The Online Photographer

Why the Sony A6600?

[Comments have been added, 3:15 p.m. Saturday]

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Although you hear all about the ins and outs of my camera perseverations in excruciating detail—it's part 'n' parcel of our grand topic here—I don't actually buy that many cameras for my own self. I'm currently still mostly using my Fuji X-T1 from 2014. I have tried to replace it several times, most notably with the Panasonic GX8, but so far nothing's "took." I also own an X-H1 which is a good tool (see below) but is not my box, personally.

And although I really cannot afford a camera at the moment—I had some very serious difficulties with Amazon in the Summer of '20 and it cut my income grievously, more's the pity (ultimately all caused by the pandemic)—I recently did buy a Sony A6600. (Currently on sale. I bought mine from B&H Photo.)

Why the A6600?

Well, I should say first that I've never found anything better for B&W conversions than an X-T1. I don't know why, but there's something about that 16-MP Fuji X-Trans sensor that seems to match well with Nik Silver Efex Pro, the conversion software I use, and my personal taste in tone and how I like B&W images to look. I'm currently excited about the new Nik Silver Efex Pro 3* I just bought, which is part of the new Nik Collection 4 introduced in June. It's the first overhaul of Silver Efex in a long time.

Otherwise, however, I've just never been convinced that Fuji X-Trans files really play all that well with ACR, especially the ones from Fuji's 24-MP sensor. I'm not convinced they won't, either, and I'm the first to admit that people who are more adroit with software than I am (which is not saying much) might have no problems. One indicator, though, is that many deep Fujiphiles seem to like other raw converters better than Adobe's. Which is something I understand. Anyway, Sony's sensors seem to be a more natural match with ACR. I've never actually been all that happy with the results I get from the X-H1 and ACR.

Why not just change raw converters? Well, you can. In fact, if you have a 24-MP Fuji, you might just want to research and/or explore a few different raw converters. But ACR is what I want to use.

That lens
The second reason is that I want to (need to?) explore the Sigma 30mm ƒ/1.4 DC DN Contemporary lens more thoroughly. It's an elaborated Planar-type with a concave-convex grouping between elements 3 and 4, similar to the old Pentax Super-Takumar design, a design I've always known I particularly like. I go way back with it. Of course the Contemporary has aspherical followers and Sigma's current coatings and so forth—all the up-to-date special sauce—but the basic look is one I recognize and have always liked. It's a markedly inexpensive lens, and the sample of it that I received when I tested it was mildly decentered, so I'm aware that I might have to do a little sample experimentation to find a "good one," but I'm willing to go through the hassle. The lens seems like it might be balanced toward lens contrast a little more than resolution, a design choice I like, and I like the bokeh of lenses of this design. Not to everyone's taste perhaps but then, I'm me, and my taste is my taste.

And even though I can't afford a Zeiss 24mm ƒ/1.8 ZA, we may have to have a shootout with a rented one.

Those tangible intangibles
Finally, what the late Erwin Puts called "haptics." Although the A6600 design has blatantly obvious areas where it could and should be improved—I seriously hope the next major revision of Sony's flagship APS-C "NEX-style" body will have the top controls of the A7C (although without the damn flippy screen)—the A6600 fixes two of the things I most disliked about the A6500, the puny battery and the weak little hand grip. The A6600 gets the big high-capacity battery from the FF A7[x] cameras, and the handgrip is now big enough (I use the MHG-XT add-on grip with the X-T1).

Most of all, though, I've long been frustrated by the Japanese camera industry's convention of pairing big cameras with high or "pro" build quality and small cameras with cheap, flimsy "amateur" build quality. There are exceptions, of course, but for the most part there's a general correspondence. The A6600 is one of the exceptions. Despite its smallish size I find it to have the feel of a well-built, deluxe device and I like that. I like the heft of it, the feeling of solidity, the crisp action and damped feeling of the dials, the lovely shutter sound. Extraneous issues? Perhaps, but I think people like getting out and about with a camera they love to use better than with one that merely serves. Everybody says cameras are just tools, and if that's the way you feel I won't argue with you. But I'm not like that. I like to have a camera I enjoy using. I like the feel of this, that's all.

The best? Naw
I've little doubt that, in a battle between the Sony A6600 and the Fuji X-T4, the Fuji would score the win by knockout. (In fact the X-T4 might be the No. 1 most recommendable all-around, all-purpose camera on the entire market at this moment. Although sadly not for me, because I don't like flippy screens.) And I have a lot of Fuji lenses—more than I've ever had for any camera I've owned since the Olympus OM-4Ti in the '90s, actually. I'll be keeping the X-H1 as well as the X-T1. But I just felt the need to get to grips with the A6600 and the Sigma 30mm, use it a while, and get familiar with it. And have some fun with it.

Mike

Ken Bennett adds: "I guess I am a 'deep Fujiphile' and I get along with Adobe software just fine. I am currently shooting work assignments with three X-H1 bodies and a very complete GFX-100 kit. I have a couple of X-Pro2 bodies for personal work, and I have an overly complete selection of lenses.

"The key for X-Trans raw files is to change the default sharpening. (Try 42/1.4/40/30 for starters, in Lightroom.) But the really big difference is to use the Enhance...Raw Details command in the Photo menu. IMHO this fixes all the issues that the Adobe raw engine has with X-Trans files. It's especially helpful for landscape images. The Enhance command can take a while to work, especially on large sets of files.

"Have fun with the little Sony, Mike."

*The most important thing with this software is restraint, restraint, restraint. It's very easy and perhaps too tempting to take things over the top. Subtlety is not its natural strong suit. You have to be ever vigilant.

Book o' the Week

Photo No-Nos: Meditations on What Not to Photograph by Jason Fulford. Although I would never actually let anyone tell me not to photograph anything, this is a fun book for getting "the lay of the land" as what subjects and treatments are common. There are some nice insights, and it's a pleasant read, although I think it will be more fun if you already know a lot about photography and can relate to the subjects he discusses.

The above is a link to Amazon from TOP. Once you're at Amazon, anything you search and buy will be credited to TOP. The following logo is also a link:

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:

schralp: "Did you consider the Nikon Z5 with the 40mm ƒ/2? About the same size with excellent haptics, and produces files very compatible with ACR."

Mike replies: I didn't, although that would be a very sensible alternative to consider. I came at this sort of backwards: I didn't start with the idea that I wanted a new camera, compile a list of potential candidates, research the alternatives, try out the leading contenders, and then make a decision. That would be the sensible, logical way to shop. I wasn't even in the market for a new camera. I tried the A6600 + 30mm Contemporary to write about it, liked it a lot, and found as the months passed that I wanted to get to know it better. The reason I reviewed the A6600 in the first place was because I have a history with the lineage: I reviewed the A6500 before that, and owned a NEX-6 before that. The A6600 addresses some of my issues with the earlier iterations in a satisfying way. I still have other issues, which we'll discuss in due time.

The Z5 + 40mm ƒ/2 would be an excellent choice of a camera for us to review in the future, however, and I'll put it on the list. I really do need to try the Nikon, Canon, and Panasonic mirrorless FF options now that they're here; I'm already familiar with the A7-series cameras to some extent, and fair is fair. Although I'm not personally very interested in FF mirrorless cameras, they are certainly a current top choice for the kind of people who read TOP.

Jeff1000: "If a camera is not a tool, then what is the alternative? A toy?"

Mike replies: Well, it is a tool, in that I'm more interested in pictures than in cameras (some photo hobbyists are the opposite, and there's nothing wrong with that). But I'm an amateur photographer essentially, in that I don't work for clients or shoot on assignment. While my photography is not merely a casual pastime because it's what I write about, it's at least entirely up to me what I photograph and what I use. So I can afford to shoot with cameras that appeal to me and that I enjoy using.

Beyond that, I'll let robert e's comment do the talking. Here's that:

robert e: "Haptics matter for any tool. How much they matter is down to the use case—casual vs. critical, momentary vs. long-term, etc., and of course to the user's intentions and sensitivities.

"At the level of, say, a chisel or knife, haptics directly affect users' comfort, endurance, safety and confidence, and thus ultimately their capabilities and even health.

"If the idea is that it's only the end results that matter, well, haptics affect how good those results can be, or how consistently or frequently 'good' can be achieved, or even attempted, or the kinds of 'good' possible; not to mention how pleasant or efficient it is to get there.

"To the possible objection that cameras these days are complex systems and can't be compared to chisels or brushes, countless studies as well as practice in fields like laparoscopic surgery or aviation disagree. Haptics can be as or more impactful in complex tools as they are in simple ones."

"And, OK, I've been one of those people who can find pleasure in working around or even leveraging poor haptics or design, especially in vintage or toy photo gear, but that's its own category, or maybe a 'branch' of this hobby. But even we camera masochists can argue that haptics matter, if often in reverse.  ;-) "

The Rising Moon

[The first day's comments have been posted.]

As you might recall, I'm a lunatic. The moon is one of those things, like new-fallen snow, that for some unknown reason I think I have to photograph. I was heading to a meeting the other night when I crested a rise and saw this, so I had to hop out of the car and try a picture. A beautiful full moon rising over Seneca Lake. Of course all I had with me was the phone [unhappy face emoticon].

I hope you can see the picture okay. It's tough to get the density right on the blog because some people see pictures brighter on their monitors and some people see them darker. So when you're trying to hit the edge—almost dark but not quite, like here—it can get dicey. There is only a particular register where it sings, or hits the right key. Click on it to enlarge it and it might be a little better.

Pictures with predominantly mid-tones have more tolerance for being too light or dark. It's one of the big advantages of a print—you can get the values exactly right, and then they're set, or fixed. Of course then you have to worry about the viewing light—brighter light will open the shadows; dim, weak light (as is now favored by many museums, very unfortunately), will block the shadows and dull the highlights. (Many photos in museums now, although honored by being exhibited, remain mute and shrouded.) So there's no free lunch.

The detail is extremely murky in most of this picture, as you can see in the 100% detail below from the middle of the frame. But the interesting thing about that, and the reason I thought I'd bring it up for discussion, is that although it's far from sharp—the leaves of the oak look almost impressionistic, like brushstrokes—is that this level of detail works fine for an after-sunset picture. That's because our eyes (well, my eyes, anyway) see that way. I don't see distinctly in the near-dark. I don't know, maybe you do?

The detail is very vague, as in certain kinds of figurative paintings.

I did have to graft in a fake moon. It's the same size and position as the full moon that was there in reality, the but the phone couldn't handle the highlights, so I performed a little Photoshop surgery. Don't tell anyone.

Here's a strange habit I have...every time I stop to take a picture, or most times, I turn around and take a picture in the opposite direction after I'm done. Here's that one:

It's not a compulsion, but I've been doing this for years. It started many years ago when I was doing a project with a view camera in the northern tip of the lower part of Michigan. I was getting frustrated by the tyranny of the frame—my own tendency to pluck out little picturesque arrangements from out of the unruly landscape. (It's a form of lying, this selection.) One day, aware that I was just playing little games and deploying the same tricks over and over, and feeling disgusted about it, I just swung the camera around and took a picture in the opposite direction—and it turned out to be pretty good! Generally they're not, but I guess I just like to make a record of where I was, so I can get a sense of what was outside of the frame of the first picture. It lets the first picture breathe, in a way.

I used to love illustrators when I was a kid, and was a fan of people like Arthur Rackham, N.C. Wyeth, Nancy Ekholm Burkert (who was a friend of the family) and Gustave Doré. A book about Wyeth talked about "easel pictures," by which they meant single, standalone paintings, as opposed to book illustrations which were obviously sets of pictures. I guess "easel pictures" were also painted from life. It introduced to me the idea of single images versus pictures in sets or series. Most photographs tend to work best in sets or series; one photograph is seldom enough to express an idea or describe a story.

As an aside, I never lost my taste for illustrated books, and consider it a shame that only children's books are seen as being fit to illustrate. I'd like it if every book were illustrated. Why shouldn't books like The Accidental Tourist or The Omnivore's Dilemma or The Road or The Known World be published with twelve or twenty commissioned illustrations approved by the author, like Dickens' Phiz or Dodgson's Tenniel? Do we not have artists? But that's not the convention. A shame. I have some first edition Mark Twains (inherited), and they're illustrated on almost every page. (That's a spread from the original edition of Life on the Mississippi in the inset.)

The eyes we've got
And speaking of seeing indistinctly in the dark, I had my eye appointment the other day. Happy to say I passed with flying colors—everything is good, said Dr. Holly, and I don't need new glasses this time, which is a relief. Throughout the process of getting my cornea replaced I've had to get new glasses several times. It's an expense.

This is probably the last of the phone pictures for a while. These were taken right before the new Sony got here.

Parting words for this Wednesday—here's a trick. Take the cardboard inner tube of a roll of paper toweling, or make something similar, say from a rolled-up magazine. Then open the top picture on your monitor, close one eye, and, with the other eye, look at the dark foliage through the cardboard tube. Interesting, huh? It has the same effect as turning up the ambient lighting on a physical print.

Mike

P.S. And a brief blog note: I had thought the three-posts-a-week format was not working out very well, but then the "Soiling of Old Glory" post on Monday got the most views of anything in nearly a month. I didn't see that coming! I do need to learn to be more scheduled to give the new format a fighting chance.

Book o' the Week

Photo No-Nos: Meditations on What Not to Photograph by Jason Fulford. Although I would never actually let anyone tell me not to photograph anything, this is a fun book for getting "the lay of the land" as what subjects and treatments are common. There are some nice insights, and it's a pleasant read, although I think it will be more fun if you already know a lot about photography and can relate to the subjects he discusses.

The above is a link to Amazon from TOP. Once you're at Amazon, anything you search and buy will be credited to TOP. The following logo is also a link:

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: "Nice photograph, Mike!

"The single greatest challenge (or dilemma) of photographic printing is deciding how to distribute the value range of the image across the very limited tonal scale of a photographic print, from paper white to D-Max. That's what the 'Zone System' is all about. Digital image processing and inkjet printing makes it a lot simpler mechanically than in the darkroom, but you still have to make some decisions based on what you want the print to 'say.'

"Landscape painting presents exactly the same challenge. Starting from a blank canvas, you deliberately structure the painting's value range to say something. Dark and moody or bright and sunny, it's all in your hands. The standard teaching from skilled landscape painters is that photographs are inadequate as a source of painting information because of blocked up shadows, distorted colors, and perspective errors. That has not been my experience. My 30 years of landscape photography mean I'm capturing (in my humble opinion) much better image files than most painters work from. I make conscious decisions about shadow value range and color balance when I'm taking photographs knowing I'll be using them as the starting point for paintings.

"Charles Cramer trained me to understand how to pitch the shadow values in an inkjet print properly, so they read as shadow but aren't lost in the murk. Painters have the same problem; if I paint with bright light on my easel, the painting will be far too dark for viewers to see into the shadows in dim room light.

"Right now I'm working up a painting based on photos and thumbnail sketches of that same full moon I made last week on the way to work, as it was setting just before sunrise. The goal is a painting that lets you smell the damp earth and feel the chilly pre-dawn air."

Martin Pallett: "First time I've commented, but just have to say how much I enjoy your site and the contents therein. The phone image is very pleasing and I would be happy had I taken it, would look good as a print. Keep up the good work Mr. Johnston!"

Mike replies: Thank you Martin, and good to hear from you.

Bruce Bordner: "You got really lucky—the low angle light looks almost artificial. And always shoot behind you at sunset! I love this type of image, but it is a pain to display no matter how you do it. Take a print outside in the sunlight if you want to see everything. It's just a reflective medium, and you don't get colors not in the light. The 'easel pictures' effect is another problem for me—I have 13,000(?) images at Flickr but less than 200 that make good standalone prints. (In the 'Prints in Waiting' album for convenience.) I do more slideshows in effect by creating albums. Still, I have no idea what people are seeing when they open a 36MP file on their phone.... My only popular image is 'Panopticon Pussy,' so I give up in trying to be popular. Everyone told me 'you should sell that!' on every print but not one gave me money so I just do it for fun. It's good enough to share getting lucky. Few actually observe the world anymore."

Kent Wiley: "Your non compulsion to turn around and photograph the opposite direction sounds familiar. For a while a large format landscape photographer, I'm now more 'democratic' in my selection of viewpoints. Or is it indecisive? I'm collecting environmental views—on video—that encompass 360 degrees, from all 50 states, so the decisions about what to look at are either non existent—or infinite. It should be displayed as four different streams on the four walls of one room. Here's a single stream taste so far."

Jim Freeman: "I have found that, in many cases, the scene behind makes a better picture than what initially caught your eye. Also, this is one of your best posts, new format or old."

Jonathan Morse: "A 19th- and 20th-century author who thought deeply about illustration was Henry James, who loved illustration himself but didn't want illustrators to distract readers' attention from his envisioned reality with theirs. So when the time came for James to publish a collected edition of his novels, each volume bore only one illustration: a frontispiece photograph by Alvin Langdon Coburn. James's language in those books was one actuality and Coburn's photography was another: a complement, not a competition. Want a philosophical short story about that? Try James's 'The Real Thing.'"

'The Soiling of Old Glory'

[TOP publishes on M-W-F at some point during the day. I'm still adjusting to the schedule and not doing very well yet. Please excuse our growing pains.]

[Comments have been added]

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Stanley Forman in 1976

We've been talking about a few YouTube videos recently, so I wanted to mention an eight-and-a-half-minute short buried in a larger program. The full 53-minute program is called "Extraordinary Finds 2" and was produced by the PBS program Antiques Roadshow—in it, they follow up on the later disposition of certain objects originally featured on the show. Here, they produced an excellent in-depth piece about an old photograph made in 1976 during the anti-busing race riots in Boston, Massachusetts.

The picture, called "The Soiling of Old Glory," depicts Joseph Rakes, a white male teenager, attacking Theodore Landsmark, a black attorney, using an American flag on a flagpole as a weapon. It was taken by Stanley Forman, the first photographer to win the Pulitzer Prize for Spot News Photography two years in a row. (The other picture he won for is "Fire Escape Collapse," which I used to use in classroom discussions about ethics, to address the common reaction, "Why doesn't the photographer help?") Ted Landsmark, who they interviewed for the segment along with Stanley Forman, is currently Distinguished Professor of Public Policy and Urban Affairs and Director of the Kitty and Michael Dukakis Center for Urban and Regional Policy at Northeastern University.

It's a nicely done little segment and one that most photography aficionados would be very likely to miss, since it's buried in a program about antiques. It starts at 40:30.

UPDATE: Richard Parkin says this link works better for him in the UK.

Mike

Book o' the Week

Photo No-Nos: Meditations on What Not to Photograph by Jason Fulford. Although I would never actually let anyone tell me not to photograph anything, this is a fun book for getting "the lay of the land" as what subjects and treatments are common. There are some nice insights, and it's a pleasant read, although I think it will be more fun if you already know a lot about photography and can relate to the subjects he discusses.

The above is a link to Amazon from TOP. Once you're at Amazon, anything you search and buy will be credited to TOP. The following logo is also a link:

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:

Rene: "I lived in Boston at that time and lived in a racially mixed community. The tension was palpable every day. I remember when that happened and its aftermath. I had just gotten interested in photography a few years before and was stunned by the photo because it so clearly expressed what was going on. At one point, our house was attacked with rocks thrown through the windows because we were known as 'integrationists.' Actually, we were called other things, but that's the polite term. As the great Bill Russell said, 'Boston itself was a flea market of racism. It had all varieties, old and new. The city had corrupt, city hall-crony racists, brick-throwing, send-’em-back-to-Africa racists, and in the university areas phony radical-chic racists.... Other than that, I liked the city.'

"Re: your 10/15/21 post on the Basketball G.O.A.T., the correct answer IMHO is of course Bill Russell. Watch some old clips of the Celtic dynasty of the 1960s and you'll see why."

Jeff1000: "Re 'Please excuse our growing pains.' Didn't you mean 'shrinking pains'? [rimshot]"

Mike replies: I do actually mean shrinking pains. And therein lies a tale...why is it so much easier for human enterprises to grow rather than to shrink? It's not like growth can't kill a business, because it can, but generally growth is welcomed and embraced whereas shrinkage is difficult to cope with, difficult to adjust to, and demoralizing. I wonder why that is. Is it just the imbalance in enthusiasm and hopefulness?

Talking to Ctein

Oh, here's the one thing I meant to include in "Bits and Pieces" on Friday and forgot. (A glitch of my brain is that I always remember lists with one thing missing. It's some kind of neurological misfire—when I was teaching, I learned never to go around the room saying all the kids' names, because invariably just one name would escape me when I needed it—even if I knew that kid and her name perfectly well in any other situation. And I almost always forget one thing at the supermarket, no matter how many items I'm trying to remember. But I digress.)

Anyway, Ctein and I have been talking about this year's print sale. We have four possibilities, and need to settle on one. (A consideration about the print sales: before we can decide, we need to see the prints. The idea can be great, but we're not selling ideas, we're selling prints.) But, whatever it will end up being, a print sale is coming up. Just thought you might like to know.

Mike

Book o' the Week

Photo No-Nos: Meditations on What Not to Photograph by Jason Fulford. Although I would never actually let anyone tell me not to photograph, this is a fun book for getting "the lay of the land" as what subjects and treatments are common. There are some nice insights, and it's a pleasant read, although I think it will be more fun if you already know a lot about photography and can relate to the subjects he discusses.

The above is a link to Amazon from TOP. Once you're at Amazon, anything you search and buy will be credited to TOP. The following logo is also a link:

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:

MikeR: "Re forgetting an item on lists: Always? No exceptions? Never, ever?

"I often do that, but I just say that I forgot, and shrug. No neurological drama."

Mike replies: If it's not a brain glitch, then why only just one thing the great majority of the time? And why are they so often things that I know well and should be able to remember easily? There are a great many mysteries about the brain, which I know from being a big fan of—name will come to me—I'll get it—give me a moment—starts with S—Sacks—Oliver Sacks.  :-)

ASW: "Hi Mike. I have my own glitch which sometimes frustrates but is always funny (to observe). If I put on a T-shirt without checking for the tag, I always put it on backwards. This has happened for as long as I can remember, so we're talking about multiple decades of t-shirts at this point. Sometimes I even fake myself out. I'll pick up a T-shirt, remember that I'm sure to put it on backwards and therefore swap it around (without checking), and then put it on backwards. I can only assume that it is some kind of voodoo curse."

Mike replies: That's a great one! You and I don't quite rise to the level of Oliver's great book on the subject—a favorite of mine—but I think we're in that neighborhood.

Bits and Pieces

[Comments have been added]

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Boy oh boy: Yr. Hmbl. Ed. just ordered a new camera. In a moment of weakness. And because the price went down. More bloviation on same in the near near future is all but assured; you've been warned. Also, I will have a bunch of stuff to sell soon, because the photo account must be zero-sum, that being my traditional method of rationalizing new purchases.

Cutting-edge investigative journalism: The late Charlie Watts being interviewed in 1994:

Interviewer: Your role in the band. You talked about Mick and Keith and Ron. What's Charlie's role?
Watts (thoughtfully): Well, I don't know, I mean, I always consider myself a drummer, you know.

Well, now we know. 

Diane in the Park: A life-size portrait in bronze of photographer Diane Arbus is only the second statue of a real (i.e., once-living) woman in Central Park. The sculpture, by Gillian Wearing of London, UK, is unfortunately only on temporary display. You can see multiple pictures here. (Thanks to Albert Smith for this.)

Meme seen online:

Remember The Dog's Nose: The following was written by a self-described travel blogger about a Sony FF camera, in a customer review posted on an online shopping site: "So what about that awesome bokeh and shallow depth-of-field everyone loves about full frame? For a travel photographer I've learned that too much bokeh is actually bad! Full frame is great for actual portraits, but realistically horrible for environmental portraits. When there is too much bokeh you don't see the surroundings therefore missing the point of that travel destination (not telling the story of the image). Spend all the money to travel to Japan, but can't even see Mt. Fuji in the background of the portrait because it is too blurred? Travel to Egypt, but can't tell that's a pyramid in the background because you're shooting at ƒ/1.4 in full frame? I found that even on APS-C I prefer to shoot anywhere from ƒ/2.8 to ƒ/8 for environmental portraits."

Good points. More is not always better.

iPhone 13 macro: The new iPhone 13 has an extreme macro-capable lens with a minimum focus distance of less than an inch, and Halide has gone one better with Halide 2.5's Macro Mode. Ben Sandofsky explains in a very informative article at Lux, with very impressive illustrations and an excellent discussion of the basic principles. I've never shot much Macro, but if you're interested and don't know a lot about it yet, this should be your ticket. (Thanks t0 William La Via for this.)

Nikon's superfast zooms: Does the world really need ƒ/1.2 zooms? At one time I would have thought these were cool, so I don't begrudge anyone who thinks so now. It's all good.

Watch watch: Have I mentioned that I am not going to be collecting watches after all? I have six, and am really enjoying wearing different ones every day (and wearing them again, period), but there isn't going to be enough interest in this for me to keep it up. The "problem," basically, although it isn't a problem, is the intrinsic excellence of Seiko's solar watches. Mine is still on track to be accurate to within six seconds a year. That sort of makes it pointless to pursue HAQ (high accuracy quartz) watches; the ROQ (regular ol' quartz) watches are so good they hardly need improvement.

However, I will write a full review of my favorite (and most expensive) watch sooner or later, because it is really awesome and totally delightful.

P-U-N: Let me tell you about my friend Jack, who claims he can communicate with vegetables. Jack and the beans talk.

(Thanks to Dan. I think!)

A blast from the past: Is live music better, or is recorded music played on a stereo better? I took the contrarian viewpoint back in 2012.

Sweaty palms: We were speaking of YouTube videos the other day, and I wanted to mention that despite all the chaff, there really are some remarkable things to see. For instance this one. It's a ride-along video of Polish Formula 1 driver Robert Kubica (pronounced koo-BEET-zah) lapping the Nürburgring, AKA the Green Hell, in a hopped-up BMW M4. From the channel of Russian racing vlogger Misha Charoudin, no slouch himself. I swear to God this made my palms sweat as I was watching it; that is just ungodly fast. At the end, Kubica politely says that once you've driven Formula 1 cars they tend to spoil you for anything else.

Most of Misha Charoudin's videos get between 15,000 and 150,000 views. This one is closing in on six and a half million. There's a followup video too.

You just know all those guys he's passing are thinking, "no way is this guy catching up to me," and then a few seconds later, "oh sh*t."

Mike

Book o' the Week

  Friedlander First Fifty. A very fun little book that gives a tour of the first fifty of Lee Friedlander's books—extra copies of which are apparently stashed all over every floor of his house. By his grandson, who is trying to sell full, signed sets on eBay. This is very enjoyable, but also might be the most unique book about photobooks ever. Who else has published fifty photobooks?

This is a link to Amazon from TOP. The following logo is also a link:

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:

Patrick Perez: "Or, you could watch the movie Grand Prix. For portions of the races, Dan Gurney was driving a camera car with 70mm film in the actual race. On the days following the races, the production was given access to the course, and the main cast actors drove cars dressed to look like the real ones in order to duplicate sequences from the race. Those cars also had 70mm cameras. The only actor not doing his own driving was Brian Bedford, who just wasn't good enough to safely drive at speed, so a stunt driver doubled him and wore a balaclava.

"This is easily the best movie ever for racing footage. Astounding racing sequences, exhilarating score by Maurice Jarre, and montage sequences by Saul Bass. The only car movie that has better sequences (chases, that is) is Ronin, also directed by GP's director, the late John Frankenheimer."

Stelios: "I'm very excited to see what camera you bought!"

Arg: "Two days after you said you can’t afford any new camera at the moment!"

Mike replies: Yeah, except I was right, I really can't afford it. My income is just about in equilibrium with my bills. And that's only true if I'm careful. So optional purchases deduct from my savings. Scary. I need to be disciplined.

hugh crawford: "Anyone know why the Diane Arbus statue has white shoes? I’m sure there’s a reason but I can’t imagine what it is."

Mike replies: According to one of the articles, it's oil paint, and the purpose was to "humanize" the statue. Which still seems curious, but there you are.

Two Alerts

Item one: Idan Shechter at Camerasize.com is asking for help in keeping his site going. If you like Camerasize—I do—you might want to consider making a donation.

Item two: The Sony A7 IV, Sony's most mainstream camera model, just launched, as of this minute. You can pre-order it here. And please, if you're going to buy one, please consider buying through TOP's links! It really helps keep the lights on. (I know, I said please twice.)

Mike

Viewfinders Revisited

[Comments have been added.]

-

Let me ask you kind of a weird question. At this point in time, this late date, how are you feeling about EVF vs. OVF?

EVF, of course, is electronic viewfinder, which Wikipedia describes thusly: "a camera viewfinder where the image captured by the lens is projected electronically onto a miniature display. [...] The sensor records the view through the lens, the view is processed, and finally projected on a miniature display which is viewable through the eyepiece." EVFs are found only on digital cameras.

OVF is optical viewfinder. Wikipedia's article "Viewfinder" helpfully runs down many of the main types. I'll paraphrase: Single-lens reflex (SLR) cameras view the scene through the taking lens. A mechanism flips the mirror out of the way when the shutter button is pressed, followed immediately by the shutter opening. A prism is used to allow the camera to be held to the eye. OVFs are found on film and digital cameras.

In an automobile, in my opinion, the steering does the most to impart or embody the character or feel of the driving experience, and, in a camera, the viewfinder (VF) has the most influence on the character or experience of using the camera. Makes some sense; steering is how the car interacts with the road, and the VF is how you interact with the visual world using a camera. A camera's viewfinder is a discrete optical device, if you will, by which you direct how the camera aligns with what you see.

I've always been kind of a connoisseur, or, let's say, an appreciator of viewfinders. I'm not picky, though; I honestly think I'm very adaptable. I'll use whatever the camera offers for the most part.

The screen of a phone can be a pretty nice viewfinder, if you're
in the shade. Taken at 7:08 today. Butters and I go outside
first thing every morning.

The most trouble I've ever had with viewfinders is that, for a number of years, my dominant right eye, which I prefer to use when I photograph, used to need about –2 diopter correction, and during those years I wanted to use older film cameras I purchased used. Many of the add-on diopter correction lenses, originally sold separately, were scarce or impossible to find. I had to get rid of a beautiful Agfa Super Isolette once because the only way to add diopter correction would have been to glue a correction lens to the viewfinder window, and I refused to vandalize the camera that way.

(This is the reason I now believe that all cameras should have diopter correction built in, so they'll never be without it. In fact I'm not a big fan of cameras that need or use any dedicated add-on accessories for essential functions—because in the future the camera will be discontinued and those accessories might become impossible to locate. A camera should go through its life with all that it needs built-in, and have normal, ordinary attachment points for things that are commonly added, like straps and flashes. How many camera do you know of that have quirky, offbeat strap attachments? I can think of a lot. And I can think of a few cameras that have offbeat flash attachments. Bad idea.)

Interior walls
Viewfinders, of course, are troublesome for manufacturers because they don't pay their way. An analogy is interior finishing in houses. You might have noticed that virtually all houses are "open plan" these days. Open plan was either invented or popularized by Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959), the brilliant but autocratic American architect. In Wright's able hands, the concept was subtle and sophisticated. Not any more. In all but high-end contemporary house design, it's almost entirely a means for builders to avoid the cost of interior finishing. Interior walls and doorways, never mind the creative built-ins so beloved of the Victorians, are expensive to build but they don't add to the builder's profits. A three-bedroom house with lavish partitioning and thoughtful built-ins can't be sold for any more than a three-bedroom house with an interior that's all one big room like a barn with the kitchen just tacked on in one corner*. It's billed as a "feature" for the buyer, of course, but it's mainly for the convenience and profit of the builder.

Same with viewfinders. Great viewfinders typically cost a lot of money to make well, and are touchy to manufacture, requiring a great deal of precision. But the cost is just not generally perceived as added value by camera buyers. To their credit, the manufacturers keep trying. Many times I've watched manufacturers provide lavish, well-made viewfinders for a camera model, only to replace it with a model that has a more ordinary, humdrum VF later. The recent Fuji 50s to 50s II progression is a perfect illustration: the VF got cheapened on the latter. There were reasons for that, yes, but still, it's a thing that happened. And until I'm convinced otherwise, I'll go on believing that the excellent VF on the Panasonic GX8 is the reason Panasonic stubbornly refuses to make a Mark II version of that camera. The GX8's viewfinder was expensive to make and buyers didn't appreciate it; it didn't help sales of the camera. The GX9 reverts to a simpler and frankly inferior viewfinder. Most buyers don't mind. Hell, most buyers don't even notice.

The look of the light
But, back to the question. I'm sure the EVF vs. OVF decision is one you made for yourself long ago, and it's probably a settled thing for you. But personally, I find I'm either a.) getting contrarian now that EVFs are established as the mainstream choice, or b.) rethinking my own acceptance of EVFs for practical reasons. Yes, they have a lot of advantages, and the new ones are very good, but they don't report the light very well. It can be like the view is painted on, and the subtlety of the real light is crushed. Light is one of the things I've always responded to. It's one of the reasons I like pictures in the first place. So I'm wondering how I'd feel if I used an old-style SLR-type OVF for a while again. Anyway, I find myself missing them.

Also, the change to the 50s II has made me want to try the older, original camera, so I can experience its VF.

Of course I can't afford any new camera at the moment, so these issues are moot anyway, grumble grumble.

Mike

*Disclosure: I hate "open plan" houses with a smoldering passion—I need walls to put bookcases against and to hang pictures on, so in my opinion the more interior walls the better. I disclose this so you can cheerfully ignore my bias if you're of the opposite opinion.

Book o' the Week

  Friedlander First Fifty. A very fun little book that gives a tour of the first fifty of Lee Friedlander's books—extra copies of which are apparently stashed all over every floor of his house. By his grandson, who is trying to sell full, signed sets on eBay. This is very enjoyable, but also might be the most unique book about photobooks ever. Who else has published fifty photobooks?

This is a link to Amazon from TOP. The following logo is also a link:

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:

David Dyer-Bennet: "Since my first SLR in 1969, I've been in conflict with SLR viewfinders. On the one hand, they let you use any lens that mounts (not just the ones the viewfinder has a frame line for), and accessories like extension tubes for macro work. And, on the other hand, they were dim (I shoot in the dark a lot, did from the very beginning) and not very smooth, and the mechanisms that made them possible were noisy and jarred the camera at the worst possible time.

"The ground glass on a view camera is even worse—it's dark, both because the light is being spread over a larger area than in an SLR viewfinder, and because the taking lens is generally vastly slower than on an SLR. Also inverted, which complicates a lot of things. At least it doesn't jar the camera.

"For me, EVF, either eye-level or bigger flat screens, are a big step forward. (On the very rare occasions I shoot outdoors, yeah, the sun at my back can overwhelm a flat screen; but that's very rare, and I have workarounds.)

"They show me the actual image as captured by the sensors, rather than the raw light being directed to the sensor; this is a huge advantage, compared to everything I used last century. (The path from the light to the final image is complicated in both cases, but it's more direct, based on less drastic translations, than it was with film and the darkroom.)

"They also provide great features like zooming in for precise manual focusing, without getting dimmer, which makes focusing possible in situations where it pretty much wasn't before."

Steven Palmer: "I hate EVFs. I just hate them. Yes, they have their advantages but what I lose is far greater to me than what I gain. The closer a viewfinder presents the world as I see it the more I like it and the more I personally find it improves my photographs, i.e. my subject and compositional choices. I am a black-and-white film photographer but recently purchased a Fuji X-E4 to take a few colour shots of my wife. My standard for viewfinders is my Nikon F3 and FM3a and I found I disliked the EVF in the X-E4 so much that I was kicking myself for the buying the rotten thing in the first place. And that camera has a supposedly good EVF—OLED display, 2.36M dots. I know my words are quiet strong but I think the EVF in that camera is garbage. I would rather view the world through the dinky little viewfinder of my Contax G1 than any EVF. Just as you suggested, Mike, manufacturers install EVFs because they are easier and cheaper for them. Not because they are better for photographers."

John Robison: "Amen to built-in eyepiece diopter correction. Never understood why more (or any) 35mm SLR’s of the 60-70’s didn’t have them. Although not published anywhere that I could ever find it seems the typical SLR viewfinder came from the factory set to –1 (1 meter) and I think the assumption was that most people can focus on an image at 1 meter. A bad assumption, they can’t. When working at Altman’s I sold four times as many auxiliary diopters than the other salesmen. When I sold a SLR to customer who wore glasses I’d always ask to look at his spectacles. Before they left the store made doggone sure they could focus accurately. Okay, rant off. But that was my particular hot button issue."

Mike replies: I believe the first built-in diopter correction was on the Olympus OM-4, developed by Maitani's team. I'm not a maven of tech history, though, so take that with a chunk of salt.

Kodachromeguy: "I despise open concept houses also for several reasons: 1.) They are trendy with the giggly house-buyer set who claim they will entertain a lot. 2.) There is no place to temporarily conceal dirty dishes and pots after a meal/party. 3.) You hear the noise of dishwasher and laundry machines. 4.) Cooking film and grease will get all over the 'open concept' regardless of how much the seller will claim that the vent hood will eliminate fumes. 5.) So many 'open concept' houses look like cheap sh*t McMansions built to minimize price. What else was cheap? 6.) Where are convenient electric outlets?"

Edward Taylor: "Given the choice of several large spacious rooms vs. just one ridiculously humongous room, I would choose the former. But given the choice of several small, cramped, claustrophobic rooms vs. a large comfortable room, I'd choose the latter any day. I have never seen the need for a den and a living room, for example. Some people have nice living rooms that no one is allowed in so as to keep them nice, and dining rooms that are used once or twice a week at most. Seems like a waste. I think the space one has should be comfortable, and used. In short, I generally like the open design and I would have a real problem living in most houses designed in the '70s, '80s, or early '90s—unless they were huge."

Aaron: "Sometimes I get all feely-feely about it and think 'I don't want the camera to hide the real world from me. I want to see the real world through the camera. So, give me an OVF.' Sometimes I get all techy-techy about it and think, 'But, the picture I make isn't going to look like the real world anyway [and it didn't in the days of film either!], so I want to see the picture through the camera. Give me an EVF.' Then, the irresponsible side of me says, 'I can have it both ways!' and so I buy too many cameras."

Geoff Wittig: "I have tried really, really hard to like electronic viewfinders. But to me they're still a dreadful kludge. I do recognize they provide some advantages, from much easier viewing in dim light to simulating exposure compensation. But they just lie to me constantly. The brightness changes dramatically depending on where you point it. Likewise the global color balance and contrast. The camera's electronic brain inserts a continuously varying filter between the subject and my eye, which may or may not be reflected in the captured file. So despite the allure of new spiffy full frame mirrorless cameras, I'll keep soldiering on with my pair of crotchety Canon EOS 5 DSLRs. They don't lie to me. I always know exactly what I'm going to get when I trip the shutter.

"I recently had to sight-in a .22 rifle I've owned for years after I missed an easy shot, which is unheard of for me. My first attempts were utter failures, with terribly random groupings that made it impossible to adjust the sight. After multiple attempts I finally discovered the rear bracket for the sight had loosened, introducing random variation that made accurate aim impossible. That's precisely what electronic viewfinders do to me."

Stephane: "After seven years with Fuji (X-T1, X-T2, X-H1) and thus EVF, I am back to a Nikon F3 and a D850. Fuji cameras are very, very good, no question, but it is indeed a delight to go back to a natural optical viewfinder. No one will be surprised to read the F3's viewfinder is wonderful. The big surprise for me is the D850. It is a great optical viewfinder that works very well for manual focus. It is actually easier to focus the AI-S lenses on the D850 than on the F3. However, it is not only the viewfinder. There are also the AI-S lenses. The focusing and aperture rings for me are also important aspects of the overall camera experience, or camera feeling. And surprise, manual focusing with the D850 works like a treat, and I am not talking about the digital focusing aid. The ground glass is wonderful for manual focusing. Of course, the F3 is a joy too. The combination of the D850 viewfinder and an AI-S lens is something Fuji does not approach. On the Fujis, the electronic viewfinder is not quite real time, the focusing rings on the lenses all have a dead feeling, yet without consistency between the lenses.

"In a word, manual focusing on a Fuji is a chore and a pleasure on the Nikons. I find the AF-S Nikkors to be much better at manual focusing than the Fuji lenses too. So I am the odd one who went from mirrorless to DSLR, entirely for subjective reasons."

Michael Wayne Plant: "Hi Mike, liking the new format of three posts a week.

"I have decided that I like optical viewfinders, I spent years being a Sony Global Imaging Ambassador and really liked the instant feedback of live histograms, but then found myself lusting after a Leica rangefinder and before I knew it I became the owner of not just one Leica, but a range of them from the M9 onwards. I eventually sold all my Sony gear to buy a selected limited set of Nikon lens and got the wonderful D850, as its viewfinder is just so good! Now I am happy except that the Nikon D850 might be the last DSLR from Nikon before they try to force us to move to mirrorless, which I do not want to do. So ultimately, I might end up with a Pentax DSLR if they ever release a camera that has above the Nikon D850 performance levels, as they keep making noises about keeping the DSLR and not moving to Mirrorless. If Pentax do that, they might pick up all the DSLR fans who want to keep using DSLRs and that might be okay with me as Pentax currently makes lens that I would be happy to own."

Matthew Buynoski: "I'm sticking with DSLRs because they have optical viewfinders and thus show you the scene as it really is, not what some electronic algorithm and circuitry says it is. I find especially that an OVF does not (to me) look blurry when panning, while an EVF does; this is important as I do a lot of birds-in-flight photography. Essentially an OVF has an infinitely fast (well, OK, yes it is speed-of-light limited :-)  'refresh rate,' something no EVF can match."

Art is Personal

[The first day's comments have been added.]

-

I MIGHT BE OLD
...but I got to see all the best bands

—One of my friend Dan's T-shirts

I had the best weekend. Yesterday, on fairly short notice, we staged a Zoom reunion of my photography school graduating class—the Photography Department Class of '85 at the old Corcoran School of Art (as it was then called) in Washington, D.C.

It wasn't as big an event as you might be picturing—when I entered as a second-year student (first year was a foundation program in art before students specialized into departments), there were 15 of us in the Photo Department. When we graduated, only eight remained. Seven of the eight of us were in touch for this reuniting, but one had prior commitments and couldn't attend (hopefully Adrian will make it next time). Our classmate Sheri Lyn Marshall couldn't be located—the only person I knew who had been in touch with her recently was our teacher Mark L. Power, who largely built the photography program at the Corcoran in the 1970s—but I couldn't ask him; Mark died last August.

Being part of such a small class has definite advantages. Art is personal, and being mashed together for so much of our schooling for three years made us close in ways that have never been replicated in my life. Our graduating group of four men and four women had little in common in 1982 apart from a love of photography, but, even after 35 years, we slipped easily into the old dynamic. Seeing everyone again brought vividly to the forefront just how important these people were to me, then and in my subsequent life. We knew each other really well.

Engagé
We were known then to be a volatile, opinionated, vigorous, forceful, and lively group. The then-chairman of the Department, Steve Szabo, once commented to me privately that our group had "ten times the energy" of certain other classes the faculty had known over the years. Critiques, the core of the didactic method at the school, could be, ahh, let's say, very engaged. Jay Townsend wrote, after the meeting, "My wife and I still hang out with a lot of the fine arts folks from the Corcoran, and their interpersonal communications are generally very touchy-feely, quiet and sensitive, whereas our group is much more blunt, free-wheeling and challenging, but still very supportive of each other." In the group each one of us has a lot of integrity, I think, and long ago we learned to be honest with each other.  

We visited for two and a half hours on Sunday, on Zoom. Sarah Huntington called the meetup life-affirming, energizing, and inspiring, and got that right. But then that's the way we were. The reunion was one of the true bright spots of the Time of the Contagion for me. As competitive as we could be back then, it's so easy to see now that I really love these amazing people. I learned so much from all of them, and from our experience together. My time with them at the Corcoran shaped me.

Life is strange
It's true that it's best to be young, and, given the choice, we'd be young, for some definition of the word, if we could be. But later years have consolations as well. As I approach traditional retirement age, I really am deeply grateful that I lived across the span of years I did. It's been the perfect stretch of history to be involved in photography. When I was born, Edward Weston, Paul Strand, Edward Steichen, and Dorothea Lange were still alive. The Decisive Moment was five years old and The Americans would be published a year later. To see everything and watch everything that has happened up to now...well, I wouldn't have missed it for the world.

The Corcoran sits in the midst of that experience. When I arrived there I had been forced to drop out of Dartmouth after doing very well there, and then (alcoholism raging, by that time) I crashed and burned out of Reed College in Portland all on my own. I didn't expect to fit in at the Corcoran, didn't expect to make friends, never thought I'd be anything but an outsider. If I'm honest, I didn't expect to learn much—I had already been busy teaching myself photography for two years at that point. I was pretty cynical. Originally, I planned to stay for only one year—my reasoning was that one year was better than none, and I thought one year was as long as I'd have patience for.

But life is strange. To my great surprise, I found a whole community of like-minded souls and made many friends. My frozen heart thawed out. I didn't have a teacher I didn't learn from, and I had veritable Socratic experiences with several of them. I stopped drinking, fell in love, learned to see, learned to print, learned where I fit in. I might be looking at the past with rose-colored glasses, but I honestly think I looked forward to every day. I loved art school. Every day held new surprises, new riches. I looked through every book in the library, saw every show in the gallery, listened to every visiting speaker, roved through all the museums and galleries of D.C. as if it had all been put there for me. All of it was just what I wanted to be doing. I stayed as long as they let me and graduated with a BFA. It was a marvelous time.

I'll write more when I can, but it's past sunset on Monday and I promised a post on Mondays, so I've got to be good and get this up. Anyway, our little six-person Zoom meetup yesterday might not have been a typical one, but for me it was everything a college reunion should be. And then some. Such a nice time. Big thanks and solidarność to Pam, Jay, Sarah, Ian, and Karen. May we meet again.

Mike

P.S. And by the way, we challenged each other to get the old cameras out of mothballs and shoot a roll of film before our next meetup. I'm in.

Book o' the Week

  Friedlander First Fifty. A very fun little book that gives a tour of the first fifty of Lee Friedlander's books—extra copies of which are apparently stashed all over every floor of his house. By his grandson, who is trying to sell full, signed sets on eBay. This is very enjoyable, but also might be the most unique book about photobooks ever. Who else has published fifty photobooks?

This is a link to Amazon from TOP. The following logo is also a link:

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:

Frank Gorga: "In my estimation, the value of caring, informed feedback/critique from a group of friends cannot be overestimated in the 'art life.' Too many photographers work in isolation. To me making photographs is a more-or-less solitary endeavor. However, on the other hand, we need feedback in order to do our best work.

"I belong to a group or a dozen accomplished photographers who get together once a month to share prints, gather feedback and 'talk photography' in general. I am always amazed at how little of the talk is about cameras, printers, etc. Most of the discussion is rather deeper than that. The group formed organically five years ago with three of us asking other acquaintances to join us over the subsequent months. I can not overstate the value of this group of friends to my growth as a photographer."

Zack S: "Speaking of seeing the best bands, I saw the Doors play the longest set they ever performed, at Cobo Arena in Detroit. Also saw Springsteen for the Born to Run tour and Pink Floyd do the Dark Side of the Moon tour there too. I saw Bob Seger play in a small bar long before he hit it big. Worked security for a show that John Lee Hooker was doing and just he and I sat around talking for about an hour."

Mike replies: Dan's T-shirt rests its case. My friend Kim K. (Corcoran '86) saw Led Zeppelin when they were an opening act. He saw Hendrix live, too. (Plus about 1,800 other bands—I picked that number out of a hat, but he's been a dedicated concertgoer for decades. He's responsible for about half of my own live-music experiences. The real number of concerts he's seen is probably more than that.)

John Robison: "What a great post. Agree with Dave Millier, post these type of remembrances more often. Your happiness just spills all over the page and is heartwarming."

Ron Hoffer: "So glad you could get together with such a nurturing group of Corcoran alumnae. As a former (and somewhat jaded) NYC native who moved to DC for work in the late 1970s, for decades I was delighted to experience, at lunch and in the early evening, the quality and approachability of the Corcoran exhibits and the so memorable pubic presentations by photographers from far and wide. A cherished photo book still in my collection is the slim catalogue from an incredible exhibit 'Washington Photography: Images of the Eighties' held in early 1982 featuring the work of not only Mark Power and Steve Szabo, but other great artists you may have run into Mike, including William Christenberry, Frank DiPerna, John Gossage, John Radcliffe, and Shirley True."

Mike replies: Knew them all to varying degrees except John Radcliffe. Went to NYC with John G., used to hang out with Steve, even. And that show was one of the reasons I went to the Corcoran! I didn't realize then what a great historical moment it was, but man were we lucky. 

The Basketball G.O.A.T.

Ever know a person who seems to want to be your friend but actually doesn't know you all that well? Even though they think they do? That's what YouTube reminds me of.

I recently watched a bunch of videos about the GOAT (greatest of all time) debate in basketball. A lot of which centers on: Team Michael or Team LeBron? I find disputes about meaningless things sort of soothing somehow—as if to say, yeah, we're gonna fight, but we don't really mean it. "Happy disputation" you might call it. Similar to that old joke about academe: the arguments are so heated because the stakes are so low.

Anyway, YouTube, which knows I'm an old white guy, decided on its own that I must want to watch Larry Bird stories. Because apparently Larry Bird is the GOAT candidate favored by old white guys. When they were first presented to me, I did watch a few, and that was it—YouTube was convinced I needed to be offered Larry Bird content at every turn. Couldn't get rid of it.

Not only do I not particularly care about Larry Bird, but I'm not even that interested in basketball. I just liked the way some of the videos educated me about the history of a sport I don't know all that much about.

Courtesy U.S. Department of State

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in 2012

It did get me mulling over the whole "Greatest of All Time" concept, though. What's so appealing to people about that idea? It's a sort of lazy "competitiveness porn," if you will. The conclusion I came to is that it's really only useful for purposes of hero worship. What seems more pertinent to me is the idea of what might be called a "pantheon," although I'm not really convinced that term is appropriate. Pan = all plus theos = gods, a shrine to all the gods. In other words, my top o' the tops would be a group, not an individual. Because in any conversation about greatness, it's much more interesting to consider all the great players—what they accomplished, how they stood out, how they differed, what was amazing about them. The drama of their stories and career arcs.  I'd put 16, 20, or 24 players in the GOATheon. More fun, more meaningful, more respectful. At any rate, I'm just not comfortable leaving people like Hakeem Olajuwon or Stephen Curry out of the conversation.

21st century only
Where photography is concerned, I sometimes say that IMHO Ansel Adams was the greatest American photographer of the first half of the 20th century and Lee Friedlander was the greatest American photographer of the second half of the 20th century. That's the best I can do: Americans only, and 50-year periods, not "of all time." ("Of all time" = "since 1839" where photography is concerned anyway.)

But why even make such a statement? What, do I need heroes?

The trouble with it is the same problem: it leaves so many people out. Never mind that you could choose Weston and Erwitt as alternatives (at a college program where I taught long ago, the faculty had collectively agreed that Weston was the GOAT, in the same too-willful way that Ken Burns decided Ellington and Armstrong were the GOATs of jazz). If you came up with fifty great American photographers of the 20th century, you'd still be impoverishing your list, because even that would leave out people you should know. Or who dovetail with your own tastes and concerns. I wouldn't be comfortable excluding Dorothea Lange or Roy DeCarava, for example.

The best thing I can come up with to explain why I like the Adams/Friedlander idea is that the choices are representative and didactic. The coolest thing about pairing them that way is that they're so radically different than each other, and yet each expresses something essential about their era. It's interesting to think of what they had in common—huge talent and voracious appetites for work, to name two—but I love thinking about all the ways their work differs.

Here's a book I'd like to write: fifty great photographers of the 21st century so far. That would be a challenge. But wouldn't you love to set aside everything that came before Y2k and look at contemporary photographers in isolation? That would be really interesting I think. It wouldn't mean much but it would be a tremendous way to engage with new work and compare, contrast, and sort. Of course, it would take two years and when you were done you'd be utterly exhausted and virtually no one would care about your conclusions. In other words, just quixotic enough to tempt me.

OldNorm YoungNorm
Now my haywire YouTube algorithm sort-of friend thinks I'm mad about Norm Macdonald. Apparently also much beloved of old white guys—although that doesn't speak very well of old white guys. In truth, until his recent demise I barely remembered him from "Saturday Night Live," and get this—although he was a perfectly decent-looking fellow in his older age, I actually didn't connect the old Norm Macdonald to his young self because he looked so different after he gained weight. On the rare occasions I encountered random clips from his radio show or whatever it was, I just got that sort of vague celebrity-I-should-know-but-don't feeling. (I get that a lot.) I'm only mentioning that to indicate how little I knew about Norm Macdonald. He had barely entered my radar field in any phase of his career.

But now he seems to be all that YouTube wants to talk about. The more it offers Norm videos, the more I click on them, and pretty soon I'm lost in a ghetto of nothing but Norm. And I actually don't click with the guy's humor all that much.

I'm currently not clicking on anything having to do with him because I don't want to encourage my clueless clingy friend. I mean, I just recently managed to get rid of Larry Bird. Sigh. I gotta get algorithms that know me better....

Mike

P.S. Team Kareem.

Book o' the Week

  Friedlander First Fifty. A very fun little book that gives a tour of the first fifty of Lee Friedlander's books—extra copies of which are apparently stashed all over every floor of his house. By his grandson, who is trying to sell full, signed sets on eBay. This is very enjoyable, but also might be the most unique book about photobooks ever. Who else has published fifty photobooks?

This is a link to Amazon from TOP. The following logo is also a link:

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:

A Scream**

[Comments have been posted]

SA*

Another great victory in the neverending battle to keep America safe from photographers occurred last Saturday at LaGuardia Airport in New York. A Republic Airways aircraft operating as American Flight 4817, full of patriotic Americans going about their everyday business, was proceeding from Indianapolis to LaGuardia when an alert woman correctly identified a man seated near her as a vintage camera enthusiast. Fearing that at any moment he might try to capture her image on a negative without obtaining a model release from her, thus violating her God-given copyright to images of herself, she properly alerted authorities—okay, flight attendants—that he had a device.

She was correct: he did. The device might have been something like a Certo 6 folder with a Synchro-Compur shutter built in East Germany (the former Communist part) in the 1950s. Experts from counter-photography watchdog agencies who monitor the activities of suspicious photographers say it is possible to use this shutter to MacGuyver a detonator for a 1950s Russian nuclear warhead, and that for this reason photographers are always attempting to smuggle these shutters from one terrorist cell to another.

"It's DA BOMB!!"

It was later determined that the passenger was merely engaged in an activity known as "camera fondling" and was not actually planning to take any pictures without permission. However this form of fondling is well known to quickly lead to pederasty and the permitting of male animals to legally marry each other in civil courts with their hoofs or paws on the Holy Bible and with an American flag not all that far away.

Fearful that this aberrant passenger might actually have more vintage cameras in his carry-on or even packed away in the baggage compartment, feet or even inches from the vulnerable essential systems of the jet, pilots immediately panicked, requesting that air traffic control divert the plane to...well, LaGuardia, where it was headed anyway. Air traffic controllers of course complied.

The pilots, however, made the landing as quick and rough as possible in order to heighten the drama, while responders massed on the ground to quickly close in on the deviant. Passengers were rewarded for the scary landing by being allowed to slide down those cool inflatable slides, which is something many passengers—well, okay, many male passengers—have always secretly wanted to do. The vintage camera collector was forced to lie down on the runway while people kept their distance just in case he had a Minox or a Minolta TC-1 secretly duct-taped to his midriff ready to go off.

Some background for context
The public is reminded yet again that photographers are always up to no good. In 1997 following the tragic death of Princess Diana, everyone became hyper-vigilant about the cult of extremist fanatics known as the paparazzi, who relentlessly hound celebrities to death by chasing them to the point of exhaustion and bad judgement, similar to the way English aristocrats on horseback in cool costumes used to molest foxes. (Photographers of any type may be damned by association to paparazzi, because close enough.) Then after 9/11 it became known that anyone photographing the outside of any building or any other feature of our national infrastructure, no matter how remote or insignificant, were secretly planning to blow it up. In response, bored security guards were given carte blanche to harass said terrorists until they went away. These miscreants are often cunningly disguised as tourists and are often seen with camera backpacks or camera bags that probably contain bombs. One telltale is that these "photographers" are constantly seen with different bags. Why? It is believed to be because the old ones were used in the commission of crimes—why else would anyone need so many different bags?*** Finally, anyone taking any picture with a child visible in any part of the image can automatically be deemed a predatory pedophile even in the absence of other evidence. And so forth. 

Torches and pitchforks Dept.
Disappointingly, although the vintage camera collector was detained, he could not be executed or even imprisoned, for the very inconvenient reason that he had not actually broken any, well, you know, laws. But he was definitely stressed out and shamed, which should make him think twice the next time he settles down with a three-quarters-full bottle of cheap Chardonnay and opens up eBay on his browser instead of going to bed.

However, support among the passengers for the heroic actions of everyone involved, from the Governor of New York (who Tweeted soothingly to calm the populace [seriously, she did]), to the police, the fire crews, airport authorities, pilots, cabin crew, and the lady who sounded the alarums, was strong. Some passenger comments in the aftermath:

"You just never know when you're going to be trapped on a flight with one of these freaks. Why can't he just collect guns like everyone else?"

"This was a close one, and I agree with the decisions made. He should be taking pictures with his phone like a normal person."

"Honestly, taking out a camera and fondling it in public? What did he expect would happen? Certain things, like picking your nose or doing Elaine Benes dancing in your undies, you should do in the privacy of your own home."

"I guess this turned out to be just precautionary. But the slide was great. They should let us get off the plane like that every time."

"I was trapped in a window seat next to a Leica collector once, so I know what she was going through. At least she realized she could get an emergency landing and a super-quick deplaning out of it. I wish I had known that."

"You just dread the day when your slightly odd eight-year-old says something like, 'Daddy, what's a view camera?' Your heart just sinks."

In the end, everything was fine. Fox5 News New York got a really alarming news segment out of it to agitate the public with the unimportant half of a story, another photographer was harassed for God and country, and all the survivors had quite an exciting story to tell when they got home, without ever actually having been in any danger.

The advice for air travelers is clear: if you're on a plane and you see someone taking out an old camera, don't think. Scream.

Mike

Disclaimer: I have seen no report yet about what camera(s) the passenger actually had.

*Satire Alert. I was especially miffed by PetaPixel's headline, "Man’s Vintage Camera Mistaken for Bomb, Causes Emergency Landing," the syntax of which clearly implies that it was the man's vintage camera that caused the emergency landing. Whose side are they on?! The asinine woman jumping to completely incorrect conclusions and sounding a false alarm caused the emergency landing, not the poor fellow's vintage camera!

**Re the title: My grandmother, born 1901, used to call a funny story "a scream."

***I was going to link to that amazing video called "Bag World (with Dr. David Alan Harvey, Professor of Bagology)" showing the famous Magnum photographer rummaging through his absolutely vast collection of old camera bags. Sadly for photo-geek culture, that video is no longer available.

Book o' the Week

  Friedlander First Fifty. A very fun little book that gives a tour of the first fifty of Lee Friedlander's books—extra copies of which are apparently stashed all over every floor of his house. By his grandson, who is trying to sell full sets on eBay. This is very enjoyable, but also might be the most unique book about photobooks ever. Who else has published fifty photobooks?

This is a link to Amazon from TOP. The following logo is also a link:

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:

Christopher Kleihege: "Yes, the alleged satire above follows my train of thought exactly. Like I said, the photographer should have taken Amtrak. Remember the old Dudley Do-Right cartoons with the damsel tied to the tracks?"

Don Parsons: "As a former regional pilot and a current teacher of many of Republic Airways pilots, I find this both funny and alarming. Don't people think any more?"

Daniel M: "At first, I was thinking that you have presented a funny story to entertain us. But, with the link you have posted, I have discovered that it was real, very sadly...."

Dillan: "You never know what you're going to read here! That was great! As an aside, I can just imagine your grandmother as a flapper girl in the 1920s, telling her bestie that she had a funny story to tell. 'Oh Gertie, you have to hear this! It's such a SCREAM!'"

John Krumm: "This morning, after dropping off a car at my auto mechanic, I was walking down a residential street with my still new Fuji X100V, taking the occasional photo of interesting houses. A woman came out of one house, loudly saying, 'excuse me' to get me to stop. She was super concerned because I had taken a photo of her neighbor's house and it had kids inside, apparently. She wanted my full name, which I refused, though I did explain I was a hobby photographer, and she can see some of my neighborhood photos on my website. Two blocks later I was talking to a cop, who had received a 'suspicious person' call from said woman. He asked for my ID and checked for warrants, which surprised me. I was in no mood to argue with a cop, but I know that was wrong. Frankly my whole morning was kind of a mess emotionally after that."

Mani Sitaraman: "From the Atlanta Journal-Constitution's news story about the incident. 'The woman was traveling with her husband and children, sitting across the aisle from her spouse, when she spotted another man in her husband’s row scrolling through videos and photos of vintage cameras, sources said.' Life with Mom."

Lee Rust: "I thought you were kidding at first...like a spoof article in The Onion...but no...I looked it up and all the initial news stories were about the threat and the drama and the emergency slides and etc....and then, nothing. 'No further information is available at this time.' it seemed like the 'authorities' were pretty embarrassed and just wanted the story to go away, which it did. Except for here, of course."

Eric Rose: "That lady should be sued by the owner of the camera plus have to pay compensation to all the passengers who were affected by her hysterics. The crew should also be better trained in what is and what is not a bomb. This whole thing just shows how hysterical and unhinged America has become."

scott kirkpatrick: "Two-three days later, it's not news and in several pages of Googling I can't find any further information about who was the photographer or what camera he had. The picture of a TLR was the result of a reporter going to Willoughby-Peerless and asking 'what is a vintage camera?' So not much of a clue. I realize that deep in my Leica bag is an external self-timer. I can imagine the reception I might get if I wound it up in public and let it buzz down to its 'click!' And, at Oren G.'s suggestion, I will never again go out in public with my Pentax Spotmeter in its holster. But why did nothing happen to the lady who caused all the trouble? Neither embarrassment nor education resulting from the moment...."

David Lee: "I hope this woman is added to the no-fly list as soon as possible.

"Years ago in the Denver airport, a TSA guy asked me to take my camera out of my bag so he could inspect it. He started looking at it with that gesture in his face that can only mean 'I won’t get fooled.' He asked me to turn the camera on. I can’t, I said, it’s an old camera, no batteries inside. Then he removed the lens cap and looked through the viewfinder to make sure he could see through the lens (it was a Leica M3). After he convinced himself it was a real camera, he gave it back to me. The funniest thing is that I was one of the pilots in the flight…."

New New Schedule (Blog Note)

Note that TOP is on a new schedule, posting every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, with comments posted on the day following.

Yr. Hmbl. Ed. rashly promised a few weeks ago that each M-W-F post would appear at 7:00 a.m. Eastern U.S. Time. However, at the time I wrote that I was apparently momentarily insane. Stark barking. Loopy, crackers, bonkers, barmy. Daft, in short....

Must'a been. At least overly hopeful. You would think I would know myself better by now. I don't know what gets into me when I make promises like that.

Tomorrow's post will appear at 7:00 a.m., but that's the last one. After that, reality, and sanity, must return. Posts will in future appear on those days at some time or other.

There, that's more like Mike.

—Mike the unrealistic idealistic overoptimistic Head of the Dept. of Planning Dept.

 

More about Clichés

1.
You know you're getting old when...

...You can go to InstaRepeat and a.) not only recognize the motifs, b.) not only recognize specific places in multiple cases, but c.) remember famous photographs by name photographers taken at that same location, or remember books in which pictures taken at that location were printed.

Nevertheless, I find this fascinating, and I have to say I love some of the composites.

One thing I was gobsmacked by: a commenter who acknowledges that people will stage view-from-the-tent photos just to get the picture...to put on Instagram. Seriously? I guess it's like bird-watching. You collect motifs, adding them to your life-list. Or maybe you just want to show off by implying that you live the good life because you go camping. Have to ask them I guess.

Thanks to Rob de Loe for mentioning InstaRepeat. Even InstaRepeat is a repeat, though; InstaRepeat repeats other instances where motifs have been collected and collaged. Somewhere in the barn I have a book by a photographer who took pictures of people he encountered on the street who are dressed almost identically, proving that even our outfits are memes.

I have to mention again that in general I'm frustrated by Instagram because all of the pictures are so small and there's no way to see larger versions. This is twelve times as true for the combined pictures on InstaRepeat. I guess the reason is that people are looking at them on phones—? And I shouldn't talk, because pictures on this site are relatively small.

As I mentioned the other day, I have transmogrified into a dinosaur. One proof for this is that I come from an era long past and mostly forgotten when seeing pictures online was considered to be an inferior substitute for actually seeing the actual picture, which was accepted to have a separate and independent reality as part of the real world...and which would be better experienced there. Now, of course, "onscreen" is how many pictures are seen period, and there is only very seldomly an alternative in the real world. And that alternative, if it exists, is accepted to be seldom seen. Sigh.

2.
Ned Bunnell, ever witty (great guy—although we've never met in person, I'd like to meet him), linked to a picture he took as a joke-slash-homage to Lee Friedlander, in my humble opinion the greatest American photographer of the second half of the 20th century. Here it is. And here is the original. This is not a cliché at all; rather, Ned's riffing. It's different when it is done with full knowledge of the antecedent, like John Pfahl's "Moonrise Over Pie Pan" is a riff on "Moonrise Over Hernandez, New Mexico."

Now then, in support of the point just above, I have to point out that three of these four images were not originally tiny JPEGs. If you haven't seen a print of "Moonrise Over Hernandez," you haven't really seen it. I've seen a print of it about six times. The most interesting occasion was in a private back room at the Art Institute of Chicago, where a small group of us were shown the Institute's collection of different vintages of "Moonrise" prints showing the evolution of Ansel's interpretations. I was asked not to take pictures. I did anyway, furtively, but I can't show them to you.

3.
Tom Hill mentioned the book Photo No-Nos by Jason Fulford. Now, I've always had this idea, which I've mentioned several times over the years, that it might be entertaining to compile a list of photo clichés and then set yourself the challenge of making personal pictures of all of them—a sort of "make it yours" exercise, or even Ezra Pound's "make it new." Just from reading a few pages of the sample of Jason Fulford's book, however, I think I might have to retire that idea. Perhaps its time has simply passed, in this brave new world. He makes it clear that it's not just the subject that makes a photo a cliché, but the way in which it's photographed...and he's right, of course.

But for some reason I think I'm going to enjoy that book anyway.

Mike

Book o' the Week

The Atlas of Beauty: Women of the World in 500 Portraits. "Since 2013 photographer Mihaela Noroc has traveled the world with her backpack and camera taking photos of everyday women to showcase the diversity of beauty all around us. The Atlas of Beauty is a collection of her photographs celebrating women from all corners of the world, revealing that beauty is everywhere, and that it comes in many different sizes and colors."

This is a link to Amazon from TOP. The following logo is also a link:

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:

James Weekes: "Let me add another vote for Lee Friedlander as best photographer of the last half of the twentieth century. I collect photo books but my sub collection of Friedlanders is my prize possession."

Mike replies: I wish I had more of a sub-collection. I just got the astonishing Friedlander First Fifty which details the contents of his "first" fifty(!) books. That's amazing in itself. I'm really enjoying it—kinda like candy. I wish I had more than the five or six I do have. At least I have Cherry Blossom Time in Japan which is exquisitely printed. I'm amazed to find it's still pretty affordable—probably because it's full of flower pictures in black-and-white, which would seem just perverse to a lot of normal people.

Mark Jennings: "I’ve never done it, but I’ve read many times that copying great work can be highly instructive. Often the work isn’t straightforward either.

"John Constable, the early 19th century British landscape painter, and countless other painters, enthusiastically copied the actual paintings of many admired paintings. He did it for the instruction, the inspiration, and the pleasure.

"In 2009 I left Ghost Ranch late one afternoon and headed back to Santa Fe. Nothing clicked in my mind when a short time later I passed a road sign 'Hernandez,' but a minute later strange sensations ambushed me. On the left and down a little slope stood the old Adobe church and the cemetery, the flat river valley a ways beyond, and in the far background the mighty Sangre de Christo mountains bathed in the soft late afternoon sun.

"The light was changing fast, and I too veered onto the shoulder, gave explanations and requests to my tired, hungry, and baffled friend, and then jumped out of the car with my trusty Leica point-and-shoot.

"The location has changed since Adams's heyday. The church and graveyard in 2009 stood at the back of a broad swath of sprawl that included modest cottages, house trailers with white picket fences and flamingoes, an auto repair garage, and other Americana. I’d been taken by surprise, but even without previously knowing where Adam’s picture had been captured, I did know its core enough to feel the hair on the napeof my neck go up when I got near the scene. But that’s what photographers are known for, that improbable sense."

Mark: "This series on photographic clichés is fascinating, and I thank you for writing it. I don't spend much time in hotels, but I think one could compile a semi-comprehensive inventory of modern photographic cliches from the prints hanging on hotel room walls. The three stacked round rocks, and the bow of the canoe pointing toward the cleft in the mountains are two of my favorites."

Albert Smith: "Re 'If you haven't seen a print of "Moonrise Over Hernandez," you haven't really seen it. I've seen a print...', I agree. In 1986 (two years after his death), my now ex-wife and I were touring San Diego, doing all the tourist stuff, Sea World, the Zoo, etc. In Balboa Park, adjacent to the Zoo, unexpectedly was an Ansel Adams retrospective with many dozens of his handmade prints. I was a fanboy of photojournalists and knew of Adams only from magazine articles, which never excited me with their small, low-res images of his work. We went in only because we were there. When I walked into that gallery, I was floored with the size and quality of those prints. As a photographer who never shot anything bigger that 6x6cm in my Rollei, I could not believe the detail in Adams's work. My wife had to pull me out of there to continue our itinerary, but as Mike said, you have to see the real thing to appreciate it."

Jeff: "As a print collector (back when prices were sane), I’ve had the privilege of seeing various mammoth, mural sized, Adams prints, including 'Grand Tetons and the Snake River,' one of which sold from David Arrington’s collection for $988,000 at Sotheby’s last year. It sold for several hundred thousand more than a smaller, early vintage 'Moonrise,' which came with a much higher auction estimate. People are wowed by the huge prints, especially nowadays when bigger seems better. I prefer smaller prints, but it hurts a bit to know that I could have privately bought one of the few 'Grand Tetons' mammoth prints for low five figures many years ago. I’ve also seen Arrington’s collection showing changing versions of 'Moonrise,' shown here."

Dennis Buss: "Andreas Feininger addressed the problem of photo clichés in a few of his many books. He acknowledged that conscious imitation is part of one's growth as a photographer but should be avoided once technique is reasonably mastered. One of my favorites that he identified are photos of coiled ropes on fishing piers."

Jim Henry: "This is somewhat tangential to your main points today, but I need to speak up on behalf of screens. Don't get me wrong, I like prints, I have thousands from the 1960's up until now. They are on my walls, in boxes, have been gifts, sold a few, etc. Nothing against prints. But a good screen display can be wonderful, because the light is being transmitted from the image, not just reflected. Prints are always reflecting the light that falls on them. Screens and (remember them>) slides transmit light; the light emits from them. They are like little jewels, especially when the display has a good color gamut and high resolution. My old iPad 4 (retina display)is just spectacular. Compare a stained glass window with (even a good) post card of one. Perhaps I belabor the obvious. And of course, you are mostly talking about phone cameras and Facebook postings. But don't lump all screen renditions with them!"

Geoff Wittig: "Well, now I have my sadness for the week. I'm mostly a traditional landscape photographer, but I have long admired the work of John Pfahl, a post-modernist who spent many years in the Buffalo, New York, area. A Distanced Land (1990) is the best monograph of his work. He produced all kinds of visual wit. He created a weirdly beautiful series of photographs of industrial smokestacks with their toxic effluent perfectly lit by the setting sun. And a series of forest scenes with carefully placed stretched ribbons creating visual puzzles. Sadly, Pfahl was another victim of the early wave of COVID19."

Mike replies: I wrote about John Pfahl's passing and even posted a picture of him in April of 2020.

In that same post I noticed that I passed along the same Ned Bunnell picture that I passed along again here! I knew I had seen it before but I thought maybe Ned had sent it to me privately, or I had seen it while browsing his Instagram. Oh well, at least I'm consistent. And Ned is too!

A Distanced Land is a little-known treasure. I saw a show of those "weirdly beautiful series of photographs of industrial smokestacks" you mentioned in original prints, at the Jones-Troyer Gallery in D.C.

On Glass Orbs and Pictorialism

Words and photo by Dave Levingston

As a fan of Clarence White, Sr., and someone who has used orbs in his own photos, I thought I'd give you a little info on orbs that goes beyond what I put in my comment on TOP. White was a native of my home town, Newark, Ohio, and I have often photographed in some of the same locations, such as Blackhand Gorge, where he did some of his most well-known photographs.

White was fond of orbs. Stieglitz, not so much. There are quotes of him complaining about White using them. I've not dug those quotes up, but here is a note from page 227 of the book Clarence White and His World by Anne McCauley:

"The glass orb, which became one of White's trademark props, had been used since the Renaissance as a symbol of the Holy Spirit (because it echoes the orb of the world), of the transparency of the soul (as in Johannes Vermeer's Allegory of the Catholic Faith [ca. 1670–72], in which it hangs from the ceiling), or of the vanity of earthly things, akin to a soap bubble (in seventeenth-century vanitas still lifes). It was also traditionally associated with virginal purity, as in Cesar van Everdingen's Amor Holding a Glass Orb (ca. 1660). Later it reflects the mystical practice of scrying, in which the future appears in a crystal orb. A typical Aesthetic movement example of the use of glass orbs is Edward Burne-Jones's cycle The Days of Creation (1870–76), in which each stage of creation is envisioned in a crystal orb held by a female allegorical figure. Underlying all its symbolic uses, the glass orb presented painters and photographers like White with an interesting play of transparency and reflections that challenged normal optical perception and complicated the process of representation."

So as I've been working on a project in homage to White, I've used orbs quite a bit. Above is one of my favorite and most popular examples.

On a related note, in photo school I was taught that Pictorialism was a mistake, a dead end that didn't actually advance photography. I think that is wrong. The modernist ƒ/64 group photographers reacted against Pictorialism and put it in disrepute. But I think it was crucial in the process of photography being accepted as a legitimate medium for art and not just a representative craft. And, looking back from today, I think we can see that Pictorialism is one way to do photography, just as valid as any other technique or genre.

Dave

Mike adds: The most famous glass orb in art recently was of course the one in Christ's hand in Leonardo's Salvator Mundi, which (the painting, not the orb) sold at Christie's in New York City for approximately $450 million in 2017. That one caused quite a bit of controversy, which appears to be resolved now. P.S. here's me and Dave last time he was in town.

Book o' the Week

The Atlas of Beauty: Women of the World in 500 Portraits. "Since 2013 photographer Mihaela Noroc has traveled the world with her backpack and camera taking photos of everyday women to showcase the diversity of beauty all around us. The Atlas of Beauty is a collection of her photographs celebrating women from all corners of the world, revealing that beauty is everywhere, and that it comes in many different sizes and colors."

This is a link to Amazon from TOP. The following logo is also a link:

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:

Bill Tyler: "The controversy Mike alludes to is in part whether Salvator Mundi is actually by Leonardo, and in part about the fact that Jesus' robe, seen through the orb, is not shown inverted. I'm astonished at the misunderstanding about the inversion. Writing on the topic seems to reflect a mistaken belief that objects viewed through a glass sphere always appear inverted. This is not always so. A glass sphere is in effect a lens with a focal length that is quite short relative to its size. Looking through such a lens at an object more than one focal length away will indeed show the object inverted. However, if the object is closer than one focal length, it will appear erect, not inverted. That orb in the painting is very close to Jesus' robe, and thus the lack of inversion is completely optically accurate.

"Here's a photo of a solid glass sphere resting on my keyboard, illustrating the point. The letter G seen through the sphere is right-side-up, not inverted. It's how an ordinary magnifying glass works—the focal length there is a bit longer relative to the magnifier's size, and you see the subject erect. The article Mike references has a bunch of computer scientists doing simulations with hollow and solid spheres. If they'd bothered to open a first-year physics textbook, or any introduction to optics, this point would have been explained in detail. Failing that, glass spheres are easy to obtain and inexpensive. An actual experiment seems to me to be far more convincing than a numeric simulation."

Jnny: "That is a mesmerizing photo. Kudos."

Eschew Cliché

The urge to make clichés stems from a desire to make pictures that look like everybody else's pictures. Why would anybody want to do this? Personally I think it's because it relieves us from having to rely only on our own judgment when evaluating what we've done. Photographers, far more than other kinds of artists, are perpetually insecure about whether what they've done is going to be accepted as good. I also think photographers like clichés because, at an early stage of our development, it's a way of demonstrating competence and accomplishment. You can tell you're in this stage because the phrases "that looks like a professional took it!" and "it looks like a postcard!" are construed as compliments, and make us swell up with pride. (Later, of course, those kinds of comments become insults.)

So what's a photographic cliché? As with pornography, you're supposed to know it when you see it. I suppose we might define it as "conventional subjects shown in a conventional way." That this leaves each of us to define "conventional" for ourselves is probably a good thing.

Conventions, of course, change. In the style known as "pictorialism"—largely defined through the journal Camera Work by Alfred Stieglitz, who later grew bored by it—it was conventional, for some reason I never understood, to include a large glass globe in many pictures (guild secret? Masonic talisman? Esoteric symbology? Beats me). During the Eisenhower years, it was conventional that pictures be robust, cheerful, forward-looking, even heroic (which fortunately didn't hamper the ebullient Eisie, one of the great photographers of those days). Lately, convention can be found on tony art-gallery walls, where "photographers" no other photographers have heard of display fey, fatuous, flat, fuzzy, foreboding photos of nothing, interchangeably.

If you're smiling at that, don't get cocky. Amateurs are even worse. What informs the taste of amateurs who pursue clichés is their idea of the taste of others. Not the actual taste of others, mind you, but just the photographer's best attempts at second-guessing.

Be confident, baby
That's no way to live. As with many things, photography is often about self-confidence. The point is not so much to learn what other people like—that's ultimately a fool's errand—but to learn what you like. Only by identifying your own concerns and becoming comfortable with your own taste will you stand a chance of developing an organic style, or signature, or way of seeing, that is neither imitative ("designed to be like something else, but usually inferior to the original") or derivative.

Photo by Lee Friedlander

I think this is why rebellious and nonconformist teenagers often make the best photography students. They don't want to conform. They don't work to please.

We each are stuck with using our own taste as the foundation for what's good or bad, because the taste of others is so varied and unpredictable. If I found one person who loved one particular picture of yours and and gushed about it on and on, praising it to the skies, and another person who hated it and pronounced it worthless, what would that teach you? If you learn your own taste and cultivate self-confidence, you can be secure in the face of either reaction.

When you know with a quiet but solid confidence that you truly like one of your pictures and you're not shaken in the least when someone says, "What the hell is the point of that?" or "I hate that!," you're there.

Go for it. Dare to be different; be yourself. Eschew cliché.

-

A version of this post was first published in 2003! (Jeez. Time flies.) I found it when I was poking around in the archives for the previous post. In the meantime, I found this. It's a page from a 1937 issue of U.S. Camera. Pretty funny that it starts with the same mysterious glass globes I mentioned. Notice which of M.F. Agha's clichés are no longer popular or would be politically incorrect today.

Wikipedia says Dr. Mehemed Fehmy Agha was a "Russian-born Turkish designer, art director, and pioneer of modern American publishing" who was "instrumental in...delivering the full force of European avant garde experimentation to the pages of Vogue, Vanity Fair, and House & Garden, the Condé Nast publishing company's flagship magazines in the United States."

Mike

Book o' the Week

The Atlas of Beauty: Women of the World in 500 Portraits. "Since 2013 photographer Mihaela Noroc has traveled the world with her backpack and camera taking photos of everyday women to showcase the diversity of beauty all around us. The Atlas of Beauty is a collection of her photographs celebrating women from all corners of the world, revealing that beauty is everywhere, and that it comes in many different sizes and colors."

This is a link to Amazon from TOP. The following logo is also a link:

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:

Roger Bradbury: "Typical subjects at the first camera club I joined, over 40 years ago: 1.) Windmills. 2.) Sunsets. 3.) Swans. 4.) Any combination of the above. So when I entered an almost abstract photo of a top corner of my bedroom, with two different coloured walls, the top of a coloured door and frame and a white triangle of ceiling, I was laughed at. I grew disillusioned with the club from that point. At least I'd tried something different. But I do remember it. Not that I'm still holding a grudge or anything....  :-)  "

Kenneth Tanaka: "I agree with your general suggestion to strive to make distinctive images. But I’d prefer to place emphasis on what to do, rather than to avoid clichés (which have a habit of changing over time anyway).

"Re 'The urge to make clichés stems from a desire to make pictures that look like everybody else's pictures.' No, I don’t agree. Or at least I don’t feel that the sentence accurately covers the observation. Photography is fundamentally a craft. Technology has automated most of its ickiest aspects, but it still requires learnin’. 'Making pictures that look like' pictures that you admire is a landmark in that process for many, perhaps most, people. So I’d encourage newbies to make many such pictures and study them, whether the person is 17 or 75. Once you’re able to intentionally make that trite image of the Grand Canyon, the Eiffel Tower, or the Brooklyn Bridge you’ve achieved competence with the gadget. Now for the fun part.

"Which leads to understanding why people make photos at all. Generally not for art. Not for recognition. And generally not for compensation. They make pictures to commemorate and, increasingly, to communicate. So as soon as someone mastered the basics or controlling their camera I would encourage them to concentrate of using it to communicate. Don’t be self-conscious about being cliché. Forget silly amateur photo 'composition' rules (that weren’t made for photography or art or the 20th or 21st centuries at all). Pay attention to what you’re putting in that frame, and where you’re putting it. Everything in the frame matters. Forget 'pretty.' Does it communicate what you want to say or depict? Does it record what you want to remember in, say, years to come? That’s the main purpose for using a camera for most of us.

"If some of your photos turn out to look very similar to many others you’ve seen…so what? As long as you created the image purposefully, who really gives a damn?"

Mike replies: I like your comments, as usual, and would only suggest that our differences hinge on one thing: you're considering "eschew cliché" as it represents a restriction, a limitation, a rule that one has to abide by; whereas, when I wrote that piece, I considered it might be a liberation, which might be freeing for some people. It's been my observation that people really do have a tendency to restrict their picture-taking to subjects that they've already seen as pictures by others.

Brian Cormack: "When I was in high school back in the 1990s, the school had a literary magazine that also included photography. My junior year I submitted a few pictures taken around town, including a few at the biggest tourist attraction here (called 'The Old Mill'). I joined the staff of the literary magazine my senior year and was surprised to see that the advisor adamantly refused to ever print any pictures of The Old Mill, since they received so many submissions of it every year. They even had a wall of photos in the office filled with all the pictures of the Mill that had been submitted over the years. I looked closely and found the one I had submitted the year before. I think about that every time I go out to that Mill to take pictures. It is a photogenic little spot, at least!"

Mike replies: That's great. The editor might have suggested an "Old Mill Issue," jam-packed with nothing but pictures of the Old Mill. Just as a joke. She could have included an open invitation to submit more pictures of the Old Mill for the next Old Mill Issue, which would be announced as being definitely scheduled for, say, a date 30 years in the future.  :-)

My predecessor at the magazine I edited hated pictures of kids, and refused to print pictures of children unless he couldn't help it.

Ten Years Ago!

A post we published ten years ago yesterday:

Fuji Goes on the Attack

Shigetaka Komori, Fuji CEO, has announced that Fuji will enter the mirrorless interchangeable-lens market by next Spring (2012) with a line of products that will share the "Fujifilm X" nomenclature with its recent fixed-lens cameras the X100 and X10.

Komori-san says that the sensor quality of Fujifilm X mirrorless will exceed that of current full-frame sensors, although its sensor size will likely be smaller than 24x36mm. The claim reminded me of something...I have a hazy memory of someone with knowledge of the industry telling me long ago that an official of Canon said that Fuji is the only company Canon is scared of—not Panasonic, not Sony, not Nikon—because of Fuji's expertise with sensors. (I might not have that right, so please don't quote me.)

Fuji also confirmed that demand for the X100 has far exceeded expectations. More than 70,000 have sold in six months, and the total is expected to top 100,000 by year's end.

Note: About that anecdote, I did have it right. I was being circumspect because the source had given me permission to quote him but asked me to please camouflage his identity as best I could. He has since passed away, but I'll leave it alone.

Shigetaka Komori retired at CEO of Fuji last Summer. He certainly presided over a wonderful renaissance at that company.

Yesterday was also the tenth anniversary of the death of Steve Jobs.

Mike

(Thanks to Lex Stewart and Richard Man for corrections)

Book o' the Week

The Atlas of Beauty: Women of the World in 500 Portraits. "Since 2013 photographer Mihaela Noroc has traveled the world with her backpack and camera taking photos of everyday women to showcase the diversity of beauty all around us. The Atlas of Beauty is a collection of her photographs celebrating women from all corners of the world, revealing that beauty is everywhere, and that it comes in many different sizes and colors."

This is a link to Amazon from TOP. The following logo is also a link:

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:

Albert Smith: "Well, I was one of the 70,000 that bought the original X100, literally the day it hit the shelf of my local camera store (now, sadly, gone). The images of that Leica look alike in the many photo magazines (now sadly gone too) had me salivating after jumping to digital and relegating my M6 to a shelf. I'm glad that I allowed Fujifilm some growing pains because if that original X100 were my impression of the brand, it would have been my last Fuji. They certainly have evolved, and today a Fuji camera is in my hand 99% of the time. It's great to see a mission statement actually be realized also to the letter."

Zave Shapiro: "I'm old enough to remember when people who sold things were familiar with products, their own and competitors. Today we have product managers who claim expertise in 'marketing' and 'product positioning.' I remember fondly when I was offered Good, Better, Best rather than today's 'I can sell you features. How much money do you have?' I just bought a new car so I'm disgusted, of course. The great thing about phone cameras is the return to Good, Better, Best. If Fuji, CaNyKon, etc can hang on I'm sure the MBAs will foul up the phones. We'll have seven Apple phones within $22 all distinguished by feature set (software), and the customers will need classes."

Rob Spring's Picture: Childhood Revisited

Rob Spring of Barre, Vermont said of his picture from the Baker's Dozen mini-portfolio, "Here is a photo of my grandson, Waylon, with his dad, my son-in-law. This was the last ride on the swing that my kids used more than 30 years ago. The swing was attached to a limb of an ancient but dying Vermont sugar maple which was cut down the next day after standing in what is now our front yard for over 155 years."

This looks so much like one of my own pictures that I don't have to wonder why I like it. We don't even really need to know that this commemorates the last day of a long-standing tree, although it's a bonus. What it made me think of when I saw it was that there's a relatively short window for us, as children, during which a swing is good for playing on. How long it is, really? Six or seven years maybe, maybe less. But with most childish things that pleased you when you were young yourself, you get a chance to revisit them again when they make your children happy. It's really tough to say who's happier here, the child or the man; they both appear to be enjoying themselves equally. And I'm glad I wasn't imagining the resemblance between them. Their expressions are the same.

I just love pictures like this when they're my own—straightforward documents of people, places and times that were important to me. I would have loved to have taken this, if these were my family members. And it's a charming shot even though they're strangers to me. Great job, Rob.

Mike

Book o' the Week

The Atlas of Beauty: Women of the World in 500 Portraits. "Since 2013 photographer Mihaela Noroc has traveled the world with her backpack and camera taking photos of everyday women to showcase the diversity of beauty all around us. The Atlas of Beauty is a collection of her photographs celebrating women from all corners of the world, revealing that beauty is everywhere, and that it comes in many different sizes and colors."

This is a link to Amazon from TOP. The following logo is also a link:

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:

Jerker Andersson's Picture: Composition, Colors, Lighting, Love

Jerker Andersson of Lund, Sweden, wrote of his submission: "Early Fall, 2004. My father-in-law, Håkan, and his first grandchild Elsa have a conversation in the dining room. Over the years since then, my wife Åsa and I have had two more kids, a girl and a boy, and my wife’s father has five grandchildren in all. But this was in the beginning. Sometimes I find it hard to remember what life was like without the kids. Lots of time to spend, I suppose."

Formally this is a great candid—it uses a lighting strategy I've seen before but have never heard a name for. If you have two faces looking at each other, and the main light source is coming from behind one of the people and hence directed at the front of the other face, you can split the background and contrast the lit face with a darker background and the darker face with a lighter background. I know I've seen pros do it on purpose; I imagine Jerker recognized it rather than set it up, but it's marvelously effective here.

I suppose we can't help our personal responses to photographs. I've always been interested in what you might call "the ages of Man"—capital M, meaning humankind. This is a quirky thought, but in some ways I wonder if we sometimes aren't programmed to see people of much different ages as being a little like a different species, slightly alien almost, as a way of protecting ourselves. I've noticed that young, healthy people sometimes treat infirm and decrepit old people a bit like they are something "other"—not people who were once just like them. You can't quite get them to say they'll never be like that, but being honest, aging is alarming, so why think it if you don't have to? In our youth, we're somewhat blind to the inevitability of our aging. Conversely, I've sometimes observed that people have a way to talking about babies as not quite being us yet. Children, too, sometimes.

This is probably the most amateur sort of sociobiology. But it creates the wonderful tension for me here: an infant looking at an adult like she will one day be; a grandparent looking at an infant like he himself once was. And their obvious pleasure and contentment in regarding each other. They recognize each other. And yet I sense a touch of wonder, too, on both sides! Makes me smile.

This rises well above the usual family snapshot. Everything's in perfect balance here, composition, colors, lighting, love. Don't you wish all your family photographs could be this good?

Mike

Book o' the Week

The Atlas of Beauty: Women of the World in 500 Portraits. "Since 2013 photographer Mihaela Noroc has traveled the world with her backpack and camera taking photos of everyday women to showcase the diversity of beauty all around us. The Atlas of Beauty is a collection of her photographs celebrating women from all corners of the world, revealing that beauty is everywhere, and that it comes in many different sizes and colors."

This is a link to Amazon from TOP. The following logo is also a link:

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:

Jerker Andersson: "Thank you for those kind words! From August 1996 to June of '99 I studied photography as art, full time, at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. For a few years after that, I made a modest living as a photographer. But I grew tired of having to hunt for every assignment and then hunt the clients to get my money. I studied to become a teacher of the Swedish language for immigrants instead, and I've been working like that on different levels since 2005. Anyway; if I couldn't take decent family pictures, it would be quite embarrassing! Again—thank you!"

Monika Göhmann's Picture: Character Study

Monika Göhmann of Darmstadt, Germany writes, "In the image you see my parents with my daughter. My mother hated to have her photograph taken, but my daughter convinced her to sit down with her on this day, because we didn’t have any photo of the three of them together. My parents were 95 (father) and 93 (mother) years old at the time. Only four months later, they had to leave their house to live in an old peoples home; in 2020 they both died. So this image is a true treasure for my family!"

At first pass this seemed too plain, and I flipped past it pretty quickly. But it grew on me with repeated visits, and I long ago learned to appreciate it when a photograph has "legs"—staying power—for me. The more I looked at it, the more I liked it. First of all, I just love those wonderful faces—all three of them strong, interesting, personable, and (excuse me sir), beautiful. Then I noticed a certain consonance between the two women—notice how the colors of their clothing echo back and forth. Then the hands. Hands can reveal as much as facial expressions about feelings, and I love how the six hands are arrayed across the picture. Again the women echo. Notice how the man draws the group together, and also how different his hold is on each woman. The two older people are turned toward each other, almost folded into each other—you would guess they are long married even if you didn't know, I think. Neither looks at anything in particular, as if they are content and secure to be together. But the most marvelous thing is how the face of the daughter brings the photographer, her mother, into the picture. Her expression says a lot about their relationship, as well as how happy she is about the occasion. The picture is a character study even to someone who doesn't know the people; knowing the story enhances it. In a world that clamors for attention, there's still a lot of reward to be found in quiet, subtle pictures. I think Monika really got the moment. Sehr gut gemacht!

Mike

Book o' the Week

The Atlas of Beauty: Women of the World in 500 Portraits. "Since 2013 photographer Mihaela Noroc has traveled the world with her backpack and camera taking photos of everyday women to showcase the diversity of beauty all around us. The Atlas of Beauty is a collection of her photographs celebrating women from all corners of the world, revealing that beauty is everywhere, and that it comes in many different sizes and colors."

This is a link to Amazon from TOP. The following logo is also a link:

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:

Jens Ronneberger: "Ein schönes bild von zwei generationen." (A beautiful picture of two generations.)

Ernest Zarate: "Re 'At first pass this (photograph) seemed too plain, and I flipped past it pretty quickly. But it grew on me with repeated visits….' I don’t think I could have written a better response to the whole 'shoulder tapping' criteria as, at best, a limited (and limiting) metric for judging a photograph’s success. Any creative work (movie, music, painting, architecture, etc…) may seem too (plain, outrageous, etc…) at first pass. That’s the 'tapping' phase, which with this photo ended up with a 'meh.' I think as creators of works, we need to not insult those who view our work by making it so simplistic that a three second glance gives it all away. 'Nothing more to see here. Next!' We must not hesitate to demand a bit of effort from those viewers, provided we reward them with a pay-off for their efforts. I’m glad you gave this photo more than a passing glance."

Thanks! (Plus an Update)

Things are going well. I appreciate all the advice, pro and con, the good wishes, the admonitions, the compliments and complaints. I'm extremely grateful to everyone who signed up at Patreon and all the people who increased their donation. Thank you! Thank you.

I had a great writing day today. Was in the saddle by 7:00 and didn't run out of steam till 1:00. Wrote 1,700 words. For those who've asked and are curious, I'm not imagining myself as a bestseller author, novelist, or instant millionaire. I'm going to write a series of modest books either on practical topics or for reading enjoyment. From each one I aspire to earn around $20k. I intend to put the profits into paying off my mortgage. Assuming I can hit that target, I'll need eight books to pay it down to zero. More if they earn less, fewer if they earn more. I'm really looking forward to it because I love coming up with ideas for projects and I anticipate that I'll get better at the process after I get a couple under my belt.

I'm going to try to find an agent to offer them to mainstream publishers, but I don't have a lot of illusions about that; most probably they'll end up self-published on Amazon and marketed as well as I can by myself. If I can't make 50k words worth $7.99 or so to most anybody then I'm not worth my salt. I'm confident I'll have few if any dissatisfied customers. I just know I can offer more than $8 worth of entertainment for $8, that's all.

I'd like to get at least three of these under my belt before I tackle the book about Xander. That one will be the only full-length book. It's really a fantastic story, the best story I have by far; all I really have to do is not mess it up. But I don't want it to be my first book because I want some practice before I tackle it. However, I've finished a very good first chapter for it and a solid draft of a proposal. It's an uphill climb to sell a book proposal to a real publisher for an advance, but I'll be prepared just in case.

The small books will be about 40–50k words each, although I'm the type who tends to add more words as I revise, and I love to revise. (I live for it.) So maybe a draft that starts out at 40k words will grow to 70k naturally as I work it over.

Y'all are going to love the first book. It's just pure fun, and pure pleasure to write. It's a series of entertaining tales based on my life (but fictionalized some, too). In the past two days I added 4,000 words. And it's some of the best writing I've done lately. I'm really, really enjoying it. I feel energized and happy.

I can't wait to wake up tomorrow morning and get back to work!

Mike