The Online Photographer

Baker's Dozen: In the Museum (Complete)

Photo by Benjamin Kelley, Boston, Massachusetts, USA. "I’ve been photographing my daughter looking at art for a number of years now. She was newly four here, in 2015. This was taken at our local museum, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, with John White Alexander’s Isabella and the Pot of Basil."

Photo by Rich Barbara, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA. "I had to set the camera down on a bench to keep the ISO fairly low. Was afraid they’d move before I got the shot but I figured when the man sat down on the floor I had a bit of time. Taken at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh with an Olympus E-M10 and a 25mm ƒ/1.8 lens."

Photo by Albano García, Buenos Aires, Argentina. "I took this photo a couple of months before your call for work at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes here in Buenos Aires. My daugher Margarita loves museums, but that day she'd had enough.  :-)  Shot with a Sony a6000 with 16–50mm kit zoom I bought from my dear friend Juan Buhler."

Photo by David Mackenzie, Bedford, New Hampshire, USA. "We were running late one day in Paris and decided to visit the Louvre about half an hour before closing. Given the short amount of time we had we headed directly for the Mona Lisa. When we turned the corner into the exhibit space we were met by this. A docent told me were lucky to arrive so late so that the crowd was much thinner than normal. At least nobody was taking a selfie."

...Except the guy in front just to the left of the painting. And maybe one guy on the opposite side, just to the left of the end of the DSLR lens. Hard to tell. —MJ.

Photo by Stelios Karouzakis, London, United Kingdom. "This is a picture I took in 2015 outside the British Museum in London, with my new to me then (secondhand) DSLR. I'd been shooting for years with nothing but a rangefinder and a 35mm so that was an all-new setup for me. I remember I was determined to get a picture I liked that day for no particular reason, just to please myself. I was paying particular attention to the sun. I like the soft light and the gestures of the children. I have it printed and framed in my living room."

This is a particular favorite of mine Stelios. —MJ

Photo by Leon Droby, Uxbridge, Massachusetts, USA. "Being a local, I usually go to this museum a couple of times a month. And no matter how many times I go, there’s always something interesting there. Taken at the Worcester Art Museum in Worcester, Massachusetts, with a Fujifilm X100F."

Photo by John Denniston, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. November 16th, 2018—A wall being painted in readiness for a new exhibition at the Equinox Gallery in Vancouver, B.C.

Why I liked this... —MJ

Photo by Sergio Bartelsman, Bogotá, Distrito Capital, Colombia.

Photo by Nick Van Zanten, Grand Haven, Michigan, USA. Shot with a Nikon D700, 1/250 at ƒ/4. "Two of the potential voters in Art Prize 2010. Launched in 2009 as an experiment, Art Prize was designed to be a bottom-up rather than top-down art contest. Offering the largest cash prize in the art world, the venue, downtown Grand Rapids, Michigan, was open to any artist. Any visitor could vote via the internet for their favorite piece. The experiment worked. ArtPrize has continued to grow and evolve."

Photo by Maggie Osterberg, Lincoln, Nebraska, USA. "This is in the pelagic pool viewing area at The Monterey Bay Aquarium and the odd fish you see is an Ocean Sunfish, or Mola Mola. The giant tank held a variety of fish and mid-sea invertebrates, including a young Great White Shark. What I love about this shot is that it reminds me of 'Mystery Science Theater 3000,' with phone-toting tourists standing in for Joel, Crow, and Tom Servo. The kids in the lower left, putting their hands on the glass are endearing and, if I’m honest, a little bit creepy."

In the submissions there were a number of creative departures from the conventional idea of a museum—an "old village" museum of historical structures (Ronny Nilsen), a permanently docked warship (Kristoffer Tripplaar), the exterior of an alternative museum on the streets of an old town (Ray Maines), even the interior of a huge freight elevator at SFMoMA (Saul Rosenfield).

Photo by Markus Fischer, Germany. "This is entitled 'Inside the Camera'—which is where it was created, inside the room-size camera obscura located in The Photographers' Gallery in Central London. Hope that passes for a museum…great place by the way."

Photo by Mark Hobson, Adirondack Mountains near Lake Placid, New York USA. "My grandson in the Canadian War Museum, Ottawa, Canada. Over the past year I have been 'converting' hundreds of my pictures into an 'old' snapshot format/look. The purpose is to amass a large body of 'snapshots' which I then place in POD (print on demand) photo books. My intent is to create legacy books which have the look and feel of the traditional/classic family photo album. Enough copies of each album/photo book are printed to distribute to immediate family members. In addition, I put 20–15 individual 5x5" prints into boxes and leave them around my house so family and visitors can handle and look at them."

As for the "good measure" 13th picture, it's humorous, but a little risqué too. I don't think it will offend anyone, but perhaps you should consider it NSFW. Therefore I'm hiding it behind this page break. Proceed if appropriate.

Photographing With the Wrong Camera

Following on from yesterday, here are two pictures of mine that I desperately wish hadn't been taken with a phone:

Keuka in the Rain

Butters at the Window

Longtime readers will have seen these before, but they're good examples of why it's best to photograph with the right camera as much as possible. The way photography works—for me, anyway, and yes, your mileage may vary—is that if you keep looking and keep photographing, every now and then you get a good one. Every now and then you get lucky, you might say. Every now and then things come together in that mysterious way and the magic happens.

But I failed here, in an important sense. All I had at hand was my phone. Neither picture prints decently—and in the top picture especially, the phone just plain failed to record the marvelous glowing turquoise color of the lake, which was the reason I stopped the car in the first place. You can see a hint of it, but the reality is missing in action.

Now, you can say that I got "a" picture in both cases, and if I hadn't had my phone in my hand I wouldn't have gotten a picture at all. True. But you're seeing them in about the only way they work—as little JPEGs online. They also look good on my phone screen, of course. So, imagine if I were a photographer who normally works with an APS-C Fuji and prints to 15 inches in the long dimension on a 13x19" sheet. And imagine that both of these shots would have fit right into the rest of my work visually—quiet, lyrical pictures that relate to my real life; the lake where I live, my dog by the window in my house. I've failed because I was gifted with two successes that can't be made into prints that fit in with the rest of my work. These should have been in the portfolio...but I had the wrong camera in my hands when I took them.

I think it's in the book Photography Until Now (1989) that John Szarkowski makes the case that it is about the camera...it's just not all about the camera. He makes the case that if you look back at history carefully enough, you can see how developments in cameras changed what people photographed and how they photographed.

It's been one of the features (I'm deliberately using a neutral word) of my life that I often have the "wrong" camera with me, for the simple reason that I've been a camera reviewer. If you accept the fact that the "magic" happens rarely, the converse is that the magic doesn't stop happening just because you're out and about with a camera that won't give you the results you like or need.

Here's an example:

I was testing the Ricoh GXR, a quirky little camera with lens/sensor modules that clicked into the same body shell. Here I had a module in the camera that provided a zoom lens with a thumbnail-sized, 2011-era point-and-shoot sensor. But it was just a neighborhood block party...my house is in the background here. How was I to know the universe was going to smile on me with a real picture? It was a very unpromising situation, the kind of event where normally I'd just get a bunch of crappy meaningless snapshots of people standing around eating hot dogs. But the Fire Department showed up, a fireman turned the hose on for the kids, and this miraculous little scene unfolded. You might not like this picture, but for me and my work it's right there, a hit. But again, I just had the wrong camera with me. It barely even recorded the rainbows! Much weaker in the picture than to the eye. I've always regretted that I got this picture and yet didn't get it. My life is dotted with such success/failures. They go with the territory for me.

You can choose to use any camera that suits your conception for a body of work. Nancy Rexroth made an influential body of work with a plastic toy Diana camera; Ernst Haas used super-slow early Kodachrome and learned to exploit what seemed to most people to be limitations; Elsa Dorfman made her life's work with a 20x24-inch Polaroid. Each one made their choice of tools fit the work they wanted to do, and in that sense "any camera will work" and "the camera doesn't matter." But how can anyone imagine that you could make Ernst Haas shoot with a 20x24" Polaroid without having it change his work entirely? Would Haas's Leica and Kodachrome make pictures that would fit in Rexroth's book Iowa? Would Elsa Dorfman be able to shoot with a toy Diana and exhibit the results seamlessly alongside her 20x24" Polaroids? Of course not, in all three cases.

Digital flattens the differences and distinctions somewhat, and more of the characteristics of the final image can be moved to post-processing—they're not as inherent in the tools and materials as they used to be. But surely you can see how a smartphone camera can be the right tool for some bodies of work and the wrong tool for others. It depends what you're trying to do, and it depends on what the rest of your work looks like.

Again, feel free to disagree. We're all different. Just because something is true for me doesn't mean it has to be true for you.

Mike

P.S. It really might be time for me to do a OC/OL/OY. My muse needs nourishment!

[How to Put a Picture in a Comment]

Product o' the Week:

Fingertip Pulse Oximeter. The link is from TOP to Amazon. This relates to health, not photography—it replaces one of the advanced functions on the latest Apple Watch. Takes your pulse and measures your blood oxygen. For heart monitoring, checking for COVID (low blood oxygen is an early warning sign) and slow heartbeat. I'm learning to correlate the way I feel with the readings. Works with iOS and Android. Nifty little device, super easy to use, and cheap.

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

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

Michael J. Perini: "I don't know anyone who cares about making expressive pictures who doesn't have a bunch of 'nice picture, wrong camera' pictures.

"Smartphone cameras are a double-edged sword. More people take more pictures than ever before because of them: they have ushered in a whole new kind of super-convenient note-taking photography. Video and stills are always at our fingertips—with a level of quality that by any historical standard of 'power to weight ratio' is astonishing.

"That's all good. Like every camera it has limitations, things it is good at and things it isn't so good at. It has also given us the single most potent reason to not carry a different 'better' camera.

"It is often said the the difference between professionals and amateurs is that pros don't show their misses. A really good photograph is a confluence of circumstances: the event, a photographer to see it, and a camera capable of capturing their full vision. If any one of those things is missing, at best all it can be is 'close, but no cigar.' Every photographer including Elsa Dorfman and Ernst Haas has lots of photographs that in their own opinion are 'close but no cigar.' They don't show them. That takes a great deal of discipline.

"I know I have been guilty many times of showing my 'nice picture, wrong camera' pictures—and sometimes I think it's OK because I'm showing them casually to friends and family. I'm grateful I had the iPhone with me. But I don't put them in my 'portfolio' so to speak.

"We also all live lives that aren't always about photography , so not always having the 'best' camera for the job at hand is perfectly understandable.

"Even the most conscious photographer will come across situations where a different camera or lens would have been better. It is part of the deal. You can't really worry about what you didn't get; it is much more fun to be happy about what you did get."

DZ: "Nothing makes you happy. Those are two fine photographs—well-seen, nicely composed. They show you really connecting with the world. So what if they can’t be printed 15 inches wide? You’ve got plenty of photographs that can be. A failure 'in an important sense'? Don’t define yourself down." 

Michael: "If I were a photographer who normally works with an APS-C Fuji and prints to 15 inches in the long dimension on a 13x19" sheet, I‘d always have the Fuji at hand.  😉😎  "

Mike replies: I was just thinking something similar myself. Maybe my disaffection is with myself, for not being more dedicated. Successful photographers are very dedicated. They work hard and long, and keep at it, and surmount all sorts of difficulties. They're dogged and determined. Meanwhile, I want to have had my good camera with me, but somehow not enough to...have my good camera with me. At some level it's my lack of dedication and commitment that's to blame.

Rant: Smartphone Contest

This post relates to the last one. In fact I almost put them together in one post, but I thought the point here might get lost if I buried it.

Disclaimer: This is none of my business. Anyone can have any sort of contest they want to, and judges can judge however they want to.

But: Somebody sent me a link to some of the iPhone Photography Awards winners, and, based on the sampling presented, at least, I really strongly disagree with the judges' approach.

See disclaimer.

Further qualifying/waffling (in advance of the big slam): of course, anyone can take any picture they want to with any camera they want to. If you want to use an iPhone for the same kind of pictures you'd take with an SLR—"across categories such as Nature, Abstract, City Life, Portrait and People" [groan]—knock yourself out.

However, I think that misses the point of what makes smartphone cameras unique and different as cameras, and it totally misses the character of what I think of as the best sort of smartphone pictures. The salient properties of smartphones are that most everybody—well, for some first-world definition of everybody—has one, everybody carries theirs most of the time, and they're so simple anybody can use one and anybody can get a well-exposed, color-balanced shot most of the time. Cropping is as simple as pinching and spreading two fingers. People tend to use them to take pictures of quotidian things in their humdrum lives, remarkable things they were unprepared to encounter, and pictures of casual but extraordinary intimacy that they have access to only because of who they are and their relationships to whomever or whatever they're photographing. Not to mention serendipitous accidents that happen totally by chance. (In cue sports when a ball goes in in some purely lucky fashion, it's called a "fluke."* Great smartphone shots sometimes are amazing flukes, pure and simple.)

So where is the best of that sort of thing? The sort of thing iPhones are peculiarly and specifically good at?

Not long ago a friend here showed me a wonderful snap of his twin grandsons, toddlers in diapers, who were energetically helping each other climb up into the family refrigerator after bedtime. By chance they were as well composed as putti in a Renaissance frieze**. That's one example of the kind of thing a non-photographer grandpa can get a picture of only because of his unique access and familial intimacy. That's the kind of picture a smartphone can enable that an outside photographer coming in all prepared with serious kit would never get.

I just do not need to see some conventional anodyne desiccated "Abstract" shot with an iPhone as opposed to being shot with an ordinary camera. Who needs it?

Go find some shots that only exist because smartphone cameras do, and then come back and see me.

That's my take.

But see disclaimer.  :-)

Mike

[How to put a picture in a comment]

*The snooker at the end is my favorite. (A snooker is when the object ball is blocked from the cue ball.)

**Pun intended.

Product o' the Week:

Fingertip Pulse Oximeter. The link is from TOP to Amazon. This relates to health, not photography—it replaces one of the advanced functions on the latest Apple Watch. Takes your pulse and measures your blood oxygen. For heart monitoring, checking for COVID (low blood oxygen is an early warning sign) and slow heartbeat. I'm learning to correlate the way I feel with the readings. Works with iOS and Android. Nifty little device, super easy to use, and cheap.

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

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

Andrew L: "I agree with you. I have long been an avid proponent of what could be called the snapshot, but maybe 'slice of life' or something would be a better moniker, since snapshots were traditionally very posed much of the time. But these images that capture life events in the making, people at their most unguarded, memorable glimpses, these are vastly more interesting than the competition winners, which are all aping traditional 'real camera' genres and stylings. If you're trying to get something that looks exactly like what would have been gotten much easier with a full-size camera, a high-quality lens, and fully available settings, you may be nothing more than a masochist!"

Peter Komar: "Hello Mike, I loved every single image in that link. I know I am not smart enough to get your point of your post but it succeeded in getting me to look at the images. I would love to have any single one of those images framed and hanging in my home. They are exceptional in my humble opinion. Do you appreciate any of them as simply good photography?"

Mike replies: Hi Peter. I would be the last one to tell you what to like! But what I personally miss in the group presented by the WaPo is emotion, whimsy, chance and happenstance, a sense of any personal meaning for the photographer, mystery and wonder...the "snapshot or slice of life" that Andrew L mentions. I guess my basic problem is that I really love realness and life and meaning and a sense of the poetic in photographs, and really great iPhone snapshots, while rare, can so easily have all these things. Maybe I should mount a protest exhibition and go find some smartphone photographs that I feel actually represent the best of the genre....

Bill Poole: "Hmm. The Post's editors must have debated using 'iPhone'—a registered Apple trademark—as opposed to 'smartphone,' which you used. Apple marketing may be pleased; Apple legal, perhaps less so."

Mike replies: I haven't been able to find out much about it, but it's not the Post's contest. The Post had nothing to do with it except that it's publicizing some of the winners. The contest is run by an outfit called "iPhone Photography Awards (IPPAWARDS)" at 401 E 76th Street 3W, New York City, New York, 10021, which, according to zoominfo, has 25 employees and annual revenues of $4 million. It charges entry fees of between $3.02 and $5.50 per image, and the prizes, per the IPPAWARDS.com website, are: 

18 Gold Bars :: The 1st place winner of the 18 categories will win a Gold Bar from the most recognizable private gold mint in the world.

18 Platinum Bars :: The 2nd and 3rd place winners of the 18 categories will win a Platinum Bar from the most recognizable private gold mint in the world.

[...] and the top 3 winners will receive a prize to be announced later.

The pictures on the IPPAWARDS website appear to show gold and platinum bars of 1g weight (right), although this is not stated in print that I can find. As of today, 1g of gold is worth $57.77, and 1g of platinum is worth $34.02. So that means the announced prizes are worth a maximum of $57.77 to one winner and $1,642.22 in toto (give or take, according to fluctuations in the cost of precious metals), or about the cost of one iPhone 12 Pro Max and one high-end iPhone SE (give or take, according to fluctuations in the cost of iPhones.)

Someone else can do the explaining of the differential between the above and revenues of $4 million, as I'm not a business-y type of guy.

Bruce Bordner: "Well, as soon as you see 'iPhone' it's obviously marketing. There was nothing wrong with any of the photos, but they didn't seem like 'winners' to me. I liked two. However I am very interested in the evolving low-light and other capabilities that phones have with multi-image processing. CPU-assisted photography is branching out, with instant effects and 'filters.' These things have a look of their own; let's see that. Don't just compete with DSLRs; show the way forward."

Steve C (partial comment): "I was also pleasantly surprised by a lot of the pictures in the competition, and agree with everyone who says who cares what kind of camera they were taken with...except that they did seem almost as if each one had been chosen based on its ability to [impress] the viewer that a phone could be used to produce that picture. And I think this kinda gets at where you're coming from, Mike. They're phone pictures that look like pictures you'd expect from bigger cameras. A good picture is a good picture, but different cameras do have a certain look or at least certain mode of operation—and you can work with or against that for various kinds of effect. This competition did feel like it was pictures taken against the mode that phone cameras are best known for. Mike, you're asking the question 'What if we went with their grain instead?' I think it's a really good question."

Kenneth Tanaka (partial comment): "To say the least, I’m disappointed by your reaction. I’ve no energy to debate the matter. It just seems so self-evident that '…photography ain’t really about cameras.'"

Mike replies: But...it wasn't me who named it the iPhone Photography Awards! Seems like they did kinda make it about the cameras....

Stan B.: "Smartphone companies no longer have to convince anyone that their phones are capable image-makers for their everyday tasks and encounters. They've been busy selling that they are formidable cameras in their own right, capable of competing with 'real' cameras on their own terms—the underlying theme of that contest."

Rick: "I think I agree with you here; these photos are technically fine to good, but most of them don't exhibit the particular intimate spontaneity that phone cameras (and in the past, small point-and-shoots) are well equipped to capture. However, I think there's a couple of seemingly disparate threads that address this:

1.) Contests generally exist to make money. This one charges a fee. I won't guess at the motivations of those who started this competition, but it seems to me that the pool of potential customers—the competitors—for an iPhone-specific contest is much larger than the pool of customers for a contest targeting 'serious' photographers. More customers = more $$$. The judges are simply looking for technically good images that fit a reproducible aesthetic and have a universal appeal that they might be able to use to further promote the contest so the contest can continue to make more money.

2.) This contest promotes the idea that having a smartphone camera is just as good as having a 'real' camera because this idea can do nothing but popularize the contest and therefore make more money. People have ideas of what a good photo is; these ideas are informed by media consumption of all sorts. We can see how the winners match all sorts of cliches of what 'professional,' technically good images look like. People see these images, equate them with professional and serious photography, see they too have a phone, and feel then that they too can create such if they just have a phone with a decent camera. Then they enter the contest and make more money for the whoever is putting it on.

"This is a long-winded way of saying that—in my opinion—this contest trades on stereotypes of 'serious' photographic imagery to promote itself so that it may make more money for whoever is putting it on. The types of images that smartphones are uniquely positioned to be able to do—the ones you want to see—don't predictably fit the 'serious' aesthetic that the contest uses to appeal to iPhone users."

Random Excellence: Family of Don Parsons

Distant cousins Ina, Bird, and Bessie. Did they
make these dresses?

Reader Don Parsons sent me these selections from his family pictures, and I asked him if I could share them with everyone. (The captions are his.)

On the "Turkey's Back" post, Don wrote: "My dad passed in late January. I just finished cleaning out his house, along with some help from my angel wife and a cleaning company. There are numerous small file cabinets filled with plastic bags stuffed with old pictures. There are three tomato boxed stuffed with old photos, many of which I had never seen before. I'm slowly going through them now, digitizing the best and the historic. It's fun, time-consuming and painful all at the same time. If I was there, I'd give you a hug and we'd have coffee my photo-brother. Stay strong."

So here we have a few of the treasures from the Parsons family tomato boxes.

Four of my Grandfathers, starting from bottom right moving counterclockwise: Merle Parsons (my grandfather), behind him his dad William, his father Jay, and, seated, John, who lived to be 100 years, 94 days.

My grandmother, Maye Hankins Parsons, riding a horse in the early 1930s.

My dad as a small boy, late 1930s.

Mike again: Years ago when I was a photography student, I used to wish that I could go scour everyone's snapshots to seek out the elusive accidental masterpieces. Given the great mass of family photo material newly ensconced in my barn, the operative expression is: be careful what you wish for!

Thanks, Don. You stay strong too...yesterday my stress finally relented, and I was as torpid as a stranded manatee the whole day long. It was weird: I kept slipping into stage-1 sleep, where you still feel like you're awake but your thoughts start to get disordered and bizarre. I felt a little like I was going mad! Blissfully, Lulu let me sleep last night, and I'm rejuvenated this morning. Onward!

Mike

[How to Put a Picture in a Comment]

Product o' the Week:

Fingertip Pulse Oximeter. The link is from TOP to Amazon. This relates to health, not photography—it replaces one of the advanced functions on the latest Apple Watch. Takes your pulse and measures your blood oxygen. For heart monitoring, checking for COVID (low blood oxygen is an early warning sign) and slow heartbeat. I'm learning to correlate the way I feel with the readings. Works with iOS and Android. Nifty little device, super easy to use, and cheap.

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

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

Michael Cytrynowicz: "Lovely photos Don!—and thank you Mike for posting them. It is such a pleasure to savor the details of how people looked, dressed, posed—the documentary function of photography is unique and irreplaceable. They are alive, their personalities and dignity visible."

A Strategy for Dealing With Recalcitrant Relatives

I thought I'd share a little arrangement I came up with years ago.

I was talking to my neighbor Ilene, and she mentioned that she doesn't have any good pictures of one of her (adult) daughters because the daughter "hates having her picture taken" and always holds her hand up in front of her face "like this" when the camera comes out. It's not easy to describe the "like this" in words—picture the motion you make with your hand when making a sock-puppet "talk."*

I'm of the opinion that you should mostly respect such peoples' wishes, and just not take pictures of them.

Operative word in present company: mostly.

Teens
Here what I did with Xander during his growing-up years. At about age thirteen he informed me that he didn't want me to take pictures of him any more. I agreed, but I explained to him that photography was my thing, and asked him if he would agree to cooperate with me four times a year for three minutes each time. Asking his permission each time, of course. Twelve minutes a year—little enough to ask.

He agreed to that, and that was the arrangement we worked under for the next five or six years. I'd take his picture every now and then—I'd just say, "can this be one of the three minutes?"—and the rest of the time I refrained.

Three-minute portrait of Xander at 14

It worked out fine. No complaints on either side. I have a couple of pictures of his teen years, which is much better than none, and he didn't have to deal with his dad being a dad all the time.

At nineteen or so he relented and said I didn't have to worry about it any more, that it was fine if I took pictures of him whenever I wanted to.

Anyway I just thought I'd pass this strategy along in case I'm not the only one who has to deal with a reluctant relative or friend.

Mike

*I have to mention that "reluctant subjects" can sometimes be pretty unkind to us photographers. And they might not realize just how inconsiderate their actions are. Years ago at my grandparents' summer home in Michigan there was a pack of kids from up and down the shore who hung out together all day, and I would take pictures. Virtually everyone got used to me and simply ignored me. One guy, however, felt awkward being photographed (or being photographed by me, I don't know which) and he ruined many of my pictures, some that would have been pretty good if he had just had the courtesy to ignore me. In many of the pictures he wasn't even close to the main subject, he was just in the background somewhere. I don't think people like that fully realize how impolite and unkind they are being to us. It's actually pretty hostile to purposefully ruin other peoples' pictures again and again.

Product o' the Week:

Fingertip Pulse Oximeter. The link is from TOP to Amazon. This relates to health, not photography—it replaces one of the advanced functions on the latest Apple Watch. Takes your pulse and measures your blood oxygen. For heart monitoring, checking for COVID (low blood oxygen is an early warning sign) and slow heartbeat. I'm learning to correlate the way I feel with the readings. Works with iOS and Android. Nifty little device, super easy to use, and cheap.

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

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

Geoff Wittig: "I like your method of dealing with the photo-reluctant. My lovely wife just hates having her photograph taken, under any circumstance. I have a collection of photos of her hand in front of her face as that's also her go-to move. And yet many of my most cherished photographs are of her; after 42 years together many of them still transport me to moments of existential joy or poignance. So I'll have to ask her if she's willing to go along with the three-minute rule."

Sharon: "I love that photo. That is so good. I have the same problem now with my beautiful grandson. I'll try your approach."

Rick Twigg: "As a father of nine-year-old twins who have recently begun their anti-photography kick which I suspect will be the next 8–10 years, this may be the most valuable information I have come across in quite some time.  :-)  "

Xf Mj: "I've had this kind of problem with people I've dated. But I blame myself much more than them. Some people are great at taking portraits and candids, engaging them so that it's not uncomfortable, having the camera and process be invisible, and also having the quick deftness to get great results that make a subject happy to be part of any future photo-taking. With me as the photographer of people I admired, though, and especially when I was just getting into digital photography, I might as well have been taking their photo with Microsoft Word software running the works of a household vacuum cleaner. Awk-ward. I just took too long to get things the way I wanted and their patience immediately wore thin.

"I'm better now, and phones help, but there is still much room for improvement. I just don't have the knack and it's a shame. I've seen very natural portraits and candids of people from you, Mike, so your thoughts here about the unwilling subject still stand.

"In the other direction, I briefly dated someone who was really really excellent at photographing people, and I'm very grateful for her photographic record of me during that time. It's a real gift to see yourself in the best light (literally and figuratively speaking) and to know that you might sometimes look at ease to others. I think everyone she photographed felt that way and she always got great results."

Marc Lawrence-Howe: "I'd be curious as to how many people who enjoy photography actually hate having their own photo taken (at least by anyone other than themselves). ~raises hand~"

Sunday Support Group: Should You Use a Mac or a PC?

The answer is: Yes.

Sure. Why not? If you need a computer, use a Mac or a PC.

Which one? Well, shop until you drop, or flip a coin, or anything in between, however you want to do it. Suit yourself.

Joke
This is kind of a redux of a brief post I wrote a long time ago: Should you shoot with Canon or Nikon? The answer then was yes. Although the choice isn't so binary any more like it was then. It was a joke, the message of which was like that kid in the movie My Life as a Dog who, whenever his parents were fighting, went under his bed, squeezed his eyes tight shut, stuck his fingers in his ears, and went "lah-lah-lah-lah-lah-lah!" so he couldn't hear the fighting.

I just didn't want to listen to any more Canon vs. Nikon nattering.

Ever noticed how there are so often two of everything? Pepsi vs. Coke, Amazon vs. Wal-Mart, Honda vs. Toyota, etc. Human beings are really good at two things: a.) making allies and joining forces to form a team to fight the other team, and b.) when there's just one team, splitting into two teams so the two teams can fight. We do both things constantly. It's like it's hardwired into our DNA. And sometimes it makes no sense: Britain [CORRECTION: excuse me, England—thanks, Peter Wright!] and France got on the same side in 1904 (with the Entente Cordiale) after being on opposite sides for like a millennium*.

I think some people think I'm being inconsistent when I show a high tolerance for personal choices on one hand and then share my own personal shopping agoni...er, problems on the other. Granted, the latter can be annoying to read about because I'm such a head case! But it doesn't mean I'm not tolerant of everyone else's approach. I am. And it doesn't mean I think everyone should adopt the level of angst and perseveration I exhibit myself. Far from it.

You should suit yourself. I'll be a nut, thanks.  :-) 

These ruminations were inspired by reading articles about the new consumer M1 iMac, which of course is causing a flareup of the hoary Mac-vs.-PC rivalry in the comments sections of the articles. Mac-vs.-PC is like one of those skin conditions that can be controlled but never cured. A new product is like an irritant that causes a flareup. But I'm 64; I have no more time left for Mac-vs.-PC threads anywhere but here. It's another hardwired human tendency: we conserve only those resources that are scarce.

Embarrassment
By the way, re my own camera perseverations and angstiness, I'll just put this out there: I haven't actually bought a new camera for myself that became my main go-to axe since 2014. Really. That's when I bought the Fuji X-T1 that became my axe for years. True, I did buy and sell a couple of Panasonics in the last couple of years, but I knew pretty quickly that they didn't "take" and moved on. I bought a bunch of film cameras, as you know, but not to use. I haven't shot film since 2002. And the X-H1 was a gift, not something I went out and bought.

It's even more extreme than that, because I didn't exactly choose to buy the X-T1 in '14.

It's kind of an embarrassing story. What happened was that I requested a sample of the then-new X-T1 from B&H Photo, who are very nice about sending samples, and then I neglected to return it on time. So my contact at B&H emailed and said, we'll give you another 30 days, but then you really have to return it. And then I neglected to return it on time a second time. Just negligence. Kind of disgraceful, but I get absentminded: it's a character defect. I got the rude-shock-slash-wakeup-call when a bill for the camera arrived in the mail. When I called my contact to apologize—well, grovel—he said (essentially), dude, you're really getting me in trouble here!

So, mainly out of embarrassment at my own negligence, I just paid for the camera.

I'm just being honest here. This is actually what happened. (B&H are still nice to me anyway.)

After that, I got to grips with the camera, and ended up liking it more after I really got to know it. So I used it as my main camera until maybe two years ago, when I started to get itchy for something more up to date. And then the X-H1 came along, thanks to Jay.

That meant it was ~5 years with the X-T1, which isn't bad. It's sort of at the long end of my historical turnover rate with cameras. I mean, I like new cameras, like I like new cars. I buy a new car every now and then, and I change cameras every now and then. I'm sure most of you can relate. It's ordinary behavior. (And by the way, I really admire you if you can stick with a camera or a car for 10 years or more. It's super-sensible, and it takes discipline and restraint. My current car is also a 2014, like the X-T1. It's got 90k miles and I'm shooting for 200.)

So don't bust my chops too much about the more annoying aspects of my camera-shopping. If it aggravates you, you can skip it. It just falls into the category of what we do here. I'm looking for a new axe is all. My criteria is that it has to be a "friend," which isn't something I can find on a feature list.

I'll have a print sale so I can pay for it, as Ken Tanaka suggested. We haven't had a print sale in a really long time. Actually I have two in mind.

More about that later. This post is long enough.

Mike

*When the Soviet Union broke up, Mikhail Gorbachev predicted that the U.S. would miss it more than we could foresee. He knew that once the United States became just one big powerful team, we'd have to break up into two teams so we could fight. And sure enough.

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Featured Comments from:

Terry Letton: "Sounds like you need a film scanner a lot more than you need another camera. But this comes from a guy who is still satisfied with his Canon 5D II and just chickened out and got rid of his truck after 11 years and 285,000 miles."

Dave Stewart: "When others ask me about matters they're ruminating over with a choice of options, I confess to cheekily and regularly using the same answer. There's usually a puzzled pause, before the laughter ensues. Yes, decide and move on with life. Of course that doesn't mean I'm good at doing so myself, it's more that I recognise others in a similar state of mind. Cameras, I've too many cameras. Likewise lenses, but I have been good lately and reduced the piles of both, which has been cathartic. My problem is the temptation of a bargain that I don't need, and would likely barely use. Most recent example being a Nikon D610, with a shutter count of 29 this weekend. Hope someone else gains that bargain soon."

Dave Millier: "I have PC, Mac, Chromebox and Linux boxes. And none of them is a clear winner. Don't limit yourself to A or B."

Chris Nicholls: "'Can't we do both?' My MacBook sit on my desk next to my PC. And the MacBook runs Win 10 alongside MacOS through the BootCamp facility, for the few Windows applications that I can't duplicate in MacOS. Best of both worlds."

Peter Wright: " Minor historical correction: England and France were on ‘opposite sides for like a millennium’, but before the United Kingdom was united, Scotland was in alliance with France for much of the early part of that millennium (The 'Auld Alliance' it was called in Scotland, and something else in French in France). This was for the purpose of fighting England of course, but after Elizabeth I had no heirs, Scotland and England became the United Kingdom under the Scottish King James (VI of Scotland and I of England). This made a lot of people quite angry, and put the Scottish and English on the same team against France. Part of the result was that there was indeed some dispute in Scotland for one or two centuries after, about which side they should really be on. As to which computer to use; well a Mac of course. Everyone knows that!"

Ilkka: "Choice is good but too much choice confuses people. Years back when Apple had lost its way, Steve Jobs came back and simplified the lineup. Two types, laptop and tabletop, and two levels of power, amateur and pro, if you will. So total of four choices. Easy to choose. Now they are lost again. Do they really need seven different computers, and seven different phones as they currently have for sale in their website? Each with different options for colour and memory."

Mike replies: Curious, isn't it? Surely every company has access to the research that proves the optimum number of choices is three. Maybe it's FOMO, fear of missing out, that drives this. They all think they are missing out on sales if they don't offer finer-grained choices. I go on car websites sometimes and there can be seven basic model choices. And the only distinction between them that's clear is price...and occasionally not even that. It's just confusing. Customers don't even know where to start.

'Rescuing' Family Photographs (Or: The Turkey's Back)

At John and Jane's house. Oddly enough, wild turkeys live in the backyards of crowded, cramped Cambridge.

I'm back. This is not an uncommon situation at all, I'm sure. This past week I voyaged to Cambridge to see my stepfather John, who just moved into assisted living, and my mother, whose name is Jane, in the memory unit at a different facility (the first time I've seen her since well before COVID-19), and offer at least token help to my step-siblings who have been taking the lead in readying John and Jane's house of 31 years for sale, a huge task. I had been asked to come sort and retrieve the family pictures.

Here's a small sample of what I found waiting. How did I never see this before?

Kodachrome slides from 1943. I felt some dismay when I opened the top drawer and the only labels were "Trees" and "Houses," but other drawers contained "Family" and "Friends" among other things. The color still looks pretty good for 78 years down the road. I believe the photographer was my mother's father, who had a Zeiss camera and had dye transfer prints made from the Kodachromes, a few of which survive.

That's he in the oil painting, a duplicate of the one that hangs at his alma mater

I had to do triage on a great mass of material, and there's no help for it, a lot just had to be discarded. It was almost overpowering, I have to say.

Giant French tripods
I've always thought I caught the photography bug from my father, who was an enthusiastic amateur. He was a businessman, but he wrote and photographed articles for travel magazines like Holiday (published 1946–1977) and for gourmet magazines such as, well, Gourmet (1941–2009). I vaguely remember figures for one trip that I accompanied him on as a teenager: he spent $3,000 on the trip (about $16,500 today), and earned $650 for the resulting article ($3,500 today, a marker of the extent to which earnings for such work have fallen). In other words, it was a hobby for him. He worked hard at it, and did good work, but it was as much a reason to travel to France and dine in a succession of fine restaurants as anything else. By the way, that was the trip on which I learned to loathe tripods—we rented an ancient and enormous wooden and metal tripod we barely used at all, and it was my job, age 16, to lug it everywhere.

But now I wonder if I also didn't get my interest in photography from my mother as well. At her house there were dozens and dozens of her albums filled with the once-ubiquitous 3.5x5-inch (3R) "drugstore prints," documenting all sorts of aspects of her life. These 3R prints were everywhere, in every sort of state: finished books, boxes of the packets in which they came back from the processor, loose stacks, and jumbled in with other things. I just don't have clear memories of her taking pictures, although I have pictures of her with various point-and-shoots on lanyards around her neck and there was a box of all her old cameras. But she simply must have taken lots of pictures, and often. Come to think of it, there were a number of her albums of square Instamatic prints, too, from before the era of the 3R print.

The sheer amount of family-historical material was overpowering. The contents of my great-grandmother's attic were transferred to my grandmother's in the '50s, and then my mother and her sister inherited that; and of course the mass was added to at every stage of the way. (At the same time, it's also been diminished at every stage of the way, as it was this time.) Just a few examples: boxes (made to resemble books, so they could be stored on bookshelves) of purchased stereoscope cards from the turn of the 2oth century; sixteen eight-inch reels of movie film, in tins, from the 1920s (I saved half, although I hardly know why); cases of very early Kodachrome slides like the ones above from the 1930s and '40s (I brought home three cardboard boxes full of very old slides, which I shouldn't have done, but I'm too curious); a large number of large-format portraits in deluxe folders by a professional photographer named Russell; many dozens of pictures in all manner of frames; all kinds of wedding pictures from many eras; even a stack of loose black-and-white 4x5 negatives.

A large number of family pictures were lost in a basement flood a number of years ago, and I went through the remaining salvage, discarding a lot of it. I did find a few things I was looking for, like the annotated copy of the family history my great-grandfather wrote in the last quarter-century of his life after retiring from the railroads. There were many manila folders full of old newspaper clippings. With these, in many cases I couldn't even guess why they were saved in the first place. To give one example of how tangential a good deal of the material was, I found a college yearbook from 1922, kept because it related to my grandfather, but it wasn't even his class—as far as I could tell he only appeared in one picture, of the "Negative Side" of the debate team (the "Affirmative Side" was on the verso). Not something that needs to accompany his descendants through generations!

Despite consigning a large mass of material to oblivion, I drove home with the floor of a nine-foot U-Haul van packed mostly with boxes of photographs.

Serves me right, eh?

Loading the van on Thursday night I heard what sounded like a large critter walking around on the roof—the turkey. Not sure a turkey was the last thing I expected to see, but close. Real life can't be made up.

Anyway, I know my great-grandmother loved photographs—she must have been photographer Russell's prized client, because every summer she commissioned large-format portraits of just about everybody and then bought multiple prints of everything. (I remember the guy. He was a little man who worked so hard he sweated, and he liked to stick a nickel to his moist forehead to make kids look at him.) Her youngest daughter, my great-aunt (who died in 2008, I believe, aged 101) loved pictures. My mother obviously did. It wasn't just my Dad. Clearly I come from a photograph-besotted family, going back years.

I'll have some other thoughts on this task, and this material, in weeks to come. There are a few really interesting issues that relate to all this. Observations are a-percolating.

Memorable evening
It was an emotional yet engaging trip. Fractious and far-flung families under the stress of difficult transitions are not without friction here and there, but reconnecting with people was deeply meaningful for me at my age. I saw my stepbrother Stephen for the first time in many years and met his wife, Chris, and several of their kids for the first time—one is at Dartmouth, where I matriculated many years ago. His sister Trisha came from Rome with one of her daughters, who speaks excellent English with a lovely Italian accent, the inverse of her Mom. I have to admit I was apprehensive about seeing my Mom, who has advanced Alzheimer's—it's just so very sad, and I'm a chicken about strongly emotional situations—I have trouble coping with them—but it went almost better than I could have hoped; she enjoys visits and is still served well by her elemental social skills. It was so interesting to watch her try to relate and connect on the thinnest of threads. She always was socially adept, and that gift still glimmers. Over the years I've gotten extremely fond of my stepfather and it was great to see him. He's failing physically but entirely himself.

Stephen, Trisha, and Chris, by me

With their mother Barbara and me, by Chris

An absolute high point of the trip—and of my recent social life, actually—was a simple family dinner with my step-siblings and their children at their mother Barbara's house. Picture a grandmother with some of her children and a sampling of grandchildren of various ages, a gracious but very warm and friendly home, a simple but extremely tasty meal of homemade lasagna, salad, and steamed squash, and happy, warm, intelligent, and vivacious conversation in which  everyone, even the youngest, participated. Just a lovely evening, which I'll long remember. 

Of course we had to take pictures...but just a few.

Mike

Product o' the Week:

Ringlight for Zoom, Facetime, vlogging, streaming, video recording, remote working or remote learning. Holds a phone, or you can set it behind and above a desktop computer with a built-in camera. The following image is also a link: 

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Featured Comments from:

John Bennett: "My father died in May. We are selling his house of 60 years. There were photos everywhere. Just when we thought we had found them all, there were more. And then more. Our rule: If we didn't know anyone in the picture, we recycled it. On the other hand, if the subjects were part of the family, no mater how far back, we saved them. The earliest ones dated to 'the aughts,' as in the 1900s. First we corral, later we will sort. Good luck with yours!"

Clay Olmstead: "My mother, who would have been 101 this year, also took a lot of pictures of us boys as we were growing up. She used to say that if we had described her, we would have said she had a face like a camera!"

Mike S: "A few years ago, you quoted a blogger who believes (paraphrasing here) that present generations are taking more pictures than ever in the history of photography but because they're not being printed, they'll be lost forever. Unless people are very organized, when they pass away, no one will know which cloud service has their photos or the required passwords. And that's hoping that particular cloud storage still exists. And just as important, without those penciled notations on the back of the prints, no one will know who all those people are and what they are doing and yada yada yada. She is so correct."

Hermon Joyner: "FYI, that case holding the slides is something of a collectible in itself. Musicians buy them to carry their microphones in when they travel. Singer-songwriter Gillian Welch famously uses one when she goes on the road."

Bob Fogt: "I think I've written of this once before, Mike, but it seems somewhat apt to repeat it now. When my mother died, I found among her things a yellowed old drug store print order envelope. SUPERIOR PHOTO SERVICE—'Any Good Negative Will Make a Good Enlargement.' The envelope was empty. On the reverse, in her hand, was written: 'Pictures I haven't got.' The envelope now lives in my top dresser drawer, and will remain there until someone else discovers it."

Ron Hoffer: "Wishing you strength and patience as you work through both the care and archive issues. My mother did collect/hoard hundreds of photos, negatives, and mementos in a small suitcase that I picked up from her home after she moved to assisted living over 16 years ago. Since that time till last year I've stared at the case, occasionally in anguish and occasionally with nostalgia, but always with a sense of guilt that I not just pass it on to my son as is. Thankfully one of my pandemic goals was met last September—to turn this mixed up pile into a self-published book of family photos from around 1900 to the mid-1960s. Once I got into it, with some accompanying research on Ancestry.com and other places, it became a wonderful diversion. The initial sorting and triaging was so necessary. Some mysteries uncovered and some remain. About 300 images (mostly prints) scanned and (with text) self-published through Blurb. Perhaps the most fun was working with negatives from the 1930s and uncovering all sorts of interesting scenes. About two dozen copies of the finished book was then sent as gifts to relatives; the original prints/negs shipped off in packets to them as well. Glad it's done!"

darlene: "You’ve got a treasure trove of memories and wonderment ahead! Pretty nice realizing mom gave you some of her visual keenness, a welcomed surprise I am sure. My visual prowess is passed down from my maternal grandfather. I grew-up watching him create beautiful oil paintings, and have cherished photos he made with his Rolleiflex. His love for baseball seems to be in my DNA as well. After receiving all these gifts, I just had to name my son after him."

Don Parsons: "Mike, So sorry that you have to deal with this. I'm in a similar situation. My dad passed in late January. I just finished cleaning out his house, along with some help from my angel wife and a cleaning company. There are numerous small file cabinets filled with plastic bags stuffed with old pictures. There are three tomato boxed stuffed with old photos, many of which I had never seen before. I'm slowly going through them now, digitizing the best and the historic. It's fun, time-consuming and painful all at the same time. If I was there, I'd give you a hug and we'd have coffee my photo-brother. Stay strong."

Mike replies: You too, Don. Sending good wishes.

Blog Note

Very unfortunately, I have to take a few more days off. I hate to interrupt the conversation and I apologize sincerely. Family business to attend to, unavoidable. I have to say, this has been a difficult Summer.

Back Friday, and "miles to go before I sleep."

—Mike

P.S. If you ever have to bring caregivers and other workers into the houses of older relatives, secure the valuables before outsiders so much as set foot in the house. Lock up the jewelry and, if you can't put the valuables under literal lock and key, at least itemize and photograph everything. And do both at the earliest possible opportunity, for otherwise there's never a time.

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 Cytrynowicz: "Oh s**t sorry to hear Mike."

Peter Williams: "That seems like a s**t attitude to and generalisation about caregivers and other workers."

Mike replies: Hmm, good point, and I'm sorry. Caregivers are among the blessed of the Earth: the good, responsible ones are doing work that benefits human beings as well as the human family as a whole. On the other hand, in every barrel of people there are a few bad ones that diminish the rest. In the news recently we have watched that with police officers, in people like Michael Slager and Derek Chauvin, but a large number of police officers are upright individuals who sincerely serve their communities and do a good job. In like fashion, what is likely a very small number of caregivers, those who neglect, abuse, or steal, stink up the air for the rest.

Maybe I should have worded it better: if you don't sensibly secure your elders' valuables from the start of their decline, you have no one to blame but yourself.

Alan Ampolsk: "About your PS? Amen! One of the many notable episodes during my father's Alzheimer's was the home health aide who lifted one of his credit cards, which we hadn't properly secured, and used it to pay her cell phone bill—which resulted in her name appearing on the credit card statement. There is no such thing as a criminal mastermind. Nevertheless—be careful out there."

...And About the Camera

...And about the camera, I just really want an A6600, but I can't do it. I already have an X-T1 and an X-H1, and they'll do everything I need a camera to do, and, therefore, I can't pull the trigger on a $1,400 camera I don't have the lenses for and don't need. Just can't do it. Just. Cannot. Do it.

It's a psychological problem more than anything else. It just seems too wasteful and impractical. I have a whole Fuji system—two bodies and six lenses. If I sold the bodies and bought an X-Pro3, that would make enough sense, I think.

Do you ever run into problems with this? The most common one, I suppose, is buying too much, spending too much, indulging yourself too much. But I often have the opposite problem...difficulty letting go of the money. When I started teaching photography in 1985 and I suddenly had an income and a place for an enlarger, it was still very difficult for me to buy the enlarger. It took me months of struggling with it before I managed to place the order.

Ninety percent of this stuff is half mental, Yogi Berra allegedly said. The image that usually comes into my head is of the great golfer Ben Hogan, whose yips took the form of not being able to draw the putter back to make a putt. He would stand there at address, frozen, unable to move. Very, very mysterious, the way the brain sometimes works. 

Mike

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Ringlight for Zoom, Facetime, vlogging, streaming, video recording, remote working or remote learning. Holds a phone, or you can set it behind and above a desktop computer with a built-in camera. The following image is also a link: 

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Dan Gorman: " A few years back, I suddenly developed a near-complete inability to hand-write the capital letters W and M. Only with great effort could I make my pen/pencil move. Once the first stroke was finally under way, it took tremendous concentration to form the rest of the letters, and generally came out pretty badly mangled. A year or so later the problem disappeared on its own. I still have no idea what caused the problem, or what caused it to go away. All good now, but the episode did give me a new sense of my own vulnerability."

Mike replies: Wow, that's fascinating. I'm very interested when I see things like that happen in myself. For example, when I was 45 or so I started occasionally transposing letters as I typed. I had never done it before. Then, for a few years, I'd be typing along, and just one random word would come out with all the letters mixed up...the proper letters and the proper number of letters would be there, but jumbled. If I were trying to type "mixed" what might come out was "dxemi." And just one word amongst all the rest.

Now that never happens any more. What the...?!

Have you ever read The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat? It's Oliver Sacks' engaging recounting of a wide variety of neurological disorders. A fascinating, memorable book, I thought. 

Mike: "Take the stuff you have, all of it that you don't or won't ever use, and trade it in for the stuff you want. Simple. Take the hit, get what you like and stop whining.  ;-)  Seriously, it's only money. Use what makes you happy. Then go out and take some pictures with the new stuff that you want to have and use. It's not like you want a Leica SL2 and a 50mm Summicron!"

Mike replies: I almost never allow any form of the word "whiner" in the comments, but in this case I have to allow it.  :-D

Jamie Pillers: "Mike, have a look at the Fuji X-S10. It has all the guts of the X-T4, including IBIS. Thus, better performer than the X-H1. And it's tiny! Have a look at CameraSize.com and be surprised. Another feature I like about the X-S10 is it has the type of flippy screen I like...you can fold it around so that the screen doesn't face out. Thus the camera has more of a feel of a film camera and it promotes 'anti-chimping'. And...the cost is very nice! And...it's lighter than the A6600.  :-)  "

Sroyon: "Yes I know the problem you describe. In 2011, a camera store in Tokyo let me handle a film Leica (I had already told them I wasn't in the market for one, just wanted to see what it was like). I had never handled a Leica before, nor even a rangefinder. Of course Leicas are beautiful and finely-engineered and all that, but what I remember most vividly is focusing on a shelf across the room. I was used to focusing with an SLR, but seeing the double-image come together, the rangefinder suddenly felt like the easiest, most natural way to focus.

"I could afford it—I was a finance lawyer at the time, in fact I was earning more than I currently do as an academic—but I just couldn't bring myself to buy it. Photography is just a hobby for me; I had a perfectly good film camera and a perfectly good digital camera already, and spending that much on a camera just felt...wrong.

"Anyway seven(!) years later, my girlfriend finally got tired of hearing me carry on about how amazing it was, said 'Right, let's get you one for your birthday.' And we got an M3 and 50mm Summicron from an estate sale (she paid half, most expensive birthday present ever). I will always be grateful to her, because I unreservedly love that camera, and if not for her prodding, I would never have got it for myself."

Tolerating Yr. Hmbl. Ed.

So I hope you can bear with me on the stuff about watches. For some reason I can't imagine people not being interested in pool, but I can absolutely "get it" that a lot of people are just totally uninterested in watches. Heck, I myself was totally uninterested in watches barely more than a month ago. I have to say, though, I'm curiously happy to be back wearing one after all these years.

I mean, how can anybody not be interested in pool? It's a sport. Can't pretty much anyone watch any particular sport with at least a little interest? I can watch high diving, snowboarding, dog agility contests, soccer, even poker. I mean I don't go out of my way. I guess there are a few sports I won't watch...back in Wisconsin, fishing shows seemed popular. I have no problem conceiving that some people are interested in fishing, but I really don't need to watch it on TV. (What's the weirdest sport [or game or recreation] you'll watch on TV?) When I was young I thought golf was about as exciting as watching grass grow, but then for a few years there I would stare at the TV screen like I was hypnotized. Or hyp-mo-tized, as David Letterman used to say. I guess bowling would make me change the channel, but I have a buddy locally—Kurt, who owns the town bowling alley—who travels to tournaments. To compete, not just to watch. He'll play pool with us, but to get his eyes to really light up, bring up bowling.

Anyway, about the watches: it'll pass, and I'll try my best to go easy on it. You know me. I get these enthusiasms. But 40% is a pretty big number...

Here's a very rough breakdown: of American adults, 20% wear smartwatches; 20% are into traditional watches (both quartz and mechanical, which are lumped together now); 20% own both; and 40% don't own or wear a watch.

TOP's audience is thought to skew older now (the Commentariat seems to) but, curiously, older people are more likely to fall into the "no watch" group. Apparently a lot of the over-60 crowd remembers pain-in-the-butt hand-wound watches that were only accurate to the nearest five minutes and were always stopping at inconvenient times because we forgot to wind them (my hand is raised here). Most of us are more than happy to have the time on the phones we're carrying anyway, accurate to within a fraction of a second always. With zero care and feeding. Heck, my best watch syncs to my phone, four times a day. And some retirees go out of their way to banish the tyranny of the clock from their lives and not be a slave!

Anyway, nobody comes here to read about watches. And the real watch guys here have no need to listen to a blithering wet-behind-the-ears greenhorn newbie like me. And a quartz snob at that. Like I say, I'll try to go easy, and I hope you'll indulge me....

Mike

Product o' the Week:

Ringlight for Zoom, Facetime, vlogging, streaming, video recording, remote working or remote learning. Holds a phone, or you can set it behind and above a desktop computer with a built-in camera. The following image is also a link: 

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Featured Comments from:

John Camp: "As for sports, I honestly believe you have to ingest illegal drugs before you can appreciate synchronized swimming. The sport might very well be interesting to the athletes, but for spectating...acid may be the only answer. Or mushrooms."

Mike replies: Made me laugh. I was going to use synchronized swimming as an example but I couldn't remember what it was called!

AN: "I've gradually realized that for me, watching sports on TV has more or less the same kind of appeal as watching a soap opera. If I know something about the specific teams/players/coaches and their history, then I am interested. If I don't know any 'backstory,' then it doesn't matter what sport they are playing; I'm not engaged. It doesn't even particularly seem to matter how well I understand the rules or strategies of the sport being played (the announcers/fan reaction will tell me enough to follow along). So: if you want to get me excited about your pool articles, you know what you have to do."

Mike replies: You have thrown down the gauntlet! (...He says, as other readers groan.)

Dan Doviddio: Fountain pens can be another rabbit hole hobby. I am surprised how popular they are. I've acquired four since the pandemic.

Mike thinks to himself: No fountain pens...no fountain pens...no fountain pens....

Caleb Courteau: "By pure chance you and I became interested in watches at the same time, so of course I’m gobbling up your posts about watches. They really are a perfect third hobby. Unlike a camera they’re not begging to be used. If a camera isn’t producing photos it’s a bit of a pointless object, but a watch’s purpose is being carried out whether it’s on your wrist or your nightstand. They take up very little space, and as you pointed out, you can spend as much or as little as you desire. Furthermore, if it’s the shopping for watches that you enjoy most, and less the actual watches themselves, there is an endless supply of novelty within the world of watches. Different, straps, dials, movements, and case materials. There’s dozens of manufacturers, many of them with origins going back more than a century, making it easy to lose yourself in the history of watchmaking, if that’s your thing."

Sunday Support Group: Watch Watch

Mike Disfarmer, East Faust

Another Chance: My old friend Kim K. has posted an accessible mix at Mixcloud. Called "2nd Chance," it includes The Grateful Dead, XTC, Gomez, Bob Dylan, Another Sunny Day, and more. I've always loved the opening Dead song, and check out that zany harmonica on this version of "Desolation Row." Funky and funny. Typically, I liked the song that turned out to be Nick Lowe. (I like Nick. Jesus of Cool was an album I liked in the days of the old New Wave.) And check out that "cover" photograph: oddly touching, isn't it? The missing part graced a heart-shaped locket maybe. And I wonder what became of the locket? Surely the lover and the beloved are gone now, but what treasure the memento must have been to each other in their time. The more you can honor the one you love and the love you share, the happier both of you will be. By the bye, I use the Shazam app to identify the cuts—it can peg most of them, although Kim regularly stumps it. 2nd Chance is a nice listen for this cloudy Sunday.

Moose demos: TOP reader Moose posted a comment yesterday that linked to a couple of wonderful graphics—by hovering your mouse over several labels, you can compare and contrast various processing applications for phone pictures.

Sunset, Alameda Lagoon

Salad, Barley & Hops Pub, Occidental, CA

Quite a difference! I've never done much in the way of processing of phone snaps, but Moose has explored it thoroughly. Don't miss this. It only takes a few minutes to check it out and it's pretty eye-opening. Thanks, Moose.

Watch watch: Almost four weeks ago I did a post called "My New Watch," and I started a watch collection. I'm collecting only quartz watches, mostly in the "affordable" category. You might think affordable is a euphemism for "cheap," but it's actually one level above cheap, because cheap watches are really cheap*. I wanted to start out with a small group as a core, so I've had eight watches pass through my hands, and three of them have made it into the collection. Here's a fourth I'm considering now:

You can see the tag is still on it. I haven't decided if I'll keep it yet. For a guy who doesn't like color much, I find I really like touches of color in watch designs. You can see some of the little green accents in this one. Very pretty. Goes with my green shirt. On the other hand, I really don't like watches with advertisements printed on the dial like this one has. I had to buy this from the Netherlands for an inflated price...Casio doesn't bring its better Oceanus watches to the U.S., and the Edifice line is hard to find here too (although you can get the chronograph version of this one from Amazon.) This set me back $120 and change, which is higher than it was when you could buy it here, yet it's still high value: it's got a sapphire crystal, for one thing, which is rare at this price.

I call myself a "quartz snob." It's a joke, because watch people don't like quartz. Quartz watches have so many disadvantages: they require much less tending, you don't get to pay for regular servicing, they're less expensive to begin with, and they're far more accurate. No fun at all, in other words. I'm timing out that little Seiko I bought back on June 22nd, and after nearly a month, it is slow—but by about half a second. What a terrible watch—you hardly ever get to reset it!  :-)

Annals of the legal profession: Do you remember Mike Disfarmer? He was the Vivian Maier of the 1970s, a local "find" by a man named Peter Miller who rescued and publicized the work. By now the subject of many books whose prints sell for high prices, Disfarmer has joined Maier in that his archive is in legal dispute. A group of about 60 distant relatives are fighting for control of the valuable estate. It's the subject of a new article in The New Yorker called "Who Owns Mike Disfarmer's Photographs?" written by Eren Orbey. I haven't actually read it yet, but I'm a-gonna.

Mike

*In fact, I doubt any other single class of product has a wider range of prices on Amazon. At the high end, there's a Breguet Double Tourbillon in rose gold listed for $299,999.00, and at the low end there seem to be numerous Chinese watches listed for 1¢...apparently they make it up in the $10+ shipping charges.

Product o' the Week:

Ringlight for Zoom, Facetime, vlogging, streaming, video recording, remote working or remote learning. Holds a phone, or you can set it behind and above a desktop computer with a built-in camera. The following image is also a link: 

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:

Joe Holmes: "That Mike Disfarmer article in The New Yorker originated with Ron Slattery, who is mentioned in the article. I'm an old online buddy of Slattery, and he contacted me a few months ago to ask if I knew any magazine that might be interested in writing up this crazy tale. My wife Sara Bennett had worked with Eren Orbey at one point...

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/photo-booth/life-after-prison-for-women-who-served-decades-behind-bars 

...so I put Orbey and Slattery together and the result you can now read at The New Yorker. I told each of them that I feel like the guy at the wedding who had introduced the bride and groom way back when."

Why I Don't Love the X-H1

Over the years (and many cameras) I've noticed something: Sometimes you bond with a camera, sometimes you don't.

I have to face it: I haven't taken to the Fuji X-H1. It has become clear.

This isn't a value judgement. It's a great camera. And it was a gift, and an extremely kind one at that—I'm grateful for the experience of getting to know it. But I don't love using it and I'm not enthused about the results I manage to get from it. For whatever reason, it hasn't joined my parade of favorites.

Why? Not sure I know. I don't think it's quantifiable. It's kind of like breaking up with someone you still really like, admire, approve of, wish the best for, and aren't unhappy with...but simply don't love, for whatever mysterious alchemical reason.

You can't force it. I've tried.

And this is absolutely not a knock against anyone else who uses it and loves it. We're all different.

Xander and Alyssa. I even like the touch of blue on the right, the distinctive color of Xander's new car.

I had a wonderful visit with my son and his girlfriend and their delightful little doggie Ziggy. They are excellent dog parents, attentive and caring but relaxed, tolerant, and adaptable. We had trouble even remembering how long it had been. A friend told me recently that his little kid thought a stylized "2021" spelled "ZOZI," so I'm going to try to set this past week in my memory as "the Zozi visit." I think I treasured every moment because it's been so long since I've seen them—COVID-19 made for the longest time Xander and I have ever been apart in his entire life. Just over two years, since June of '19. I hope such a long gap between in-person visits never has to happen again.

What is real
Re the picture above, when I mentioned I was taking a little time off, Gordon Lewis wrote: "Well, okay, as long as you show us one or two portraits of Zander with your 'real' camera. And while you're at it, see how he feels about watches."

That's when my feelings about the X-H1 finally gelled. Even meaning to carry out Gordon's request, I found myself resisting getting it out or taking it along. In some ways it makes sense: I have a long history of liking small, light cameras—139Q, M6, OM-4T, CLE, C-3040z, GF1, and so on. Pro cameras such as the F4, RZ67, and D3 haven't suited me. They usually strike me as fantastic cameras made for somebody else. So the thought that kept nagging me about Gordon's comment was: I kinda don't have a real camera.

The iPhone comes closest for me right now, if I'm honest. By a small margin, it's closer to the way I like to shoot than the X-H1 is, but in the other direction. I get criticism for publishing iPhone snaps here, but I actually wouldn't mind being a smartphone photographer. There are even a few things the phone does well: for instance, it always seems to hit the proper exposure, at least if the highlights aren't blown (I always worry about that). And it does well at balancing mixed light. I understand the newer ones have a very usable "Night Mode" too. Unfortunately, as much as I love it as a "note-pad," the iPhone isn't my axe either. The sensor's too small: the images look great on the phone itself and do okay at the 800-pixel-wide blog-post size as long as the dynamic range is adequate, but the files don't correct easily, have too many artifacts in enlargements, and those highlights I mentioned are often blown. I dislike blown highlights. The iPhone is simultaneously a.) very good at casual snaps to use as communication and b.) frustrating to try to control as well as deficient for non-stylized regular prints. I've seen people use them for great small prints, used within their limits, but usually processed in some distinctive way. The ergonomics also leave a lot to be desired.

So it's both very good and also bad. Kinda like texting: texting is great too, but only within its intended limits. You wouldn't write a book that way.

If the X-H1 is at one end and the iPhone is at the other, I want something in the middle.

And, come to think, Jay B., who gave the X-H1 to me, didn't want to keep it either. He loves his Leica Q2.

Awk-ward!
Anyway, I almost hated to write this post. But I need to be up-front with everyone about where I find myself camera-wise. It's our deal, am I right? Another time this happened was with the Olympus E-M5, which I got all enthused about at first but that I didn't bond with. I had to 'fess up that time too, awkward as it was. (I'd link to that post, but I can't find it.)

Anyway, I'm officially on the lookout for a new camera. Which is odd, for me, in Zozi. It will probably be a Fuji, but then again, I won't be selling the X-H1—I need a capable body for the lenses I have, and it's a good camera for specific tasks.

And by the way, Gordon, what Xander thinks about watches? Basically that they're not an asset. That also made me realize something about myself—I instinctively think possessions are assets when they're generally not. He who dies with the most toys doesn't win, he who dies with the most toys just makes it harder on whoever has to clean out his house. Xander's got a much better head for investing, money, and finances than I do. One of many things I admire about him.

But then, I think the world of the guy. We had a really nice four days.  :-) 

Mike

Product o' the Week:

Ringlight for Zoom, Facetime, vlogging, streaming, video recording, remote working or remote learning. Holds a phone, or you can set it behind and above a desktop computer with a built-in camera. The following image is also a link: 

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

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

James: "I can't believe I was on your page at the moment you made a new post! Glad you had fun with your family—the most important thing in life."

Gordon Lewis: "It surely wasn't my intent to trigger such self-reflection, but if you got an engaging post out my previous request, so much the better. I'm glad to see you documented Xander and Alyssa's visit regardless of what camera you used. If nothing else, images help break up the monotony of text on screen. The best part of all of this is that, despite your challenges, doubts and insecurities, you have managed to raise a strong, healthy, loving, level-headed young man. Congratulations, my friend."

Mike replies: Thanks.  :-)

Robert Roaldi: "Have you tried bonding with a Fuji X-E4 (or previous versions)? I had a similar issue with a Rollei 35s. I liked everything about it except taking pictures with it. Maybe I should just collect them instead.

"About the X-H1, could it be the looks? I don't like the aesthetics of a 'squarish' top body, I prefer a bit of a pointed top on the 'pentaprism.' I know this is silly but a lot of personal preferences are."

Dave Van de Mark (partial comment): "I totally understand where your head is at with the X-H1 because I am in a 'near' identical space with my camera, a Panasonic S1R. The situation is slightly different from your lack of love for using the X-H1. I love using my S1R but often find it too heavy and bulky for the 'situations' I have been and will continue to find myself in, and am looking for an occasional substitute."

Pierre: "You ought to try an X100V. Fixed 35mm equivalent. Plenty of tweaks under the hood to make it faster and more responsive than previous X100 models. Tilt screen. Built-in leaf shutter and ND filter."

Mike replies: For fourteen hundred freakin' dollars? For a little point-and-shoot? Above my pay grade, I'm afraid.

Kirk: "Leica M10 + 35mm Apo Summicron-M. Perfect size. Perfect performance. No where to go from there.... Resist the temptation to go with chrome finish. Stick with the utilitarian aesthetic. All done."

Mike replies: At $19,000 all in I'd be all done all right! And if Xander thinks watches aren't an asset...besides, how exactly is that better than an X100V? At least the X100V can focus itself—that's a thing that came in during the 1980s.

Your suggestion brings a hazy memory to mind. Years ago I used to buy Automobile magazine for a columnist named Ezra Dyer, who Google tells me is now a Senior Editor at Car & Driver. You might remember me talking about how he decided that whenever anyone among his friends and family asked him for a car recommendation, they never bought what he suggested, so, from then on, no matter who it was and no matter what they really needed, he was going to suggest a Ferrari 599. Have you taken that to heart, Kirk?  :-D

Kirk replies: "Exactly!"

robert e: "Thanks for sharing your joy and pride and pics of your wonderful ZOZI visit, Mike! Interesting thoughts about 'real' cameras. I think for many of us, if not most, no single camera can do it all because our needs or interests are too varied. Maybe we should just roll with it and instead of pursuing 'the one' or 'the middle,' build the tool box. And that's not GAS talking; in fact, I expect this approach to result in less GAS than the pursuit of a chimerical ideal."

Mike replies: So sort of like having a watch collection instead of just one watch.... ;-)

Moose: "What about 1" sensors? I know, I know, bigger sensors are better. But, you know, I spend a lot of time inside image files. I simply don't think about whether they are 20-MP 1", 16- or 20-MP Micro 4/3, 24- or 42-MP FF. They all process much the same and give the same sort of results.

"I've just been processing some 2009/10 12-MP Canon 5D photos, and it's all pretty much the same. Sure, the size they all can be printed will vary, but for web display and book pages, they are all similar. I feel that current 1" sensors are at least as good as the first Micro 4/3 sensor systems.

"The two cameras that come to mind are Sony RX100 (latest version) and the Panasonic ZS200. One NatGeo photographer says he uses only the Sony for his magazine work. Both use the same sensor. I chose the Panny mostly for the wider zoom range, which matters a lot to me, and for the mechanically and ergonomically better EVF design, which doesn't pop up and down. (I can see me losing that one to handling.)

"Physically, they are somewhere between cellphone and 'serious' cameras. Coat pocket-able or nice in a belt case.

"To give an idea what it can do, here are way too many photos, 146, that I've taken with it and posted somewhere or other. Many are photos you would never take and/or won't like. I hope others tickle your fancy. I do think they demonstrate great range/versatility. There are several that show full pixel samples and/or before and after processing. Anything fuzzy or murky is artistic license, not camera faults.  \;~)>  "

Jamie Pillers: "I have the X-T4 and the X-E4. I like the X-T4 for its grip, beautiful EVF, sound of the shutter, life of the battery, and two card slots. I like the X-E4 for its size and its minimalist approach to buttons and grip (there isn't one). The X-E4 suits me like the little screwmount Leicas suited...forces one to relax with the simplicity of the thing."

John Camp: "I don't think that switching around from one theoretically fine camera to the next theoretically fine camera (all the cameras we are now dealing with are theoretically fine) will get you very far. The best thing to do would be to lie down and close your eyes and remember what your best-feeling camera was like—all of the various ergonomic details, and the visual cues as well—and then find that camera among the long list of theoretically fine cameras we have available.

"I personally very much like the Panasonic GX8s and the Nikon Z cameras...and if you look at them closely, you'd find that the GX8's and the Z's are very similar, except that the GX8's are smaller and lighter. I've now gotten to the point where I can use them interchangeably, depending on what I'm doing.

"Rather than looking for a perfect camera, you should be looking for a friend. Whatever you come up with will be capable of taking excellent pictures. IMHO."

Mike replies: Yep, that's exactly what this post is about, that sense of your camera being a friend. It's what I haven't gotten from the X-H1 despite giving it the old college try (now there's an expression from way back).

V.I. Voltz: "Behrouz Boochani wrote his first novel No Friend but the Mountains by text message while held by the Australian Government at the Manus Island detention centre. An exception that maybe proves the rule."

Tex Andrews: "Camera bonding: definitely a thing. Same with tools. Above, someone mentioned a Rollei 35S. They came in different flavors, but in form factor they were of a piece—and I bonded with mine. Maybe because it was my first 'real' camera, maybe because it was so simple it distilled photography for me to an essence, something I later had with my Fuji GSW690II, like the Rollei's radiation-affected sci-fi big brother (also known as the Texas Leica).

"I've had other great cameras, with mixed bonding, like girlfriends (of which I've not had many). You can't explain the bonding—an excellent camera may just not click (pun intended) with a person. And I've had some cameras I bonded with that I had to let go with sadness. Happy to say my current two are bond-mates. Phone? not really, although the convenience and utility of it cannot be denied."

[Ed. note: So many good comments on this post...the above is just a sampling. By the way, that's the concept for "Featured Comments"—a sampling, for people who don't have the time or inclination to read everything. Featured Comments are not just "the best ones" and certainly not the ones that agree with me—what I try to do is provide a selection that is representative of the whole spectrum. There are always great ones not featured.]

Quote o' the Day: Josef Koudelka

Q: Other than the practical elements of carrying and developing film, was there any difference between digital and film?

A: "For me it is the same. Only I enjoy digital more. I don’t carry a computer. I come inside in the evening, and until 12 o’clock I look at the screen on the back of the camera, and I eliminate.

"Landscape photography is fantastic. It’s not by chance that as they get older many photographers start with the landscape. There are certain things you have to do to photograph people—you have to be able to run.  If you photograph people, all of the time you are running after something and you are losing all the time. With landscapes you are waiting all the time. It’s much more relaxing."

—Josef Koudelka, one of the greatest photographers
of people in the history of the medium

From the Lens Blog interview by James Estrin in the World's Best Photography Magazine, Part II. Many great quotes in this! I love Koudelka. Here's Part I. Koudelka's current camera is a special B&W panoramic version of the Leica S2 that Leica made especially for him six years ago. Photo of Koudelka in 2014 by NoJin (Jindřich Nosek) via Wikimedia Commons.

Product o' the Week:

Ringlight for Zoom, Facetime, vlogging, streaming, video recording, remote working or remote learning. Holds a phone, or you can set it behind and above a desktop computer with a built-in camera. The following image is also a link: 

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: "I think I can confirm this. I met Josef Koudelka twice. The first was at a private reception for him in 2010. He was wearing his trademark photo vest which looked like a costume amidst the jackets and ties. Having noticed one pocket bulging heavily I took the opportunity during a private moment to point to it and asked, 'Leica?' He winked and nodded, as if I’d just discovered him concealing a pet. I wondered if he’d pulled it out at all during the day.

"My second meeting with Koudelka was at the opening of his retrospective show, 'Josef Koudelka: Nationality Doubtful' in 2014. Gone was the vest, at least that evening, and its Leica bulge. Instead, slung over his shoulder was a silver Fujifilm X100. During a brief conversation I pointed to it and asked how he liked it. He immediately beamed and grabbed it like a prize. His young assistant smiled and rolled her eyes, a silent, 'Oh no, please, don’t get him started on that camera again!' I laughed…loudly."

Short Vacation (Blog Note)

TOP will be taking time off for a few days...for a selfish reason. My son Xander, his girlfriend Alyssa, and their little doggie Ziggy drove 750 miles (1,207 km) to come visit. It's been so long since I've seen Xander—usually we see each at least once a year, but with the pandemic and all, it's been since June 2019, and longer than that since Alyssa was here last.

Ziggy doing "the Captain's stare." The Captain's stare was a standard portrait pose in days of yore, used to make a subject look stalwart, visionary, and intrepid. Check! Note Ziggy's cool bling.

I can't tell you how good it is to see them—I guess if you're a parent you'll know the feeling. I really needed this visit, with all that's been going on in the family lately. Just such a pleasure.

They're both in school, so they'll be leaving again early Friday morning. I'll sit down and get to work after I wave goodbye. So I'll see you on Friday! And best regards as well as best of luck for your own Summer 2021 vacation...I hope it goes (or went) well.

Mike

Any Birders Out There? Basic Birding Camera

This question comes from my nephew David, a family man with a lovely wife and two toddlers in Texas. I told him I have very little experience with long lenses and would ask the brain trust—which would be you.

Hey uncle Mike, had a camera-type question. I currently have a Fujifilm super zoom type all in one (I'm out of town and don't have it with me, so I don't know the model number) but I've been getting into birding and it's a frustrating camera to use. The autofocus and shutter are both very slow, and the autofocus loves to focus on foreground twigs and backgrounds instead of the bird. I know the DSLR market has gotten far more affordable recently, but I'm pretty illiterate with types, models, lens terminology, etc. So, I figured I'd ask the expert! What would you recommend for an inexpensive DSLR and long lens capable of manual focus, with a fast enough shutter for birds, that will give sufficient quality for identification? I'm mostly focused on making sure I have enough detail to see important field marks. Thanks in advance, and hope things are going well!

He gave me permission to post the question here. I was thinking Micro 4/3 might actually be the best balance. Pretty sure he doesn't have the budget for a Sony RX-10 1-incher (what version is that on now? IV?). But I really don't feel competent to make a recommendation. Can you help?

Hawk
I had a surprise encounter with a bird recently. I was looking at a house in Canadaigua. The small backyard had a tall wooden fence around it, the kind you can't see through, and as I walked into the yard a large hawk of some sort hopped up from behind the fence and perched on the fence looking at me. I walked slowly toward him. He let me get to within ten feet or so before spreading his impressively large wings—but he only flew a couple of feet to a nearby branch. I know very little about birds but it didn't seem like entirely natural behavior—perhaps it was sick or hurt? Or perhaps the homeowner fed it? It certainly looked sleek and healthy.

We have a lot of raptors in this area, although I've seen fewer this year than in years past. There don't seem to be as many turkey buzzards about for one thing. Anyway the hawk was quite beautiful, and, as has happened before, it took me aback to be so close to such a large bird.

The one thing I can tell you about bird photography: if you want to really appreciate great bird photography, just try doing it yourself. Not easy!

Thanks for any advice, bird people.

Mike

[UPDATE Monday morning: David sends thanks for what he called the "information firehose" in these comments. I didn't "Feature" many because I don't want to seem to privilege any recommendation as being favored; I figure many people know what they're talking about and everyone knows more than I do. David reports he's been loaned a Canon EOS XTi and with 18–55mm and 55–250mm lenses by his mother-in-law in Idaho—they're currently visiting out there. So he's going to try that for a while and see what he can learn from the experience. I have an AF VR-Nikkor 80–400mm ƒ4.5–5.6G here (a donation) and I offered him that, but that would mean he'd still have to buy a body. I told him I'd keep the Nikkor around so he can borrow it in the future if he wants to.

He says, "I've kinda gone crazy on birds. Got some pretty nice binoculars, started recording a life list, took students on birding walks [he's a high school science teacher]—it's been great. Seen over a hundred and fifty species in the last 13 months." Thanks to everyone for pitching in with suggestions! —Mike]

Book o' the Week:

Byways: Photographs by Roger A Deakins. Damiani, September 2021. Note: PRE-ORDER ONLY. The little birdies are telling me that these will go fast. This is the first monograph by the legendary Oscar-winning cinematographer Sir Roger A. Deakins (born 1949), best known for his collaborations with directors such as the Coen brothers, Sam Mendes and Denis Villeneuve.

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:

Sharon: "No advice on the camera but my husband got an awesome photo of a hawk that let him get very close. He was big but really just a baby. You could tell by the markings on his chest."

Thom Hogan: "Since my name was summoned [James wrote, 'I'm sure Thom Hogan will chime in here eventually' —Ed.]...'Birder' is different than 'BIF' [birds in flight —Ed.]. If you look carefully enough, you'll find lots of sub-categories of bird photographers. The problem with the OP? I don't 100% know which one he is, as his question has contradictions in it. But I'd say 'bird ID' is what he wants. For bird ID, long lens (with stabilization) is more important than anything else. Many in the bird ID camp are perfectly happy with something like a Coolpix P950/P1000. For the BIF crowd, things change to AF being the most important attribute, and at the moment for BIF that goes (in order of best to less best) Sony A1, Nikon D6, Canon R5/R6. The 'value' product would be the D500. That said, in all cases there is a learning curve, and that's what trips up most: the just-press-a-button-and-it-works crowd is going to be continuously disappointed in some, if not all, of their bird photos."

Hip to be Square

So here's what happened.

On Thursday I started writing a post about the effect my pandemic experience had on my photography. But I seldom start out knowing in advance what I'm going to say. It evolves, depending on where my mind goes. Alas, as I got into it, I realized it was turning into a full-on gripes-'n'-grievances session, and at some point I thought, wow, this is a downer. I can't subject you to this.

So I just posted the simple question instead. Rather than tell you about my pandemic experience I figured I'd let you tell me about yours.

Several people reported disasters for their business or their motivation, and I don't want to minimize that. I greatly sympathize, as no doubt the majority of us do. And I'm sure the responses were affected by survivor bias: it's possible that some former readers who got out of the hobby altogether are no longer here to comment!

But overall I found I was heartened. Many commenters managed to make lemonade out of lemons, as the saying goes, and it did me good to hear about it.

Circle squared

One thing I've wanted to do is to explore what it's like to shoot square. A while back I set up my X-H1 in 1:1 mode with the XF 35mm ƒ/1.4 and started to see what I could see. I've never actually shot square before; even when I shot with my old Exakta 66 (120 film, 2 1/4 cm square format) for the better part of a year, I ended up cropping everything to verticals, in about a 645 aspect ratio.

Most of all, though, Thursday's comments pointed out to me that my motivation is my own responsibility. I liked what Roger Bradbury said:

I've started and kept with a project, something I've never done before. But the first thing I did, before I took a single photo, was think hard about what I wanted to do until I came up with [a] simple explanation.

Until I had that description of my aims in a single short and clear sentence, I was not ready to begin, for I did not know what I wanted to do. Now I have that description, it influences how and when and why I take every project photo.

Wise words. (Here's his whole comment—worth reading again.)

My former teacher Mark L. Power died not long ago, and it was a big loss to all who knew him—he was a unique and distinctive guy and a great writer and teacher. (John Anderson did an excellent job on the linked article.) But I'm reminded here of something Mark told me many years ago. He had observed over many years that when students complained about their photography or photography in general, it was because they hadn't found a way to get out and work. He said that whenever someone found an idea for a project and got into the work, somehow the complaints and the malaise all went away.

I've never forgotten that.

Surely it's up to me to find a way to work, and it's something that's within my power and ability. Yeah, I've been in the doldrums. But the wind will fill my sails again.

Mike

P.S. The category I filed this post in is "Reflections." Craig Ferguson: "Made meself laugh, and that's half the battle."

Book o' the Week:

Byways: Photographs by Roger A Deakins. Damiani, September 2021. Note: PRE-ORDER ONLY. The little birdies are telling me that these will go fast. This is the first monograph by the legendary Oscar-winning cinematographer Sir Roger A. Deakins (born 1949), best known for his collaborations with directors such as the Coen brothers, Sam Mendes and Denis Villeneuve.

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:

Robert Pillow: "Shooting square makes you a well-rounded photographer."

Mike Peters (partial comment): "Now, and since 2000, all of my personal work has been shot on square format, while the pro work is strictly rectangles. It makes it very easy for me to shift gears in my head. When I see a square my mindset changes over to seeing the world differently, and with no client in mind. It's very refreshing to be able to make that distinction, and it immediately shifts my intention when I look at the world to a more personal perspective."

Ilkka: "I photograph a lot of architecture. I often crop square, but never in camera. One advantage of shooting square, on a rectangular format camera, is that every lens becomes a shift lens. If you have a full frame camera (24x36) and turn it upright, you have 6mm shift up or down. By using a bit wider lens and cropping a bit more, you easily get 8 or 10mm shift. That is almost always enough. Just keep the camera level."

Did the Pandemic Affect Your Photography?

...And if so, for good or bad?

I know people of both types, so it doesn't have to be one way or the other (Peter did some of the best photojournalistic work of his life, for example). Anyway, I was just wondering.

Mike

Book o' the Week:

Byways: Photographs by Roger A Deakins. Damiani, September 2021. Note: PRE-ORDER ONLY. The little birdies are telling me that these will go fast. This is the first monograph by the legendary Oscar-winning cinematographer Sir Roger A. Deakins (born 1949), best known for his collaborations with directors such as the Coen brothers, Sam Mendes and Denis Villeneuve.

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:

Tex Andrews: "Yes, in two ways. Did much less personal work, but somewhat more professional work, including work for our new catalog at the Hirshhorn, the first refresh of our collections catalog in 40+ years (as one of several photographers, plus existing images we had from our previous full time person), so very pleased about that. Includes some linkable video material as well. Other projects got attenuated or cancelled, sadly."

Ron Hoffer: "Having my photo memoir From the Bronx to Berlin and Beyond published by Kerber-Verlag in Germany right before the global lockdown meant a 10-month delay until copies made it to the U.S. distributer (you may recall I sent you a copy). I had been looking forward to an April 2020 launch in NYC, followed by fun book signings and parties in the U.S. and Europe; all of which were cancelled. Oh well, still some progress as I've had online presentations and featured on the Film Photography Project podcast. Hoping for a gallery show ahead. But the time was helpful in that I was able to put together an album of photos and mementos from my family's history, focusing on the period of 1900-late '60s, and self-published with Blurb. Still so fortunate to have a pension rather than rely on photography to keep food on the table!"

Mike replies: I did receive your book and I thank you for it! Strong work, and congratulations on publication. I enjoyed looking at it.

Jim Kofron: Yes. There were a number of non-pandemic factors involved (falling in love, selling a house, moving, getting a bike), but I've done virtually no 'serious' photography in the last couple years. And honestly, I'm OK with that. I'll get back to it when I'm ready."

Kodachromeguy: "Good! I Reactivated my 4×5" camera and made a serious exploration of the Mississippi Delta using black-and-white film of different formats. We were not restricted or made to stay indoors here, so there was no problem with traveling around the state."

Nick: "It basically stomped it out of existence. I need to get out of the house and see new places in order to take decent photos; spending months within walking distance of my house nearly killed the hobby for me entirely. I'm vaccinated and traveling again soon, which I hope will wake up my eye."

William Schneider: "The confluence of pandemic restrictions and a chronically ill relative provided a push into a new direction for me—bird photography. My wife urged me to send a photo-a-day (sound familiar?) of our splendid backyard birds to cheer him up. For over a year now, I have sent to him a daily email with a new bird photo and a short upbeat note. I learned to enjoy this project enough to purchase some dedicated photo equipment and the excellent book Mastering Bird Photography by Marie Read for inspiration."

Matt: "Definite negative effect. The majority of my photography was events, concerts, and portraits. The types of photography the are most accessible during lockdown don't really appeal to me."

Bob Rosinsky: "The pandemic had a huge impact on my choice of subject matter. During the early days of sheltering in, I started playing around with making ersatz UFO pictures. COVID-19 seemed to fall from the sky, and UFOs served as a perfect metaphor. I shot most of the pictures on film, then digitized the negatives and drew in the UFOs in post."

Mike replies: You are a very creative guy Bob.

Thomas Rink: "Definitely for good. In March 2020, my employer relegated all of us to work from home. For me, this meant two additional hours of available time per day. Since my current project is about a place close to my home, travel restrictions have not been an impediment, and the government of the German state where I live (North Rhine-Westphalia) has never significantly restricted individual mobility (as, for example, the French government had). During my past life—up to the onset of the pandemic—nothing much has changed. I've always taken this as a given. The events of March 2020 really challenged this certainty; it became clear to me that if I'd wanted to get something done with my photography, the time for that is now, as the future is always uncertain. In addition to photography, during the last year I committed a lot of time into producing a small edition of inkjet-printed, handmade books from one of my projects. For me, this was a deeply satisfying experience. Definitely something I will repeat in the future."

Markus: "Yes, of course it did, and admittedly I felt quite restricted when basically hobbled to my hometown. But soon I discovered a (for me) new theme that was easily collected on my various ramblings: minor landscapes like this one:

"In the end I turned out enriched, especially by the fact that I had to turn my head and change my way of seeing."

Marcin Wuu: "Ruined it would be just about right way to put it. In shambles is another one."

Kenneth Wajda: "I was extremely prolific. I did a project out my front door of people passing the alley across the street: https://kennethwajda.com/alley/

"Plus during the summer, I had a goal of making four 4x5 photos a day, which if you need four photos, you find four photos: https://KennethWajda.com/4x4x5/

"I continued to make photos for http://TheWisePhotoProject.com of elderly folks.

"And I worked on making photos from my car for my street photography gallery: http://coloradofaces.com

"Plus photos for my http://RoyStryker.com documentary project, which I published three times a week.

"I am a believer that the muse exists, but she has to find you working. So many people wait to be inspired but that's not how inspiration works."

Mike replies: I always enjoy looking at your photos Kenneth. I looked through everything linked here—whew! A lot.

Phil Martin: "Yes, it actually gave me the time to trawl through and edit all my folders and files and discover that I'd actually done quite a lot of work to be pleased about. I now feel much more positive about photography and working towards some more coherent projects."

s.wolters: "Artistic low but a peak of production. Digitized my slide archive and then some."

Tom Rawson: "We have lived in the Kansas Flint Hills for thirty years but had never really explored them…always opting to take vacations in other states (usually Colorado) and foreign countries. As a result, most of my photography involved mountain landscapes and wildlife. Since travel was so restricted during the pandemic, we were 'forced' to explore our own beautiful surroundings. In the process, I became interested in abandoned one-room country schools and began photographing them. After exploring and photographing more than fifty of these schools, I self-published a book titled Pioneer Prairie Learning: 50 One Room Schools in the Kansas Flint Hills."

Geoff Wittig: "The pandemic changed things dramatically for me. Lots of 100 hour weeks working as a physician, plenty of desperately ill patients, endless stress. Thankfully most of this is ebbing now in our area. Previously I would visit promising 'showboat' locations for landscape photography with a giant bag full of bodies and lenses, heavy tripod, filters etc., to try to get that one great image. This past year I felt the need for distance and solace. So I did a lot of hiking on remote trails with one X-H1 body and one lens, the 16–80mm ƒ/4 zoom. I've gotten to know the corners of my rural region far better than I did over the previous 33 years I've lived here, and my photographs are definitely different. Quieter, less dramatic, more meditative."

Mark Crean: "I’ve gone off and started a photography degree online during the pandemic. This has changed everything about my photography while also keeping me busy and focused (a godsend during difficult times). Having to concentrate on a few square miles around my home during the long lockdowns here has also changed the way I look, because this has obliged me to immerse myself in one place and research it. I’ve learned by walking and more walking. Research has uncovered layers of history and land use as well as amazing stories about past lives that I never knew were there. It’s so easy to overlook the past. Anyway, there is some richness in all of this even though it’s been a pretty horrible time for so many of us."

PDLanum: "I shot several thousand images in 2019. 2020—four (4) with my DSLR. I shot about six (6) with my phone.

"I did spend some of the time (most of it photo editing) keywording my 30,000 images taken over the years.

"This year I have taken less then two hundred images. I have removed my 'brand' affiliation from web sites and now post rarely.

"I am trying to figure out how to extract myself from shooting for the non-profits I shot for last year. The body I have is most likely the last one I will ever purchase. The lenses are starting to have internal motor failures and shooting just is not fun anymore.

"We had to cancel a vacation to Norway; maybe next year. I just got off of a 'staycation' (one day), took a few images. My better half and son were walking from the stadium to the Hotel and when I stopped to shoot something all I got was dirty looks and comments about keeping up.

"Seriously thinking it is time to just give up."

Keith S: "I thought I was done with photography. I still enjoyed it but my interest and energy for it were a small fraction of what they used to be. I was only getting one or two pictures a year that I liked. It had been like that for over 10 years.

"When the lockdown started, I was riding my bike more because of the quiet, empty streets. From April to June, the entirety of Marin Headlands (on the north side of the Golden Gate Bridge) was closed to vehicles, turning it into a once-in-a-lifetime paradise for cycling. I rode across the bridge every day and climbed up to Hawk Hill which is one of the highest points there. That’s when I found the ravens, or they found me. I had no prior interest in ravens, photographically or otherwise. But something just clicked and I visited them every day, and after getting to know them, I began photographing them. I’ve been photographing ravens almost exclusively since then and my enthusiasm for photography is back to what it used to be.

"As the world is opening back up, roads are overflowing with cars, and life is returning to 'normal,' a part of me wishes it could remain in Spring of last year."

Open Mike: If You Like Light (OT)

[Ed. note: I just added a whole bunch of new "Featured Comments" to the "Unicorn Lens" post.]

Introduction: Well, I wrote this post yesterday but I lost it. It happens. It's difficult to keep everything organized on the computer desktop, and sometimes something vanishes into the ether. I'll start over again and keep it short.

Re the discussion about collecting in last week's "Open Mike," I've decided to deliberately start a collection. My intent is to make a small collection of generally inexpensive quartz watches.

On a more meta level, I want to try collecting something seriously for once in my life—just as an experiment, to see what it's like and how I do at it*.

I've bought four watches already. Which probably sounds exactly like you should be worried for my mental health (and maybe...), except all but one is inexpensive, and the not-inexpensive one would be cheap if we were talking about a lens. Harmless. (I'll keep telling myself that.)

TOP reader Hans Andersen provided my first crucial collecting insight, which is: no impulse purchases. Three of the five watches I've bought so far already seem like they don't quite belong in the collection, and I was wondering why when Hans mentioned this. The light bulb of comprehension flickered dimly. Sure enough, all three were impulse purchases, made late at night with an itchy mouse finger after looking at watches for hours. So that's enough of that now.

My favorite so far is this Seiko. It's a deliberately old-fashioned design (I have conservative taste in watches), with a 1930s Art Deco vibe. The ID code is SGEH79P1. The original retail price was $250 but the watch is nearing the end of its availability—watch designs sell out and once they're gone, they're pretty gone—and Amazon's end-of-model-cycle price on this one is actually lower than the gray market. There was a lower price at CreationWatches but they're sold out now.

It's "just" a cheap watch, but. If you take a step back for a minute, and look at this from an historical perspective and include the technological dimension, it's a wonder of modern manufacture—it's really quite incredible that you can get something this beautiful and this accurate for a measly hundred and six bucks, only 291 years after John Harrison's first marine chronometer and 52 years after the first commercial quartz watch.

You could pay $38,000 for a Patek Philippe Calatrava, I suppose. You'd be getting a watch that resembles this Seiko quite a lot and keeps much, much worse time. One review of the Patek said it was guaranteed to gain no more than two seconds a day and lose no more than three, and that it was "hard to imagine" anything better. Which for a mechanical watch is probably true, but it made me chuckle. A $35 Casio from Wal-Mart keeps better time and yet somehow remains within the bounds of my imagination. Amount of seconds my Seiko is off per day for the first few days: 0. Absolutely zero, with a zed. It's bang on with the atomic clock app.

I'm a quartz guy, if you can't tell. And a cheapskate: for me, the value proposition here is a plus, not a minus. (For the Patek Philippe owner it would be a minus I'm sure. Who wants a cheap, trifling hundred dollar watch? But it adds to the satisfaction for me. To each his or her own.)

So the standout design feature of the SGEH79P1? Almost no one would say this or even notice it, but: no lume. That is, there's no luminous paint on the hands or the indices. And that makes the silvered accents of the watch look lovely in the light. I even posted a short video at Amazon to suggest how the light plays off the watch as you look at it. It's not the most legible watch in the world, but it sure is pretty to look at as you turn it this way and that. If you like light.

And if you want lume, then go whole-hog and get something like that Padi Diver that Dori told us about, with its great big gobs of lume and lume all over the hands. Why be shy? Don't just dip a toe, over the side you go.

It's already clear that accuracy and precision appeal to me, so I'll be timing out my new Seiko to see how this one does in terms of accuracy. Just as a point of interest: decent mechanical watches are accurate to 10–15 seconds a day; decent quartz watches to 10–15 seconds a month; and decent HAQ (high-accuracy quartz) watches to 10–15 seconds a year. Particularly good examples of all three kinds can do better (like that Patek Philippe with its claimed accuracy of three seconds a day), and many examples will do worse, but those ranges are a good ballpark.''

New band! Lizard skin. Note that the color scheme
goes nicely with you-know-who there.

Here we go
Anyway, I wrote out my "principles of collection," and I bought a watch case to keep everything organized, and I'm keeping all the boxes and tags and receipts, and I hope I'll have the discipline to cull the collection and keep it optimized as I go. I'm giving myself a five-to-10-year window to complete the process.

The only thing I wonder about is whether watches will hold my interest enough; unlike photography, there's not that much of an intellectual tradition associated with quartz watches. Appreciation seems to be mostly based on design taste. Is that going to be enough for me, or I am the perfect candidate for a "one-watch collection"? Time, as they say, will tell.

Mike

["Open Mike" is the often off-topic, anything-goes Editorial page of TOP. It appears on Wednesdays, if it's on time.]

ADDENDUM: I'm already wondering how this is going to work...I have five watches, only three of which can be considered "part of the collection," yet they're already competing for "wrist time." I'm wondering how it's going to be when I have more. Frankly, I'm pretty sure I could be happy with one watch, and four might be overkill. On the other hand (everything becomes a pun when it comes to watches), I absolutely love all three of these. They're just beautiful objects. Maybe I should imitate like the late Swatch Group Chairman Nicolas Hayek (scroll down to the second picture)(!).

Book o' the Week:

Byways: Photographs by Roger A Deakins. Damiani, September 2021. Note: PRE-ORDER ONLY. The little birdies are telling me that these will go fast. This is the first monograph by the legendary Oscar-winning cinematographer Sir Roger A. Deakins (born 1949), best known for his collaborations with directors such as the Coen brothers, Sam Mendes and Denis Villeneuve.

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:

Christopher May: "Somewhere at the intersection of the collection post and the favorite prime post, a spark was lit and I'm sort of contemplating starting an 8x10 Tessar-based lens collection. My most used lens for the format is my 12" Commercial Ektar. However, I've already added a few other Tessar derived lenses almost by osmosis:

— 14" ƒ/6.3 Bausch and Lomb Tessar IIb
— 12" ƒ/4.5 Wollensak Series II (tweaked for a little soft focus glow by Jim Galli)
— 12" ƒ/6.3 Ilex Acutar (supposedly designed to emulate the Commercial Ektar)
— 12" ƒ/4.5 Gundlach Radar (which Gundlach tried to claim wasn't a Tessar because it was five elements in three groups but this was just a patent evasion tactic)

"There seems to be no shortage of Tessar derived formulae lenses out there and in the 8x10 lens realm, these are generally on the affordable end of the spectrum. I've always liked the rendering of Tessars and even uncoated examples do all right with a hood thanks to their simple designs and lack of air-to-glass surfaces.

"I really should just spend more time taking photos but the desire to build a specific and focused collection does appeal...."

Mike replies: Ooh, good idea for a collection. Very focused, pardon pun. And I like the Jim Galli association, that's a nice touch for that lens.

Mike Chisholm: "A collection of watches?? Surely not...I sincerely trust you have ring-fenced your Patreon dollars for food, coffee, and the occasional camera or lens.

"That 'one watch collection' sounds perfectly adequate to me. All collectors (except book collectors) are insane. Have you seen Martin Parr's collection of Saddam Hussein watches? Mental! Although in a fun, kitsch kind of way. If it's light you like, though, why not collect light meters, rather than time meters? Besides, you could always replace your one watch whenever time itself gets an upgrade, or the watch wears out, whichever is the sooner."

Mike J. replies: Saddam Hussein watches!? Did you just make that up?

Mike C. replies: "Make it up? Martin's collection is firmly in the category of 'you couldn't make it up.' Exhibit A. Now there you have a collectible of a collection...."

Zyni Möe: "I do not know quite what 'intellectual tradition' means. Also I do not know if there is any kind of intellectual tradition (any meaning) around watch collecting: I suspect you may be right and there is only very small amount of it and it is mostly just shiny jewels for (mostly) men.

"However there is very certainly an intellectual tradition around timekeepers in general. Mostly of course for current timekeepers this is a scientific and mathematical tradition: to understand how an atomic clock works and what limits its accuracy you need good understanding of quite deep physics (I have passing interest in this as very accurate clocks are one thing which can help test General Relativity). To build such a thing, and maybe to fly it in a spacecraft to Mars where it can never fail and never need maintenance, requires extraordinary engineering skill: I know nothing of this but engineering of this kind certainly has its own intellectual tradition.

"As interesting as this is the tradition around mechanical clocks. People still make and study these long after they were replaced by quartz and then atomic clocks. And how a really good electro-mechanical 'free pendulum' clock works is a marvelous wonder: if you just look at one it is not clear at all how they work at all. And there are long disputes between people who think Harrison's ideas are good and those who think he did not understand things (he did not understand things...but his clocks keep very good time, so clearly he understood something else). The nature of errors in clocks was not understood until quite recently: a simple person like me would expect the error to go quite differently than horologists know it really does, and how that works was not sorted out until Philip Woodward did so I think. And some of the clocks made in the early 20th century were very good: someone measured a preserved Shortt clock against an atomic clock and found it was accurate to one second in twelve years and indeed that it was probably as accurate as such a clock could be, since its accuracy may well be limited by the gravitational influence of the water table which can't really be controlled (Sun and Moon tides were both easily seen but can be controlled for).

"Well, all of that is a scientific / mathematical tradition, but these are not less than artistic traditions. And there artistic traditions as well: mechanical timekeepers are often extremely beautiful, and you can go and see galleries of them in museums, and marvel at the beauty of the designs, only some of which is functional, and understand who influenced whom and who worked in whose workshop and so on. And this still goes on: I can not find good pictures of Philip Woodward's W5, but it is described in his book My Own Right Time which is itself a major work in both the scientific and artistic traditions. There is a clock derived from W5 described here. (I think it is not as beautiful, but astonishingly this is a clock you can, I think, buy).

"So, I don't know about watch collecting and I believe you may be correct. But about timekeeping and about mechanical and electromechanical timekeeping yes, there are intellectual traditions here.

"While writing this I discovered that Philip Woodward has died."

Mike replies: After getting your comment I modified the text of the post to state there's not much intellectual interest in quartz watches...at least that I can find so far. It seems barren next to the history and traditions of mechanicals. But I'm happy the original statement inspired this comment, thanks for this.

Al C.: "I was going to submit a list of disparaging comments on your favorite quartz 'dress' Seiko, but managed to catch myself just in time. I am instead going to defend the much-maligned quartz movement.

"There is no question the history of the development of the mechanical movement is rich with inspirations, innovations, and lore. On the other hand, imagine the inspirations and innovations that went into replacing the complications of the balance wheel, escapement etc. with a vibrate-when-excited tiny chip of an abundant, natural crystal! Why do we venerate the former, but not the latter? Because we can mass manufacture cheap and perfect units of the latter but not the former? Which is the greater achievement in time-keeping? Yes, the former allowed us to navigate the longitudes. But the latter has enabled us to explore the universe!

"When we collect something (for 'value,' not personal quirks), what are we saying? A thing is lust-worthy chiefly because it is rare, and impossible or difficult to reproduce? Congrats. The reductio ad absurdum to that logic has given us Bitcoins, and NFTs.

"Compounding the phenomenon is our strange attachment to analog and prejudice against digital. Static-prone LPs doomed by inner-groove distortions are prized over well recorded/remastered CDs. Mechanical movements, even crappy Soviet or Chinese copies become collectibles. Film is preferred over perfectly exposed, perfectly focused digital.

"It appears that none of us is immune to this odd prejudice/nostalgia. Mea culpa. But, it's nuts."

Mike replies: Re your initial point, you kinda did slag my Seiko, via apophasis—that's when you bring something up by saying you're not going to bring it up, as when a politician might say, "I'm not going to mention all the scandals that have plagued my opponent in recent years." But that's okay.

Re your point about quartz, I agree. I do like a lot of older, mechanical/physical things, from stick shifts to paper books to the very physical game of billiards as opposed to electronic and computer gaming. But I was just short of 13 when Seiko introduced the first commercial quartz watch, the Astron, and it wowed me—the technology seemed both mysterious and miraculous. I remember reading everything I could find about it and being frustrated that there wasn't more. Then I worked at the local pharmacy starting when I was 16, which sold watches, and that was right at the time—which turned out to be transient!—when "quartz" was the magic marketing word everybody wanted. I finally got my first quartz watch in '83, as a gift from my Mom. I know many people are fascinated by mechanical watch and clock movements, but I find quartz to be far more fascinating. It's got the magic, in my mind.

I found figures for 2015, according to which, 97% of all watches sold are quartz, but that a large percentage of the profits of watch sales were in luxury mechanical watches. (I would have had to pay to get the exact figures). Money usually drives perception, in my view. If those who make the most money have a vested interest in people believing mechanical watches are superior, then that's what people will believe.

Jayanand Govindaraj: "Welcome to the club. You are hooked for life, whether you know it or not. You will end up like me, collecting JLC and IWC, and seriously considering a foray into Grand Seiko. The only point I am extremely happy about is that I did not get hooked on to collecting cars, which is prohibitive both in terms of cash outflow and storage space, being content with physically small stuff like fountain pens and mechanical watches."

Mike replies: Check out this guy. Whew.

An Ultra-Compact Lens? Nikon SE vs. Fuji 27mm

Pretty sure I got permission from CameraSize a few years ago to reproduce images here, but do visit the site, and consider contributing to them—I do. It's a valuable resource and one I wouldn't like to see disappear.

I don't mean to be picking on Nikon lately. I'm really not. We all love Nikon, right? It's a given. I like the new 28mm SE and if I were getting the new Z fc I'd get the 28mm SE with it. But...well—and yeah, this might seem a little snarky—I kinda had to snurfle when I read the marketing description "ultra-compact" applied to the SE.

Maybe today it is.

The pinnacle of Nikon's manual-focus and early AF 28mm ƒ/2.8's was the 1981 AIS. Remarkably, it's still listed as an available product at B&H, although it's currently back-ordered. Nikon's published statement about it is: "Available through special order only against confirmed and non-cancelable orders. Allow 60 to 120 days for delivery. Subject to limited availability." Compared to the new SE lens, the old "pinnacle" AIS 28mm is 5 mm smaller in diameter and only 2.7 mm longer.

So basically the new SE is the same size as the old AIS! That's what counts as "ultra-compact" in these days of giant pickup trucks, giant houses and giant lenses—the way lenses used to be normally. Made me chuckle. What was ordinary and expected then is "ultra-compact" now.

Of course the new SE lens is much lighter than the old AIS, because it's plastic instead of metal. The AIS weighs 250g / 8.8 oz., and the new SE, 160g / 5.6 oz.

Of course, you have to remember the Nikon SE is a full-frame lens, not one that's limited to APS-C. That's a smart decision, because a lot of people use Z full-frame cameras and it means the SE lens can do double duty. But it also means that if you compare it to a nearly identically-spec'd lens made specifically for APS-C, you get something that's really compact:

Courtesy CameraSize

The new version of the Fuji XF 27mm ƒ/2.8 R is 22.7 mm shorter than the Nikon SE and about the same diameter. It's also considerable lighter at 84g / 3 oz.

It also sports about the tiniest lens hood ever...almost comical-looking. And yet, who wants a giant hood on a tiny lens?

There are a few more differences. The Nikon SE has nine elements and the Fujinon, seven. The XF 27mm has an aperture ring and the 28mm SE doesn't (neither did the original Fuji 27mm). The Fuji costs $399 (although, as Fujiphiles know, Fuji has periodic sales) and Nikon says the SE will cost $299 when it's available by itself.

That won't happen till autumn, we're told.

...But you can't get the Fuji now either! It's been a particularly hot-selling lens and it's basically sold out everywhere. Maybe you can find one, but it might not be easy. B&H is listing it for purchase but says it's a "New item, coming soon," and if you add it to your cart the shipping date is stated as "Not available." Amazon says "Temporarily out of stock. We are working hard to be back in stock as soon as possible."

My take
Personally, I like smallish primes but I don't see any particular reason to be a nut about it. It's not worth it to me to "optimize" this particular parameter by seeking out extremes. Too far down on the list of things I'm more likely to obsess about! Over the years, using many dozens of lenses, I've just empirically observed my own feelings about it, and my standard, as it has evolved, is that anything less than 300g (about 10.6 oz.) is okay, and conversely that any lens that weighs over 500g (about 17.5 oz.) is going to pull on the strap and annoy me sooner or later. I don't see a lot to choose, size-and-weight-wise, between the Fuji 27mm discussed here (84g) and, say, the Fuji 35mm ƒ/1.4 (187g). But, really, that's my personal preference, when I have a choice. Of course you use heavier lenses if you need to, to get the shot you want.

Still and all, there's something very appealing about the little Fuji 27mm. Given the state of the supply chain at the moment, I guess I'm not the only one who thinks so.

Mike

UPDATE: Oren, who reads Japanese, found a page at Nikon Japan listing the discontinuation of a number of products (he called it an "older-product-line massacre"), and many of the surviving metal AIS manual-focus primes are labeled "old product." So, once the existing lenses are out of the pipeline, that's it. The only one B&H has in stock is the AIS Micro-Nikkor 55mm ƒ2.8. Get it while you can, if you want it new....

Book o' the Week:

Byways: Photographs by Roger A Deakins. Damiani, September 2021. Note: PRE-ORDER ONLY. The little birdies are telling me that these will go fast. This is the first monograph by the legendary Oscar-winning cinematographer Sir Roger A. Deakins (born 1949), best known for his collaborations with directors such as the Coen brothers, Sam Mendes and Denis Villeneuve.

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:

DavidB: "Ah, the Nikon 28mm ƒ/2.8 AIS lens. A favorite of mine for many years on a Nikon FM—and it still gets used from time to time on my Nikon D750."

Jamie Pillers: "If you purchase the Fuji 27mm as part of a kit with the new X-E4, you get the lens for $200!  :-)  "

Richard Tugwell: "I've had good optical experiences with 'pancake' lenses (Canon 40mm, Summicron 40mm, etc.), but I find the balance a bit off-putting, even if it is probably just subconscious. You mention the Fujinon XF 35mm ƒ/1.4. I started my Fuji journey with that lens, intitially on the X-T1, but for years now on the X-Pro2. I pair it with the much maligned XF 18 ƒ/2 for street / travel photography. Smaller, lighter, and easily pocketable, but also nicely balanced on the camera. Neither obscure the optical viewfinder. It's a combination I haven't really had to think about for the last five years. (Street / travel stuff.)"

Mike replies: That's the ideal, right? Just to have the lenses you need and need only what you have.

James: "I have the new Fuji 27mm (and the old one, but I love aperture rings, sigh...). The Fuji 27mm is all metal construction, not plastic. It's also weather sealed. So that might explain the $100 premium along with the fact that it has an actual aperture ring. It's also a really great lens."

Albert Smith: "The 27mm Fuji has changed the way I shoot. It didn't happen immediately, and it wasn't dramatic, but my images look different than previously when my lens(es) of choice were the 16mm, 23mm and 35mm ƒ/1.4 primes. Having the ƒ/1.4 aperture made me feel that if I didn't use it, then what did I pay for?

"With the 35mm particularly over 50% of my shots were at full aperture, even outdoors in good light using the electronic shutter which gives a couple of stops more shutter speed than the mechanical 1/8000th. I was grinning at the selective focus that I kept thinking was separating me from the cell phone users and their hyper-focused tiny sensors.

"The 27mm was different. The wide-open aperture was fairly pedestrian. There was not the eye-arresting drop off of 'in focus/out of focus'...it was gradual. I tend now to shoot at ƒ/5.6 and up to ƒ/11. My compositions now have to support the overall depth of field, so I have to think about the whole frame; no more pastel blurring to fill the non-primary subject area.

"The 27mm with moderate aperture has changed the way I shoot and I'm enjoying looking at my shots when I return from an outing with it."

Sunday Support Group: That Unicorn Lens

Do you have a favorite prime lens?

I should first say, Happy Fourth of July, fellow 'Murricuns. The Lake Road outside my window is practically a parade! Lots of people here for the Fourth. Dogs, bikes, joggers, walkers, babies in strollers. It's 70°F and partly sunny, after lots of wetness lately. But even the rain has been nice; yesterday we had the kind of rain you want to take a walk in, a "farmer's rain," warm and gentle but steady.

A "prime" as the term is nearly universally used now is merely a single-focal length lens, as opposed to a zoom. Ninety-nine-point-nine of all the lenses photography enthusiasts buy these days are either primes or zooms; all other types have become curiosities.

For a lot of the history of photography, primes were your only choice, and with a lot of my favorite camera types you were pretty much forced to use a prime lens. View cameras use almost exclusively single-focal-length lenses. Rangefinders like the classic Leica M4 and M6 not only used primes, but you were limited to a middle range of focal lengths by the magnification of the viewfinder and the framelines it provided. Many early TLRs were even more limited, having only one prime lens permanently mounted. These days, there's a new and very important type of camera that is typically restricted to either one, two, or three prime lenses: smartphone cameras. A whole new generation of photographers is learning to see with fixed focal-lengths. (Given that device cameras enable you to crop with lightning speed, a lot of this new generation are already naturally fluent at cropping, further enhancing their visualizing skills.)

There are a few traditional advantage of primes that still usually hold, namely that they tend to be smaller, faster, and cheaper than zoom lenses. But those things aren't always strictly or necessarily true. Just usually.

My favorite favorite prime*, historically. They cost about a million dollars now.

There are visualizing advantages to primes too. Somewhere in his books, Ansel Adams recommended making a cardboard cut-out with the aspect ratio of your format, and learning how far away from your eye to hold it to mimic the field of view of your lens. By closing one eye and moving this "cropping aid" around, you could essentially preview what the view camera would see without having to laboriously set up the tripod and the camera and get under the groundglass. It's an exercise that's always appealed to me but that I've never actually done—which is strange, considering that I tend to like learning exercises, especially ones that apply to seeing. Of course, most cameras these days let you preview scenes by simply holding them up to your eye and looking through them, or holding them up and looking at the viewing screen. If you use any kind of big or involved kind of camera these days, a wonderful way to "scout" situations is Adam Fowler's Viewfinder Preview app ($5.49) for the iPhone.

The reason the cardboard-cutout route might be preferable is that it gets you closer to the naked eye, and one of the best reasons to shoot with a prime lens or two is that it greatly facilitates the skill of being able to look at the world with the naked eye and know instinctively exactly how your camera is going to see it—without raising your camera to your eye at all. Anyone who's done an OC/OL/OY (one camera, one lens, one year) with a prime will know exactly what I mean. A prime teaches you how to see like your camera sees.

So do you have a favorite? For the sake of simplicity, please name only one. No lists please.

...Name only one, that is, if you have one. I suspect a lot of people won't. Strangely enough, I myself don't have a favorite prime at the moment. I wish I did! I've had various ones in the past, which I remember with great fondness. But not right now. The last one I had was the Fuji XF 23mm ƒ/1.4, but it hasn't been on my camera much in recent years.

Maybe I should work on that!

Mike

*Note boudoir-themed camera porn.

Product o' the Week:

Spiffy new Nikon beauty for hipsters young and old! Buy it here and you keep our engine running.

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.)

[Ed. note: Skullduggerous Ed. has added B&H links to these comments. Just keepin' the lights on, ignore the guy disguised as the janitor....]

Featured Comments from:

Bob Blakley: "This is probably the most conservative choice possible, but hey—it's what I use and what I like: the Leica Summilux-M 50mm ƒ/1.4 ASPH. It's not the lens I use most; I shoot a lot of live music events and I need an 85mm to get the field of view and framing I like for that. But the Summilux is the lens I like using most. 50mm is the field of view in which I naturally visualize, and low light is the environment in which I see images best. The Summilux is the best performer I've ever used within those parameters, and I've used it for a long time so its output rarely surprises me in a way that disappoints. And it's ergonomically perfect. Like a baseball, it's just the right size and weight for the human hand."

Mike replies: I wrote about that one once. Your review is better, because you've used it. Plus yours is shorter.

Wiley Bogren: "Pentax DA 35mm ƒ/2.8 macro  :-)  SO flexible and satisfying!!"

Mike replies: Carl and I wrote about that one too! Unfortunately most of the illustrations have vanished. I'm starting to see my life disappear....

Sharon: "Fujifim GF 110mm. It’s such a beautiful lens."

Mike Ferron: "For the time being I have bagged up the Micro 4/3 gear and dusted off the well-used Nikon D610. The default, do-everything lens bolted to the front is a 35mm AFD ƒ/2. Not only is it a very useful general purpose focal length but it is quite compact and very sharp through most of the frame. The D610 does not feel like a beast with this smallish 35mm attached."

Mike replies: I reviewed that one too, but I no longer know where.

Geoff Wittig: "I'm very fond of Sigma's 135mm ƒ/1.8 lens in Canon's EF mount. Yes, it's big and heavy, but it balances nicely on the Eos-5 mk.IV, especially with the battery grip. It's quiet and quick to focus, especially considering how much glass is moving around. Sigma's 85mm ƒ/1.4 is maybe a bit sharper, but it's pretty close, and eminently usable wide open if you want that. The drawing is very nice, and the bokeh looks great to my eyes. I find the extra working distance compared to 85mm just gives me nicer portraits, whether of people, flowers or trees."

Tom Burke: "I have four primes, clustered quite closely in focal length, but of them the only one I use with any frequency is the Canon EF-S 24mm ƒ/2.8 STM. On my Canon 90D APS-C DSLR that’s about a 38mm full frame equivalent. I do like it, though partly because it’s very small and light—it’s a pancake lens. But I must admit, I would feel very restricted if that was my only lens—even my iPhone has three. Normally, I use a standard zoom."

Kirk: "Sigma 65mm ƒ/2 i-Series Contemporary for L-mount. It's the perfect focal length for me."

Nick Reith: "The 18mm (28mm equivalent) bolted to the Ricoh GR II is, to my eye, quite sublime. Macro/closeup is equally sharp and overall rendering in this small, lightweight package never fails to deliver."

Crabby Umbo: "When it comes to my professional career, the number one 'go-to' lens for most of my sheet film work was a Goerz Red-Dot Artar 8.25 inch, although I spent most of my career with an equivalent 210mm Computar. For my Hasselblad, it was the 150mm Carl Zeiss. Not being a 35mm person, professionally, out of all the systems I cycled through, it's gotta be the 35mm ƒ/2.8 Carl Zeiss for Contax."

Jayanand Govindaraj: "On the Nikon systems it has to be the AF-S 58mm ƒ/1.4G—slightly longer than normal, but not too much, a perfect full-frame prime for me, and works well with the FTZ adapter. Of course, on a Nikon APS-C body it becomes a gentle, soft and totally perfect portrait lens. It is a real all rounder! On the Fuji system, my favourite lens is the 90mm ƒ/2, though my most used one is the 35mm ƒ/1.4. After the Nikon Z system came out, I sold all my Leica M primes, because I really could not see the differences in a print to justify keeping them over the Nikkor S equivalents."

Mike replies: I wrote about that Nikon 58mm too...here and there....

Michael Cytrynowicz: "Pentax FA 31mm. I sold my copy years ago, when I sold my K20D, and bought a new one when I bought the K3 III. In fact, I bought the K3 because I wanted to use the FA 31mm again. And it's a killer combination. My wife, who's a fierce critic, recently looked at some old Yosemite photos (on the K20D) and remarked they were 'beautiful.' I was so embarrassed (I immediately thought of Ansel and felt a deep attack of impostor's syndrome).

Jeff1000: "Without question, the Nikon Z 50mm ƒ/1.8 S, supplanting the Leica 35mm Summicron (available at the time of the M6). The Nikon Z 50mm is generally sharper edge to edge. The Leica possessed peachier bokeh though."

Kent Phelan: "35mm, anybody's 35mm. I don't know how many of them I have owned through the years, but the various iterations of 35mm Summicron top the list. I vividly remember photographing the first seconds of my first-born child's life with a Nikon F and 35mm ƒ/2 AI Nikkor lens. Today I met his 2-day-old son, my first grandchild, for the first time. This time I used a Nikon Z7 with, you guessed it, a 35mm ƒ/1.8 Nikkor-Z lens. If I could have only one lens it would be a 35mm or 35mm equivalent."

Adrian: "The 80mm normal lens on the Mamiya 7. Perfection, once I came to terms with its design compromises (slow, doesn’t focus close). I haven’t shot much film since the pandemic started, but this lens remains the reference for me. Everything else I use, I end up comparing mentally with this ultimate form of the Plasmat design would have drawn."

Steve Rosenblum: "M Rokkor 40mm f/2. Incredible lens."

Marc Lawrence-Howe: "The Fujifilm XF 35mm ƒ/1.4 R is my favourite. I think a strength* I have in photography is seeing detail or composition within the everyday that perhaps a lot of people don't see, seeing things from a literal or metaphorical different angle, divergent from 'normal.' I don't mean this as a conscious thing, more as an innate thing, a 'lucky' skill. The contrasting, significant deficiency is that I'm not at all good at previsualising photos, in particular including wider or longer focal lengths—the 'natural eye' focal length, as boring as it can seem even to me, feels like it is where I do best, and I enjoy the results more. I'm also realising technical perfection isn't really my bag, but this has been a harder thing to pull away from as my pleasure in photography is also the technological. Overall I feel like this lens lets me see what my eye sees, satisfy the technical pedantry I sometimes over-focus on, but lets me also use its optics like a broad, abstracting brush or a 'boring,' precise record of what I see. It lets me show how the world looks to me.

"I do call a lot of my photos my 'boring photos,' but I like them, and I most often like them with this lens.

"(*I am not a great photographer, placing myself just above mediocre for the photo-taking population. It is what it is; after several decades I still enjoy photography more than most anything else; it'll do.)"

Ken Bennett: "I'll throw in another vote for the Fujifilm XF 35mm ƒ/1.4 lens. I often shoot with that lens in addition to the usual two-zoom combo, or with other primes, and the photos from that lens just pop off the screen even as thumbnails."

Len Metcalf (partial comment): "I love one particular prime lens...by far my favourite all-time lens. I use it almost exclusively. It’s a nifty-fifty equivalent. Interestingly no one else has mentioned it. I love the manual aperture ring and manual focus as I can only blame myself when it’s wrong. Voigtländer 25mm ƒ/0.95 on an E-M1 Mark II for 95% of all my photographs. It’s definitely not perfect. Sharp when stopped down. Strange bokeh sometimes. Slow to use. Not weather sealed. But I love it and haven’t ever found something I like the same in a different format. So I always seem to return to Micro 4/3. I am spoiled by it, I reckon."