowly and ponderously. (Plus, the hero is basically a villain in my view, which doesn't help my interest!) I rented the movie, so I have about nine hours left in which to watch the last 34 minutes. I might get there. I'd much rather read.

Sherry transformed
To bring the idea of worker productivity back around to photography, I'll tell a short story about a photography school classmate of mine named Sherry. Sherry was the daughter of a surgeon and had lived a sheltered life in a gated community. When we were in Second Year together, Sherry was very contemplative and placid—she didn't have much appetite for work; small tasks seemed like a lot to her. She worked at a leisurely pace and her output was low.

Then we were off for the Summer.

When we came back in the Fall for Third Year, Sherry had transformed. Suddenly she was all business. Compared to the way she was only a semester earlier, she was doing twice the work in half the time. Her productivity leaped upward.

I talked to her about the change and she laughed, saying she hadn't realized how lazily she used to work.

Well, it turned out that during the Summer she had worked as an assistant to a professional photographer. That individual—I don't recall if it was a man or a woman—had taught her how to work hard. Her boss wasn't having any of her stroll-in-the-park pace through life or her dreamy attitude. Boss wanted stuff done yesterday, and chop-chop. Sherry, who was plenty bright and conscientious, got the picture.

The biggest commonality I've noticed among professional photographers is energy. They are all people who have a lot of energy and a high tolerance for hard work. So whenever anyone used to talk about going pro (something few people seem to aspire to any more, or am I wrong about that?), those are the first questions I would ask. It goes for many successful art photographers too—I still find it unbelievable when I contemplate the sheer amount of work that someone like Elliott Erwitt or George Tice or Joel Meyerowitz would do on a regular basis. Or used to do, when they were in the prime of their careers—Elliott is 92 now, and George and Joel are both 83. (I tend to know the most about the generation of photographers I looked up to.)

Ctein said, correctly, that "nobody cares how hard you worked," and that's certainly true. (Warren Buffett, the billionaire investor and "Oracle of Omaha," put the same thought slightly differently: "you don't get extra points for the fact that something's very hard to do." Right, but the corollary is, you've got to work as hard as you need to. Laziness, sluggishness, and lack of follow-through have killed a lot of dreams.

Ansel Adams credited piano playing with teaching him discipline and a good work ethic. Early in his life he carried himself to the brink of a career as a professional concert pianist, and that required diligent practice and stern self-discipline. He felt those lessons carried over into his photography and allowed him to work at a high level of energy and productivity.

My own aptitude for photographic work seems to be on the low side generally, except for darkroom work, which I loved and had a high tolerance for (probably why I was a custom printer for a while). Of course darkrooms have mostly been relegated to the dustbin of history. As far as blogging and vlogging is concerned, I'm certainly aware of people who appear to work a lot harder than I can. But 1.67 posts a day seven days a week for 15.5 years seems like a good pace to me, and I'm happy.

Mike

*Change that comma and the space after it to a hyphen and the sentence is still true.

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Original contents copyright 2021 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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

Jim Richardson: "I'm one of those photographers you referred to who started a blog, worked furiously for a while, then quietly slipped off to lurk jealously. Be it known that your steadfast efforts, writing day in and day out, are one of the wonders of the known world. As one who thought they could do it, meant to do it, tried to do it, and then saw what it really took to actually do it, my hat is off to you and will remain off in perpetuity."

Mike replies:  :-)  Thanks for the props Jim.

MikeR: "We called those highly productive programmers 'super coders.' I had the very good fortune to hire one of them, a young woman whose code seemed to flow from her fingertips. She didn't think that was anything special. There was a correlation I noticed some many years ago, that the best programmers had a musical background; something about creativity within a disciplined structure. My son was an example, innately musically adept, and coding, in an assembly language, before he was a teen. Same with the super coder mentioned above. Me, I'm just a mule pulling a heavy wagon."

Grant: "So for 15.5 years, I have read 1.67 TOP posts per day. In addition I have clicked on most of the links, studied all the photos, read nearly every one of the featured comments and read a high percentage of the lesser comments. All this while never having to move from my chair in front of the computer. TOP has made me the sloth that I am today. Well done Mike."

Quote o' the Day: Hannu Hautala

[I know I said I don't post on Saturdays, but this was too good to resist. Big thanks to Ilkka for submitting the comment. —Ed.]

"Good bird photography consists 30% of equipment, 50% of knowing the subject, and 70% of luck. All 150% is needed; that has been shown in practice many times."

—Hannu Hautala, the most famous Finnish bird photographer

-

[posted by] Mike

Original contents copyright 2021 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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

Mike Shwarts: "Funny to find this. I had terrible luck trying to photograph a Mexican Eagle (Crested Caracara) today in East Texas."

The Worst Player in the NBA

Reader Luke S. sent me a link to an article I enjoyed a lot. Here it is: "The Worst NBA Player Is Way Better Than You." I liked what veteran NBA journeyman Brian Scalabrine told an amateur challenger: "I'm closer to LeBron than you are to me."

It was interesting to read the comments of the WNBA professional player Devereaux Peters, too. I've heard the same thing about golfers—that a lot of guys with a USGA handicap of one or two or three think they're just a few strokes away from pro caliber—meaning they could get there if they just buckled down and worked for it—when in fact there's a huge yawning gulf between them and the average tour pro.

Reminds me of a similar photography-related story. A friend of mine used to shoot features for Air Force Magazine because the art director was a friend of his and they'd travel to locations together. This was back in the '80s when point-and-shoots were a relatively new thing. So the art director got a point-and-shoot and started shooting alongside my friend. The trouble was, my friend got paid by the picture and the art director was so proud of himself and his own work that he would often pick his own pictures over my friend's, even though my friend knew his pictures were better. So suddenly my friend's paycheck was cut in half because his friend the art director was choosing to run his own pictures half the time.

A while later I asked my friend about the Air Force situation, and he grinned. "Everything's back to normal again," he said. Turns out an Air Force general who happened to be a photography enthusiast had called the Air Force Association and went on a rant about how the quality of the photography in the magazine had suddenly taken an inexplicable nosedive. The general wanted to know what the hell had happened to the photographer—he named my friend, whose name was still bylined on the stories he shot—who "used to be good." He thought the guy ought to be fired.

Well, a photographer got "fired" all right...the chastened amateur-photographer art director who had been so impressed with his own snaps abruptly stopped running his own shots.

Luke S. thought the article about Brian Scalabrine called to mind my post about playing tennis with Chrissie Evert, in which I described ever-so-briefly being of the opinion that I could hang with a pro myself.

Tomorrow's housework day at TOP Rural World Headquarters, so see you back here on Sunday. Thanks so much for reading TOP. I really appreciate it.

Mike

Books o' the Week

Nikon fan are ya? Nikon: A Celebration by British automotive writer and Nikon collector Brian Long covers the history of the company from its beginnings to the end of the film era. A U.S. parallel with more concentration on opinions about the equipment is B. Moose Peterson's Nikon System Handbook. The 6th Edition covered film equipment up to 2000. <—These are portals to Amazon.com thru TOP; you can also search for Nikon books from The Book Depository, which offers free shipping worldwide.

Original contents copyright 2021 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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

Enrique: "I manage a studio of Photoshop artists in Cupertino. Yes, exactly what you’re thinking. You would not believe the number of applicants who think they know Photoshop."

Steve C: "It's the same in cycling. I watched national-level, A-grade racers—the local elite—being blown out the back of a handful of professionals who were sitting up at the front, in the wind, having a casual chat. Unbelievable. And it goes against what you regularly hear about diminishing returns."

hugh crawford: "My Porsche mechanic raced at LeMans, and won the 24 hours of Daytona. My car always ran better when he drove it. On the other hand I never hit the top of a tree at 200 MPH so there is that."

Dave Fultz: "Ha! That was fun!

"It’s complicated, though, as things often are. One of the curiosities of our modern, hyper-available information world is that all of us, whether Internet-connected or not, have access to the best in the world that was undreamed-of a hundred years ago. Want to listen to Itzhak Perlman playing the piece your violin teacher just told you to practice? How many versions do you want? How about looking at the sketches of Degas when you’re thinking about drawing ballerinas? Surfing the Internet, did you discover that Don Knuth just tossed off an algorithm in a day that solves a problem you’ve been tussling with for months?

"This access is wonderful; there’s no doubt of that. But it has two surprising effects. The first is the intimidation of such world-class skill—how can I, a kid in Mongolia, play like that? I should stop (don’t). The second is the familiarity bred by screens in your living room. They’re your friends, right? After all, they’re in your living room! Heh! Michael! Nice dunk! I bet I could do that.... Well, yes! You could! That’s what keeps us all going! Every once in a while you do something extraordinary. But, extraordinary, professional athletes and artists and engineers and leaders and skilled persons in every domain do that level way more often than you. They are different and they are the products of a long process where they’ve been challenged for years on a basketball court, in a lab, competing for a gallery show, spending months taking pictures of birds in the arctic, or just simply sitting and thinking about things.

"It’s complicated."

Mike replies: Re your first "surprising effect," I like to tell the story of the guy my first cousin Liz married. His name is Dan. Growing up he was a very good baseball player, but he quit playing seriously in his teen years. The reason was that he had a same-age first cousin whose name was Don, and Don was always a little better than Dan was. No matter how hard Dan tried, he couldn't surpass his cousin, and that discouraged him. Dan reasoned, how can I expect to be a good baseball player out in the world when I'm not even the best baseball player in my own family?

The kicker is that the cousins' last name is Mattingly. Don Mattingly, for those who remember the '80s and '90s, had a stellar career as the first baseman for the New York Yankees and is now a Major League manager. Dan, who now owns a concrete business, says (I'm paraphrasing), "How was I supposed to know that I was measuring myself against the kid who would grow up to be Don Mattingly?"

Not sure if he thinks he should have kept trying, but maybe he should have.

Jim Natale: "No brief, fleeting, moment of glory here. Just the story of a conversation. I once worked with a fellow who had played minor league baseball. I asked him, 'Major League pitchers have batting averages like .080 and .090. What would a guy with average or good athletic ability hit versus big league pitching—.050 maybe?' His answer: 'Try zero zero zero.'"

Mike replies: I was never a baseball player, but I played tennis and I could smack a softball at the work picnic, and I have a good way of knowing that what that guy said is true. I went to a batting cage once. I felt pretty good hitting 30-MPH pitches. But with the machine ratcheted up to spitting 50 MPH pitches at me, never mind getting the bat to connect with the ball, I couldn't physically bring the bat around fast enough so that it was even aligned properly to hit the ball. I was always too late. My reflexes weren't fast enough. My few touches were behind the ball such that they angled off into the net in front of me. Then, I figured, just extrapolate from a 50-MPH pitch to a 90-MPH pitch like the Major League pitchers throw. It was very obvious I wouldn't stand a snowflake's chance in a fire!

Gave me new respect for hitters.

Albert Smith: "I remember when people use to make fun of John McCain for coming in near last in his class at the Naval Academy. The attrition rate to just get accepted, then the drop out rate for those that couldn't hack it during the four years were things that most couldn't imagine. Besides academics, every cadet had to participate in a sport on a team. Then there was the military training, with all the cosmetic ceremony that that entailed. Oh yeah, those academics are still expected to be done at a high level, no making excuses for the pomp and sports taking up too much time. I'd match last in class at a service academy to a lot of top ten percenters from most universities."

John Y: "There are studies of this kind of thing. I have been in the software industry for more than 20 years. We know that good programmers are 10x more productive than mediocre programmers. 'This degree of variation isn't unique to software. A study by Norm Augustine found that in a variety of professions—writing, football, invention, police work, and other occupations—the top 20 percent of the people produced about 50 percent of the output, whether the output is touchdowns, patents, solved cases, or software (Augustine 1979).'"

Mike replies: ...Or blogging? In the early days—it never happens any more of course—I even had people ask for information interviews to help them establish a successful blog. Back then, I saw a lot of people start a blog with high ambitions and a handful of magnificent, well-researched, well-written posts, only to find it too onerous. They would take a break, perhaps adding one or several more posts after a week or a month or two, only to have the "break" eventually became permanent. My readers are intelligent, educated, interesting people, the great majority of whom could write dozens of absolutely outstanding blog posts if they put their minds to it (the only possible exceptions are those for whom English is not their first language, and in those cases I'd bet money they could do it in their own native language). The question is, what kind of person would or could do it more or less every day for sixteen years?

Wait, don't answer that!!  :-)

Tom R. Halfhill: "I heard an old joke about people who yearn to be a country-western music star. Before driving all the way into Nashville, stop at a gas station just outside of town. If you can't play guitar better than the station attendant, go home!"

Bear.: "My moment was as a young man playing table tennis—I thought I was pretty good—at least I held my own—until I met a top 100 world ranked player. Although my muscular reflexes were quick enough, I could barely see the ball, let alone process the spin rate, and return it except by chance. I did not and could not win a point. Since it was obvious to me that I had reached my level of incompetence—all the training in the world could not improve my visual processing speed—that was my last game. After all, the sole purpose of a solo sport is to win, which was just not going to happen, at least at the level I wanted to play.

"To my own surprise, I was not really disappointed but instead was privately quite proud that had made it as far as I did.

"It's been nearly 40 years now and I still have my bats in their case, as well as the ball from that game as a memento, in the attic somewhere. But the real lesson for me was to pursue sports and hobbies for enjoyment and preferably those in respect of which no objective measurement of output determines a sole winner—I expect that’s why I enjoy photography so much—if I enjoy myself, that is sufficient, and it’s just a bonus if anyone else enjoys my work too."

AirDrop Problem?

No sooner do I venture a post about Apple's AirDrop than there's a spate of new articles on the web implying possible security breaches with the feature, such as this one from Mashable. I don't have the expertise to evaluate the competing claims, but I felt I should pass it along.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2021 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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

BjörnH: "Nothing to really worry about. What can happen is that when you open the share menu on your phone, it will emit an encrypted (or close enough) version of your email address and phone number over Bluetooth. This is so the receiver can determine if you are a known contact. Problem is that it is almost trivial to guess the original data. This boils down to that your phone will leak this information to anyone close by, if the listener is inclined to reverse the 'encryption.'"

Two Brief Comments About Landscape and Bird Photographers

I just have two little things to say:

First, bird photography: I tried to do a little bird photography, just casually, with the Fuji 100–400mm I recently sold and the Fuji 55–200mm that replaced it. My word / good gracious / dear me that is hard! Since then I've looked at a lot of bird photographs with new eyes, and simply marveled at the degree of skill, patience and knowledge it must have taken to get them. Really impressive. I'm much more impressed with good bird photography now that I've tried my hand at a bit of the sloppy amateur kind. It's not trivial.

And I liked it before, too. I honestly have had in mind since the '90s that I would love to edit a book called "Bird Photographs as Art." Every now and then I come across one that is simply stunning.

Second, landscape photography: Yesterday I returned home to be presented, at the bottom of the hill, with a remarkable scene. The weather for two days had been truly odd: it was as if spring and winter were fighting. Spring would melt the snow off the ground and the sun would shine, but then the snow would swirl. The sky grayed and then brightened, darkened and lightened. Bright spring-green grass and delicate flowers, then a cold wind blowing. The lake scene was really wonderful—a snow squall, swirling snow, the orb of the sun like a disk behind the clouds, gorgeous windblown water like hammered silver, unearthly light. I raced the rest of the way home to get my camera and sped back...only to laugh at myself. Who in the world am I kidding? You can't go home to get your camera and expect to find things unchanged when you get back. Not up here. Heck, I can't see something in the yard and run inside to get the camera and have it look the same when I get back. I half think things might change too much between the time I see something and can get the camera lifted to my eye when it's around my neck.

Same result: it gives me a lot of appreciation for real landscape photographers. I'm not sure landscape photography is for me; there's the problem above, that things change too darn fast, and then the other problem, which is that there's always stuff in the way. I saw a different remarkable scene from my upstairs window a few evenings ago—an amazing confluence of the muted sun from which appeared to stream a dissipating jet contrail.... It would have made a marvelous photograph, except for the unavoidable telephone and power lines that were running straight across the view and the impingement of various treetops further spoiling things. I run into that a lot: there just seem to be so few places from which you can get a clear view. There's just enough to tantalize.

Up here anyway, landscapes can change constantly. The light, the clouds, the wind and snow and leaves....

Rather than landscape, it might be easier to photograph things like sports and small children racing around. They don't change so much!

Mike

Books o' the Week

Nikon fan are ya? Nikon: A Celebration by British automotive writer and Nikon collector Brian Long covers the history of the company from its beginnings to the end of the film era. A U.S. parallel with more concentration on opinions about the equipment is B. Moose Peterson's Nikon System Handbook. The 6th Edition covered film equipment up to 2000. <—These are portals to Amazon.com thru TOP; you can also search for Nikon books from The Book Depository, which offers free shipping worldwide.

Original contents copyright 2021 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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

Bill Tyler: "In addition to presenting all the normal photographic problems, birds seem to have a preferred minimum distance from humans, and it's usually just a little farther than your longest lens will comfortably reach."

Daniel (partial comment): "On having a camera with you. Years ago Jay Maisel was to give a talk to a photo group. Story is he walked on stage and saw the group, asked 'who has their camera with them?' and no one did."

[Ed. note: The full text of all partial comments can be found in the full Comments section, accessible with the link in the post footer.]

Craig Yuill (partial comment): " I am glad that you acknowledged how challenging bird photography can be. That is partly why I like it. I get a tremendous sense of satisfaction when I get a good bird photo, which does not happen nearly as often as I would like."

Jeff: "I have no desire to specialize in bird photography. But I have wondered how others go about the process. This fellow, Duade Paton, has a YouTube channel with a lot of content, including this video, which covers some of his basic techniques."

The Least Attractive Lens (Or, the Happy Dude)

One of the fun things about this hobby is having an interest in equipment we might get.  And when I come across things in which I have utterly no interest, I always tell myself, well, there's someone out there who's into this.

I'm carefully watching the prices of the Olympus E-M1 Mark II*, since I still have a complete complement of Micro 4/3 lenses.

But one new lens crossed my virtual desktop recently in which my interest is about as close to zero as it gets (EMMV**). It's the new-but-not-exactly Canon RF 600mm ƒ/4L IS. Canon attached a permanent RF adapter to the end of the existing 600mm ƒ/4L, and will take your thirteen thousand dollars in exchange for the result, thank you very much. This goes well beyond triggering my price-sensitivity sensors—it puts them into overload till the alarm lights flash madly and there's smoke coming out. Even though I know in my head everybody's price sensitivity is different. (There are people on the lake here with two boats—for their second house—who are still looking around for things to spend their money on.)

There are verified buyers on B&H for the SLR lens, so my truism holds true—some people are into this. But is it really that important to use full-frame that you'd cart around a lens that's a foot and a half long without the hood and weighs seven pounds? But then, one of the verified buyers called this "unbelievably light."

A different horse for that course
For less than $3,200, you could buy an Olympus E-M1 Mark III and Panasonic-Leica 100–400mm ƒ/4–6.3. That whole shebang, body and lens, new, would cost very close to $10,000 less ($3,200 vs. $13,000), weigh less than half as much (3.45 lbs. for the camera and lens vs. 6.8 lbs. for the Canon lens alone), and—again, camera body included—be less than half as long (8.75 inches, approximately, vs. 18.6" for the Canon lens alone). And I don't know, but I'll bet the Micro 4/3 rig would be considerably more hand-holdable. Is the "quality difference" of FF really going to be worth all that?

It even reaches further. I'd carry the Olympus in preference to the 600mm even if the rest of my gear was Canon RF.

Yet, different strokes for different folks. And I don't even shoot supertele, so I'm not just on the other side of the street, I'm on a different street altogether. I'm not the guy to say. But I have a little interest in the new Leica 35mm APO-Summicron-M, even though it's blatantly priced for multimillionaires. (A tiny bit of interest. A detached and remote arm's-length curiosity.) The Canon...not so much. It probably takes the palm as the lens on the market now that I could not be less interested in—sort of a perfect storm of turn-offs.

Big tent
Of course, I could be missing out. I could be as happy as this guy:

Customer Photo courtesy B&H Photo

...And that's one happy dude. (The only way he could be happier would be if that garish white lens were camouflaged.) Gearheadism—it's a big tent!

Mike

*You know what's gone up? The price of used Panasonic GX8's. And they're getting scarce on the used market, too. I've been watching.

**Everybody's mileage may vary.

Books o' the Week

Nikon fan are ya? Nikon: A Celebration by British automotive writer and Nikon collector Brian Long covers the history of the company from its beginnings to the end of the film era. A U.S. parallel with more concentration on opinions about the equipment is B. Moose Peterson's Nikon System Handbook. The 6th Edition covered film equipment up to 2000. <—These are portals to Amazon.com thru TOP; you can also search for Nikon books from The Book Depository, which offers free shipping worldwide.

Original contents copyright 2021 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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

Pedro J. Aphalo: "I have been using for several months an Olympus E-M1 II and M.Zuiko 300mm ƒ/4. At the moment they cost US$999 and US$2,899 at B&H, so for less than US$4,000 this is a closer match to the Canon. It can be easily handheld, even with the MC-14 teleconverter and with a bit more care, also with the MC-20 teleconverter. I love that the minimum focusing distance of this lens is 1.4 m."

Bobby Salmon: "Well he's loaded for bear! (Or for bird anyway.)"

Speed: "It would be interesting to know the ratio of owners to renters for this lens. Or how many LensRentals keeps in stock vs. something like a 70–200mm."

John: "It’s the ƒ/4 that’s key. There are other reasons, but only in FF and with ƒ/4 can you shoot in low light conditions and get great results if you shoot what those lenses are made for. You may be on a different street, but that lens makes perfect sense for people who are not in your street."

Rusty: "I jumped at the $700 discount on the Oly Mk II a month ago and am a happy camper; maybe not as happy as the guy in the photo, but happy.  :-)  "

Ken Bennett: "Most of the 600mm ƒ/4 users are going to be sports pros, who need the ƒ/4 aperture both for faster shutter speeds and to blur out the fans in the background. (Well, back when we allowed fans in the stadiums.) Me, if I were a Canon-shooting sports pro, I'd get the 400mm ƒ/2.8 and the 1.4X converter. Similar cost and weight, but more versatile for many situations."

Geoff Wittig: "There is a legitimate place for these giant lenses if you're a bird photography fanatic. You really can't have too many mm's of focal length when shooting small birds. I have Canon's 600mm ƒ/4 II, which is a bit longer and heavier than the newer iteration but fractionally sharper. Yes, it's huge and ungainly. Yes, it needs a solid tripod with a gimbal mount. But the results are great. And it doubles as weightlifting exercise."

David Dyer-Bennet: "A friend locally has the Nikon 400mm ƒ/2.8, similar price and weight to that Canon. Uses it on a Nikon D850 these days mostly. Animals in the wild, and some in zoos too. Gorillas in the wild, even; do you know how dark it is where gorillas mostly hang out? Infrared photos of sea turtles laying their eggs (for a turtle charity in Costa Rica or somewhere; the IR prevents the light from confusing the turtles while making photos possible). The FF body supports high ISOs better than the Micro 4/3. If you need the fast aperture then you probably need FF backing it as well. The super-teles are complete game-changers if you do the things they're really for, mostly sports and wildlife."

AirDrop

I really like AirDrop in iOS. It's an efficient, fast, secure method of transferring a photo from the iPhone to the Mac. With the phone near the computer, select the picture, tap the share icon, designate the destination from the choices list, and send. It shows up immediately in the Downloads folder. Do all computers and phones do that?

Since I use the iPhone for blog illustrations (which are only 800 pixels wide) and things like eBay sale illustrations, it's convenient and easy.

Can people do this with a "real" camera? Are there any cameras that allow you to use AirDrop or something like it? I'm really not an expert about anything computer-related. Quite the opposite really. You do know I write these posts in quill pen and India ink first, right? As you might expect I have strong opinions about what kind of goose feathers make the best pens.

I can't believe I'm complaining, given all I used to do to develop film. But it's not as easy to transfer a file from the SD card, especially when I just want one in a hurry. I know Fuji has an app called PC Autosave, but I don't think it's compatible with Big Sur.

I'm mainly just curious here. It's not a necessity for me personally.

Anyway, here is the "new technique" version of the phone picture I posted this morning, that is, X-H1, square, with the wide lens:

Not sure it looks any better than the picture I posted, writ small like this.

I wonder what focal length the 14mm lens on the Fuji X-H1 would equate to on a 56mm square piece of film in a Rollei or a Hassie? I'll have to figure that out in the morning.

Mike 

Books o' the Week

Nikon fan are ya? Nikon: A Celebration by British automotive writer and Nikon collector Brian Long covers the history of the company from its beginnings to the end of the film era. A U.S. parallel with more concentration on opinions about the equipment is B. Moose Peterson's Nikon System Handbook. The 6th Edition covered film equipment up to 2000. <—These are portals to Amazon.com thru TOP; you can also search for Nikon books from The Book Depository, which offers free shipping worldwide.

Original contents copyright 2021 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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

Curt Gerston: "AirDrop is outrageously good. I teach photography and video in a middle school iMac lab, and AirDrop allows my students to do a lot of work on their phones outside of class, and then easily drop their stuff onto the Macs and start using Photoshop and/or iMovie or whatever. From a classroom management point of view, Airdrop is heavenly."

Stéphane Bosman: "Slightly less than 49mm, so that’s like using a 50mm on a Hasselblad, which is a classic wide angle focal length in medium format. Is this a coincidence or did someone at Fuji plan this?"

Soeren Engelbrecht: "The equation is relatively simple: Your Fuji sensor is 15.6mm tall, compared to 56mm for a 6x6 negative. Comparing focal length relative to negative size, the equivalent focal length for your 14mm lens is then 14/15.6*56 = 50mm. The other day, I did a similar calculation for the Sigma 65mm lens on 'squared' full-frame: 65/24*56= 152mm—or the classic portrait focal length.

"Hope this helps—and no, I won't start talking equivalent apertures.  :-)  "

Mike replies: Thanks for doing that for me guys, and that's interesting. I had a 50mm once for the Mamiya 6, and I liked it but for the slow maximum aperture of ƒ/4, which, along with the ISO of 250 at which I shot Tri-X 400, just created too many limitations for general shooting.

Dogman: "Re: 'Not sure it looks any better than the picture I posted, writ small like this.' Much better, for me. A cleaner image and the square format works very well."

Speed: "Canon, Sony, Hasselblad et al. make cameras. Apple makes a photographic ecosystem. Canon, Sony, Hasselblad et al. take better pictures (for some value of 'better') but Apple makes its pictures more usable."

Dan Khong: "AirDrop is good. I did not know until you shared. I learned how to use it in a few minutes. Many thanks."

Daniel Speyer: "I had commented on the two pictures and then erased it as this kind of critique is your forté, but then looking at them the later one is sooo much better IMO, I will comment. The two bushes were fighting for attention. Also the tops of the trees are now there. So now it is lovely (again IMO)."

Thom Hogan: "Apple's unique superpower is that it controls everything in its ecosystem. Thus, they are about the only ones that can do this sort of thing (apparently you haven't discovered Handoff yet  ;~) . The problem from the camera standpoint is that they all can do something, but not at the level that Apple can. For instance, Nikon's SnapBridge can push files over to the phone/tablet easily, but not to your Mac at the same time or the same way. You could, I suppose, SnapBridge to the phone and AirDrop to the Mac, but that requires a manual step in between (has anyone figured out how to do that with Shortcuts yet?). Canon tries to get around this by having you push images to their cloud and then having the cloud send them where you want them, but it's a little kludgey and subject to problems when someone changes their API."

Open Mike: What's in a Name?

["Open Mike" is the anything-goes Opinion page of TOP, in which Yr. Hmbl. Ed. blows steam off the top of his head. It normally appears on Wednesdays.]

-

It's snowing and below freezing here right now. Making me anxious about the health of the delicate blooming plants hereabouts. This is the view through my kitchen window about 80 seconds ago, snapped with the phone and AirDrop'd on to the computer.

Monkeys
I have a sensitivity to a thing I call "American Irony." The examples just pelt me like there's a monkey nearby enthusiastically flinging his dung about, occasionally smiting me on the cheek with a fat wet lump. Example: terrorists attacked the World Trade Center. In response, Bush the Lesser declares "the" War on Terror. To me, this immediately telegraphed that his government intended to use the event as a pretext to do whatever it wanted to. (The salient result of the "War on Terror" was the establishment of a dozen permanent U.S. military bases on Iraqi soil, to enforce the flow of Iraqi oil to the U.S. Everything else about it was gaslight. As ably explained by one of the original founders of movement conservatism who later went renegade, Kevin Phillips.) I went around at the time pointing out that it's meaningless in any normal sense to "declare war" on a condition, like "the war on hunger." At best it merely works at the level of metaphor. "Terror" is a state of mind, a state of being, not an enemy that can be isolated and destroyed. It's not even an enemy that can have intent or agency in any normal sense. As any sensitive child can tell you, you can be terrorized by your dreams.

And then what happened shortly thereafter? As if were, yea verily, a sign from God, batting us upside the chops, a pair of deranged psychopath snipers started randomly murdering ordinary citizens going about their daily business in the environs of Washington, D.C....doing what to the community? Oh, terrorizing it. It was as if the Universe were forcefully making the same point, that terror can come from any quarter at any time.

The really odd thing, well, to me anyway, was that no one seemed to see any connection. Maybe I just think about words too much.

His name is what?
Anyway, it kills me that sometimes American irony can come in the form of a name. It's not always just a joke, as when talk show host Jimmy Kimmel featured a prison guard named Robyn Banks and a urologist who had performed hundreds of vasectomies whose name is Dr. Dick Chopp. For instance, the supposed "smartest woman in the world," so-called because she scored higher on standardized IQ tests than anyone else, is named Marilyn Mach vos Savant. A savant, of course, is a learned person or one in possession of deep, detailed knowledge.

The transgressive non-politician who trumped politics-as-usual and upended all the normal and accepted standards is named...? Well, y'know. Changed when his paternal grandfather Americanized his name from Friedrich Drumpf to Fred Trump. Seriously, Universe? The verb "to trump," of course, means "to override," as when a card of a different suit overrides the suit that was led.

American irony kills me.

And now.... Well, you know what chauvinism is. Wikipedia: "Chauvinism is the belief in the superiority or dominance of one's own group or people, who are seen as strong, virtuous and supreme, while others are considered weak, unworthy or inferior." The word's an eponym, meaning a word that comes from a name. It derives from "Nicolas Chauvin," a fictional character lampooned for excessive patriotism and his devotion to Napoleon in the 1831 play La Cocarde tricolore ("the tri-color cockade") by two brothers named Cogniard.

And now the everlasting symbol of white America with its knee on the neck of black America is a guy whose actual name is Chauvin.

Names are just the tip of the iceberg. Don't start looking around for this kind of irony, is my advice. It gets pretty hard to escape. I should've kept a list. It knows no bounds, and less subtlety. And as with the metaphorical monkey you-know-what, the best advice is, learn to dodge.

Mike 

Books o' the Week

Nikon fan are ya? Nikon: A Celebration by British automotive writer and Nikon collector Brian Long covers the history of the company from its beginnings to the end of the film era. A U.S. parallel with more concentration on opinions about the equipment is B. Moose Peterson's Nikon System Handbook. The 6th Edition covered film equipment up to 2000. <—These are portals to Amazon.com thru TOP; you can also search for Nikon books from The Book Depository, which offers free shipping worldwide.

Original contents copyright 2021 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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

Keith: "I once pulled into a parking lot for several businesses that were housed in a strip mall. The dentist office was next door to the meat market. So the sign on the building literally read 'Mr Butcher Dentistry.'"

Jacob: "Here's a nice one: my wife's childhood doctor was Dr. Morgenbesser. In English: Dr. Tomorrow Better."

Upcoming! (Update)

Upcoming: Apple iMac Pro 32" with M2 chip, with an adequate number of ports and an Apple logo on the business side. Available in silver and space gray only.

(Photographers who do heavy Photoshop lifting might be better off waiting for that one.)

I've always had this ability to see the future. It's a curse as well as a blessing.... 

Mike 

Books o' the Week

Nikon fan are ya? Nikon: A Celebration by British automotive writer and Nikon collector Brian Long covers the history of the company from its beginnings to the end of the film era. A U.S. parallel with more concentration on opinions about the equipment is B. Moose Peterson's Nikon System Handbook. The 6th Edition covered film equipment up to 2000. <—These are portals to Amazon.com thru TOP; you can also search for Nikon books from The Book Depository, which offers free shipping worldwide.

Original contents copyright 2021 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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

MarkB: "Har har. Today's iMac announcement is, for serious digital photographers, the equivalent of 'nothing to see here.' I'm rather relieved, as they retained the 27" Intel models for a little longer...whew!"

Margaret: "Completely underwhelmed by new M1 iMac. 24", no SD slot, only 'up to' 16Gb memory and 2TB storage. I'm currently on 27", SD slot, 32GB and 3TB, so why on Earth would I downgrade to this? And with everything one one chip, no possibility of upgrading anything. But wait!! It comes in 'seven vibrant new colours'!! Oh well. Obviously I'll be buying one then (massive eye roll). Another triumph of style over substance."

Mike replies: Exactly. That why I think this is the rollout of just the "lower tier," the computer for people to put in their family rooms so they can keep a watchful eye on the kids at school and doing homework, the computer for people who don't use the computer much, and for people who care about things like color-matching computer and peripherals (the new 24" iMac comes with color-matching mouses, did you see?) in Easterish pastels.  Not the things that are enticing for the likes of us.

The colors simply radiate unseriousness. Surely Apple means to telegraph that this is not the computer for power users.

I'm probably three years away from a new computer, unfortunately (I'm out of sync with Apple), and I hope my new computer will have 32GB RAM and a 4TB hard drive and enough ports that it doesn't automatically require a dock that automatically clutters up the desktop—the real top of my desk, I mean. I absolutely would have to use a dock/cardreader with this just-introduced model. Just as I do with my Mini.

Although I have to say, 24" strikes me as perfect. I currently have a 21.5" iMac and a 27" NEC monitor on my Mini, and while the latter is fine there's something nice about my little iMac. But I don't do photo editing on it, and for that it's just a bit small. About the only thing I don't need is a screen larger than my NEC...it will just be harder to wrangle and ship, and I personally don't need the screen real estate. And who really does? If you want room for your image and your palettes, don't you just get two screens? I know people who use three screens.

It mystifies me that Apple insists on sleek, uncluttered design, as if your office is a showplace, and then at the same time limits the number of ports it affords you and removes features like the SD card slot and DVD drive. Doesn't Apple understand that having more ports and built-in features would mean less clutter?

But then, I value practicality over style. And I notice that my whole (real) desktop has migrated slowly away from Apple for everything save the computer itself—my display, keyboard(s), mouse, speakers, dock/cardreader, and outboard drives are all non-Apple items now.

robert quiet photographer: "Am I the only Apple user who would like a desktop in between the Mac Mini and the Mac Pro? I'm still on my Mac Pro (2013) trash bin...with too many cables around it...."

Mike replies: I wrote a rant to that effect once. It doesn't appear to have changed Apple's mind.... :-)

Apple News

Is this OT or not? I guess it depends on you.

It's possible the Apple M1 iMacs could be announced tomorrow. The event is at 10 a.m. U.S. Pacific Time, 1 p.m. here in the East.

The iMac has been Apple's mainstream desktop computer product since it stopped seeing its major prestige market as being graphic designers and video and photo editors. Current iMacs range from a little over $1k to a little over $5k, which is a broad segment. If we do get new iMacs, it'll be interesting to see where in that range it targets Apple Silicon. The first iMac cost $1,299 in 1998, which would be $2,111 now.

Watchers expect a redesign, too. Other options: the iMac could be redesigned for the first time in years but retain Intel chips; or they could get Apple Silicon but no redesign.

One of the touted benefits of the M1 chip is battery life, which obviously won't be relevant in an iMac. So the focus will have to shift to other performance parameters. What those are going to be, and how much they might matter, is the question.

Could be an interesting day; or not.

I've been using all-in-one Macs, including the first Macintosh and the first iMac, since 1984. I'll be watching. Or, more accurately, waiting for the relevant news to filter through from someone who can 'splain it to me. But maybe actually watching too. 

Meanwhile, provoked by a bug in Word for Mac, a friend switched from Apple to PC and was impressed by the feature-richness of the mid-level PC he bought.

Spring
I've got my windows open and I'm starting Spring Cleaning out here on the porch where I work. (One of my ambitions for this year is to move my office to the back of the house.) I gave the lawn its first haircut yesterday, strategically shoehorning the task in between rain showers. The daffodils are up and the robins are mating—two robin couples were actually making such a racket in a bush this morning that Butters charged the bush barking! Rude interruption, that.

Go Spring.

Mike 

Books o' the Week

Nikon fan are ya? Nikon: A Celebration by British automotive writer and Nikon collector Brian Long covers the history of the company from its beginnings to the end of the film era. A U.S. parallel with more concentration on opinions about the equipment is B. Moose Peterson's Nikon System Handbook. The 6th Edition covered film equipment up to 2000. <—These are portals to Amazon.com thru TOP; you can also search for Nikon books from The Book Depository, which offers free shipping worldwide.

Original contents copyright 2021 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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

Joseph Vavak: "I bought a MacBook Air with the M1 earlier this year and have been very impressed with just how quick and responsive it is to use. I expected some slowness and hiccups with applications that hadn't been optimized for the M1, but it's hardly noticeable, if at all. The Air feels faster in day-to-day usage than the Lenovo Ryzen 5 powered-desktop I bought at the start of the pandemic for work purposes and upgraded to 16GB of RAM and a 1TB NVME drive. I expected the battery life and the lack of heat generated, but I am honestly surprised how well it works for a 1st generation product that doesn't even have a fan."

Richard T: "Re whether this is OT, computing is another main interest of mine so from my side, the more you write/opine/reflect on Apple or related issues the better.  :-)  "

John Camp: "I'm Mike's friend who is experimenting with a PC. (Lenovo A940 with the i9 processor.) In addition to the new Lenovo, my wife and I between us have five active Apple machines, three 27-inch iMacs and two laptops for travel. (We're professional writers. [Here's John's latest —Ed.]) Our problem is, Microsoft Word is the publishing standard, and Word for Mac and MS Word have become increasingly incompatible—not in any large way, but in small ways that drive you absolutely crazy. For example, if you create in Word for Mac (or worse, in the supposedly compatible Pages) and the manuscript is opened in MS Word (the standard), one bug may separate a possessive apostrophe from its intended place, and attach it to the following word. (As in: The Smiths 'car.) Try finding all of those in a 110,000-word manuscript. There are also bugs that mess with spacing. I finally couldn't deal with it anymore, and I'm trying a PC with MS Word. (I'm a Word subscriber for both machines.)

"I don't know why the bugs appeared, but I suspect that Microsoft isn't interested in writing new Word software every time Apple updates its OS, which is now annually. And honestly, some of the incompatibilities are really hard to see until they get you by the throat.

"What I'm finding so far: the Lenovo, also an all-in-one, has far surpassed the iMac in function, although it is clunkier. The screen is the same size (27") and UHD, but it is a touch screen. I won't get into all the specs, they're easily researched on the 'net, but I'll mention a few things: the underside of the screen has a row of dimmable LED lights (that may also be turned off) that shine down on a manuscript that you may be editing. To the right side of the screen is a small platform that is a wireless iPhone charger. The machine comes with an electronic 'pencil' for writing on the touch screen which is great for apps like Photoshop. The 940 is faster than the iMac and has more RAM and storage. It has excellent Dolby Atmos speakers built into the base. It cost $2,449.99.

"The downside is Windows 10, which is not as good as the Mac OS (I'm using Big Sur.) Still too complicated, but much better than it used to be. After a few days use, I'm getting into it, and though I'm getting into it, it's not as slick as the Mac. Though, really, it is fairly slick.

"Going forward, I suspect the Lenovo will become my main machine, and my Apples, as they become increasingly obsolete, will go away. But I'm not sure of that. I've been using Apples since the '90s. I do think that Apple's tendency toward fashion and sleekness at the price of less function will eventually bite it in the ass."

Thomas Mc Cann: "A post on TOP some years back coupled with a recommendation from Ctein led me to buy the latest Mac with the latest screen and an Epson SureColor P600. All touted as the ne plus ultra. A longtime PC user, I struggled with the Mac. Eventually I gave up in frustration and switched back to a Dell and Windows 10. I was probably too steeped in the Windows environment. Only good thing was I got a good price for the Mac when I sold it."

Sunday Support Group: Impulse, or Compulsion?

Every time I sell stuff on eBay I end up...buying stuff. I bought another film camera a few days ago.

Geez. This marks what, five months since I swore up and down to myself that I would never, ever, under any circumstances ever buy another film camera again? Yeah, about that long.

It was a pure impulse purchase. I wasn't even looking at film cameras at the time.

I now own twelve, which might be a lifetime high number (I don't actually keep track), which I think you'll agree is very appropriate in light of the impressive amount of film I shoot every year, namely, nada, also expressible as "zilch." So I need all these cameras, obviously.

I had a girlfriend once who had such a thing for shoes that she seemed to be incapable of walking past a women's shoestore without being drawn inside by an invisible tractor beam. Shoes were like a compulsion with her. Well, can't imagine that.

But wow, look...I scored a Nikon N8008 for a mere $99 and it turned out to be new. In the box, with the protective film on the bottom and the JCII sticker fresh and sparkling. It even had the little plastic insert over the film gate. Not a mark of any kind on the thing. Looks untouched.

Of course, the seller might possibly have been being just a wee bit disingenuous even so—because the battery compartment was hard to open and the batteries, which the camera had obviously been stored with for a long time, had oxidized and bled some of that white crusty stuff (what is that, anyway?) on the insert and into the battery compartment.

Or possibly there was no intent to deceive; maybe the seller just didn't realize. It's possible. Things happen. People do pass away, loved ones put their belongings up on eBay without really knowing how or if they work...things like that. Collections are broken up and sold. Things are parceled off to intermediaries for selling. Could have been quite innocent. Then again, maybe that's why a pristine LN Nikon was for sale at a measly ninety-nine bucks. And how come he described it as "in perfect working condition. All of the shutter speeds, program and manual modes, light meter, motor drive and all other functions are working as they should"? Really? How would he know that, with ancient dead-as-a-doornail batteries frozen in the battery well? Methinks the seller doth claim too much.

Caveat emptor all the way on Ye Olde Fleabay.

Anyway, an hour's soak of the battery holder in a weak solution of vinegar and a little careful swabbing of the battery compartment with a dry Q-tip, some fresh batteries, and all was forgiven.

For a camera that's 30 to 33 years old, this is a time capsule.

Leading edge but not bleeding edge
Takes me back (nostalgia being no doubt the main attraction here). In 1988–91, the original 8008's production run, Nikon pitched it as an amalgamated successor to both the FE2 and the FA. The FA was the first camera to feature what came to be called Matrix metering, although it was called "Automatic Multi-Pattern" (AMP) metering in the FA. That was the beginning of the end for photographers understanding how metering works. It boasted the "world's fastest autofocus" at the time. It's also very easy to focus with manual-focus AIS lenses, what with its AF-confirmation dot in the viewfinder.  It has auto-load and auto-wind and -rewind, ultramodern features in the '80s. Woo-hoo. It also had lots of of plastic, which alarmed everyone.

Oh, and I need to eat a little crow, too: remember the other day when I was expressing dismay that the new Pentax K-3 III will cost two thousand dollars? Well, the N8008 cost $857 when it was introduced in 1988, and that is, ahem, $1,934.37 in 2021 dollars. Hmm. Maybe the problem here is that my sense of the value of money is stuck in 1988?

I had two 8008's back then (for some reason no one then ever used the "N" when referring to it). I joined a professional studio with the condition that I would switch to Nikon, because the other three photographers all used Nikon and everyone pooled their equipment. Needed a particular lens for a job? Somebody had one. My Contax stuff wouldn't have been useful in the mix.

I wanted to get an F4s, and had one on order, but there was a several-month delay before it would be available, so I bought an 8008 to use in the meantime. When my F4s arrived, I de-accessioned the 8008, as planned. Then, after using the F4s for a year, I decided I actually liked the 8008 better! So I bought another one and sold the F4s. So this is my third of these.

I slugged it out as a pro for five years, although gradually my business and income shifted mainly to high-quality custom B&W printing for exhibition and reproduction. I was better at that than anyone in town. I was not better as a professional photographer than anyone in town.

Now all this old camera needs is an AF-Nikkor 35mm ƒ/2 D, which by a strange vagary of fortune is still available new. Not gonna do it, not gonna do it, not gonna....

The F4s was the camera that turned me off of big cameras, by the way. For the duration, as it turned out. What a portly beastie it was. (Paul, whose name was on the lease at our beautiful studio, called his Nikon F3 with full motor drive "Darth Vader." So of course he called my F4s "Luke." He was sadder than I was when Luke departed.)

Will I ever take a single picture with this survivor 8008? Probably not. But one thing's absolutely for certain this time: no more film cameras for me. This is it. No question. Never buying another one.

Believe me? Why of course you do. How could you doubt?

It's hip to be square
Meanwhile, back in the here and now, I've been taking pictures with the X-H1 using the widest lens I have, the 14mm prime (21mm equivalent), with the aspect ratio set on square. It's very different for me. Not the way I'm used to seeing at all. But I've been in a rut, so I'm shaking myself up. Trying to be more iconoclastic in my compositions, too, to loosen the visual calcification.

We'll see how that goes. But I always enjoy experiments.

And y'know, I do love photography, so it's all good.

Mike 

Books o' the Week

Nikon fan are ya? Nikon: A Celebration by British automotive writer and Nikon collector Brian Long covers the history of the company from its beginnings to the end of the film era. A U.S. parallel with more concentration on opinions about the equipment is B. Moose Peterson's Nikon System Handbook. The 6th Edition covered film equipment up to 2000. <—These are portals to Amazon.com thru TOP; you can also search for Nikon books from The Book Depository, which offers free shipping worldwide.

Original contents copyright 2021 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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

Ron Hoffer: "I sincerely took the same pledge around four years ago after I sold off the last of my Nikon SLR gear, figuring the remaining stable of six classic, elegant and capable film cameras (Leica M7; Contax T; Rollei 35; Hasselblad 501 CM; Rolleiflex T, and a folding medium-format Ikonta) should suffice for my occasional film shooting diversion from Fuji fan behavior. Barely a year passed before two lovely M-mount lenses passionately and successfully cried to join the brood. After all I could use these on my Fujis! But how to explain the purchase and then near immediate return of a rebought Nikon F3HP and then a Barnack Leica? Alas, their behavior suggested expensive repairs ahead. When the electronics of my pocket rocket Contax-T failed two months ago, I lost all resilience and succumbed to a Pentax Spotmatic; a chrome version of my first serious camera from 51 years ago. At least I chose two lenses that I never used before (a 35mm ƒ/3.5 and 55 mm ƒ/1.8). After a professional CLA, the camera reminds me of my youth, with a serious shutter 'clunk' and the benefits of small aperture hyper-focus to account for the crude groundless focusing. First rolls affirmed the glory of Takumar glass and home souping in Rodinal. So, the itch is satisfied for now; that is unless a Mamiya 6 or 7 crosses my path...!!!"

Crabby Umbo (partial comment): "I knew more than one fashion photographer that favored the 8008 over the F4. They first bought them as back-up, and then just started using them as their primary!"

Kye Wood: "The only cure to this specific ailment is this; have your collection (of whatever you keep purchasing) on the table in front of you. At all times. When you're presented with temptation, glance at the surfeit. The urge will immediately abate. I can guarantee that this strategy works for cameras, lenses, watches and guitars."

Malcolm Leader: "White powder? From the web: White Crystals and powder on the battery is potassium carbonate. This is electrolyte (potassium hydroxide) which reacted with O2 to form Potassium Carbonate. In this condition the battery is no longer usable. Potassium carbonate is a very strong alkaline and water soluble."

hugh crawford: "I used to use a 8008 and the dedicated flash that Nikon made for it because it had one really neat trick. You could set it up so if you held it over your head and were using autofocus the flash would project a spot where the camera was pointed. It was great for when a PR agency client was throwing a party at a nightclub and there were a lot of other photographers crowding around some celebrity. Stick your arm up, get the red spot on celebrity X, push the button, and you get the overhead eye-of-god photo of celebrity X surrounded by photographers. As an extra bonus you would often get them looking straight at the camera (because of the the mysterious red spotlight) with a puzzled expression as though they had just recognized someone.

"The PR people loved it since it showed that the celebrity came to the event, the press covered the event, and the celebrity was looking right at the camera.

"I didn’t really have any 35mm equipment at the time so I went into Lens & Repro where I was a frequent renter, and said that I needed to rent a camera for party/disco photography. The guy behind the counter said 'watch this,' did the red spot thing, and I was sold."

Mike replies: Great story! I never knew about that.

I was amazed at the sheer number of flash units pictured in the "System Information" brochure that came with the old Nikon. It made me reflect that one of the things that made Nikon top dog back in the day was its expertise with flash...no other camera came close. With today's extreme high ISO's making flash much less necessary, that could be another contributor to Nikon's decline these days.

Richard Man: "It's so cheap, I save money every time I buy!!!  ;-P  "

John Camp: "Back in the '90s, I had newspaper photographer friends who were secretly leaving the newspaper-supplied F4s's at home and using their N90's instead. The N90 I believe was the 8008 successor, and was a terrific camera that weighed about half of what an F4 weighed. That was important—PJs carried an immense amount of crap around with them, ready for anything, and some literally damaged their shoulders with the weight of their camera bags."

Mike replies: I used to believe I damaged my neck by draping heavy cameras around it and maybe I did. I had chronic neck pain for at least twenty years. Believe it or not, the thing that cured it was pool!  It didn't occur to me until after I bought first first pool table (in 2012 or so) that it might make my neck pain worse, but it did the opposite—something about leaning over above the cue and then raising up my head as far as I could stretched whatever needed to be stretched or strengthened whatever needed to be strengthened. In three weeks my old neck pain was gone, and it hasn't come back. It's amazing what the right exercises will do. Physical therapy is full of deep mysteries, I think.

Alex G: "I can still recall the desire I once felt for a Nikon F100. Sometimes I forget that it’s an old, obsolete desire and it feels very real. I satisfied that impulse pretty well with a N80, back in 2004...the last film camera I bought new. It came somewhat close to the F100. Fortunately I resold it while it still had some value. But these obsolete desires just live in your head alongside the names of ex girlfriends’ parents and the like."

David Brown: "eBay came close to being like crack to me in the late 1990s and early 2000s (I'm recovering...). At one time I owned 12 (Twelve!) 35mm SLRs that worked, and a couple or three that did not. I think (I would have to count) that I am down to six or eight now, and four medium format. Last frame of film? I don't remember."

What Does Cindy Sherman Look Like?

Cindy Sherman as Cindy Sherman

When a reader left a tip asking the question in the headline, I laughed. The very question seems preposterous. Cindy Sherman, look like someone? Cindy Sherman can't look like anyone. Or rather, she looks like everyone.

Cindy has been around for most of my whole life in photography. I never quite "got" her work—even when I have it explained it to me in a way I grasp intellectually, I still don't quite get it. If I'm honest.

One thing that taught me, though, is that maybe it's not for me. It's a peculiar kind of egocentrism to think all art should be for us. Of course it isn't. Maybe Cindy reaches just the audience she ought to and that she seeks to, and I'm just not in it. That's no crime on her part or mine. The older I get, the less egotistically demanding of others I get, and, also, the more I forgive myself for all the potentially interesting things I don't engage with.

So much art, so little time.

I'll tell you one thing, though, she's the real deal. When I first became aware of her, which must have been in art school—she's only a few years older than I am—my knee-jerk reaction was to suspect that her schtick of being just another attention-grabbing gimmick. Wrong-O, Dektol-breath. No one can sustain such a rich career, varied yet consistent—not to mention remarkably unique—without being sincere and authentically motivated. My initial bratty wet-behind-the-ears insolence was gradually displaced by admiration and respect.

But one question for sure never occurred to me to ask...what does Cindy look like? The question itself must be existential art-world doublespeak! Heh.

Anyway, as you know I take Saturdays off, so on Fridays I try to leave you with something good to occupy your Saturday, in case it might be, for you, a lazy day in which you have some free time. Today it's Art:21's "Cindy Sherman in 'Transformation,'" from Season 5 of that wonderful series.

I enjoyed it so much I watched it twice. Hope you enjoy it too.

Mike

Book o' this Week:
Black in White America 1963–1965 by Leonard Freed, a new reprint of this classic from the Civil Rights era. I got to meet Leonard Freed once. <—This is a portal to Amazon; also available at the Book Depository for global delivery with free shipping.

Original contents copyright 2021 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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

James Bullard (partial comment): "I don't 'get' her either but then I belong to the 'witness' tradition of photography and she's a conceptual artist. Her photographs are not about the subjects in the photographs. Her subjects are just a medium, a proprietary visual vocabulary to express her ideas. I don't get her work because I don't share or understand that visual vocabulary."

Rickard Grangården: "Surely that question has been answered ages ago.... :-) "

Mike replies: Great find, thank you! I love it. Never saw that before.

Daniel Speyer: "I don’t look for artist’s interviews or reading usually what they say about their art, but having said this it was interesting to see what my three favorites had to say—they being Hockney, Arbus, and Sherman.

—Sherman is talking about the mechanics (your link was the first time I heard/saw the [real?] Sherman).
—Hockney being interviewed in a (what do they call it: a coffee table book?) book is very intellectual.
—Arbus—well she committed suicide.

"I guess those are three extremes for talking about one's art. In no case, at the level of viewer, do they tell you about their art."

Kenneth Tanaka replies to Daniel: " Right on, Dan! Whenever you have a chance to hear an artist, or photographer, speak directly about their own work, grab it! Even if you don't like the work. Actually, especially when you don't like their work [I second that —MJ]. I have been very fortunate to have had such opportunities many times and it always enriches my understanding of the work. I may still not engage with their stuff but I feel I have a better understanding of why. The case of this Art:21 doc of Cindy Sherman is a good example. This was my first time hearing directly from her about her work. (My earlier encounter with her was largely social.) I still feel the work it kitschy but I understand its genesis much better.

"There are so few artists and photographers still living who affect our aesthetic trajectories or sensibilities. Even fewer can coherently discuss their work. Make time to see or meet with them if possible. If the Internet is the only way to do so, fine! But do it if you have any interest in maturing your appreciation and sensibilities."

Angela Weil: "How Cindy Sherman looks like? I always enjoyed her work as she presented quite a spectrum of the female experience. Now, a few years ago, a person very dear to me did a project as homage to Cindy Sherman—in B&W. I had the pleasure to assist in some of the setups and the costumes."

Mike replies: She did a great job. I really like that.

David Brown: "I only wish I could do something at the level of her work! Not 'her' work, mine, but at that level. Genius."

Stephen Cowdery: "I saw her 2012 retrospective (MoMA, Walker Art Center) and I wasn't expecting much but I was stunned and I am not usually impressed by staged photography. Nearly every image spoke to me, sometimes apparently in a foreign language, but I felt challenged. As David P. Goldman said: 'We may judge what is merely beautiful, but sublime art judges us, or better said, it challenges us to judge ourselves.'"

Dogman: "I've liked her work since 'Untitled Film Stills.' It's not the kind of photography I do but it's engaging and well done. I also like Crewdson's vignettes. Both make little mysteries without resolution."

hugh crawford: "When my friend Jamie Livingston lived in a loft on Fulton street in the early '80s I kept seeing this woman in the elevator who seemed really familiar but I couldn’t quit remember her from anywhere. Turned out that Cindy Sherman was the upstairs neighbor. I thought she sort of looked like Shirley MacLaine."

Ernest Zarate: "For me, what you describe is what I call letting go of expectations. As humans, we seem particularly determined to lay our expectations at the feet of others, and then get mightily offended when they fail to live up to those expectations. Expectations cover so many aspects of life: what we do, what we wear, what we eat, what we drive, religion, politics, sex... and so on. And those expectations, in my book, pave the long, torturous, and soul-sucking road to disappointment.

"A few decades ago, I realized that no one was put on Earth to live up to my expectations. Every person is free to make up their own life, without having to consult me first. I found this revelation to be quite liberating. For me, life is like going to a restaurant with your friends: each person orders what they like from the menu, without regard to what anyone else is ordering. If I order the salmon, and someone else orders a salad, and someone else wants to dive into a bowl of fresh strawberries, it matters not one whit—except to the person ordering it. We all sit down at the table, enjoy our unique meals, and the company we each bring. In truth, the only person Cindy Sherman’s work needs to satisfy is herself. That others (though not everyone) find value in her work is no doubt icing on her cake."

Zyni Moë: "Pretty sure people who do not ever have to obfuscate or hide their identity would find it hard to understand what Cindy Sherman has done. If you are American man (especially white American man), well you never really have to conceal who you are unless you are a criminal or something. We all sneer at you (not you specifically, at all Americans), but you come to us bearing money, nuclear weapons and sometimes even you pretend to high principles, so we accept you as you are. Unless you enjoy playing identity games, you do not need to play them.

"If you are, perhaps, female of Roma (Gipsy) background from Eastern Europe then things are very different. If you say you are romani, people will think you live in a vardo and ride coloured horses and that you are dirty and stupid. Perhaps they will try to help you escape from this imagined squalor, perhaps they will spit on you: certainly they will not accept that you just want to do maths which (despite being smelly and stupid) you are good at. If you tell people on the internet you are female and dare to be more clever than them you will get rape threats (yes, you will: I can show you them). And there is worse I will not say. So, if you will not give up, you hide. You wear masks, you invent characters and play at being them because being what you really are is somehow asking to be ignored or attacked. And that is how you make your way. And Cindy Sherman is interesting to people who must do these things, and what she does is a little more interesting than yet another macho photographer sticking his camera in people's faces."

Mike replies: Thank you for that. It really helps me see Cindy Sherman's work differently. (Your first paragraph reminded me of something my black freshman roommate told me in college: "the difference between you and me is that you think about race whenever you want to. I have to think about race all the time whether I want to or not." I've never forgotten that.)

Crabby Umbo: "I have to respond to Kenneth Tanaka and say I've made some of my biggest mistakes going to hear artists talk about work I admired, only to lose interest because the artist was less than expected. I now make it a policy to never go and listen to artists talk about their work, under that old art director's adage that '...if your work doesn't speak for itself, I don't need to hear you talk about it.' I remember going to a lecture by a photographer (who shall remain nameless), in the '90s, whose work was very out of the ordinary and dark, I thought one of the freshest things I'd seen in years! When I went to the lecture, I realized this person wasn't a weird troubled soul, but his work was all an MFA degree calculation; like he had a marketing crew planning the look to be 'different' (he didn't, but...). I came home and sold my books by him. I've never been to an artist lecture since then...."

Even Leica Makes istakes

Reader Nico Maijer came across this photo on Marktplaats, which he described as "Holland's favorite second-hand-stuff website." Nico writes, "if you know how to handle a 3-D printer, it should be possible to manufacture such a 'funny' front ring yourself, in the hope to yank up the price. (Can’t help being slightly suspicious.)"

That seems like a lot of trouble to go through for a questionable return, though—although skepticism is always a good stance in matters like this. As for the photo, although it would be easy to fake in Photoshop, why would you? I'm guessing both are real—the lens and the picture of it. I could be wrong.

Leica used to make a big deal about how many inspections its products went through, but maybe this is the equivalent of a typo in the masthead. It used to be well known among old-time newspaper guys that if you wanted to play a practical joke on a newspaper staff, mess with the masthead, because nobody ever proofread the masthead. In the same vein, most editors have a sore spot regarding typos in headlines, which seem to find it easy to sneak through despite being writ big and bold. Maybe none of Leica's inspectors proofread the front engravings because they were never wrong and didn't need to be checked?

A curiosity, though, for sure.

Mike
(Thanks to Nico)

Book o' this Week:
Black in White America 1963–1965 by Leonard Freed, a new reprint of this classic from the Civil Rights era. I got to meet Leonard Freed once. <—This is a portal to Amazon; also available at the Book Depository for global delivery with free shipping.

Original contents copyright 2021 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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

Albert Smith: "Ha! 'Summicron' is printed upside down. Can't believe quality control didn't catch that. 😀 "

Mike replies: Plus, the "CA" in "LEICA" is rendered with a "TZ." Must be Cyrillic!

Kjell: "For us Leica ignorants: What's the typo? Looks fine to me. I wouldn't buy it anyway."

Mike replies: Apart from a sojourn in Solms, Leitz, and later Leica, were located in the city of Wetzlar, where Leitz was founded in 1869.

Rick in CO: "Obviously, ot he eal hing."

Dave Elden: "I have a guidebook to a large Californian city known for its bridge and fisherman's wharf; the cover reads: Guide to San Framcisco. I didn't notice it myself for a while."

Mike replies: Ouch. Somebody had egg on their face for that one.

My cousin worked for a while for David E. Davis at Automobile magazine, which David founded. One time someone misidentified a car on the cover, which led to some embarrassment for the then-new publication. A high-tension staff meeting was called, and David read the group the riot act. He ended by saying he would let it go that one time, but the next time it happened the responsible party would be fired without discussion. I don't know, but I'll bet it never happened again.

 

Open Mike (a day late): The Way Photographs Should Look

This is an awkward subject, and I'm sure my attempts to verbalize it will be awkward and perhaps inept. So please forgive me if my words are insufficient. I'm hoping I'll manage to communicate anyway—that you'll "know what I mean."

All photographs translate the visual world we see with our eyes into some form or other. All of these forms have characteristics. With experience, we learn what characteristics belong to which equipment, techniques, and tastes.

So my question is, do you have a favorite kind of way that you prefer photographs to look?

I'm not talking about a litmus test...I'm not suggesting if you like one look it means you can't appreciate many others. I assume that the more photographs you look at knowledgeably, the more catholic (small c) your taste is. I'm not accusing anyone of being narrow-minded.

Years ago I had an exchange with Howard Bond, an underappreciated large format photographer. He, of course, has a broad ability to appreciate many types of photographs. I, too, have a broad ability to appreciate many types of photographs. But where our discussion of formats seemed to be leading, in the end, was that I had a certain kind of photograph I liked to see best—a 35mm B&W negative from fast film (i.e., Tri-X, HP-5+) printed full-frame on something close to 11x14 paper—and he had a certain kind of photograph he liked to see best—an 8x10 negative, also B&W, printed larger but still mid-sized I'd call it, with Zone System technique. (See Howard and get an idea of the print sizes he likes at this link).

I don't think it's a bad idea to have a sort of prototype of the way you like best to see the visual world translated by the camera. We have an appetite for these things, because when we see what we like best it actually creates a sort of visceral satisfaction for that goes beyond the merely intellectual—we can get a sort of "charge" out of it, a sense or even a sensation of gratification. The reason it's not a bad idea is that it's really unavoidable for many artists. It's an inherent part of expressing what we call a "style." You'd never mistake an Edward Weston print for a Eugene Richards print, or an Uta Barth for a Gregory Crewdson.

Some people have more than one style they work in. Carl Weese is a dedicated platinum/palladium printer but he makes other kinds of work as well. And I suppose some people don't have any preference at all...although I would have to confess to being slightly biased against such claims. Sort of like when someone says "I like all kinds of music!" (That post was one of the most fun to write of all the posts and articles I've ever written.)

And some people change, of course. Ctein used to "translate" his visual world into 16x20" dye transfer prints. Now he makes somewhat smaller color inkjet prints from Micro 4/3 files. (Do you subscribe to "Ctein's Occasional Newsletter"? You should; it's very non-intrusive and often entertaining and informative.)

However, I'm having a bit of a mini-crisis here...because I have to admit, my old allegiance to my "Photo 101" style as I called it—B&W Tri-X, printed with a filed-out negative carrier on an 11x14 sheet—is just that now, "old." I don't practice it any more and haven't for years. So what's my preferred type of photograph now? Hmm, I might have to do some soul-searching myself!

Mike

Book o' this Week:
Black in White America 1963–1965 by Leonard Freed, a new reprint of this classic from the Civil Rights era. I got to meet Leonard Freed once. <—This is a portal to Amazon; also available at the Book Depository for global delivery with free shipping.

Original contents copyright 2021 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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

Grant (partial comment): "Like most people, I like all photos and all music except for the stuff I don't like."

Mike replies: Great line. I love it.

Geoff Wittig: "Another thought-provoking post, Mike. I rarely think much about what kind of photograph and what print size and presentation I like. Which already betrays a range of assumptions on my part; it’s the photographic print I love. Book reproductions are substitutes of varying degrees of sufficiency, but never as good. And on-screen representation is a completely tangential experience to me.

"I was reared on Ansel Adams, and I still see a good black-and-white photograph as a relatively large print with a tonal distribution very deliberately chosen for artistic effect. One that guides the eye and takes me on a satisfying journey while still demonstrating reverence for the natural world. So I’ve been drawn to beautiful prints by Clyde Butcher, John Sexton, Howard Bond and Roman Loranc. Michael Kenna’s in there too. I respect the work of documentary photographers like Eugene Richards and Larry Towell, but they’re not quite my thing. When I look at Koudelka’s work in Gypsies [link —Ed.] I find his stark tonalities like nails on a chalkboard. They look all wrong to me.

"I also realize I have a very narrow view of what a color photograph should look like. I love large, carefully crafted prints with color that can be subtle or rich, but never gaudy. Robert Glenn Ketchum’s early work, (his newer stuff is a bit too garish) Edward Burtynsky’s prints, Charles Cramer’s thoughtful inkjet prints and Christopher Burkett’s exquisite Cibachromes are my touchstones. I also love the unsentimental yet affectionate photographs of the built environment by Jeff Brouws; hard to describe their unpretentious beauty. Next to his work, Stephen Shore’s strikes me as smug and sarcastic.

"So I guess that identifies my organizing principle for how a photograph should look. I need to see and feel the photographer’s interest in, and perhaps love for, the subject. A carefully made print crafted with intention gives me that."

Dillan K: "Speaking of 'the way photographs should look,' thanks for bringing Howard Bond to my attention. I like the way his photographs look! I'm sorry that I didn't know about him earlier. I've lived a sheltered life. I appreciate it when you broaden my knowledge of accomplished photographers."

Photographic Value System

Who is Bunny and what killed him or her?
A long time ago, some literary friends were arguing about what allows readers to get "pulled into" a book of fiction. They were arguing nuts and bolts—one was claiming that Hemingway's simple, declarative style allowed more readers "a way in" to the stories he was telling, because more of them could understand him easily. Here's an example of his prose, in case you've heard of him but never read him:

Manuel drank his brandy. He felt sleepy himself. It was too hot to go out into the town. Besides there was nothing to do. He wanted to see Zurito. He would go to sleep while he waited. He kicked his suitcase under the table to be sure it was there. Perhaps it would be better to put it back under the seat, against the wall. He leaned down and shoved it under. Then he leaned forward on the table and went to sleep.

That's from the short story "The Undefeated."

This was leading to some heated words about "writing down" to the audience and so forth, probably from people who were tired of defending their own more ornate or involved writing styles.

I thought about it, and I decided that what draws me into reading has nothing to do with nuts and bolts at all. It's in wanting to know what happens. What's called "the hook." As soon as I get the hook, that's when the word-by-word, line-by-line reading vanishes for me and I start speeding through it, propelled forward. Here's the beginning of Donna Tartt's The Secret History:

The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation.

Who is Bunny and what killed him or her? Who's the us of "our"? Are they in the mountains? Is Bunny dead and buried or dead and unburied? The first thing that springs to mind is a plane crash leading to a survivalist situation, but at the same time I know that might be wrong. I want to find out all these things. Prose style be damned, I would read on.

(It's a famous one-line opener.)

Intrusions
My wonderful former psychoanalyst, Karen Maroda, who has written many books in her field, feels that everyone has a basic value system. (I got the idea she also feels that many people aren't aware of what their own basic value systems are. But I mustn't put words in her mouth.) My basic value system is essentially psychological—I always return to psychological explanations by way of first principles, as my way of explaining the world to myself.

Photographically speaking—to hop to safe ground—I do have a pretty distinct value system. I like pictures that get me to engage with the subject. For all my apparent preoccupation with it, technique is a means to an end for me. It's secondary, not primary. Like prose style. So I like technique that doesn't call attention to itself—more specifically, I dislike technique that pulls my attention away from engagement with the picture.

I'd like to discuss two very different photographs, both of black females, one a young woman, one a girl. Here's Scottish photographer Leanne Boulton's "Silver Lining." It's pretty simple, straightforward picture, a portrait in the genre of "people on the street," and could be effective in context. Here the young woman is girded against accidental contact in many ways: sunglasses hide her eyes, earbuds allow her to either not hear or pretend not to hear, her hair is hidden by a cap, her hands turn inward and seem to literally hold her own torso, her expression is blank in the mask we adopt in public that says don't mess with me, nothing to see here, pass on by. Even in the angle of her head we get the idea she's not looking at us—that is, at the camera—from behind those sunglasses.

Of course, all this could be exactly what the photographer is examining and wants us to look at. I'm not criticizing.

Airless
Understand, I'm not the authority over anyone but me, but I have a right to encounter photographs as myself and to honor my own reaction—one of my basic principles is embodied in a phrase I wrote decades ago, "I have a right to respond to art as if my encounter with it matters to me." So what I say only applies to me and my own reaction.

However, everything about the technique here, to my eye, intrudes. The tonal scale has that distinctly depressed midrange so common in digital. I call it (as shorthand) "airlessness"—that is, it fights against showing us a sense of atmosphere. It does this by making all the middle values darker. The light ends up not looking real—the light that might have been there got sucked out of the scene by the oppressive tonality. I can't tell what time of day it is except from clues. The background, though readable as context, is unpleasant because the bokeh is jangly and jumpy. It gives the picture an unsettled feeling. Detail is way too hyped-up—back in the days when I hung around with a lot of wannabe Ansels, a friend privately called the style "zippy-zappy zoner sh*t," and the phrase has always stuck in my mind as something to avoid. Of course we're long past the popularity of the Zone System, but Photoshop makes similar looks easier and faster to achieve. In this case the zippy-zappy look draws my eye to meaningless details, such as the fake-fur lining of the coat, the fabric lanyard around her neck that holds her her ID and the words on it. (Have you ever been sitting somewhere bored and find yourself reading gratuitous words that happen to be visible nearby, just because they're there? It always gives me the feeling that I've allowed a particle of junk to enter my brain against my will.) The zipper, the half-seen necklace, all the "cranial accessories" as Mitch Hedberg once called all the stuff we wear on our head. Even the photographer, with her title, seems to be drawing our attention to...the coat lining, which is emphasized by the excessive local contrast.

Or maybe the title's just a handy label. I'm not interested in the coat lining, in any event.

Just for fun I processed the JPEG as if it were my picture, and I tried to de-emphasize the coat lining. (I tried to contact the photographer for permission to show you my version, but she—perhaps wisely!—didn't reply. She's a good photographer, by the way—see for instance her 16 Questions, about a color photograph that's quite successful. She can't help it if one grumpy old former custom printer over in America happens to be allergic to the B&W technique she's chosen. Can't please all the people, etc.)

All of this might be intentional on the part of the photographer, but it all colludes in making the photograph unappealing for me. YMMV.

Natural
Now compare that with an even simpler shot—formally just a headshot—"Michelle [Happiness]" by Stefan Elf, who might be from Sweden given what little I can find about him. (His website doesn't load for me.) His Photostream shows a much less accomplished and less directed photographer. Leanne Boulton is much more intentional and directed. But as a single image this picture is coherent, integrated, and has much more life. It seems to show a real moment. It engages me in that it seems like a particular moment, and it makes me want to know more about what surrounds this moment—who is this, why is she happy, who is she responding to, what's outside the frame?

I'd be willing to believe that if there were eight frames shot, this one was the one, and none of the others would do.

Technically nothing distracts. There's nothing rote or static in the pose. I like the slight awkwardness—here the slightly off-kilter composition just adds to the sense of immediacy, of the picture's individuality if you will. I don't get the sense that this is just one more exposure among a bunch of similar but slightly different exposures. In "Silver Lining" all I sense is the transaction—"May I take your photo?" "What would you like me to do?" "Just stand there"—followed by six or eight frames from which none truly stands out. Can we help but note that all the young woman's efforts to go unnoticed have gotten her noticed? The best-laid schemes. (I'm being too hard on "Silver Lining," you perceive, just to make my points.) In "Michelle [Happiness]" nothing about the technique intrudes. The depth of field is fine, the tonality is natural, the light is plain, detail is neither unpleasantly etched nor ostentatiously suppressed. To me there's an effortless sense of wholeness about it.

That sense of naturalness, coherence, and integrity is what I like in photographic technique. It should be like ballet dancing—all the effort put into it is only meaningful if the result looks effortless.

I'm me and you aren't
Anyway, this whole thing is just to say—I'm only going by my own value system. Yours might vary considerably. You might hang out with different friends who value different things. You might think every picture is all about how exaggerated and vivid the detail can be, and you might not even think about representing natural light at all—the idea might not even be on your radar. You might be a B&W-hater (they're out there in digiworld.) I don't know. My values aren't the only values, they're just mine.

We are who we are, as viewers as in every other sense.

Mike

P.S. I believe I have the right, according to Fair Use, to publish both of these pictures here—Fair Use specifically allows for works to be quoted for the purpose of commenting on or criticizing them, and that's surely what I've just done. But on the other hand, we're a photography website, and we support photographers, so I like to get permission. I often do receive permission when I try to contact people through Flickr or other sharing sites—just not this month. And sometimes not even next month. Once, a guy took eight months to respond. By then I had long forgotten why I wanted to show his picture in the first place. It's awkward, in other words.

Book o' this Week:
Black in White America 1963–1965 by Leonard Freed, a new reprint of this classic from the Civil Rights era. I got to meet Leonard Freed once. <—This is a portal to Amazon; also available at the Book Depository for global delivery with free shipping.

Original contents copyright 2021 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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

John Camp: "As you said, YMMV, and mine does. I think the first shot is terrific, and I'm more interested in this kind of work than any other kind of photography, except perhaps some portraiture. That first shot says everything about the world we now inhabit, and it's like a latter-day riff on Edward Hopper—this young woman is as isolated and alone as Hopper's characters, while at the same time she's passing through a busy world. The earbud and sunglasses and hand gestures are classic; she's in her own world, tight, defensive, possibly hostile. The second shot, I would treasure if it were a shot of my daughter. But it's not, so to me, it's a nice snapshot. In cases like this I think YMMV should be changed to EMMV—everybody's mileage may vary."

Chris Hunt: "Question I asked myself while reading this post—so how would you feel about the two photos if the styles were swapped?"

Mike replies: Well, the tl;dr version of this post is that the technique of "Silver Lining" impedes or obstructs my ability to contemplate and appreciate what it shows, while in the second picture the technique seems (to me) to get out of the way. So if the styles were reversed I'd like the first better and the second worse.

In fact, after reading your question, I imagined the second photo with the look of the first imposed on it, and even though I was just seeing it in my mind's eye it actually kind of upset me a little.  :-)

Dave (partial comment): "Re: Who is Bunny and what killed him or her? I prefer the 'Bunny' prose to Hemingway's. Hemingway's example is too full of sentences with nearly the same length. It's just harder to get into a flow when I'm always encountering a period to stop my progress. Additionally, Hemingway has harsher words (hot, Zurito, kicked) which makes it seem more staccato sounding than the 'Bunny' excerpt.

"Re: Intrusions, the photo example with the harsh look surprised me. I had read the entire post before clicking on the photo links. Most digital photos on the web must have that look because I had to think about the points you made before realizing that indeed parts of the photo really were too sharp. The second photo is simply terrific. Great work by Stefan Elf!"