The Online Photographer

Spectacular Dud

Figures. The alleged "new Sony APS-C flagship" will be nothing of the sort; and it won't be coming in May as originally expected, either. Sony Alpha Rumors now predicts that it will be called the "ZV-E10." They say journalists have had it in their hands for a long time now and are just waiting around for the NDA to expire, that it will have no viewfinder and the same old 24mm sensor (Seinfeldism: not that there's anything wrong with that), and is to be positioned as a vlogging/streaming camera.

In other words, nothing to see here, move along. By the way, did you know that the venerable RX100 series 1" point-and-shoots have morphed into the ZV-1 (below), a version specifically made for vlogging?

More videos of me!

Bleh. Maybe I'm crotchety this morning*, but I'm tired of camcorders oppressing cameras. I don't want a camcorder. I'm a photographer. I like "stills cameras," previously known throughout most of history as "cameras." It might be old-fashioned, but I grew up pointing cameras away from my head.

Sorry, I'll stop now. Nothing against vloggers; it's a cool thing to do and it's a dynamic arena right now. My only gripe is that I don't want my bow-and-arrow to also shoot bullets. At least not all the choices. Actually, what's probably happening is that Sony wants to push serious photographers into its full-frame product lines, and not-so-subtly discourage buyers from thinking that "little" 1-inch and APS-C sensors are appropriate for anything but video.

Anyway, so much for my attempts to soften the ground for a review of the new top-o'-the-line.

And by the way, this is a good example of why I don't typically talk about products that aren't here yet. There's plenty of time to talk about products after they're out in the sunlight. 

Dogs and Dawgs
Most people know the expression "Pavlov's dog." Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov was studying in the 1890s how dogs salivate when presented with food when he noticed that the test animals began to salivate when they heard the footsteps of the assistant approaching with the food. He became fascinated with what became known as "classical conditioning" and spent the rest of his life studying this kind of learning.

We Photo Dawgs are not above that...we've been conditioned to salivate, figuratively speaking, over the next new thing, the enthusiasm for which I once called neomania. I don't know about you, but I'm actually kinda tired of neomania and the constellation of conditioned behaviors surrounding it in Internet culture...all the breathless speculation, wish-lists, ultimatums in advance ("It better have x or I'll..."), arguments over what the coming product will or will not have (when all you need to do, all you can do, is wait and see), and the inevitable let-downs. I don't know why I still get snared every once in a while...it was a lesson I learned in the early '90s waiting for the Nikon N8008s! Boy, how I admire people who just find a box, learn to make it do what they want to do, and get on with it. It ain't the golf club, it's the swing that counts.

Anyway, I'm getting an A6600, because I want to explore the Sigma Contemporary Trio on APS-C. But that's a different subject, about which more later. Sorry for the wasted bandwidth earlier in the month.

Mike

*I used to call myself a "curmudgeon in training," but I finished my training and got my certificate....

Book of Interest this week:

Ralph Eugene Meatyard: American Mystic (Fraenkel Gallery, 2017). An excellent introduction to Meatyard's quirky, spooky worlds, and Fraenkel Gallery's productions are always a cut above. The link is a doorway to Amazon.

Also sponsored by...

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 Krill: "Re 'I don't want a camcorder. I'm a photographer.' YES. That's why I love Fujifilm. When I read reviews of the Fujifilm X-E4 that mentioned poor vlogging experience I knew I made the right choice. Because I'm a still photographer not a videographer or whatever they call themselves. P.S. The X-E4 has turned out to be a better camera than I thought it would be."

Stephen Scharf: "Camera companies, YouTubers, and as audio reviewer Hans Beekhuizen calls it, 'the social media,' spend an incredible amount of time and resources to convince you that if only you'll buy the latest and greatest camera, you will be a better photographer. This is bullish*t.

"As you mentioned in an article you posted back in 2008 entitled 'Big Sticks' (remember that one?), it's not about the size of the bat you use, it's how hard you swing it that matters. At the end of the day, you're gong to find that an A6600 doesn't take photos that engage with your viewers any more than your X-H1. Or your X-T1, for that matter.

[Ed note: Jeff S. and DavidB found that post—here it is. Featuring Stephen's great shot of Chris the V. Thanks, Jeff and David.]

"Just give me a camera with excellent shutter life, a fit-for-purpose AF system (Canon 1D MkII-level), a proper-sized grip, and a stiff and strong lens mount on a durable and rugged body, and I'm good to go. How successful my photographs are is overwhelmingly due to how well my vision and execution can realize my intention, rather than having eye-AF or 30 FPS. And, having the discipline to show up for the shot."

Mike replies: But Stephen, the X-H1 is no longer new. (Kidding.)

My Fujis are not going anywhere.

Albert Smith: "Re 'I don't want a camcorder. I'm a photographer. I like "stills cameras," previously known throughout most of history as "cameras..."' Yes, yes, yes! I have several Swiss Army knives and Leatherman multi-tools, and if you need a screw driver or a small file in a situation where you don't have a proper tool box, they can really bail you out. But you wouldn't use them for serious work under the hood of your car or home repair. Why use a Swiss Army camera?

Mike replies: Ah, I'm going to steal that term, if you don't mind.

Thomas Walsh: "Amen to Stephen Scharf's comment."

Sands of Time

I'm back from being away. I stayed in a lovely little seafaring town called Bristol on a peninsula in the tidal lowlands of Narragansett Bay in Rhode Island, a town my brother likes in the area where he lives. It was built up by the time of the Revolution (the British bombarded it, but bygones have become bygones), and it has many fine, and some grand, examples of Colonial architecture. It's a resort town now, with innumerable boats anchored in its many mooring fields.

To the South, Mount Hope Bridge, a grand suspension bridge lined with streetlamps, is a magnificent sight at dusk when the light from the streetlamps and the sky are in balance. And I can't believe I missed the Herreshoff Marine Museum. I would have loved to see that. Rats. (Herreshoff is like the Leica, or Rolex, or Stradivarius of sailboats.)

Purely by chance, I stayed in a house built long ago by a distant relative! I used the pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey method of choosing lodgings, not being picky in any way, but I lucked into a beautiful little bed-and-breakfast in Bristol called William's Grant Inn [sic]—so-called because the first person who turned it into a B&B was aided by a grant from her uncle William. As the plaque on the front proclaims, the house was built in 1808 by a William Bradford—a fellow descendant of the Governor of Plymouth Colony, although not himself a direct ancestor of mine. The house was in the Bradford family for 150 years.

William's Grant Inn, Bristol. Note the house plaque.

The Inn is run by a couple, Liz and Doug Miller. It's a wonderful little place, loaded with historic charm. I was struck by the pure thoughtfulness of the place—it seems to me that the proprietors have a gift for putting themselves in their guests' places and finding ways to make their experience more pleasant. Some people don't like B&B's, but I like them. Tomorrow I'll tell you about one of the couples I met there, as they turned out to have a photography business of a kind I had never heard of (!). (That takes a little doing, right?)

The breakfasts were superb, and they even indulged my quirky food preferences. Not so hard as it turns out, in that their son's girlfriend has a burgeoning business called LivPrepared (her name being Liv). Liv and a legion of friends/employees cook up huge batches of gourmet vegan dishes from Thursday through Saturday evenings and then deliver a week's worth of food to customers all over Rhode Island on Sundays. Liv has so far developed more than four hundred recipes! And to think I'm still working on my first ten.

Liz and Doug. Can you tell I slipped into brochure/promo
mode here photographically, even though it was
just a single iPhone shot? Very good hosts.

Anyway if you happen to be looking for a characterful and comfortable place to stay in New England in a picturesque little seaside town, I recommend William's Grant Inn. It might be geographically remote—there are basically two main roads leading down the peninsula—one named for the son of the Massasoit—but at the same time it's within easy striking distance of Boston, Providence, Newport, Cape Cod, Nantucket, and Martha's Vineyard. Please tell them The Online Photographer sent you. But no quid pro quo here—this is a pure endorsement, nothing more. I liked everything about the place. I feel like I made a discovery.

On Tuesday, my brother was being moved to inpatient hospice and I was left at loose ends, so I wandered around the town with an old camera. My mind was not on it nor my heart in it, but it was a comfort to resort to old habits. Being in need of company but having none, I struck up conversations with various locals. Below is the cheerful Mrs. Nenna, Kate, who was born in Bristol and taught high school math there for 42 years. Her customary companion at the Hope Diner was absent that day, so I became the willing stand-in at the next table over, and learned all about her life in Bristol and her long career. She was that rare thing, a big talker who is also a good listener. We energetically solved some of the problems of the world, and I confessed to her some of the ways I used to cheat in math class (I am not innumerate, but words were my thing, not numbers). She allowed as how she had seen it all. She said she had enjoyed every minute of her teaching career, and woke up every morning happy and enthusiastic and looking forward to each day. A very nice lady, who reminded me of some of my long-suffering but dauntless mathematics tutors of yore.

Mrs. Nenna

I'll let the story of Mrs. Nenna story stand for the others I talked to—the disgruntled antiques store owner who sells half his stuff on eBay but resents the Internet and regrets the changing times; the public works guy with the heavy local accent who helps keep the town clean and well-kept and was preparing to paint an old shore-defense cannon that is now a monument; and the woman with the unicorn on her porch. Actually I don't recall what she said she had on her porch, but it was something odd. A wizard, maybe? A fantasy character? I forget. She keeps a bin of local guidebooks on her porch that are free for the taking, and invited me to go by her house and take one. I somehow missed the house.

But, speaking of unicorns, I did stumble across this inscrutable house plaque with its enigmatic message. I thought it might be some kind of spoof, that "Eubulides" might be a made-up name—it sounds like it, doesn't it? But no—he was a Greek philosopher, a student of Euclid, famous for his paradoxes. His best-known one is the famous Liar (pseudomenos) paradox, "What I am saying now is a lie," of which the house plaque is a variant.

But the one I like best is his Heap paradox. Here's how Wikipedia describes it: "A single grain of sand is certainly not a heap. Nor is the addition of a single grain of sand enough to transform a non-heap into a heap: when we have a collection of grains of sand that is not a heap, then adding but one single grain will not create a heap. And yet we know that at some point we will have a heap." Seems a sturdy basis for the metaphor "the sands of time." Isn't it the way the days, the months, the years go by?

I got to see my brother three times. By the third visit he was having difficulty speaking. Thursday morning I saw him for an hour and a half, alone together in the room at the hospice, as he drifted in and out. Cachexia has wasted him away. He tried to crack jokes, but apart from a few words he couldn't muster enough breath to make his voice sound. But I could tell what he was up to from his so-very-familiar smile. He has a quiet but quicksilver wit, incisive but never mean, so it was easy to imagine the quips in his head were good ones and would have made me laugh.

He asked me to put my weight on his hands and with great effort he levered himself up into a half-sitting position so he could clear his airway...so I asked him if he was about to do a thousand sit-ups. It made him smile. When he was little, maybe eight or nine, he read in a Richie Rich comic book that Richie's butler, Cadbury, did a thousand situps, so Scott resolved to do it too. I tried to explain that it was an exaggeration for comedic effect—I'm five years older—but he said, "no, I'll do it." He did more than 350 on the first try. It took him a few weeks to work up to it, with me helping by holding his feet down for what seemed like hours, but with characteristic tenacity he accomplished it. His life has been like that, in some ways; he was a delinquent student in high school, barely squeaking into his first college and then flunking out, but he ended up with a Masters from Harvard and a Ph.D. from Columbia. Despite the disparity in our ages we were great companions throughout our growing-up years, always playing tennis, board games, basketball, ping-pong, pool, backgammon, foosball, or something, with him beating me more often than not. He was much the better athlete, more canny, more coordinated, more competitive. And I didn't know when we were young that the kid playing head games with me at the pool table was a future psychologist! We had many talks sitting on opposite sides of a room lazily throwing a Koosh ball back and forth, the game being to make it brush the ceiling without changing its arc. We have never been out of touch. I have never had a better friend.

Frustrated by his inability to communicate, he gestured for a pen, and with great effort he scrawled, "just to hold hands." So I held his hand, and he drifted off to sleep for a while. A while later, I had to do what I had come to Rhode Island to do, say goodbye.

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:

Michael Perini: "Very sorry to hear this news. Saying goodbye to a brother is a most difficult thing. In my case he was my older brother. That was 20 years ago, and to this day, when something interesting happens my brain still wants to call him.... At first it made me sad; now, I just warmly miss him. Peace be with you."

Mike replies: "Warmly miss him." I'm going to remember those words. I look forward to that time. Thank you for that. And, very sorry for your loss, too.

RubyT: "My best friend lost her sister and said the loss was also the loss of the peer witness to her childhood. My deepest condolences."

Mike replies: That's such an interesting thing, isn't it? I would say the loss is of a sympathetic peer witness to your childhood...someone who really understood you and liked you. Scott is a very sympathetic witness for me—he is the peer (he might say "littermate"!) who knows me best—but I have had a peer or two who acquired a negative or judgemental conception of me and in their cases I was actually rather relieved to have the friendship dissipate. Those could be called "unsympathetic peer witnesses." They can sort of oppress you by reminding you of past shortcomings or failures, or by expecting future shortcomings or failures. You can feel trapped in their unsympathetic conceptions. I suppose it's why some people divorce. On the other hand, the sympathetic peer witnesses grow more precious as the years go by and they become more and more irreplaceable.

And by the way, Scott was so wise about subjects like this...I encouraged him several times to put some of his wisdom into a book but he didn't have that interest. As a psychologist he was a gifted and insightful couples counselor and very good at helping people set their lives aright again when they had gone off track. If I had to describe him in two words, the words would be wise and compassionate. I was able to tell him that a few days ago, and he said "I like that."

Martin D: "Thinking of you and your brother Scott, Mike. What you tell us is so sad and also so life-affirming. It is good that you could make that trip and say farewell. It makes such a difference. Loss is terrible regardless. I am thinking of you."

Mike replies: Thanks Martin, and a heartfelt thanks to everyone for the condolences. It helps.

How Should You Frame a Photograph? (Thursday)

This week I've been featuring some older posts that contain at least one photograph by me, since I'm sometimes accused of never publishing my own work. These have appeared at 7:00 Eastern U.S. Time every morning.

We covered the titular topic in 2013 with three articles, which you can access with this one link and a little cleverness. Following the theme of the week just passed, the post contains a shot of two—well, one and a half—of my own pictures, medium format darkroom prints in this case.

By the way, I think the critics are actually right...I don't publish very many of my own pictures. As I went looking for them, they seemed to be hiding. Here's one more for good measure.

I'll be back soon. Thanks for being patient.

Mike

Book of interest this week:

David Hurn: Arizona Trips. Reel Art Press, 2017. "In 1979–80 [David Hurn] was awarded a UK/USA Bicentennial Fellowship, a one-year award to photograph in America. He chose Arizona, as 'the most right-wing state in America, plus it is the driest state in America. The exact opposite of my home country Wales. The contrasts appealed to me.' Hurn fell in love with Arizona and made several trips back between 1979 and 2001."

The link above is a portal to Amazon. TOP is also affiliated with:

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.

( No "Featured Comments" this week. To see all the comments, please click on the "Comments" link below.)

Old Snapshot (Wednesday)

Yr. Hmbl. Ed. is on a break this week, so I thought we'd post some "oldies" that you might not have seen before. This week I'll feature posts that contain at least one photograph by me, since I'm sometimes accused of never publishing my own work. These will appear at 7:00 Eastern U.S. Time every morning. Hope it tides you over adequately! (But I also hope you miss the real me, at least a little.)

One thing we sometimes hear on the internet is that our taste has simply been informed by what we're used to. I want to give myself more credit than that of course, but I can't actually argue with it too much. Here's a case in point, where I processed a digital picture and didn't realize until I was three-quarters through that I was making it look like an old Kodacolor snapshot printed by the local pharmacy.

I have a favor to ask: Since I'll be moderating comments on my phone, would you please help me out by making comments brief and not including any links? Just for a short time. Thanks much. I'll be back at the end of this week.

Mike

Book of interest this week:

David Hurn: Arizona Trips. Reel Art Press, 2017. "In 1979–80 [David Hurn] was awarded a UK/USA Bicentennial Fellowship, a one-year award to photograph in America. He chose Arizona, as 'the most right-wing state in America, plus it is the driest state in America. The exact opposite of my home country Wales. The contrasts appealed to me.' Hurn fell in love with Arizona and made several trips back between 1979 and 2001."

The link above is a portal to Amazon. TOP is also affiliated with:

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.

( No "Featured Comments" this week. To see all the comments, please click on the "Comments" link below.)

Funny Story (Tuesday)

Yr. Hmbl. Ed. is on a break this week, so I thought we'd post some "oldies" that you might not have seen before. This week I'll feature posts that contain at least one photograph by me, since I'm sometimes accused of never publishing my own work. These will appear at 7:00 Eastern U.S. Time every morning. Hope it tides you over!

Here's an article I did in June of 2013 showing the run-up to a certain portrait. I admit I'm fascinated by this process...how you keep looking, seeing what happens, reacting, and then having things come together. (Or not.) I've written several posts on this topic over the years. Here I started out thinking something was about to come together between husband and wife, and I ended up with a portrait of mother and daughter. "You never know how things are going to go."

By the way, here's the portrait that I ended up with.

I have a favor to ask: Since I'll be moderating comments on my phone, would you please help me out by making comments brief and not including any links? Just for a short time. Thanks much. I'll be back at the end of this week.

Mike

Book of interest this week:

David Hurn: Arizona Trips. Reel Art Press, 2017. "In 1979–80 [David Hurn] was awarded a UK/USA Bicentennial Fellowship, a one-year award to photograph in America. He chose Arizona, as 'the most right-wing state in America, plus it is the driest state in America. The exact opposite of my home country Wales. The contrasts appealed to me.' Hurn fell in love with Arizona and made several trips back between 1979 and 2001."

The link above is a portal to Amazon. TOP is also affiliated with:

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.

( No "Featured Comments" this week. To see all the comments, please click on the "Comments" link below.)

Portraits (Monday)

Yr. Hmbl. Ed. is on a break this week, so I thought we'd post some "oldies" that you might not have seen before. This week I'll feature posts that contain at least one photograph by me, since I'm sometimes accused of never publishing my own work. These will appear at 7:00 Eastern U.S. Time every morning. Hope it tides you over!

To begin with: Portraits, from March 2015. Remember Sergio Larrain's "Most of what you’re doing is not your best work. Concentrate on what you do well"? Well, what I did well was portraits.

I have a favor to ask: Since I'll be moderating comments on my phone, would you please help me out by making comments brief and not including any links? Just for a short time. Thanks much. I'll be back at the end of this week.

Mike

Book of interest this week:

David Hurn: Arizona Trips. Reel Art Press, 2017. "In 1979–80 [David Hurn] was awarded a UK/USA Bicentennial Fellowship, a one-year award to photograph in America. He chose Arizona, as 'the most right-wing state in America, plus it is the driest state in America. The exact opposite of my home country Wales. The contrasts appealed to me.' Hurn fell in love with Arizona and made several trips back between 1979 and 2001."

The link above is a portal to Amazon. TOP is also affiliated with:

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.

( No "Featured Comments" this week. To see all the comments, please click on the "Comments" link below.)

An Uplifting Dog Story

A dog-loving friend who lives in a pleasant, leafy, shady neighborhood in a mid-sized Midwestern city texted me a nice story the other day:

I was outside today and a car stopped with a man and a woman inside (in their sixties, like me), and they asked if I lived here.

They told me they grew up in my house. They were brother and sister. We talked for quite a while and I asked them if they had a dog. She said yes, Buff.

I told them I had his tag. I had found it 30 years ago while I was digging in the yard and I kept it. They gasped and couldn’t believe it. I went inside and got it and gave it to them.

After that I was convinced they weren’t serial killers trying to get access to my house  :-)  so I invited them in.

We went through every room and they told me lots of stories about every room and old neighbors.

My current bedroom was their grandmother’s bedroom.

It all felt spiritual.

Like something else was driving the situation.

Especially the dog tag. When I found it 30 years ago I just couldn’t throw it away because it belonged to a dog, and a dog someone probably loved, so I kept it. It felt wrong to throw it away. But I always had a feeling there was a purpose.

Anyway it was a goosebumpy experience.

They were super nice people.

Oh, and I always worried the the dog was buried on my property because his tag popped up. I didn’t ever want to disturb his resting place.

But Buff isn't buried here. And that’s good to know.

Executive decisions
Something similar happened to me back in Wisconsin. I lived next to a nice couple who were moving their young family to Oregon. As they prepared to sell the house, they were going to be away for a few days, so they gave me a key and asked me to please come over every day and open the windows for a few hours so the house didn't start smelling musty. On the dining room table, on a tablecloth, they had placed some information pertaining to the house and some sales flyers in preparation for the sale.

A day or two later, my doorbell rang. At my doorstep stood a small, smartly dressed elderly woman with white hair. Curiously, she introduced herself in a friendly manner using only her first name (which unfortunately for my story I have forgotten). She said it like she expected me to recognize it, like she was someone I should have heard of.

"I'm a such-and-such!" she said, brightly, naming her last name. Surely I had heard of the such-and-suches? Afraid not.

It turned out she had grown up in the house next door. She had rung the doorbell, but no one appeared to be home, and did I know where the owners were? She was visiting from another State and hadn't been here for many years.

I attempted to call my neighbors to get their permission to let her into their house, but I couldn't reach them.

Time for an executive decision. I decided she was very likely harmless and was probably telling the truth, and anyway I could stay with her while we were inside. As I had about a hundred and fifty pounds on her, I figured I could probably take her if she tried any funny business. So I let her in. Like Buff's owners, she told me some stories about the house and the neighborhood as it existed long ago...who lived where and so forth.

After touring the house, all neatened for the sale, we stood in the dining room, and she told me more about her family. At one time there were many such-and-suches who all lived on our little street, and people related to her had built a number of the houses on the block. Did I know that the reason the neighborhood was called Doctors' Hill was because most of the people in her family had been in medicine? Her father had been the first doctor to build, and then others had followed. But I had never heard the neighborhood called that. Her opinion of my mental capacities seemed to be diminishing. Did I at least know about the people who used to live in my house? No. I had heard the names of two of the owners before me, but that went back only a couple of decades.

Then something strange happened. The box on the dining room table contained old papers relating to the house—remodeling plans, old maintenance receipts, expired deeds, that sort of thing. And underneath all the papers was an old WWII-era passport.

The old woman opened the passport and her eyes widened in astonishment.

"This is my father!" she said. "Look! It's he!"

She told me the story. Her father had been a Christian missionary, and was assigned to a foreign post during WWII. When the day came for him to travel, he couldn't find his passport anywhere. They turned the house upside down and inside out but couldn't find it. His trip was delayed several days while special arrangements were made. The woman said that, as a little girl, she secretly hoped her father wouldn't have to go at all, but after a few days he was able to leave. He was gone for several years and she was a teenager by the time he got back.

She stared for a long time at her father's face in the passport picture, which was as clean and glossy as if it had just been taken. Then she asked me if she could please have the passport.

Ach...time for another of those pesky executive decisions.

Although I was 97% certain my neighbors would want her to have it, I apologized profusely and told her it simply wasn't mine to give. I was just a neighbor looking after the house for a few days—I had no right to make decisions about the disposition of any of its contents. She said she understood. I had her leave her phone number so we could reach her again.

Later, my neighbors called me back. They told me they had found the passport only a couple of years earlier under a heavy bookcase on the third floor—where it must have lain undisturbed for more than sixty years—and had always wondered if it could be reunited with a family member. "I hope you gave it to her," Amy said. I told her I hadn't but that she had left a phone number.

Well, we tried the number several times and left messages, but we never heard from the woman again.

Any time
Have you ever noticed that some people are deeply interested in old photographs while others don't seem to get anything from them? I've noticed over my lifetime that different people vary greatly in their relationships with the past and future. For some people, the past is a rich tapestry of romance and mystery, and runs like an invisible current or an underground stream beneath the present, whereas other people dismiss it all too casually, as if to say, what does any of it matter now?

Similarly, some people have little foresight, and to them the future is a "featureless plain." Whereas to others it is a place of fantastic and limitless possibility: anything could happen at any time, and might.

Mike
(With thanks to L.)

Lens of Interest this week:

If you should happen to be looking for an all-purpose zoom for the Sony APS-C cameras I've been discussing lately, here it is. The Sony E 16–55mm ƒ/2.8 G is a high-quality, constant aperture APS-C zoom of manageable weight and appropriate size that covers the true wide-angle to short telephoto range.

The link above is a portal to Amazon. Also available from:

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:

Bahi: "Loved this essay. I’m one of those people who love old photographs, too—perhaps there’s a link."

Sharon: "This is a beautiful post. Thank you."

Alan H: "Love this story! It took me back nearly 40 years ago when my wife and I moved to Vermont. We had bought a house built around 1830 and a strange thing happened the day we moved in. We were both down in the basement doing something when we heard footsteps on the wooden floor above us. We didn't know anybody there, at the time, so it was somewhat concerning. We immediately came upstairs to find about six people standing in our kitchen! Long story short...they were looking for the woman whose family owned the house for 50 years. We kindly explained that we now owned the house and she had moved into an apartment in town."

Mike replies: One of my favorite books of large-format photography is Paula Chamlee's loving portrait of her childhood home, High Plains Farm. I think that's where she tells this story. When her parents were leaving the farm for a week and she suggested that perhaps they ought to lock the doors, they said, "but what if the neighbors need something?"

Lois Elling: "I love stories like these. Thank you for sharing them. Growing up in the '60s our family would often visit my grandmother (my grandfather died when I was very young) at the house in Los Angeles that my grandparents had built in the 1920s. After my grandmother died, a neighbor bought the house. Just a few years ago my sister and I were passing through the area and stopped to get a picture or two of that house, which is remarkably still there on a street full of apartment buildings. A young man came out in the front yard as I snapped pictures, so I called to him and told him why we were there. It turned out his parents had bought the house years ago from that same neighbor and raised several kids there. The kids are grown and some have their own kids now, but that house is still the place where the family gathers. We met his mother and they were nice enough to show us the living room, dining room, kitchen, and back yard. What a wonderful experience and I was very thankful to them for sharing their home. I had showed them a couple of old photos of the house that were on my phone, and later I shared more old pictures of the house. The house number and front porch light were still the same as in the 1930s. It warms my heart to know the house is still full of love."

JOHN B GILLOOLY: "Beautiful post. And a very nice description of what drew me to a life of photography. I am enthralled with images from the past and constantly thinking of the future historical value of images that I capture on a daily basis. And as you suggest in the essay, I am constantly amazed at the wide range of feelings to the past, in general, and historical images in particular. I grew up the first child of a photographer and am lucky to have hundreds-thousands of 5x7 and 8x10 black and white prints of my childhood. I would guess that the only possession that made its way with me to every address I've ever lived, including dorm rooms in college, apartments abroad and in various states, is one Ilford 8x10(250) box that included a sort of greatest hits. The essence of my existence. I am also a huge fan of visiting places of my past. There is such a palpable feeling to be standing in the same spaces that were once so important to your everyday life - houses, schools, playgrounds, fields, etc. Everywhere you look, flashbacks to moments that took place in that particular corner, hallway or room. Moments that are gone to you until you stand in that space and gaze with old eyes upon things that your young eyes once saw daily. I am sometimes saddened that I am the only one that seems to feel the power and emotion in these moments. It's nice to know there are others that appreciate this same thing."

'The Picture That Changed My Life'

David Hurn, now 86 years old, is one of the great "plain-talkers" about how to approach being a photographer. This great interview is packed with simple but profound insights, and is well worth reading carefully. Fron Lensculture, and I don't see a date, although it must have been from some time in 2017.

Just a couple of quotations, because I can't resist:

The first is David quoting something Sergio Larrain told him: "Most of what you’re doing is not your best work. Concentrate on what you do well." After 40 years in photography I think that applies to most photographers. It leads to two related problems: one is work that's "all over the place," and the other is that what they do best remains tragically invisible to them...they do so many things they don't ever really know what they do best. Of course there's nothing wrong with being a dilettante if that's they want to be. But those who really concentrate and strive to honestly express their real concerns eventually have to become themselves. "If you are yourself," David says, "then something of your particular personality and way of looking at the world will come out in what you do. But you only get there if you genuinely follow your own interests."

I love the incisiveness of these appraisals: "Don [McCullin] loved anything that raised his adrenaline level, Philip [Jones Griffiths] had astute political knowledge, Ian [Berry] was basically a traveller." 

Enough tidbits. For younger and newer photographers, I don't actually recommend reading this interview. I recommend three things:

• First, read it twice;
• Then, go think about it as deeply as you can;
• Finally, read it again, slowly. 

Okay, I'm kinda kidding. But also kinda not. Much good and true wisdom in few and simple words.

Mike

Lens of Interest this week:

If you should happen to be looking for an all-purpose zoom for the Sony APS-C cameras I've been discussing lately, here it is. The Sony E 16–55mm ƒ/2.8 G is a high-quality, constant aperture APS-C zoom of manageable weight and appropriate size that covers the true wide-angle to short telephoto range.

The link above is a portal to Amazon. Also available from:

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:

Kye Wood: "The photograph of his father. That photograph. Hit me like an anvil. Along with the clear text of someone who is so immersed and versed in their work, they can convey what's important without seeming effort. Great choice to share Mike. Thank you."

Mike replies: Yes, I had never seen that before, but I think that's one of the best photographs I've ever seen. Of course it has to have its "caption," its story, the explanation, to go along with it, or it's just a pleasant picture of an old man.

Lee Rust: "I'm not a young photographer, but thanks for this link. The message applies to all ages."

The Wrecking Crew (OT) (Music Notes)

I spent yesterday feasting on music and movies and articles about music, following up on all your suggestions and comments from the recent post about guitarists. The big discovery for me is Sylvain Luc, who was suggested by a reader signing himself Williiam.

And I've been learning all about The Wrecking Crew, a shifting group of 15 to 35 freewheeling first-call session musicians in L.A. in the 1960s and early '70s who played on literally hundreds of hits from the era. Just a few: The Byrds' "Mr. Tambourine Man"; Barbra Streisand's "The Way We Were"; the Monkees' "Last Train to Clarksville"; the Beach Boys' "Good Vibrations"; Simon and Garfunkel's "Bridge Over Troubled Waters"; Sonny and Cher's "The Beat Goes On" (for which Wrecking Crew stalwart Carol Kaye provided the famous bass line); and Frank Sinatra's "Strangers in the Night" ("the worst f------ song I've ever heard," Sinatra said when he first heard it, but it went straight to number one and stayed there for a whopping fifteen weeks). They played on records by Nat King Cole, the Carpenters, John Denver, Neil Diamond, and Ike and Tina Turner and dozens if not hundreds of others. Frothy now-forgotten number-one hits like The Association's "Windy," and "Dizzy" by Tommy Roe? That was them. They played on dozens of TV themes, too, from "Hawaii Five-O" to "Bonanza" to "Batman," and created innumerable commercial jingles.

Their names never appeared on the records because the recording industry didn't want the public to know that the bands weren't playing on their own records—and that so many of the same musicians were playing on all the records. The facade began to crack when one of the Monkees—I think it was Peter Tork—arrived at the studio with his guitar and was shocked to learn that the songs were already all finished except for the vocals, which was the only part the band members were expected to provide. The word started to get out—I actually remember where I was when I heard the rumor about the Monkees not even playing on their own records (on the school bus passing my friend Larry Dubin's house)—and the practice of having session aces replace band members on recordings started to decline.

One of the biggest reasons for the arrangement in the first place was efficiency. Wrecking Crew players could lay down a finished track in one to four hours whereas it might take the real band a similar number of days of studio time to accomplish the same task. Ironically, the huge and growing sales of records in the '60s made it more feasible to let bands play on their own records; paying for exorbitant amounts of studio time became feasible for big acts in the later years of the '60s and in fact became a bit of a status symbol. (The vinyl box of the recent deluxe 50th Anniversary release of Crosby Stills & Nash's Déjà Vu contains three disks of demos, outtakes and alternates from the sessions.) The Beatles famously allowed themselves unlimited amounts of studio time after they stopped touring.

The group got its moniker from the 1990 memoir of drummer Hal Blaine, who said that in the early days, the more straightlaced and formal studio musicians of an earlier time thought that the new young guys (and Carol!) who were willing to play rock 'n' roll, as well as improvise from charts instead of having everything written out, were going to "wreck" music.

If you're interested in pop music and you remember that era, the 2008 documentary The Wrecking Crew is fascinating. I found it on Amazon but it's available elsewhere too.

Mike

Lens of Interest this week:

If you should happen to be looking for an all-purpose zoom for the Sony APS-C cameras I've been discussing lately, here it is. The Sony E 16–55mm ƒ/2.8 G is a high-quality, constant aperture APS-C zoom of manageable weight and appropriate size that covers the true wide-angle to short telephoto range. Its built-in stabilization makes it a perfect match for the unstabilized A6xxx models, but it's good enough to be matched with Sony's best.

The link above is a portal to Amazon. Also available from:

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:

Blog Note: Hiatus

Just an advance warning that I'll be away for a few days next week due to a family emergency. Family tragedy is more accurate. I'll leave links to some gems from the past to keep you occupied while I'm away, and I humbly ask your forbearance.

One of the problems of blogs is that they can't stop. When this type of website was more popular—they went from cutting edge to old fashioned in 20 years—I could be away for a week and it wouldn't affect traffic even during the time I was gone. Now, if I went silent for a week it would be at my great peril; my numbers would take a permanent hit. In AA they call that "life on life's terms" (i.e., that's the way it is), and the proper stance toward it "acceptance" (it is what it is).

Mike

Thanks, MR

It was five years ago today that Michael Reichmann died. He was known across the internet simply as "MR"—everyone knew who you were talking about. His website The Luminous-Landscape was a regular go-to for most people with an interest in digital photography.

He was mentioned here a few weeks ago and the mention of his name inspired a number of comments, but they were buried in an unrelated post. Knowing this anniversary was coming I thought it might be an appropriate time for sharing our appreciation.

I miss Michael. He had a large personality. His voice, his opinions, and especially his enthusiasm were intimately entwined with the era of the digital transition for me. It was an interesting and exciting time and he was a big presence in it. His interest was sharp and you were always curious to know what he thought about things.

When he was first diagnosed I set up a call for him with a relative who had dealt with the same kind of cancer. We were at the family cottage in Michigan at the time. He was so positive and forthright about seeking treatment that it didn't occur to me then that the disease might win. He would have been seventy-six today; hardly old enough for aging to have slowed him down more than a half-step. If he had lived I'm sure we'd be reading his articles today about his latest workshop jaunts to far corners of Earth and his opinions about the latest cameras and printers.

For those few of you who might not know who he was, these were my words at the time of his passing. I'd be pleased to host your thoughts if you'd care to share them in the comments.

I'm sorry he's no longer here, but—good memories. I'm glad he was around and I'm grateful I got to be his friend for a while. Rest in peace, MR.

Mike

P.S. No 'Featured' comments today. To see everyone's comments, simply go to the link at the very bottom of this post.

Lists Are Impossible

So (as you might imagine) I've gotten interested in some of the many things people said yesterday about lists, and I've been thinking more about my little off-the-cuff "20 Greatest Male Guitarists" list from yesterday.

Grant said "perhaps you would better understand your affection for lists if you just made a list of things that you like about lists." A good joke, but actually it made me feel tempted to do just that!

I won't, though. Too much work.

False hierarchy and other headaches
Thinking about it more, if I were really making a list of notable guitarists, I think it would have to include about 50 people. Twenty is just the wrong number. Too limited.

These things suggest the scale they need...for instance, I think a list of the Greatest NBA Basketball Players of All Time should be a group of about 15. That's the point at which I start to be comfortable leaving people out. With only 20 guitarists, there are musicians not mentioned who we're simply not comfortable leaving out.

A list of 50 would naturally include female guitarists. (And then, not only could I have Bonnie Raitt and Joni Mitchell, I could at least try to finagle a place for Ana Vidović.)

In fact it would have room for representing many things that people mentioned and that need to be represented, such as: a historical figure from before the age of recording; pure virtuosos like Guthrie Govan whose playing is purely about dexterity and speed; and at least one token studio musician. You might consider "token" to be a pejorative, but in fact it's a highly useful concept to a listmaker. In a list of 50, many people could be tokens—each of them representing whole genres, periods, instruments, regions, or styles and approaches that really should be represented. Of course this is only useful if every list item is discussed.

Next, it would be much better if it wasn't titled "Greatest" or "Best." That makes it instantly about status, which opens a Pandora's box. Humans love competition, and our attention is instantly engaged when we make anything into a contest. But art isn't really a contest, cutting contests and "battles of the bands" notwithstanding. So I'd be much more comfortable with a title like "50 Fascinating Guitarists," or "50 Guitarists You Should Know." That takes away not only the Greatest/Best aspect, but also the false-hierarchy aspect, avoiding the absurdity of a list on which the person ranked at number 12, say, is implied to be "better" than the person in the 13th position, which is nothing but false precision.

This is the reason I put my list yesterday in order of birth year: it was a way to abolish ranking.

Balance imbalances
Of course then I ran into another problem...I had inadvertently highlighted the fact that many people considered "great guitarists" were born in the 1940s. Which in turn led me to include Kurt Cobain because I realized late in the process that I needed at least one person born in the 1960s.

This is the "balance" problem you run into in any such list. Balance problems open lists to criticism based on ideas of inclusiveness—as when, for example, Victor Bloomfield criticized my list for not including enough classical guitarists (my list only had one, as a token). And didn't somebody mention that I had shortchanged Spanish and Portuguese guitarists?

You might think there are only a limited number of inclusiveness factors to balance, and that therefore it should be possible to consider all of them, but actually there is an unlimited supply. It all depends on which criteria you highlight. What if a list didn't have a single Latinx guitarist? Or a single left-handed guitarist—what are you, biased toward righties? Or a single blind guitarist—don't you know that there are a number of famous blind guitarists, such as José Feliciano, Jeff Healey, and Blind Lemon Jefferson (whose first name, by the way, really was Lemon)? This "balance problem" goes on and on. No matter how the listmaker struggles for balance, there are still going to be openings for criticism to sneak in.

In this case, I highlighted year of birth, which in turn obligated me to make sure not too many of the guitarists I mentioned were people born in the '40s. Many of the musicians who were most active in the peak decades of "classic rock," the '60s and '70s, were naturally born in the '40s. But as I (and, ahem, several critics) mentioned, my attempt at balance in that regard ended up distorting my list, because I made a stab at balance by going out of my way to find a guitarist born in the '60s. You might call this "overbalancing"...bending too far over backwards to preserve an appearance of fairness.

It's related to quotas, as in, "on a list of 50, at least ten must be women, 20 must be acoustic guitarists, and at least one must have sold his soul to the Devil at the crossroads."

Impossible
Reader robert e said it nicely: "I think lists are most useful for one's own delectation and education, and possibly to fuel edifying geeky debate if they're not taken too seriously. They're also decent starting points to get into a new topic, again as long as they're not taken too seriously."

That's getting into "a list of the reasons we like lists," and it's a nice starting point. For me, listmaking is a way of engaging with a subject, a reason to get into the kind of research I enjoy doing, which in turn helps me learn. Mostly, I suppose, it's just a way of focusing on something I want to focus on. I do get a bit "obsessive" sometimes. I had fun on Saturday night listening to dozens of guitarists.

Probably the most important thing Robert said, he said twice: don't take it too seriously! That's crucial. Only if a list can stay lighthearted, flexible, and fun does it serve its real functions, which are and ought to be modest.

Finally, Zyni Moë put it succintly (she said it twice too): "lists are impossible."

As the characters in The Wire all say, "true dat."

Mike

Lens of Interest this week:

If you should happen to be looking for an all-purpose zoom for the Sony APS-C cameras I've been discussing lately, here it is. The Sony E 16–55mm ƒ/2.8 G is a high-quality, constant aperture APS-C zoom of manageable weight and appropriate size that covers the true wide-angle to short telephoto range. Good enough to be matched with Sony's best.

The link above is a portal to Amazon. Also available from:

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:

Open Mike: G.O.A.T. Guitarists (OT)

[Ed. note: "Open Mike" is the often off-topic Editorial page of TOP, and is supposed to appear on Wednesday; "Sunday Support Group," loosely defined as posts meant to be supportive of projects and aspirations, is supposed to appear on Sundays. But we're out of sync this week.]

Arthur Rothstein, Boy musician [Weldon Drake], Weslaco, Texas, 1942.
Note that his 12-string has 11 strings. From
the Library of Congress via Shorpy.

I like lists. They're fun and a challenge to compile. They're also ultimately meaningless and pointless, so I'm not exactly sure why they appeal to me. I guess it's the process of deciding which criteria matter; it helps clarify one's values. It's also a way of celebrating what's real, or good...or of bestowing approval. Or maybe it's just a way of diving into the thing, whatever it is.

I don't know, actually.

I was whiling away some downtime last night and stumbled on a WatchMojo video called "20 Greatest Male Guitarists of All Time." The list was just so bad, so wrong, that it actually troubled me. (I can't come to bed, someone is wrong on the internet!)

So I made my own list.

Here's mine, in chronological order by date of birth:

Andres Segovia b. 1893
Django Reinhardt b. 1910
Robert Johnson b. 1911
Les Paul b. 1915
Wes Montgomery b. 1923

Chet Atkins b. 1924
Chuck Berry b. 1926
Derek Bailey b. 1930
John Fahey b. 1939
Jimi Hendrix b. 1942

Jeff Beck b. 1944
Neil Young b. 1945
Allan Holdsworth b. 1946
Paco de Lucia b. 1947
Carlos Santana b. 1947

Larry Carlton b. 1948
Stevie Ray Vaughan b. 1954
Eddie Van Halen b. 1955
Kurt Cobain b. 1969
Derek Trucks b. 1979

What do you think? I tried to look at different styles, not just flashy BDR-type* players.

But...20? It doesn't even scratch the surface. The real truth is probably that you might be able to pick 20 guitarists in the specific style you like and listen to, and then present them as a group without ranking. I saw one such list of bluegrass flat-picking guitarists. Or you could pick 20 from a particular era, or divide them by some quality or property like most influential or most popular.

My friend Kim, who posts those "C60Crew" mixes on MixCloud, knows about twenty times as much as I do about guitarists. Maybe that's giving me too much credit. But I asked him for help with some list or other a long time ago (was it my Jazz Starter Kit list? I don't remember), and he said, "I hate lists. I don't even think like that."

Ever since then, I've been sort of suspicious of my affection for listmaking.

Anyway, I'm hoping you might educate me on the topic of great guitarists. I'm sure to learn something....

Mike

*Big dumb rock. A friend used to refer to the radio station DC101 in Washington D.C. back in the '80s as "the BDR station."

Book of Interest this week:

The Education of a Photographer, Edited by Charles H. Traub, Steven Heller, and Adam B. Bell, Allworth Press, 2006, 256 pages. A small but rich gold mine of short essays and interviews by and about photographers. Also available from The Book Depository with 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:

dkreithen: "OK, I'll bite: you missed all the Nashville session guys. An imperfect and partial list would include Glen Campbell, Albert Lee, James Burton, Jimmy Capps, Bryan Sutton, and, to me, the greatest living guitarist, Jerry Douglas (but he plays dobro). Those are only the ones that I know the names of. Also, the LA crowd, including Carol Kaye and Tommy Tedesco. In addition, Ry Cooder should be on or near your list. Many of the ones you have listed I would call 'stylists' rather than all-around greats, including: Kurt Cobain (really?), Stevie Ray Vaughn, Van Halen, Neil Young, Chuck Berry. Some of them are notable and individualistic, but hardly great. I would put most rock guitarists in that category. If you want great stylists, you missed folks like Bo Diddley (truly inventive), Buddy Guy, James Williamson, Robert Quine, Billy Zoom, Dave Davies, etc. Your real omission are the session guys (and gals). They don't have household names, but they tend to be the best."

Mike replies: One of my faves among the session guys is Elliott Randall. Jimmy Page's favorite guitar solo is Elliott Randall's on Steely Dan's "Reelin' in the Years." Page supposedly once said it was "a 12 out of 10."

Grant: "Mike, perhaps you would better understand your affection for lists, if you just made a list of things that you like about lists. Just sayin'."

Michael Allen: "Great topic for a Sunday, Mike. I'll weigh in from the Canadian perspective. One of the wellsprings of Canadian guitar is Bruce Cockburn. While best known as an edgy songwriter, his playing has influenced no end of Canadian artists for more than a generation. An apocryphal tale has a Rolling Stone interviewer asking Van Halen what it's like to be the best guitarist in the world, his reply being 'ask Bruce Cockburn.' Probably not true, but with enough potential substance to remain in circulation. Check out his 2005 instrumental album, 'Speechless.' Not at all splashy, but it nourishes me. Cockburn downplayed his technique, feeling that he was a pretty good player for a lyricist.

"It's a pretty straight line from Bruce to Don Ross, who cannot be described. Don won the National Fingerstyle Guitar Championship twice, and to see him play is jaw-dropping (he calls it 'heavy wood'). Keep safe. Mike Allen (Vancouver)."

Robert: "No real arguments (it's a personal list after all), but I would include at least two others that you have not: Roy Buchanan and Tommy Emmanuel (an Australian). And perhaps another Australian (I am from there, so biased): John Williams."

Tippler (partial comment): "Unless you’re cultured enough and have heard every guitarist of all times, you would not know if you missed one that should be on the list. And suppose you did happen to hear every guitarist, you may not know enough about a particular genre of guitar to be able to discern greatness."

Mike replies: Very true, very true. There are whole genres I never listen to. Metal, for one. I wouldn't know Dave Mustaine from Kirk Hammett.

CRM (partial comment): "I think that almost everyone that I would add has already been mentioned. A dozen or two in the comments that I don’t know. I will be wandering around YouTube for the next week."

Mike replies: The great discovery for me of this post so far has been Sylvain Luc. Wonderful. Suggested by Williiam.

Mike Plews (partial comment): "One of the strangest and most wonderful albums I own is a Hank Williams tribute record by Joe Pass and Roy Clark. Turns out they had been fans of each other for years and didn't know."

Ed. note: Here's the link.

Mark Roberts: "Speaking of Allan Holdsworth, here's a great video that breaks down one of his mind-blowing licks. It's beautiful to see how it's constructed and amazing to think that such a complex part could be improvised. (And be aware that Rick Beato's YouTube channel can be a serious time sink!)"

Simon: "Lots of great names here, both in Mike's list and the suggestions. Zyni Moë beat me to add a name that I didn't think I'd see—Johnny Marr of The Smiths. Very distinctive and influential. I was also pleased to see Martin Taylor and would also suggest Martin Simpson. One way of settling on a genuinely 'greatest' list is to get the choice of the players that have been nominated. You should end up with a clearer idea of who the ultimate 'guitarist's guitarists' might be. As a player, much as I admire shredders, I'd second Steve Rosenblum's suggestion of David Gilmour. I never tire of Comfortably Numb (particularly the live Pompeii recording) and Another Brick In The Wall Part II."

Dillan: "I know this is an impossible task, but you've left off some true innovators: Freddie King, who influenced everything from surf music to good old roadhouse blues, Link Wray who's innovations led the way from early countryfied rock to the harder sounds of the late '60s, and Dick Dale, who brought a Middle Eastern vibe to surf guitar.

"I humbly submit the subdued, but hugely influential sound of Steve Cropper to this list. Without him, the Stax R & B sound wouldn't exist. His sound reverberates through music today. I would also point out Jerry Garcia, who had a very unique sound. I personally can listen to the man play for hours. I would also consider J.J. Cale, who had a very unique and influential sound. Eric Clapton, Peter Green, Mick Taylor, Jimmy Page, Keith Richards, Pete Townshend, and Mark Knopfler all deserve mention. None were really innovators, but all are profoundly skilled. Speaking of profoundly skilled, Glen Campbell? He was truly awesome! One more to consider, now that I'm thinking: Ry Cooder. He seems like a true master to me. I really enjoyed this article. I know we're all forgetting artists who belong on this list, but it's just for fun anyway. Thank you very much for publishing it!"

Mike replies: A number of musicians would be on my personal favorites list, including Mick Taylor, Freddie King, J.J. Cale, Johnny Marr, and Peter Green, not to mention several jazz greats. Neil Young probably belongs on my personal favorites list and not on a GOAT list. See, this makes me happy, but isn't it silly? Like it matters. I guess it's a good way to talk about it and think about it.

John McMillin: "Pat Metheny's been around for such a long time that he tends to be taken for granted, or remembered only for his popular work in the jazz-rock crossover days of the 'eighties. Since that time, I've seen him tear it up on a beat-up Gibson jazz electric, the wailing Roland guitar sythesizer, various tender nylon-strong acoustics, and the four-necked Pikasso harp guitar that he devised. He's played with dozens of the top jazz musicians all the way back to veterans of Miles Davis's band, but also an 80-piece orchestra of robotically played instruments. Pat's latest release features his intricate compositions performed by a classical guitar quartet. What other guitarist shows that kind of broad range?

"Pat never rests on his laurels. He's well-known for practicing for hours after playing a concert. I've heard that once he practiced for two hours before a gig at his son's birthday party. He's written over 500 songs, and some have entered the jazz canon; guitarist John Pizzarelli just released an album of Metheny covers.

"Metheny's maximalist approach has included exotic instruments, world music, 'found sounds' and plenty of leading-edge technology, which leads him outside the jazz mainstream. In concert, he'll expand the musical palette from a whisper to a roar. At the core of it all is his deep melodicism, as expressed in rich chords and single notes that are as fluid and flexible as a violinist's. What he's expressing is always complex, and humane and warm...except for a couple of wild free jazz and noise albums that even this superfan can't withstand. That's the mark of a musical leader, someone who'll take you beyond where you didn't know you wanted to go."

David Aschkenas: "I might have missed it, but certainly Roy Buchanan and Danny Gatten should be on the list. I did a couple of album covers for Roy back in the '70s."

In Appreciation for David Thorpe

Wise, insightful, modest, honest, sensible, informed, mature...those are some of the adjectives that spring to mind when describing David Thorpe. Micro 4/3 users will no doubt be familiar with some of his many camera and lens videos. If you don't know him already, sample a David Thorpe video or two to see how such things are done when they're done as they ought to be.

A short voice-only message posted a few days ago brings the unwelcome news that he has suffered an illness and is saying goodbye.

Never an arm-waver or shouter, he didn't glorify himself. What came through in the videos and through his gentle, articulate voice and easygoing, respectful manner was, here's a friend we can trust.

We hardly knew ye, as the song said, but God Bless you all the same, David—you're one of the very best.

Mike

UPDATE: There's a nice bio page here. Thanks to Trevor Johnson for suggesting this.

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:

Steve Rosenblum: "I loved David's voice and the quality of his videos. I generally avoid YouTube camera gear reviews because they are frequently done by inexperienced photographers who have used the gear for a few hours only and really have nothing to offer in my opinion. David brought a very long and deep experience to his reviews which I really appreciated. And maybe I'm just an American who is too much of a sucker for a beautiful British accent, but I find his voice a pleasure to listen to. I am deeply saddened by whatever health crisis he now faces and wish him a compassionate journey."

Paul B: "As a Micro 4/3 user, I have found David’s videos to be an invaluable resource. If you use this format you will be well served to view them. I appreciate his style—calm, honest evaluation, and no hyperbole. As a proponent and champion of our format, and as just a fine person, he will be greatly missed if this is indeed the end. My prayers are for a full recovery! Best wishes, David, and a warm-hearted thanks!"

The Missing Featured Comments for the 'Menu Problem' Post

Ed. note: These are so late I figured I'd give them their own post. Sorry for the delay! The links and suggestions kept sending me down rabbit holes.

Here's the original post: How To REALLY Fix the Menu Problem, from this past Thursday.

JOHN B GILLOOLY: "I think that sounds great. It would also really familiarize the new owner with all of the capabilities of the camera. Most people, myself included, usually only scratch the surface of some of the tech innovations within the camera."

Bruce Bordner: "I've done things like this, and it starts out simple. The camera companies could easily do a setting-setting app or interactive website. However, I think what you really want/need is Thom Hogan in an app, with a few others to answer 'why would I need that?' Demos of effects would be great...now we're talking some real money with AI and gotta have blockchain, bro! It's still worth a start, but I think it has to start with the camera designers. They have to compete and cooperate with cell phones anyway. Why not add some image processing in your phone.... Now you got me going dang it!"

Malcolm Myers: "I've basically had similar thoughts for years: set your camera up on your computer. Want a faux-Leica? Turn everything off and shoot! Want your own menus? Great, set them up! Want different profiles for different situations? No problem! Two bodies? Make them the same! I'm amazed no-one's done it."

Speed: "There is a very large camera company which also manufactures printers. These printers are set up and controlled by users' personal computers. My experiences with printer setup has been...not good. The last thing I want in this world is having this or any other camera company writing more software to 'help' set up my camera or anything else. Their user manuals are bad enough. Eventually some camera manufacturer will do it. It will be painful and costly. In time it will become the norm but I'll wait for version three.

"As a software developer friend (I don't hold it against him) often reminds me, 'Software is hard.'"

Keith: "This is actually a well thought out concept, and could be carried over to many other items as well. How many off us still struggle with programming the VCR to record 'Sanford and Son'? Yes I'm being a bit sarcastic there, but I recall VCR's as being one of the first consumer items that was widely regarded as a bit of a user interface vs. user manual nightmare. Working in the field of industrial automation, I see this with many of the newer electronic components. From photo-eye sensors that have multiple pages of programming options, to basic control modules that require a full Ethernet setup for that device plus anything connected to it. I recently installed a small temperature controller (about the size of a four-pack of 120 roll film) that had nearly a 400-page manual. Companies that recognize this and implement a program to bridge the gap between their products and end users' understandings will have an edge on their competitors."

Robert: "A great idea Mike. Sign me up. There are examples of this in other technologies. For example, Logitech has a 'lead you through it' app for setting up their all-in-one remotes. You then download the setup to the device. It's not the world's best software, but it's better than the alternative."

Peter Wright: "This is such an obvious idea that I keep wondering why it has not been done. It would be I believe a major selling feature for a large part of the buying public. It could even have kept me using the Olympus EM-1 Mark II."

Kirk Tuck: "Or you could just buy into a system with a very well-designed menu system. The Leica SL2 is a joy to configure. It reinforces the idea that Olympus and Sony menus are first translated from Martian and then to Plutonian and only, finally to a human language. The one flaw with your idea is the need to have a computer just to be able to initially access your camera. We should be going the other direction and try to figure out more and more how not to go to the computer first. Leica; three buttons and a joy stick. That's it. Check it out if you are looking for simplicity in an interface. And a very logical menu."

JH: "I suggested this to several camera company reps in 2003 when I bought a Nikon D100 and again after buying an Olympus Micro 4/3 camera in 2010. The Oly U.S. rep I corresponded with told me they never passed suggestions along to the factory because they had been told that they did not want to get sued by somebody who claimed their idea was stolen. Actually I suspected the real reason was the NIH syndrome—not invented here."

Mike replies: Years ago I made some detailed suggestions to a hi-fi manufacturer. The VP (there were only a few principals at the company) entered into an involved discussion with me as to why they would never take my suggestions, with several rounds of long back-and-forth emails as I tried to persuade him that my ideas were good ones. He reported back to me about the reactions of others in the company, including engineers.

A year later, the company implemented all of my suggestions exactly as I had outlined them. When I contacted my 'friend' the VP to express my pleasure, to my astonishment he insisted he had never heard of me before, that our correspondence had never taken place, and that their actions were independent, were developed completely in-house, and could not possibly have had anything to do with me. I felt like I was being gaslighted! When I mentioned this odd development to friends in business, it was explained to me that they were probably afraid I would want to be paid if they acknowledged me. I had never asked for pay and I never had any expectation of payment, but it must be a problem for companies.

Anyway I don't do that any more.

David Dyer-Bennet: "I would never consider buying a camera that depended on an external website for configuration! The site might not last as long as the camera. Maybe, as a local app, taking advantage of the greater power and space on a computer compared to the camera; that could work. Also doesn't freeze out people working far away from Internet access."

Adam Lanigan: "I think there would also be a ton of value in your approach to the camera company as well, as this approach would really allow them to understand the features their customers actually use, how they set up their cameras, level of experience, how often they change that setup later on, etc., etc."

John Krumm: "Still sounds complicated! I would like my menus to look like Hasselblad's do now."

Alex Mercado: "'We are sorry, but the page you are looking for cannot be found. Click here to browse our latest selection of cameras.' I can't help but think one would vehemently regret such a solution, the very moment your camera's menus-on-a-website returns a 404 error."

Ed Hawco: "Mike, you might recall that I suggested essentially this on this very blog in a comment in October 2011. Specifically: 'Self-configurable menus. Not by jerking around with the buttons on the camera back, but by uploading a configuration file to your computer where a nice user-friendly GUI lets you drag & drop menu items around until you have menus that make sense to you. You can bury (or even remove) all the silly functions you don't care about and arrange the frequently used ones at the top where you can find them easily. Re-download to your camera and bingo, customized menus.'"

Mike replies: I wouldn't be surprised if that's where I got the idea! Could have happened. After moderating ~250,000 comments, I've learned a huge amount from others here. And by the way, many of your comments over the years have been great ones.

Scott Abbey: "This sort of user interface has been in use for many years in other fields. For instance, I use a multi-effects pedal board which allows me to have different guitar effects—reverb, equalization, compression, and many others. While the one I now use (a Line 6 Helix) has a pretty robust on-device UI, it also has a PC app which makes it even easier to configure, and it also lets you store sets of configurations which you can load as needed—your settings for a wedding gig, and another set for that thrash metal band you also play in. Why camera manufacturers have never done this is beyond me. It ain’t rocket science."

Mike replies: Speaking of which, the other day a reader called ghmcs recommended Gary Friedman's series of guides to Sony cameras—for instance this one about the A6100 and A6600 (search "Friedman Archives" on Amazon for others). Anyway, Gary Friedman literally used to be a rocket scientist!  :-)

Sroyon: "What a great idea. Could go even further (though I don't know if it's feasible in terms of computing power) and six months later, let you run an analysis of the metadata in your Lightroom gallery or whatever other archive, coming up with suggestions like 'You haven't used X in six months, do you still wish to keep it in your menu options?' or 'You appear to use Y frequently, do you want to assign it to a custom button?'"

Ed. note: The following two comments came in one right after the other, just as you see here, no foolin':

Joseph Reid: "Fantastic idea! You could store the settings on a card or just tether the camera for the setup routine. I wonder what Thom Hogan would say about how likely it is that camera makers would do this."

Thom Hogan: "I've been advocating something different for years (decades?). That something different is 'named settings files' that can be saved/loaded. You could supplement that with a computer/tablet/phone application that creates/manages such files, but it's not necessary. Why isn't it necessary? Because there's a huge ecosystem out there that would develop and distribute such files. I'm finishing up a book (!) on setting up a Sony A1. I could easily provide some named settings files if only Sony allowed it.  ;~)  "

Peter: "This is the best post / idea that you have had in the many years that I have been reading your blog. Well Done."

Harry B Houchins: "Brilliant idea, but sadly impractical...."

Thanks to you if you left any comment, 'Featured' or not! (I'm going to dispense with the end matter on this post, as it's not really a separate post. I'm sure there will be comments on this; should I then do Featured Comments on these Featured Comments? Talk about rabbit holes....)

—Mike the Ed.

Sigma's Little Gem

Hey, I think I'm becoming a fan of Sigma lenses.

I was impressed when I tried and wrote about the Sigma 35mm ƒ/1.4 ART in 2016. It's a fine lens that was enjoyable to use and performed admirably. I could see it being a "happily ever after" lens for a DSLR user.

I mentioned last week that Sony has effectively kept me away from its APS-C cameras by not offering a reasonably-priced option for the kind of basic normal-wide prime I like for general shooting. The Sony Zeiss 24mm ƒ/1.8 ZA is a nice enough lens (and I have history with Zeiss, which makes it even more attractive), but it's way more expensive than it should be for its spec. Its price of $1,100 is excessive for a "crop-sensor" lens of modest maximum aperture with no aperture ring and no stabilization, and performance that's very good but not absolutely great. At half its price it would still be expensive. Were it truly a standout lens, I'd stretch for it; but as it is, I have to face the fact: I'm too much of a cheapskate to be happy spending that much for that lens. It's my problem, not anybody else's necessarily. It's just that every time I think about how nice it would be to get back into Sony APS-C, I always end up thinking naw, because then I'd have to buy one of those Zeiss 24mms.

So I found a budget lens as a price-conscious substitute: the Sigma 30mm ƒ/1.4 DC DN Contemporary, which has an angle of view similar to a 45mm on full-frame.

It's one of a "Trio" of Sigma Contemporary primes for Sony E-mount APS-C. The Trio consists of the 16mm (24mm-e)  ƒ/1.4 Contemporary, the 30mm, and the 56mm (85mm-e) ƒ/1.4 Contemporary. You can also buy all three as a set with a fitted case at B&H—for the same price as the Sony 24mm alone. (The case is also available from B&H separately.)

The 30mm Contemporary by itself is decidedly inexpensive. It's listed at $289 by Sigma America, and you can check the current price at B&H Photo and Amazon. That's budget territory, as good a bargain as my once-beloved Panasonic 20mm for Micro 4/3, and even cheaper than the just-refreshed and much-lauded Fuji 27mm pancake, which is a whole two stops slower. At its price, I figured it's bound to have compromises. Especially in that it's an ƒ/1.4 lens. So the question was, would it be adequate but just not up to minimum standards, or adequate but good enough to live with for the price?

That's a big, important dividing line. After all these years, I've experienced the difference again and again. Call it the line between economy and false economy.

Ironically, the higher the price, the higher my standards. I have disliked $3,500 lenses, not because they're not better than lenses costing 1/5th as much, but because they just don't seem worth the high tariff. That makes me relatively easier to please with a very inexpensive lens like the 30mm Contemporary. Given Sigma's lately much-improved reputation as a legitimate maker of top-flight, no-excuses lenses, I figured it would stand a pretty good chance of being good enough for the money. My Sigma 60mm DN ART (discontinued) is good enough for the money; I kept that one.

Shock
To my surprise, the Sigma 30mm ƒ/1.4 Contemporary vastly exceeded my expectations last week. Not just exceeded; crushed 'em. It blew the doors off "adequate" and left "good enough" in the dust. This is an excellent lens by any standard. In fact, it's so good I'm left wondering: could this lens actually be better than the $1,100 Zeiss lens? Not just "do I like it more," but objectively better? It's in the hunt.

For the price, then, it becomes a spectacular bargain. It could certainly at least be compared to other wide/normal primes for the format regardless of price, and it's unusually affordable. That's a relatively rare combination.

I do have some questions. A week with a lens when I'm trying to review the camera isn't quite enough time; there were a few things that need to be investigated more thoroughly. But thanks to a kind reader who donated it, I have an A6000 here (thanks again, George), so I'm able to test e-mount lenses. I hadn't been planning to, but now I intend to go Full Mikey on this little gem and put it through its paces.

It's definitely worth a second look. Hey Sigma!

Mike

TOP is off on Saturdays. Have a nice mid-May weekend, and see you on Sunday.

Book of Interest this week:

The Education of a Photographer, Edited by Charles H. Traub, Steven Heller, and Adam B. Bell, Allworth Press, 2006, 256 pages. A small but rich gold mine of short essays and interviews by and about photographers. Also available from The Book Depository with 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:

Kenneth Tanaka: "Re 'For the price, then, it becomes a spectacular bargain. It could certainly at least be compared to other wide/normal primes for the format regardless of price, and it's unusually affordable': I hear ya. During the past pandemic year I dived into the L-mount world with a Leica SL2. With too much time on my hands I took the plunge into Sigma's full-frame 'Contemporary' DG DN 24mm ƒ/3.5, 35mm ƒ/2, 45mm ƒ/2.8, and 65mm ƒ/2 lenses. Wow. Comparing them to Leica's very costly 35mm, 50mm and 75mm APO Summicron lenses I can't discern which is which. The Sigmas' image qualities are absolutely comparable to the Leica's, the all-metal build quality is superb, the weather-resistant gaskets provide the same damp-proofing, and the Sigmas are a fraction of the bulk and weight of the Leicas. Additionally, Leica's new 24–70mm L-mount lens is embarrassingly obviously a Sigma rebrand, a lens that also is outstanding. Sigma is indeed kicking ass these days on the lens front!"

Craig Yuill: "Sigma is indeed producing some of the finest lenses these days. The Sigma 100–400mm Contemporary lens has been my most-used lens for the last two years. It’s a great lens, and is a bargain compared to similar lenses from Nikon, Canon, Sony, et al."

How To REALLY Fix the Menu Problem

I really want someone to switch camera setup to interactive screens online which you then transfer to the camera. That way everything could be explained adequately and systematically. Cameras are just too complicated now for paper manuals and mazes of menus. But that's a different post for a different day.

—Me, yesterday

Okay, here's my idea. I can't believe I haven't written about this before, because it's been in my head for years. But apparently I haven't.

The best way to fix the menu problem would be with an interactive setup/tutorial website that transfers your chosen settings to your camera.

You buy a new camera. The first thing you do when you get it is to plug it in to your computer and go to the dedicated setup website.

The website is takes you through a setup tutorial, in stages. First it ascertains your basic level—new to photography, experienced, or expert. That's to prevent you from having to wade through explanations of plane-of-focus and what tracking is and what ISO means, if you don't need that. If the level you choose is too confusing to you, just revert to the next one down.

Then it runs you through a sensible explanation of the various features available and what they mean and what they allow you to do—most maybe a paragraph long but expandable if you need more information about it—and asks you if you want that feature available. As you go through page after page of the website, it asks you how you want the camera configured, and you make your selections.

You would assign functions to buttons at that time, set up the custom modes the control (PASM) dial, pick the focus mode setups you want to have available to you, and so forth.

Ideally it would let you configure the menus themselves by adding or deleting items, such that the menus contained the things you might need to change on the fly but not everything else. For example, if you always process your JPEGs in post you simply wouldn't need any of the JPEG processing options.

Then you load this "customized firmware" into your camera and a.) you've got every capability you need; b.) it's where you want it, because you put it there; and b.) you know what all of your menu items mean because you chose them and you've read through the explanations of every menu item that exists on your camera.

Note that the interactive website itself would be effectively customizable too, because you'd be asked if you want things as you go along. For me, for instance: do you want to set up flash? Nope. GPS? No thanks. Tethering options, radio control, video? No thank you, no thank you. Makes the interactive website simpler and more streamlined, you see? If you're really a geek (I don't use that term as a perjorative) then you can happily dig as deep as you want and include all sorts of esoterica in your selections.

This just seems logical to me. In my experience, there are virtually no photographers who use, or want, every capability of their digital cameras. Virtually everybody just wants a subset of "everything," whether it's a small subset or a large one. And there are many things that, even if we have them available, we don't need to have access to them in the field, i.e., when we're out photographing—we could come back to the computer and re-configure the camera prior to a specialized shoot or job, for example.

The fewer button-pushes you have to make in the field, the better. Sony realized this when it set up some of its AF options to automatically revert to certain behaviors without having to select them in the menus. (See: Eye-AF.)

But never say never
I'm sure there are lots of reasons why this will "never" happen, but it's not my job to only talk about things that are immediately feasible based on current customs and norms. I look at things from the perspective of the photography enthusiast. That's whose interests I care about.

Mike

Book of Interest this week:

The Education of a Photographer, Edited by Charles H. Traub, Steven Heller, and Adam B. Bell, Allworth Press, 2006, 256 pages. A small but rich gold mine of short essays and interviews by and about photographers. Also available from The Book Depository with 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:

Sony A6600 VERDICT

The Sony A6600 goes back to Roger today...

...And I haven't managed to get through one battery charge.

I mean, it's almost embarrassing. I've had the camera for a week. I shot with it every day. I'm not a heavy shooter, granted. But I've shot a lot, for me. What is wrong with me—don't I chimp enough?

I meet some friends on Tuesdays for a noon walk on the Outlet Trail, and yesterday I looked at the charge level before setting out and saw 29%, and I thought, good, this will kill it. I shot for an hour, more or less. Then I shot some more when the dogs were at the vet for their shots ($618, for a well visit for two healthy dogs. I had to wait for them outside, so I wandered into a nearby field and commenced taking pictures of clouds). And the battery still isn't dead. This morning it reads 8% left. One thing I would not do: get an extra battery for this camera. One will do.

VERDICT: Sony's A6600 gets an "A" from me. Not an A+, because it still has Sony's confusing "old" menus (I had to look up how to turn the beep off, for god's sake...it's under "Audio Signals"), and Sony's longtime practice of making the 4-way pad into a dial is an idea that needs to have a stake driven through its heart. When I need to quickly change the EC or aperture, probably the thing I least want to do is inadvertently activate the Display or Drive modes or whatever by pressing too hard as I try to get the damn dial to turn. You can probably tell by my attitude that I did that a few too many times this past week. As far as the menus are concerned, if you don't think they're a Gothic horror it means you haven't delved into them far enough. Keep on menu-diving. It's like being lost in an endless and terrifying cave. (I really want someone to switch camera setup to interactive screens online which you then transfer to the camera. That way everything could be explained adequately and systematically. Cameras are just too complicated now for paper manuals and mazes of menus. But that's a different post for a different day.)

Worker, Birkett Mills, Penn Yan, New York. Sony A6600.

Top things I loved: the build quality as I've already mentioned; the autofocusing; the big satisfying grip (if Sony doesn't retain this exact grip on the replacement camera somebody should be fired (I write "fired" only because "beheaded" is too strong); and the results. Especially the results. I like Sony's default color; I like the lovely smooth sharpness of the files with the Sigma lens; and the files play great with ACR and Photoshop, which are what I use. One thing (among many) I didn't get around to during the week was a direct showdown with the X-H1, but any results probably would have been too specific to lenses, settings and software anyway. In truth I wasn't curious enough. But the Sony files really "nourish your enthusiasm" to use Ansel's phrase.

I—well, let's be honest, someone—could probably write several long posts on the Sony's focus modes alone, but it certainly is a lot of fun to play with. One that might be old hat to some of you but was new (and hence magic) to me was the ability to tap on the screen to indicate what you want to focus on, and then have the camera's focus grab on to that and cling to it no matter where the thing itself moves or how you move the camera around. I'm still experimenting with focus setups as I send the camera back. Warning, though, the focusing setups are very complicated and you'll need a guide to sort through the options. I'm sure I would pick two and then use the two Memory Recall settings on the Mode Dial to access them quickly.

Focus modes and performance alone are sufficient reason to buy a Sony camera. Explore some YouTube tutorials and you'll see what I mean.

Like it or not
Anyway, this isn't a review. I just wanted to try the A6600 for context, in case I get a chance to try out the successor camera that's expected later this month.

What usually happens when I try a new camera is that I like it or I don't. If I don't like it, then I have an obligation to be fair and look at its good points impartially, to try to understand the ways other peoples' tastes differ from mine. If I do like it, then I have to work to be objective and not gloss over or minimize its shortcomings.

Bottom line is, I don't like the Sony A6600...I love it. It's so good and so satisfying to use that I immediately want to just dismiss or wave away any shortcomings. I'd deal with it, never mind. It wouldn't be a chore to learn its features and operation thoroughly...it would be worth it. Personally, I don't mind that this sensor has 24 MP and that it only has one card slot; I don't mind at all that it doesn't take UHS-II cards, or that its EVF doesn't quite come up to the standards of the best. I'm still having difficulty restraining myself from going out and buying one. But I don't need another camera, and anyway it wouldn't make much sense to buy this before at least checking out the replacement.

Will it be a replacement, though? It's looking right now like the upcoming new APS-C camera will be re-imagined rather than just refined. I know that the other day I suggested it might be time for that, but the problem is that the company will take it in the opposite direction of where I'd want to go. I'm a stills photographer. We've already seen predictions that Sony is going to position the new one as a "vlogger's camera," which means they'll probably be taking it further away from what I'd want it to be, and spending a lot of development effort on things I don't care about and would just as soon my camera didn't have at all. (You know what they say: Oh well.)

In light of all that, I wonder if the A6600 will stay in the lineup too. At its sale price of $1,200, say, it would likely to be a significant numbers of hundreds of dollars less than the replacement camera, yet it's a distinct step up from the A6300. That would seem to leave a place for the A6600 between the upcoming "flagship" and the A6300.

This is the kind of thing I usually don't speculate on. Speculation about upcoming products and things like market positioning seems mostly pointless to me...I'm not a business enthusiast, I'm just a guy who likes pictures. I'd mostly rather just be patient and wait and see. What will be will be. But in this case I'm curious. After all, the A6600 is still a new camera by any rational standard—not even two years old.

But if this does turn out to be the last of the A6xxx cameras and it is indeed just about to go away, it's a fitting final evolution of this popular and long-lived series. It's a beautiful, satisfying little camera, capable of great things.

Mike

Big thanks to the gang at LensRentals for the week-long loan of the camera. If you've never rented a camera, you should try it at least once. The folks at LensRentals make it about as painless as possible. And it's really a lot of fun to try things for yourself.

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:

BugManDan: "Online settings config may be the best idea I've heard this year. Especially if it would allow you to hide all the stuff you don't care about. Make it as simple or as complicated as you want."

ghmcs: "Let me put in a plug for Gary Friedman's series of guides to Sony cameras. He has written at length on Sony focus modes, as well as features that you would be hard pressed to discover on your own."

Luke: "As the Imaging Resource lab drudge for twelve years, I went completely through every menu on every camera we tested—probably a couple thousand. I never found Sony menus to be any worse than any others. Olympus, however, often made me shout 'WTF??,' and grab for the manual just to decipher utterly meaningless menu phrases. Once you know what a Sony camera is capable of, the menus are fairly straightforward. Yep, audio signals are in 'audio settings.'"

About That Carters-Bidens Picture

The picture, which is making the rounds to an impressive extent, is an excellent example of what's called perspective distortion. The picture has gone viral all over the world because of an optical illusion that makes President Biden look like a giant next to a diminutive Mrs. Carter.

It originated as a tweet from the Carter Center. No photographer is named; possibly it was a functionary or employee of the Center using a camera that has a wide-angle lens. It's even possible it was a smartphone camera. Phone modules are getting very wide now, which is historically an interesting development—an amateur who had an "ultrawide" as wide as 24mm in the 1970s would probably have been the exception to the rule (28mm was the standard wide angle). Certainly anyone who had anything wider than 20mm in those days would have been rare. But the iPhone 12 Pro Max has an ultrawide lens of ƒ/2.4 with a 120° angle of view, which is "equivalent" in field angle to approximately a 10.5mm lens on full frame. Even in this century many dedicated amateurs have not owned lenses that wide. I never have.

A seasoned photographer might not have been caught out like this; experience would have suggested a different arrangement of the subjects. Although I imagine a professional in that situation might not have had much choice—you don't order Presidents and First Ladies around, and you might not be given much in the way of time.

So what's going on here?

Usually, when a photograph creates an optical illusion, it's a combination of several factors, all of which reinforce each other. In this case, people, particularly women, really do shrink as they age. My great-aunt Dickie, who lived to be nearly 102, lost approximately five inches of her prime-of-life height by the time she was a centenarian. (I can estimate this because I have a picture of her in her 90s standing side-by-side next to my mother, who told me they used to be the same height.) So there's a good possibility that Rosalynn Carter, who is 93, has "wizened" somewhat and really does have a smaller and more frail body than she did in midlife. Since our heads don't shrink (our eyes also stay the same size throughout life), that can make older people look a little like they have oversized heads.

Just as a long focal length lens is said to "compress" or "flatten" scenes (really, that's just perspective too), so a wide-angle lens can exaggerate the distance between nearer and farther subjects—it's all in the relative distance from camera position. But this happens in the imaging of single objects as well. I set up a quick demo so you can see what I mean. Ideally I would have had two balls, so I could set them in the same relationship and Joe and Rosalynn's heads, but I only had one old soccer ball my son left at the house years ago, and I ain't that dedicated. Watch what happens to the image of the ball when I put it in the corner of the frame at various focal lengths:

First of all, here it is at 80mm. The camera is maybe 15–20 feet away from the ball. The perspective is relatively "flattened" and the soccer ball looks round.

Now here we are at 24mm, traditionally considered the border between "wide-angle" and "ultrawide-angle." The most obvious change is that the ball is getting oblong, but look especially at the relative sizes of the two chairs.

Finally, here it is at 14mm, which is ultrawide by anyone's definition. Camera position is now very close—note that in the top picture we see the right-hand sides of the boxes and now we're seeing the left-hand sides—and the relative distances from camera position are exaggerated. The ball is very distorted and no longer looks round, and the sizes of the two exaggerates the distance between them even more. 

Perspective distortion is more evident the farther the imaged object is from the center of the frame. Even in the 14mm shot, if I had put the ball in the exact center of the frame, it would have looked exactly round.

In the Carters-Bidens photograph, the most obvious sign of perspective distortion is actually Jimmy Carter's feet. Because he's not sitting forward, and his feet are out in front of him somewhat and near the edge of the frame, the same thing is happening to them as is happening to our soccer ball. They look way too big for his head.

What could the photographer have done differently? A professional would surely have been alert to the pitfalls that did in fact end up creating the . Again, he or she might not have had much control. It's tough to stage-manage famous subjects, especially older people on whom it might be an imposition. I have trouble imagining myself telling 96-year-old Jimmy Carter to sit up straight!

I can't tell, but it looks like the thing above President Biden's left shoulder is the open door of a cabinet—perhaps a door that hides a television. If that could be shut and gotten out of the way, I would have simply asked the Bidens to position themselves so each had a bit of one arm and one shoulder behind the armchairs in which their counterparts are sitting.

Of course, then no one would have heard of the picture...so....

It's worth mentioning here that public familuiarity with, and tolerance for, wide-angle perspectives has increased greatly over the past century. Even what we now call "moderate" wide angle lenses were difficult and expensive to produce in the past, and viewers were much more sensitive to their characteristic distortions. Now, we look at something like the top-left framed picture on the Carters' wall and have no trouble "reading" it. But its strange trapezoidal shape might have been disturbing to a viewer in the 1930s or earlier. We tend to have little trouble with Jimmy Carter's feet being imaged the way they are, but even that might have looked flagrantly absurd to our great-grandparents.

So it's a combination of a number of things, all of them reinforcing the same illusion. Joe Biden being both bigger as well as taller, in his kneeling position, than Rosalynn Carter; her frailty of body because of her advanced age; the fact that President Biden is both closer to the camera position and also farther toward the edge of the frame, and leaning forward, presumably to clear that "door" or whatever it is in back of him; and the perspective distortion because of the wide-angle lens used presumably because of limited space.

But if nothing else, it's a nice example of this effect, and of the illusions it can create.

Mike

[UPDATE: The photo was taken by White House photographer Adam Schultz. Thanks to Sharon and others for this.]

Book of Interest this week:

The Education of a Photographer, Edited by Charles H. Traub, Steven Heller, and Adam B. Bell, Allworth Press, 2006, 256 pages. A small but rich gold mine of short essays and interviews by and about photographers. Also available from The Book Depository with 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:

Ken Bennett (partial comment): "I photographed President Carter a few years ago. He’s a total pro. He would have happily followed any directions. Great guy."

Sharon: "According to the New York Times, Adam Schultz, the official White House photographer took the Biden/Carter photo."

Mike replies: Thank you Sharon. I should have done a little more due diligence on that one—my policy is to try to credit photographers by name wherever possible.

Richard T.: "I fear you may get inundated with this reference, but the New York Times has a brief comment from the photographer: 'Reached by phone Adam Schultz, the chief official White House photographer, confirmed that he took the photo but declined to explain. "It’s for people to figure out and think about," he said.'"

Soeren Engelbrecht: "This is also why you would generally not use a wide-angle lens for a 'passport photo' style of portrait. If you are five feet away from the person's nose with a tele lens, the ears are at about 5 ½ feet. So the ears and nose appear to be approximately the same size (which they are, if you measure them), since they are approximately at the same distance from the camera. Would you instead move in with an ultrawide lens—say, the nose being six inches from the camera, the ears would be at 12 inches, i.e., twice as far away as the nose. Hence, the nose now looks much bigger than the ears. Exact same thing as will, henceforth, be known as the 'Presidential scale phenomenon.'  :-)  "

Dan Westergren: "Don't know if this link will work, but here's what the PJ community thinks of this photo. It appears to have been taken by the Pro White House photographer; I would sum this up to the photographer having little to no control of the situation."

Craig Yuill: "I can relate to this big time. Years ago I was asked by a friend to take pictures of his family. One photo involved having my friend and his twin brother sit on the arms of a living room chair, flanking their grandmother, who was sitting in the chair. Their two other brothers stood behind the chair. My mistake, partly caused by cramped quarters, was to use a wide lens for this photo. The twin brothers, who were in the front, wound up looking like giants compared to the others. My friend laughed every time he saw that photo."

Sony A6600: Is the Price Premium Worth It?

First, I know I joke about how it rains every time I get a camera to review, but it's a little freaky and I really don't like it. I have the A6600 here for a week, and the last three days have been more or less constant rain. I left my tea mug outside yesterday morning and this morning there's an inch of rainwater in it. I've still been shooting every day, but dang, cut it out.

Sony is just about to replace its high-end APS-C camera. According to various rumors, none confirmed, the new camera will resemble the A7C in design and have a higher-resolution sensor. Can we assume it will sport the latest Bionz XR processor, and therefore inherit the overhauled menu system that debuted on the A7S III? Don't ask me; there's nobody in here but us chickens. But that would certainly be a sound move, as the current menu system is of the HM type. (HM: hot mess). My guess on price: $1,598. Just a guess.

The A7C has a PASM dial on top of the top plate, which makes more sense than an inset one, and it has a secondary control wheel tucked into the back which allows the main control dial to be dedicated to exposure compensation.

In the not even two years since its introduction, however (it was announced in August of 2019), the A6600 has commanded a hefty price differential above and beyond its lesser siblings. The series has several tiers: the A6000 has been a price leader for years and is still available in kits; the new base model, the A6100, is currently $750 at B&H Photo, while the intermediate A6400 is $900, or combined with a kit lens for $100 more. The A6600, meanwhile, is back up to its regular price of $1,400 from the recent sale price of $1,200, although the price might differ on Amazon.

I'm here to tell you that in my opinion the A6600 is absolutely worth the price disparity. It's not a perfect camera (despite a myriad of attempts over 182 years, that hasn't been accomplished yet), but the build quality is special. Everything about it exudes quality and care in construction. In fact, the "gestalt" of the camera reminds me of nothing so much as the day I unwrapped my much-awaited Leica M6 in the parking lot of a Post Office many years ago—it has that same super-solid, overbuilt, quality-foremost, carved-from-a-single-block feeling. The grip is wonderful, I really like the card slot position (which on the A6000 is fiddley for my large fingers) and the knobs 'n' dials 'n' buttons are smooth, tactile, and pleasing.

These kinds of things matter on a camera, to me. The A6600 is similar to the other A6xxx-series camera, present and past, but it's really a different camera, because of the build quality.

Now as to the new one just being loaded into the starting gate: it will no doubt have some changes I would like, and it will get some things wrong. I ran into a fellow on a forum who was just ranting and railing about the fact that Sony would launch a new APS-C camera when what he is waiting for the A7 IV (I think...I get them mixed up). He was very bitter and couldn't stop perseverating on his disappointment. I really felt like giving him a paternalistic lecture, but then I realized we each have to learn our own lessons. If there's one thing I've learned about the camera marketplace over the years, it's this: never put your faith in vaporware. Any new camera that comes out is never going to be exactly what you think it should be. I'm sure a few of the things I like about the A6600 will be missing in action, or (needlessly, in my opinion) changed, on the new one. That's just the way it always is.

In fact, it's almost like it's a law: every new camera introduction will have some feature or other that you are convinced the manufacturer got wrong, or some conspicuous (to you!) weakness. (That's the "If only it had..." rule.) Just like every old retro camera will have at least one feature that would have to be modernized to make it fully usable now. It's always something.

The best thing about the A6600, though, imperfect as it may or may not be for any given user, is its absolutely deluxe feel and build. I love it. It's up to you whether that would be worth paying for, but it's a perfectly good reason for it to cost more.

Mike

Book of Interest this week:

The Education of a Photographer, Edited by Charles H. Traub, Steven Heller, and Adam B. Bell, Allworth Press, 2006, 256 pages. A small but rich gold mine of short essays and interviews by and about photographers. Also available from The Book Depository with 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:

JOHN B. GILLOOLY: "I've been using the A6600 alongside the A9/A9II since it was released. I like to have the two form factors as they have different strengths and expand my lens versatility. The A6600 operates and performs parallel to the A9II—you don't feel like you are going to a 'lesser' body when you use it—just a different body."

Dan Khong: "Mike, I think you will eventually evolve into a test driver of weather-proofed cameras and lenses. Just sayin'."

Mike replies: There ya go. When life gives you lemons, make lemonade, right? Anyway the sun is shining now.

Eric Rose: "Exceptional build quality seems like such a waste these days since digi cameras generally don't stay in the hands of the first owner for more than five years. Unless the owner is shooting professionally the average digi owner can get away with something that's less elegant and not built to withstand a nuclear attack. So IMHO the price differential is a waste of money and does not increase the likelihood the user will take any better photos than a cheaper model."

Mike replies: A fair point, but to me build quality is about more than longevity. It increases my pleasure when I'm using the camera.

Huw Morgan: "I had an A6600 for a year before succumbing to GAS and buying an A7c. The A6600 was a gem. You've mentioned the build quality, but the battery life and the autofocus were also superb. My only complaint was that Sony dropped the useful built-in flash."