The Online Photographer

Mike Hits the Big Time

Very wonderful red-letter day for me: my first-ever article for The New Yorker just went live at newyorker.com. It's called "Your Camera Roll Contains a Masterpiece." Comments/thoughts/ reactions welcomed. 

Please tell your friends! Post on Facebook! Butters' friend Wex is here to play, so I'll have more to say later. (Guess that's always true.)

Mike

UPDATE: Check it out...it also made Apple News+ (you did know you can search Apple News+ for "photography," right? Okay, I didn't):

And Ken Tanaka noted that it made the evening's list of featured stories for subscribers:

Whew, what a day. One thing I also wanted to point out is that my editor there spent a very generous amount of his time with me, and the articles are carefully crafted with the help of various professionals in addition to his expert editing and direction. My piece ended up far stronger than it started out.

Book of Interest this Week

Home Fires Volume II: The Present. There is of course a Volume I: The Past.  TOP reader Bruce Haley has produced documentary work relating to conflict, humanitarian crises and environmental/industrial/land use issues for 30 years. He received the Robert Capa Gold Medal for his coverage of the ethnic civil war in Burma. This is his exploration of his home territories, and it's great.

This book link is a portal to Amazon.

Today at B&H Photo

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:

Stelios: "I was thinking just that yesterday. What am I going to do with the thousands of pictures on my phone? What happens when the phone goes? Sure I download them on my computer but still, they are so many! Most of them notes. Thousands of my dog, most failures, or identical to each other (you can only have so many pictures of a dog lying upside down, all the same and yet all different because they happen now!). Congratulations on the New Yorker article. I hope there’s more coming."

Niels: "Great article, congratulations!

"I don't understand why they couldn't link to this blog in the credits, but they appear only to do internal links.

"English isn't my first language, but the article seems a bit more polished than I am used to from you—which is understandable given the medium, but I kind of prefer the style on this blog—it is more lively—in lack of better word.

"I hope you will also notify your readers when the next article is up."

Mike replies: Well, on them not linking here...it might be a little like when I hired one of the caregivers at my son's daycare center to come stay with him while I traveled to the yearly photo trade show at the Javits Center. The neighbors said she held parties at my condo every night and that they heard my three-year-old crying at midnight. She left some shot-glasses in the dishwasher, and one of my bedsheets was in the dumpster down in the garage with cigarette burns on it. When I asked the director of the daycare center about it, she said, "we can only guarantee their behavior while they're here." (The next year, I got my Mom to come stay with Xander.) I would guess that about sums up why The New Yorker doesn't link directly to things like triflin' lowdown no-editor-having blogs and the like—they can only guarantee my behavior when I'm there. (Where's that laughing emoji with the crying eyes when you need him?)

Animesh Ray: "Beautiful article. Thoughtful. Ruefully romantic. Sparkling with insights. Congratulations."

Antonis R: "Well, first: Congratulations Mike! To New Yorker's credit, they know to pick among the very best. I have been reading your wordsmithing since the days of the 37th Frame (I always opened the magazine from the back!) and this one, referencing 'Your Camera Roll' suggested a continuity in tone. Encouraging, evocative, informative, at once very personal and truly universal. It's in a different voice than, say, blog posts with their own casual charm. Making us create a mental image for a picture that only appears in words is brilliant, but how the subject switches from 'a woman in dark clothing' to 'we had gone to...' takes us across the chasm from generic to intimate and to the emotional essence of the story in a quick flash. Some sharp writing there.

"I know things live in the Cloud these days, but I wish a selection of your writing would come together, ink-on-paper, in a bound volume. A photography how-to manual with no technical instructions."

Mike replies: I tried once, but I'm too disorganized. Couldn't bring it together. I did hire a friend's daughter to clip all my magazine articles, rather than throw them away. Filled six (or was it eight? Where's the fact-checker?) three-ring binders! But they're here, at least.

Patrick Murphy: "OMG! Just saw your New Yorker article (via Apple News+, not from your blog). As you began to describe the 'woman by the sea' photo, a chill went up my spine. I purchased that photo during your print offer last year. It was the only print I’ve bought from you in the two decades of my reading your exceptional blog—the only print that really moved me. And now here it is shared with the world at large. The photo alone is an evocative masterpiece. Your description of its taking and meaning to you is what put it over the top for me. Congratulations to you on your as-always insightful writing getting the audience it deserves!"

Aaron: "After thinking more about your piece: given that we are awash in images and that our phones give us such easy access to making photographs I think you should write something on when not to take a picture. I hasten to say that this isn’t motivated by digital grouchiness or nostalgia for the good 'ol days. Rather, I’m interested in how not taking a photograph can be a way of practicing taking better photographs. I remember reading once that in a piece of music the negative spaces—the pauses, decrescendos, rests—were as or more important than the positive spaces—the notes, chords, accents, and so forth. Music is only music when the notes are framed by emptiness. A set of notes played continuously is noise not music. In our image saturated world—and our image saturated personal lives—perhaps there’s an analogy to be made. The images we do have are enhanced by the images we intentionally refrain from making. I also remember (though I can’t recall who) a professional nature photographer saying that he could only photograph a small percentage of the beautiful things he saw simply because the other things would not work as a photograph. Knowing when not to take a picture was part of his craft.

"Just this morning, clouds are clearing after several gray days and they have a the clarity and brilliance that seems only to come after rain—but these particular clouds in this particular setting won’t photograph well. Learning to appreciate the photos I do have may be part and parcel with remembering to appreciate the moments that can’t be photographs, and crucially appreciating them as moments, not as potential photographs. Again, I don’t mean this as general life advice (don’t let photography rob you of appreciation for what can’t be photographed). But, rather, I wonder if there’s something to learn about taking better photographs by paying attention to what can’t be photographed successfully."

Curt Gerston: "I’ve been a New Yorker subscriber since my dad got me my first subscription as a going-to-college gift in 1986. Great magazine…you absolutely belong. Congrats!"

Alvan: "Congratulations, Mike! A lovely, fluent, illuminating piece. You're an inspiration in many ways. Long may these—pictures, pieces, muses—continue! Long-time reader (and lurker) here, harking from Singapore."

Andre Y: "Congratulations Mike! To the story of NatGeo editors wanting a surfeit of photos to distill down to 15–20 perfect ones for the story, it's thought that in documentary filmmaking, an 80X ratio (that's eighty times) is about the right amount of footage for B-roll. That is, you need to shoot 80 times as much footage as you might use for the ancillary, illustrative stuff in your film."

We Are Who We Are

We're in the middle of an issues discussion, which is unusual around here. First, I have to address the departing supporters, who have withdrawn their Patreon contributions: I'm sorry you were offended—the aim here is indeed for that not to happen, and I strive for that. I don't want anyone to feel the way you'd have to feel to yank back your helping hand. But I don't think it would be wise for me to submit to the blunt command, "No more politics," either. Sometimes, politics enters in, and I write about what I'm moved to write about. That's the way it has to be in a daily blog that's been chugging along for going on 17 years. Everything's fodder. The deal is, you pick: like a newspaper or a magazine. It's not homework. Read what you want to read, leave what you want to leave. I can't do it for everyone. Consider: with everything I ever write, there are at least a few people who love something most people hate, or at least a few people who hate something most people love. If I had to tailor everything to everyone—well, couldn't be done. The post previous to this one wasn't labeled "OT," because it wasn't off-topic: I related the "current event" to the question of untangling art from the morality of artists. Which led, I might add, to some reader comments that might be among the best this site has ever gotten. I'll re-read them at some later time I'm sure. (I still haven't gotten them all up, but I have little else to do this afternoon.) [UPDATE Fri. evening: One of the three readers who left has already come back. I'm glad. —MJ.]

As for the Smith-Rock affair, Mike Plews pointed to the best analysis he's seen, by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Kareem touches on all the repercussions we can know about, with crystal clarity. Short and worth reading. I truly admire that guy, by the way, and have for a long time. Not just because he's a deep jazz fan. And not just because he happens to be about the first celebrity I ever saw up close and personal—he used to come in to the Bay Point Pharmacy where I worked when I was 14 and 15, back when his name was still Lew. He's a role model, IMHO.

And finally, I did promise I'd share my own take on "untangling art and the morality of artists" before we move on to the important topic of the Leica watch  :-)  . So here it is. It's not a political position with me, and it's not even an intellectualized stance: I just have trouble enjoying art when I know the artist is a shitheel in some obtruding or offensive way. It's an emotional response, and I wrestle with it. It causes me anguish, too, because sometimes I want to engage with and enjoy art or entertainment made by people I no longer trust or like. Even before the MeToo charges later leveled at him, I already had left Louis C.K. behind, for instance, because of the vile (to me) things he would say about his children. (With me, as with Dickens, mistreatment of children is the cardinal sin.)

I have a particular problem with Woody Allen, because of Annie Hall, the transitional movie between the broad, Marx-Brothers-inspired schtick of his early career and his later, Ingmar-Bergman-wannabee serious films that in my opinion encompasses the best of both. Annie Hall is a singularly brilliant movie about what Paul Simon called, in the song "Hearts and Bones," "the arc of a love affair." As moviemaking, the ideas tumble out in a dazzling torrent almost offhandedly, like Jimi Hendrix moves from musical idea to musical idea in "Born Under a Bad Sign." The pathos/but the humor/but the pathos of that little boy saying "I used to be a heroin addict, and now I'm a methadone addict"...what a way to say that fate awaits all innocence. The movie is well written, full of Allenesque quips like, after Annie parks, "That's okay, we can walk to the curb from here," and there are a remarkable number of cameos and first or early appearances—the young Christopher Walken as the psycho brother, can't do better than that. But the things I like best are the gags and vignettes that can only work as film/video: the brief panning shot across the three people in the front seat driving to the airport, ending on Alvy's puddle-of-fear face. Can't do that in a theater or a book or in anything but a movie. Annie actually is what has become a movie-blurb cliché, a tour-de-force. It earns its bittersweet, elegiac feeling-tone. Maybe I just have too many failed relationships in my life. But then, I didn't when I first saw it.

At any rate I have resisted circling back to Annie since Allen took up with his adopted daughter [UPDATE: This is an error. See correction below]. It's been a long time now. Before I can do so I'll no doubt have to delve into the details of he and Soon-Yi Previn, and I'm not sure I want to. With eyes averted it's still possible to believe it's a wholesome coupling of consenting adults who happen to have an unconventional meet-story. They're still together, and he was never convicted of a crime.... On the other hand, it's possible I'll die before ever seeing Annie again. But I'll always want to.

Orwell
I'm not actually proud of my molten moral core when it comes to art. It's just a psychological fact of me that I deal with. It was never a decision. Didn't I write a piece once called "Never Meet Your Heroes"? I think I did. And that's why. Scott Abbey writes, in the Comments,

As to the question of separating the artist from the art, it depends. It depends on how close in time, space and culture the transgressor and their transgression is. I haven’t watched a Woody Allen movie in years, although I used to really enjoy them. Bill Cosby’s comedy albums were a source of joy to me and my friends as teenagers; I can’t listen to them. Certain current musical artists—giants in my mind—have robbed me of some of the enjoyment I get from listening to their artistry due to them going out of their way to encourage people to skip getting vaxxed. Picasso was a long time ago (to me), and he was never a favorite of mine. So I like his work about as much as I ever did. So, it depends. I don’t have a good decision-making framework here.

I sympathize.

As for Yoram Nevo's recommendation of Orwell's "Benefit of Clergy": know it well. And it does treat this subject better than almost anything. One of my touchstone books is Orwell's Essays (Everyman's), a thick brick of a tome that I habitually root around in to find a truffle. I read it like the pious read the Bible, in snips and pieces, and, like they, I'll never stop. Well, until I have to. I believe I could feel the truth of Orwell's judgment of Dali, unarticulated, directly from the art itself, by the age of 12 or so (I spent my youth engaging with painters, mainly)—the sense that the obscene immorality and surreal morbidness is the only thing that enlivens the otherwise conventional Edwardian draughtsmanship ("a dexterity that goes no higher than the elbow," writes Orwell piercingly, ever the master of le mot juste). Just as I read the essays of E.B. White aloud alone (and have always done) to steal a little reflected light from his cadences, I return time after time to the watering hole of Orwell to linger a little in the company of a mind like mine only better.

And an exquisite little touch about "Benefit" I only just learned: see the little note at the bottom about it being included in a collection of essays but then being physically cut out of all the copies because the publishing house changed its mind and decided the essay wasn't fit to print. To which one can only observe, wow, how...Orwellian.

Dead heads
Once when I was young, I attended a lecture by Joel-Peter Witkin, a photographer who once posed two severed human heads as if they were kissing. (He had worked out an arrangement with a Mexican hospital that allowed him to sort through unclaimed corpses and discarded body parts to use in his photographs.) He had a photograph he told us was of his own then-six-year-old son, naked or nearly so, with a collar on, and the collar was attached by a chain to the nipple of an naked obese woman. Witkin told us, with a delighted smile, that the "little guy" was "confused" and was crying. That's all I heard; I walked out, and have never looked at Witkin's work again on purpose, and never will.

It's just the way I am, can't help it. My first role model, age six, was Popeye, who said "I yam what I yam and that's all what I yam." Gotta be yourself, like you have any choice.

Your homework for tonight (I'm kidding, kidding, don't go all Will Smith on me): read "Benefit of Clergy." It's goooood.

Kindest regards,

Mike

CORRECTION: I did look into the matter of the Allen/Farrow household, a little, thanks to a helpful reader, J Lee. Moses Farrow, the adopted son of Mia Farrow and Woody Allen, who states he is a licensed therapist, has a web page which states that:

She [Soon-Yi] is not Woody’s daughter (adopted, step, or otherwise), nor is she developmentally challenged. (She got a master’s degree in special education from Columbia University!) And the claim that they started dating while she was underage is totally false.

In truth, Woody and Soon-Yi rarely even spoke during her childhood. It was my mother who first suggested, when Soon-Yi was 20, that Woody reach out and spend time with her. He agreed and started taking her to Knicks games. That’s how their romance started. Yes, it was unorthodox, uncomfortable, disruptive to our family and it hurt my mother terribly. But the relationship itself was not nearly as devastating to our family as my mother’s insistence on making this betrayal the center of all our lives from then on.  

I will admit that I'm in over my head here. Moses' page made me uncomfortable to read, and it appears various family members have a history of feuding. I'll leave this post up, but I think I'll watch Annie Hall again.

Book of Interest this Week

Home Fires Volume II: The Present. There is of course a Volume I: The Past.  TOP reader Bruce Haley has produced documentary work relating to conflict, humanitarian crises and environmental/industrial/land use issues for 30 years. He received the Robert Capa Gold Medal for his coverage of the ethnic civil war in Burma. This is his exploration of his home territories, and it's great.

This book link is a portal to Amazon.

Today at B&H Photo

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:

John Krumm: "The end of your post made me laugh, because my wife was recounting a bad meeting where someone made her angry, and she said ugh, I just wanted to Will Smith that guy. He (Smith) managed to verb his own name."

Nikhil Ramkarran: "I can speak only for myself, but it is one of the hardest things in the world for me to give credibility, or even just acknowledgement, to differing opinions on controversial issues where I sympathise with one side. And yet, I believe it is one of the most valuable skills I could possibly learn. I have recognised the value of dissenting opinions a long time ago, decades, but I still have to fight most times, first to even recognise my own intolerance, and secondly, to moderate it. Just as an aside, there's no opinion you express Mike, that will cause me to pull support. Your approach to controversial issues over the years have been a model (or, in other words, I wanna be you when I grow up, but rich 😆)."

Lothar Adler: "I would like to say something about your experience and reaction to Joel Peter Witkin. For many years I have been very impressed, moved and disturbed by Witkin's photographic work. I have seen much of his work, read things written by him, seen many large original enlargements, spoken with him personally at an exhibition.

"The story you have reported with his six-year-old son also strikes me as repulsive and unjustifiable. But: Mr. Witkin is Mr. Witkin is Mr. Witkin, whether he uses a camera or not. And he shares his personality and his view of life through photography.

"In my understanding, it cannot and must not be that only people who are morally, ethically, legally, politically ('political correctness') correct are allowed to express and communicate themselves artistically. With that we would be directly on the way to a superordinate censorship, even if this first takes place only in our heads, in the context of a self-censorship. Of course, everyone is free to decide what he wants to ingest or not. But is it in the concrete case really the very own decision or does one believe only to have to fulfill the current social norms?

"I admit, however, that also for me a border would be crossed, if a reprehensible action against a living, feeling being, against its will! takes place only because of it, in order to produce a product of the art. In this case I will rather renounce this art product, but would hesitate to reject the other life work of this artist altogether.

"In a video interview Witkin said about the content of his photography that his pictures would show 'conditions of being.' That seems very important to me. For me, art is a way to explore and communicate the human dimension of 'conditions of being.'

"The older I have become, the more I have experienced that human life, human existence considered in its entirety, is often far beyond what young people are usually taught in so-called education. This is one reason why it is difficult for many people to come to terms with the fact that many things are in fact quite different in the course of their lives.

"I would find it tragic if then also in the art only the well-behaved, adapted to social rules and venerable people were allowed to make their messages."

Mike replies: I appreciate that you've expressed your opinion of this photographer, with one little cavil: I didn't say that he shouldn't be allowed to express himself and communicate artistically. I just said I would no longer be part of his audience. It's not up to me to convict him of anything, but I do think it's wrong to mistreat a child the way he described.

Keith: "A number of years ago I was reading Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickle and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America. I found the book to be an intriguing, thought-provoking, and well-researched work on the challenges of the many unfortunate people who are trapped in a low income existence, and the rigged socio-economic platform that keeps them there. About halfway through the book I read the passage where the author casually mentions that she is an atheist. Having been raised in a very conservative Christian (Southern Baptist and Republican) family and community, I was stunned by the author's admission, and dismayed that I had supported an atheist by purchasing her book with my discretionary income. I immediately closed the book and laid it aside for a couple weeks.

"As the initial shock subsided and I pondered over my initial reaction, it occurred to me that the fact that the author was an atheist did not change the value of the content in the book. I picked up the book and continued where I had left off. Reflecting on my thoughts after completing the book revealed two things. First, it reinforced my concern of the pitfalls of properly regulated capitalism (whatever that may be), which can become a runaway freight train that can create an imbalance in wealth distribution. But more importantly, it became a turning point for me in that I realized that we do not have to agree with or condone an individual's personal morals or actions in order to recognize and learn from the value of their contributions. The content and delivery of 'Bill Cosby—Himself' is no less funny or brilliant now than when he first created it. Our perception and appreciation of the creator may influence our interpretation of the work, but it does not change the objective strength of the content."

Open Mike: Imbroglio

["Open Mike" is the Editorial page of TOP, wherein Yr. Hmbl. Ed. recklessly wades into frays.]

The snow squalls up here are really something. One minute it's clear and sunny, and the next minute the wind is gusting and swirling and the snow is dancing in the air moving up, down, and sideways like schools of tiny fish. Visibility plummets to a few hundred feet and the headlights of oncoming cars are all you see of them at first. Then all of a sudden the road on a distant hillside is glowing with sunlight amid the gray melee, small patches of blue sky begin to open and close up again, the wind and snow abate, and ten minutes later the squall is gone and it's bright and clear again.

Never mind trying to take a picture of it—the amazing thing about it is how it changes all around you and how you can drive from one kind of weather to the next in an eighth of a mile, and then to another. When the skies in different directions look like different days. It can go from peaceful to stormy breathtakingly quickly.

In his obituary
...Speaking of which, I'm feeling sorrowful about the Will Smith imbroglio.

I have two questions: first, did Chris Rock know Jada Pinkett-Smith suffers from alopecia? Because if he didn't, and he thought Jada's hair was just a fashion statement (she looked good, right? Sure looked like fashion), then it was a very different joke. Second question, did Will Smith realize that G.I. Jane was a movie in which the female lead shaved her head? Because if he didn't, that could explain his initial laughter. Just laughing along at Chris Rock giving his family a call-out from the stage. I mean, Chris had just said, "Jada, I love ya."

If Chris knew it was a medical condition, then he went too far. It's a cheap shot, even if the affliction is hardly the worst thing in the world. The Academy Awards isn't a roast. And shouldn't he know not to insult another guy's wife? Yet Smith's response was an order of magnitude worse. Misdemeanor battery in front of ten 16.6 million people? I feel sorry for him. He has damaged his own reputation. Probably not irreparably, but at the same time, it'll be mentioned in his obituary, probably. And, painfully, he cut the legs out from under his own moment of glory, which should have been the triumphant culmination of a worthy career—his first Oscar for Best Actor—which, now, no one will be talking about. Didn't he have a solid image as a person of cheerful intensity, warm good humor, and positive energy? Has anyone ever seriously suggested that's not his real nature? To see him act the way he did on such a huge stage was so bizarre it was no wonder people thought it was a performance, a skit, planned out ahead of time.

One thing that really annoys me is that racist America is going to have a snark- and smirk-up. Ya hate that. And finally, the Academy saying, "We do not condone violence in any form." What?! Do they not go to the movies? Hollywood not condoning violence...now that's rich. Hollywood practically exists to condone violence. It could be mistaken for its very mission.

Will apologized in writing. But what should happen (well, in Mike-world, and we all know I have my head in the clouds, at least when it isn't in a snow-squall) is: Chris and Will should meet, talk it out, then hold a joint press conference in which Chris apologizes to Jada and Will apologizes to Chris. In that way the two of them would show their fans, young people everywhere, and the whole world how real men handle themselves in the wake of unfortunate and all-too-human lapses of temper and judgment—how real men act, in other words, after it gets too real.

But then, I don't follow Hollywood. I have no idea about the histories between the players, the state of the Smiths' marriage, other pressures, anything. To be honest, while I'm a fan of Chris Rock's standup (and of Everybody Hates Chris, and I'm surprised there have been no jokes), I've never seen a movie with Will Smith in it. I just know he's a top star. And that it's easier to do what he did to Chris Rock than to The Rock.

Don't like Gauguin
'Kay, now I have a very serious question, something that's been bothering me, and that I've been thinking about, for quite some time. Is it okay to separate the art from the artist? When we know an artist is a pig or worse, does that make it not okay to like the art? Bill Cosby's comedy records, Woody Allen's Annie Hall? Did Kevin Spacey taint American Beauty after the fact?

Composer Percy Grainger was an anti-semite. Paul Gauguin reportedly took three child-brides in Tahiti...and gave them all syphilis. And the less you know about the British sculptor Eric Gill's incest, the better. Pablo Picasso was probably really dreadful to women. Is it easier if it's farther back in history? Carravaggio was a murderer, and his rap sheet and court record reportedly filled many pages.

I'd be interested in your opinion. I'll give mine later.

Let me just make one (again: sorrowful) prediction...that there will be a spike in assaults on comedians.

Hope I'm wrong, hope I'm wrong.

Mike

Book of Interest this Week

Home Fires Volume II: The Present. There is of course a Volume I: The Past.  TOP reader Bruce Haley has produced documentary work relating to conflict, humanitarian crises and environmental/industrial/land use issues for 30 years. He received the Robert Capa Gold Medal for his coverage of the ethnic civil war in Burma.

This book link is a portal to Amazon.

Today at B&H Photo

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

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

Michael: "Once you learn that some artist had some deep flaw and had acted badly, even abominably, you may never be able quite to set that thought or judgement aside. But if we recognize that the line between good and evil runs through the heart of everyone—I think that's Solzhenitsyn—then we might retrieve the excellence in their work, even if that excellence is darkened by the artist's works beyond art. 'Let he who is without sin....' Or put this another way: what would we lose if we let our acceptance of 'Guernica' be wholly eclipsed by our censure of Picasso's behaviour with women?"

Mike replies: For me it's even neater and more excruciating, because it's 'Mother and Child' at Chicago, a painting that bowled me over. So then I'm dealing with a beloved expression of motherhood painted by a man who used and mistreated women...gak.

Michel Hardy-Vallée: "Well, since you asked...

"The ethics/aesthetics problem is often approached from a 'clean slate' perspective, suggesting that the general case is people consuming art in the blissful ignorance of their creators' assholery. And so it becomes a big turning point when taa-daaa! that so-called genius turns out to be despicable.

"But that is not true at all. We always know that such-and-such is shady, we already know that to get there, they made actions that are wrong on a spectrum. So we're constantly negotiating some kind of willful denial in exchange for entertainment or enlightenment.

"Gifting innocence and genius to artists has always been the most dangerous inheritance of aesthetics. No, I'm not asking for Plato's exclusion of artists from his Republic on moral grounds, but I'm calling on people to be reminded that we never give a free pass to ordinary people the way we tend to do with artists. You hate your bigoted uncle, and will grudgingly share a holiday meal with him, but you won't praise his genius, and ask others to 'separate the art from the man,' whatever his art may be.

"Denying agency is exactly at the heart of the Oscar kerfuffle. If understand the twisted macho logic of the event, it means that a wife is a property to be defended? The person targeted by the joke was unable to stand up for herself and had to be 'protected' like an object? She could not respond in a way that reflect her point of view, and someone had to think for her? You mean, like a child? F*ck this paternalist sexist shit.

"If I were to try to 'protect' my partner from a stupid joke, she would be the one kicking my butt for denying her the agency of responding in the way she saw fit! And she'd be right. There's a big difference between helping and patronizing."

Mike replies: ...Except if she's the one implicitly demanding that he do it. She apparently had a well-publicized affair a few years ago, and he acceded to a period of "non-monogamy." Now imagine if that "period" was her idea and he had to swallow it to keep up appearances, and that one of her criticisms of him was that he wasn't "man enough" and would never stand up for her when it counted? That would put her agency into the mix. This is conjecture, and I'm not disagreeing with your astute take on the matter—just pointing out that the true dynamics of a couple can really only be known to the couple themselves. He did appear to do an about-face once he saw her reaction to the joke. He was laughing at first, and next thing you know he was striding up to the stage.

Speed: "Mike asks, 'Is it okay to separate the art from the artist?'

"Is it okay to separate the speech from the speaker? Is it okay to separate the donation from the donor? Is it okay to separate the politician from the philanderer? Is it okay to separate the touchdown from the runner?—home run from the batter?—basket from the shooter? No. And it not okay to separate this act from the actor.

"Actions have consequences and people are more likely to behave themselves if those consequences are certain, meaningful and in proportion to the act. The Oscars are an institution by and for the motion picture industry to recognize its art. But they have been turned into a money-making marketing device to boost sales of their product. The correct public response would be to not patronize the movie industry products and thereby discourage it from happening again. But...it's not gonna happen."

Mike replies: It could...Gallup said last January, "Movie attendance was...down among moviegoers. In 2021, those who attended a movie saw 3.6 films on average, compared with 6.9 in December 2007 and no fewer than 5.7 in any other Gallup survey," and The New York Times said last November 29th, "Nearly half of the prepandemic audience hasn't returned, research shows, and 8 percent may be gone forever." On the other hand, 16.6 million people watched the Oscars this year, said to be an increase of 58% from 2021, and viewership spiked in real time after "the slap." Tough to separate those numbers from the influence of the pandemic, though. I'm part of the "quadrant" that doesn't go to movies much (older males, the least movie-attending of the four quadrants the movie-marketers target), but the last movie I went to see in the theaters was Richard Linklater's 2014 movie "Boyhood." I'm not purposely boycotting (I just don't like fantasy or comic-book or sci-fi or action films), but I kind of am. I used to try to see all the nominees for Best Picture every year, but since 2009 there are too many for that so I no longer try.

Margaret R: "Re 'One thing that really annoys me that racist America is going to have a snark- and smirk-up.' On the other hand, imagine how much worse the furore would have been had one of them, in that exchange, been white.... So small mercies, perhaps."

Timothy Auger: "In response to your question as to whether you can/should like art by unlikeable people: I rather like the style of architecture promoted by Mussolini in Italy during the Fascist era. It is far more successful aesthetically than most 'modern' architecture, and it's widely respected. Does that allow me to like the style of classicism promoted by Hitler in 1930s Germany? I marvel at the architecture of the Greeks and Romans of ancient times—but their rulers were no saints. The pyramids in Egypt were built by slave labour. Should they be struck from the tourist brochures? There is no consistent solution to this dilemma. The only thing you can say is the more distant the work is culturally or historically, the easier it is to ignore nasty aspects of the people who produced it.

"P.S.: And I still enjoy Woody Allen films."

Zyni Moë: "You have to. 'Baby Driver' is wonderful and Spacey is wonderful in it. It does not become less wonderful when you know what Spacey did. Gill's sculpture is wonderful as is his typography. When you can't is when the art is about the awfulness. Apart from being 935 hours too long and just not very good (yes, I have listened to it, in several recordings) The Ring (operas, not the great Japanese movie) is all about awful Germanic-supremacist myth-making, made by an awful Germanic-supremacist, antisemitic man. People who like it are making excuses all the time for something which is just not excusable. If you want overlong late-romantic pseudo-mystical gubberish, Mahler is just over there, and he really was a genius (and he would still have been a genius if he had not been Jewish). (Whenever posh people deride pop music for being shallow, mention opera.) Same: Miles Davis beat his wife but his music was not about assaulting women and is very great."

Mike replies: John Lennon: "I used to be cruel to my woman I beat her and kept her apart from the things that she loved." And apparently that was true with his first wife....

James Allen: "Re 'One thing that really annoys me that racist America is going to have a snark- and smirk-up.' Really? I have lived and traveled across America for all of my 59 years, and I haven't found this mythical place called racist America. I have met individuals who are not bastions of racial harmony, but they are rare and unpopular. I find America to be a welcoming country to all people far more than we get credit for. This ongoing self-flagellation about race is puzzling to me. I'd wager that no other country has tried as hard as the USA to live up to its ideals regarding racial harmony. Are we perfect? Nope, and I'll bet we never are. Is any country? Also nope. I love this country and the people who live here, and I think calling it 'racist America' is an unearned slur."

Mike replies: Okay, that's your opinion, and I hear it—even have some sympathy for it—but we disagree.

Are you Black?

I'm not using the phrase to say all of America is racist. I mean there is a portion of America that is racist.

We have a persistent problem with police flat-out murdering Black people. Watch the Walter Scott video online (a case I followed closely). That cop is now serving 20 years. It's not an isolated incident: look at the selected sourced list Renée Ater compiled. I asked a former police chief friend about it, expecting that he would be affronted, but he immediately agreed. He said (I'm paraphrasing), "It's a constant problem. It's a violent job and it attracts violent people. You always have to be on the lookout for the bad apples. Officers in the field don't have much oversight. You have to keep alert and keep trying."

A racist President was elected in 2016. Northerners fly Confederate flags on their pickup trucks and hang them in the windows of their homes where I live—where local town squares and parks still feature statues with lists of locals who died in the Civil War, a war fought over whether new territories should be slave or free. How is it possible to see that as anything but fealty to white supremacy? You might say that that black-and-white U.S. flag with the one blue stripe in it is merely "pro law enforcement," but others will disagree and call it anti-BLM. Racists are a minority, I do believe that, and I used to think as you do. Not any more.

Anyway, assuming you're white, it's kinda not for us to decide. In college we had a public hearing on the school's (now former) American Indian mascot, and I spoke up saying it wasn't that big a deal. A young Native American woman came up to me after the program and asked to talk to me. We wandered the streets for two hours and talked intensely. She convinced me that the oppressor's viewpoint isn't the important one. It's for the oppressed to say what their experience is. As soon as you can get Black people to agree with what you say, then I'll give it credence. I doubt that would be easy for you right now. The rallying cry "I can't breathe" speaks their opinion. How many times during your 59 years of travel in America did you ask Black people whether "racist America" exists? You and I should probably listen to them. If you don't agree, okay, but that's my take.

By the way, one of the authors of Without Sanctuary, a book of lynching photographs that's too expensive for me to own, is named James Allen.

JOHN BOUR: "Re 'Whenever there are two patches of blue that appear in the middle of a stormy sky, leaving the impression that the storm is about to break, that’s also referred to as the Dutchman’s Breeches. The expression is part of traditional sea-going weather lore where it’s believed that in bad weather, two patches of blue sky is a hopeful sign as long as the patches are big enough to 'mend a pair of Dutchman’s breeches.' Back in the day, sailors wore wide trousers, and Dutch sailors were known to wear even wider trousers which just happened to be blue like the the sky on a clear day. As a private pilot we still use the expression; 'it's overcast, with some Dutch pants.' (I'm Dutch.) Keep up the good work.  ;-) "

Mike replies: That's charming, thanks for that. I have a number of photographs of Dutchman's breeches. It's a minor theme for me—seems to symbolize a little patch of hope in grim darkness.

Christopher Perez: "Yes, Picasso was pretty bad to the women in his life. Add to the list Dali, who supported Franco. And how about Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the Italian Futurists and their support of Mussolini? Why is Tissot considered a minor artist when his works are filled with light, beauty, and are wonderfully composed? Many people see white marble statues and don't realize the great Greek and Roman works were painted. It only been in the last five years that Vigée Le Brun, Marie Antoinette's portraitist, has been exhibited in a large show dedicated to her in France. Demonstrably great women artists need to be 're-discovered' (Artemisia Gentileschi, Berthe Morisot, Mary Cassatt, or Suzanne Valadon). Closer to photographic home, why did Saint Ansel carry a Portland lens for many years after denouncing the pictorialist movement? Further, the more I learn about Ed Weston and his women, or Saint Ansel's long love affair with Nancy Newhall. the more I question their culturally recognized deification. Either out of complete ignorance or as memories of certain things artists have done or the ways they behaved fades, perhaps we can simply look at what they've accomplished? Art appreciation sure seems to have many and long cultural, social, historical, memory feeder lines."

OCOLOY Featured Comments (Blog Note)

I had some back-end headaches with the comments to one post, "OCOLOYs." The Featured Comments to that post are back up now, hopefully for good.

Sorry to have interrupted the conversation. Here's the link back to the post in case you'd like to go back and read the Featured Comments.

—Mike the webmaster

P.S. Earlier today I posted a request for help about a logical question. I got about nine different answers, but I think "Terrorists take photographs, therefore anyone taking a photograph is a terrorist" is an example of affirming the consequent, also called the fallacy of the converse. Thanks to all who answered.

The Perfect Game (OT)

Guest Post by Carl Weese

Mike's post on Saturday about pool reminded me of something I still continue to process. My maternal grandfather emigrated from Ireland to Canada as a child with his family, then at 16 crossed into the U.S. on a bicycle. At thirty, John Francis Duggan had become a vice president of the Gimbel Brothers department store chain, known as Gimbels. It wasn’t because of his executive skills. It was because the Gimbels were Jewish and were excluded from the country clubs and after-hours watering holes where some important business networking was done. Jack Duggan wasn’t. He played golf in Greenwich and the resort town of Deal, New Jersey. But most important was a prestigious private club he belonged to in New York City. The center of the networking. Through the decade of the Roaring Twenties he was the reigning billiards champion there, and God knows how many business deals for Gimbels he secured in the pool rooms. This was during prohibition of course, so I love that I’ve inherited several of his many trophies—engraved sterling silver hip flasks.

This sucker is big, too—it holds a full pint!

Flash forward to the late nineteen-thirties. He had been clobbered by the 1929 crash. When my father was courting my mother, the family had (very unwisely) not yet dealt with the sunk cost and moved out of the mansion in Greenwich. But the pool room was still there and Dad told me it was the most frustrating thing in the world to play with Jack. He was more or less recovered from his first nervous breakdown (as they were called back then), but playing the game you described today, he would insist you take the first break. You might sink a ball and get another shot or two. Then you’d miss, and he’d clear the table. And the next. And the next….

Dad said it wasn’t boring, because he could closely observe what Jack was doing, but the frustration was that he couldn’t try to replicate the moves and learn to do them, because the table was never relinquished. Bear in mind, at this moment in history my father held all the world records for tournament archery. It was one master, or champion if you will, observing another.

Bowling
I’ve almost never thought of this connection before, but when I was maybe twelve or so I asked Dad if we could go bowling, because I’d heard it was this neat thing to do that other kids were doing with their parents. I also knew that in the shoe rack in the closet there were these weird-looking narrow black shoes. I had been told, oh, those are Dad’s bowling shoes. Kangaroo leather and smooth soles. We went to a local place and found shoes small enough for me (I hadn’t had my growth spurt yet). For the first line he was mostly teaching me to get the ball, in my rented shoes, down the lane instead of in the gutter. Then he’d toss one down. Then he started throwing strikes, looking kind of happy at remembering the skill. So we did another line. I managed to knock down some pins on my turns instead of going in the gutter. Dad bowled strike after strike. A peanut gallery formed. Then management came down to look—while Dad bowled a perfect 300. He was in his early fifties and hadn’t bowled in at least twenty years. There was no video to prove it, of course, in that long-ago time, but when we turned in my shoes and went to pay, the counter guy just said, "Are you kidding? You don’t pay after a perfect game!”

I’m not the physical genius my father was. But I’m a bit better than your average bear, and have tried to make the most of it.

—Carl

Our friend Carl, who has written for TOP many times  and held several prints sales here of his platinum/palladium large-format prints, was a champion archer in his youth. You can see all his TOP articles under his name in "Categories" in the right-hand sidebar—scroll through and you'll realize how many gems there are.

Book of Interest this Week

Home Fires Volume II: The Present. There is of course a Volume I: The Past.  TOP reader Bruce Haley has produced documentary work relating to conflict, humanitarian crises and environmental/industrial/land use issues for 30 years. He received the Robert Capa Gold Medal for his coverage of the ethnic civil war in Burma.

This book link is a portal to Amazon.

Today at B&H Photo

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:

Open Mike: Jayson Shaw in Full Flow (OT)

Before I detour to pool, check this out. Maybe not elegant, but it works...this is the guy who comments here as JG, he of the Frankenkamera. As an aside, if you scroll up from there, you'll see a lovely color portrait of a beautiful young woman. Of course it doesn't detract from the picture, but note that nothing in that photograph is quite sharp. The eyes are close enough.

Now to pool. You know I need to point out that Jayson Shaw of Scotland has set a new record for high run in 14.1 straight pool.

14.1 is the name of a game. The player breaks, then can pocket any ball in any pocket scoring one point per ball. At the end of the rack, the player leaves one ball remaining and re-racks the other 14, leaving the space for the head ball vacant; then, the shot to pocket the free ball must also break open the rack, and the run continues. The game is also called straight pool. It was Mosconi's game, and the most prestigious pool game in his time, but it's fallen out of favor in recent decades. The faster, more freewheeling 9-ball, traditionally more of a gambler's game, is the leading game now, although it has lost some ground lately to 10-ball.

The most famous 14.1 record was set by Willie Mosconi in March of 1954, in an exhibition at the East High Billiard Club in Springfield, Ohio. Mosconi was shooting on an 8-foot "pro" or "plus" size Brunswick Exposition table (46x92" playing surface, slightly smaller than the 9-foot professional standard, which is 50x100 inches between the cushions). Willie shot 526 consecutive balls. At the end of that time, he didn't miss...he just got tired of pocketing balls, which he'd been doing for four and a half hours at that point, so he just packed it in.

That record stood for 65 years. There's no situation in the actual game where you'd naturally keep going and see how well you could do, so it's not something people try to do regularly. Even in exhibitions, Mosconi would usually sink 150 balls—a number that was a common finishing line for a match—and then quit.

The famous 526 was finally broken in May of 2019 by former World Straight Pool Champion John Schmidt, who was intentionally trying to break Mosconi's record. He had been training and making attempts for approximately a year. This effort culminated in a run of 626 balls on a 9-foot table with 5" corner pockets, using fast Simonis 760 cloth.

Around that time, straight pool aficionado Bobby Chamberlain, founder of the Legends of Pocket Billiards, had teamed up with owner Deon Chapman of Street Lights Billiards Academy in the Landmark Office Building in Alexandria, Virginia, to realize his longtime dream of setting up a facility where top professionals could come to attempt to break the 14.1 record—a private area with video recording (necessary to certify the results) where players could work all day for days or weeks at a time to attempt high runs. The first players to visit were Shane Van Boening, Ruslan Chinakhov, and Earl Strickland (Earl and Shane being the sport's only five-time U.S. 9-ball champions), who posted high runs of 308, 300, and 238 respectively.

Jayson Shaw, fresh from his record seventh straight win at Turning Stone, had only five days free in his schedule, so he played 12–13 hours a day to try to get it done. After many strong runs and a high of 407, his time came to an end. But he and his wife discussed it, and he ended up calling Chamberlain to see if he could try just one more day. "I felt like I was right there," said Shaw. Back at Street Lights on January 18th for one more try, he ran 11 racks on his first attempt, a run of 154, before missing a break shot.

Then it happened. First, he stopped to celebrate at 527 when he surpassed Mosconi. Then he passed Schmidt. "At 680 or 690, the way the balls were opening up, I thought I could run 1,000. I had already beat all the numbers that were out there. There was no pressure and I was free stroking. I broke the balls open at 714 and the cue ball went through the stack, bottom rail, and the length of the table to scratch." That set the new record at 714, coincidentally the same number as Babe Ruth's career home run total.

The intense week-long campaign left Shaw exhausted and sore, with an aching shoulder and blisters on his feet and on all the fingers of his bridge hand. He slept around the clock when he got home.

The video has been certified, but it's not online. If you're curious to see Jayson Shaw in top form, watch his match with U.K. snooker champion Judd Trump at the U.S. Open. Trump, coming over from snooker, had handily beaten two lower-level players, and fans in the U.K., who believe that snooker is a more difficult game than pool (it's certainly more beautiful) and that therefore snooker players should be able to beat pool players at their own game, were crowing that Trump would win the tournament. Bookies there agreed. Then he ran into a real top pool player in Shaw, who took him to school. It was so one-sided that Trump celebrated when he took his one and only rack off Shaw, preventing the ignominy of a shutout. Watch Shaw's cue ball control in particular. Masterful. Shaw in full flow is a beast.

Other top players want to put in time at Street Lights. Russia's Fedor Gorst, Yorkshireman Darren Appleton, and Corey Deuel from the U.S. have expressed interest, and Germany's Joshua Filler reportedly wants to spend two to three weeks in his attempt when his schedule permits.

How long will the latest record stand? Only time will tell. But right now, Jayson Shaw's amazing 714 is the high run to beat.

Mike
(Thanks to AZBilliards)

Book of Interest this Week

Home Fires Volume II: The Present. There is of course a Volume I: The Past.  TOP reader Bruce Haley has produced documentary work relating to conflict, humanitarian crises and environmental/industrial/land use issues for 30 years. He received the Robert Capa Gold Medal for his coverage of the ethnic civil war in Burma.

This book link is a portal to Amazon.

Today at B&H Photo

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:

Good News (Blog Note)

I think I have survived tax season yet again, wonder of wonders. Almost done—only one more task and one final appointment to go. One nice thing about earning less is that you owe less in taxes. Maybe if I earned nothing life would be free? Pretty sure that's not how that works.

If you support this site, bless you and thank you! I'll be back shortly. I have not disappeared. More anon,

Mike

Film Processing Craft: Adjust and Adapt, or Master the Materials?

First of all ("first off," as people like to say now—to which the Ed. in me wants to shout, leave the off off!), I have to apologize for comments again—I have compiled the "OCOLOYs" comments twice and each time I manage to screw up and kill them off the post again. I frustrate myself. I work on being organized, but let's face it, it is not a native aptitude of mine. Anyway, I wanted to follow up on the film post. I've located two experts who might be able to help answer the question of latent image stability—one lives in the Los Angeles area and works for NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and I knew him in the old days, but apparently I'd have to pay to find his telephone number. The other is just up the road in Rochester. (I tried emailing.) There's been a tad bit of confusion in the comments—what we were talking about is the lag between exposure and development, which is a different thing than the proper storage of unexposed film, or than archival processing, or than the permanence of negatives.

It's not rocket science—wait, yes it is
I wouldn't mind writing a bit more about film photography. I have a great deal of experience and practical knowledge stored away in my brain. But let me just say this: one thing I definitely learned in my years of editing a magazine about techniques is that generalizing across materials is a minefield. Perilous. A fool's errand. When you do an experiment, you have to accept that you have only tested those exact materials under those exact conditions. You cannot blithely extrapolate outward and make breezy pronouncements about how all such things behave. So many variables affect the results that when David Vestal and another photographer tried to duplicate each other's processing methodologies at long distance in order to solve a problem, they couldn't replicate each other's results, even after trying to chase down every variable they could think of. Something was still different.

There are two common ways to cope with this, and which you prefer might have to do with personality or psychology more than anything. The first is to let the fur fly and not worry about it—use whatever comes to hand, process it however seems best according to whatever advice you can find, and adjust and adapt. In fact we might even call this the Adjust and Adapt Method. In one of Ralph Gibson's darkroom books he told of a photographer who timed his film development by smoking a cigarette and rolling the tank around on the floor with his foot. As soon as the cigarette was done, so was the film. (I think it was a he. Might have been a she.) These are the freewheelin', what-me-worry types. The other is to pick a couple of common materials and incrementally master them, by a continual process of experience, experimentation, and learning. Let's call that the Master the Materials Method. That's what I chose to do. I picked two films and two papers, main and backup (only one developer because I could scratch-mix it from its constituent chemicals if my supply of the pre-mixed packages ever got interrupted), and learned them thoroughly, through-and-through. I may not have known nearly as much about your materials, but I sure knew mine front-to-back and soup-to-nuts.

By Frederick H. Evans. Platinum paper was integral to
Evans's vision and craft.

The disadvantage of the Master the Materials Method is that we're dependent on manufacturers for the continuing supply of said materials, and the more knowledge we have, the more vulnerable we become. I took self-defensive maneuvers when I merely imagined that Kodak Plus-X might be discontinued, and ended up leaving it behind more than twenty years before it was actually discontinued. Did you know Frederick H. Evans gave up photography when the supply of commercial platinum/palladium papers ended because of importation problems caused by WWI? When Oriental Seagull paper stopped being exported in from Japan for a time in the '90s, one master printer was so bereft and distressed that I had to field a cascade of anguished emails and distraught phone calls until he finally found a substitute. All of his printing expertise had been worked out in the context of how that paper behaved and responded. Without it, years of hard-won skills evaporated. Not just a loss—a blow. These sorts of problems were common to hear in my world at the time. We knew, for example, that Agfa had quietly changed the formula for Portriga paper long before they announced it. Alarmed Portriga fanatics poured out their hearts. (I finally got Agfa to admit and explain: environmental issues.) Michael A. Smith was so attached to Kodak Azo contact printing paper that when it was discontinued he invested in having a substitute manufactured independently. Linda Connor used to speak in lectures about her worry that Kodak's printing-out paper, called Studio Proof, would be discontinued (she used gold chloride toner to make the image permanent). Sometimes these are issues of artistic continuity—it might not have been the case that Linda couldn't find another paper, but just that a changeover of materials would create a sudden, unwanted change in the look of her prints.

This is the reason for my longstanding "philosophical" stance that what I want is for photographers to have what they need to do their work. What I personally want for myself is only one little corner of that. I want everybody to have what they need. Whatever enables their creativity. Whatever enables them to keep using their knowledge and keep practicing their craft the way they wish to and choose to.

Awesome Leitz
Mastering Materials was a heck of a lot of fun, I'll say that. I really enjoyed it. I could expound at length on the differences between enlarger light heads—Ilford XP2 looked like a completely different film if it was enlarged with a cold light head or the awesome Leitz Focomat II, the Duesenberg of enlargers, which was a true condenser enlarger with very collimated light. I had a standard for the age of my D-76 stock—I wouldn't use it if it hadn't aged for five days and I wouldn't use it past 45 days old (it was still good enough at 90 days, but I was conservative). The reason is that the activity of D-76 changes with age. I could have told you all about it. Think it's different with digital? Well, people here wouldn't think so. We know that sensors have been changing continuously, that Photoshop or Capture One take time and effort to master, and that expert printing with the latest inksets and the most beautiful papers is as far as can be imagined from just "pressing a button and the print comes out."

That's enough brain-dump for today. Sorry if this is tl;dr—I didn't have enough time to write short.

Mike

Book of Interest this Week

Home Fires Volume II: The Present. There is of course a Volume I: The Past.  TOP reader Bruce Haley has produced documentary work relating to conflict, humanitarian crises and environmental/industrial/land use issues for 30 years. He received the Robert Capa Gold Medal for his coverage of the ethnic civil war in Burma.

This book link is a portal to Amazon.

Today at B&H Photo

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:

Charles Daniels and Latent Image Deterioration with Film

I'm hearing a lot about an article on PetaPixel about "Master Blaster" Charles Daniels, longtime emcee of the Boston Tea Party and a devoted photographer of the rock bands he rubbed elbows with. It's reported that he has approximately 3,200 rolls of undeveloped film from the salad days of rock and roll.

I hope the film can be developed, and it's highly likely that usable images can be salvaged from most of it, but, just as an aside...storing pictures as undeveloped film is a very bad idea. The latent image on exposed film isn't stable. The microscopic bits of exposed silver halide that will be metalized in the reduction (development) process and become the "grain" in B&W negatives or get replaced with dye clouds in color ones continue to slowly migrate around in the emulsion after being exposed, degrading the initial report of the scene in front of the camera.

Some of my latest writing is being fact-checked, and I'm finding that the only source of some of the things I think I know at this point is, well, my brain, and the gray-matter hard drive isn't all that stable a storage medium either, turns out. While I don't remember where I got this information, for a long time I had an established habit of evaluating information for "best practices" and settling on what I thought was most supportable when I examined the evidence, and I tended to set those "takeaways" pretty firmly in my mind. So while I can't document this to a farthing's worth, it's probably close. In any event, here are the search results from the gray matter.

What I learned is that the latent image on black-and-white film is at peak integrity for about six hours after exposure. Then it goes through an initial period of deterioration lasting days or weeks; then it tends to mostly stabilize again, and further deterioration becomes slower and more gradual...but continues.

Personally it took me a long time to realize that exposed film wasn't stable. The initial clue came because I used to test films to write about them for photo magazines. (I was also a beta-tester for the T-Max films developed by Dick Dickerson and Sylvia Zawadski of Kodak. I was told at the time that with one of them—pretty sure it was the 400—I was the first person outside of Kodak to receive a roll to shoot.) Of course rolls of unexposed film had expiration dates, which should tell you something. It took me a while, but I noticed that sometimes the pictures would look great when I tested the film, and then sometimes not quite so great when I was later using the film for my own work. It finally dawned on me that a possible reason was because, when I was testing, I would often develop the film within mere hours of shooting it, whereas, when I was using it later, sometimes I'd go weeks or months before processing it (as you know, I can be a procrastinator). So that's why I started looking into it and learned what I just told you.

Could I find the source of that information again, reliably? Maybe. I still have a pretty good library of darkroom books, albeit in boxes in the barn. It's more probable that I heard it directly from Dick and Sylvia—Sylvia was a leading emulsion scientist and Dick was the head of black-and-white products at Kodak—or from one of the experts who wrote for Photo Techniques. Professor Phil Davis was the de facto technical editor of the magazine, and although he wasn't a scientist he was more rigorous than some scientists are. He once told me that half the stuff he learned he wouldn't publish, because he wasn't prepared to defend it rigorously—he'd only done the experiments for his own edification and had satisfied his most critical audience, himself. (Ctein has told me he often does much the same thing.) But I got to hear about all these tests and experiments that he refused to write about for me. I think I was in a sense his point man, because I'd take Phil's conclusions and wade into the fray and wield my sword about, while he surveyed the battle from a distant hilltop with binoculars, figuratively speaking. (When testing the pop hypothesis that "fixer is heavier than water and sinks to the bottom of the print washer," a canard promulgated by a prominent snake oil salesman at the time, Phil mixed stock fixer and water 1:1 and let the bottle sit for a year before very carefully removing samples with pipettes from the top and bottom of the bottle and testing them. He tested and measured everything, even when theory alone was more than robust. He was patient that way.)

Anyway, I always meant to try out the hypothesis and see for myself: expose two rolls of Tri-X of the same test scene, then develop one of them as soon as humanly possibly after exposure—like, have the chemicals mixed and waiting while I shot—and then wait, say, three years, or five maybe, before developing the other roll, and then compare the prints.

I never did that two-roll test, but here's a way you can see some of the effects of latent image deterioration for yourself. If you have access to a library. You've probably heard that Garry Winogrand, d. 1984, left behind thousands of undeveloped rolls at his death. The Museum of Modern Art had them all developed in the later '80s with a grant from its benefactor Springs Industries, and some of the work was included in the book Winogrand: Figments from the Real World, published 1988, reprinted 2003. So that's one example: if you look at the pictures reproduced in that book that came from the undeveloped rolls, you'll see for yourself the effects of the deterioration caused by delayed development. Such pictures tend to have mealy grain, lowered resolution, and flattened-out highlights due to fog (fog is most evident in the gradual darkening of the clear parts of the film, but it affects the entire negative), and they lack the brightness and clarity of well-exposed negatives. Fog can also decrease shadow separation.

Color film generally does even less well than B&W film with long delays before development, developing spots, strange blooms of apparent flare, color shifts, fading, and more.

The above is the best I can do just going from memory. This is not a post that would get by the fact-checkers; but I guess you get the gist.

Anyway, there's no reason not to proceed with the project of getting Charles Daniels' film developed, because pictures don't actually depend on technical quality to be "good"—maybe some of them will even be "better" because of the effects of aging. The badness of bad pictures can be good. Or at least neutral, if the pictures still contain information that's wanted. The illustration below is a daguerreotype (a word that Ted Orland quipped "cannot be spelled correctly"). Dags had notoriously fragile surfaces, and sometimes the characteristic damage can be charming in a "distressed antique" kind of way.

The badness of damaged pictures can be good. Or at least not bad.

But if you do happen to want the best from film, use fresh film and develop it promptly.

I did—after learning these things, I got my sluggard procrastinatin' habits by the horns and took to developing my film as a sort of nightly chore. I developed three rolls at a time, so I would develop every time I accumulated three rolls, which was usually within a few days, sometimes as long as a week.

Things were so much older then, they're younger than that now.

Mike

Book of Interest this Week

Home Fires Volume II: The Present. There is of course a Volume I: The Past.  TOP reader Bruce Haley has produced documentary work relating to conflict, humanitarian crises and environmental/industrial/land use issues for 30 years. He received the Robert Capa Gold Medal for his coverage of the ethnic civil war in Burma.

This book link is a portal to Amazon.

Today at B&H Photo

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:

John Krumm: "I developed a lost roll of grainy black-and-white film from our wedding in 1992 a few years ago, and yes, they were somewhat foggy, but by adding contrast digitally, and some careful sharpening, they actually made a lovely little book with small prints. Would never bother with large prints though."

Mike replies: That's a great example John. It clearly shows the degradation of the film, but it also shows that pictures are still pictures even though their quality is technically degraded. I think they are still quite successful photographs.

'A Lot of Light and Illumination Has Been Taken Away from Their Hearts'

[UPDATE: Readers have reported that this video doesn't play in other countries. You can try searching for "CBS Sunday Morning / Ukrainian refugees flee war at home." This is a common situation that works the other way too—sometimes we in the USA can't see videos from the UK or Australia. Sorry for the annoyance, though. —Ed.]

[UPDATE #2: Now I'm hearing that some people in other countries can see it. Maybe try again, or later?]

I mentioned a while back that our friend Peter Turnley, whose more lyrical prints of Paris I and perhaps you have hanging on the walls of our homes, had crossed the border into Ukraine. Here's a brief update on what he did there:

(posted by) Mike

Book of Interest this Week

Home Fires Volume II: The Present. There is of course a Volume I: The Past.  TOP reader Bruce Haley has produced documentary work relating to conflict, humanitarian crises and environmental/industrial/land use issues for 30 years. He received the Robert Capa Gold Medal for his coverage of the ethnic civil war in Burma.

This book link is a portal to Amazon.

Today at B&H Photo

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:

Fred Haynes: "I watch 'Sunday Morning' on YouTube, partly because I can use my iPad, and I can select what stories to watch. I saw this Ukrainian refugee story, and tried to avoid it, not thinking I’d have the stomach for it. I try to avoid the news, frankly, because it’s all so disturbing. But since you posted it, and made reference to Peter Turnley, I watched it. The story was heartbreaking! As I thought it would be. Peter’s photographs were amazing. The pain being suffered by these people is hard to see, hard to handle emotionally. As expected, I cried! Just writing about it, remembering it again, it’s heart wrenching! Why do we 'humans' do this to one another? The unanswerable question."

Rip Smith: "Peter’s images are searing. His monochrome treatment recalls the horrors of 70 years ago. When will we learn? Yet for all of that, the strength of the Ukrainian people is stunning."

Peter Cooke: "Thank You, Michael, from here in Australia. The Turnley's photographs had my wife and I in tears. The verbal image of the deflated balloon is a powerful one. Thank you again."

OCOLOYs

An OCOLOY or OC/OL/OY (one camera, one lens, one year) is a learning-and-engagement exercise I proposed in 2014.

To provide links, after which I'll get on with this:

The original article was called "The Leica as Teacher," May 28, 2009, further clarified the following day in "Why It Has To Be a Leica," May 29th, 2009.

I honestly didn't think anyone would do this, because it involved shooting B&W film in an old camera and doing darkroom work, but a number of people around the world (more than a hundred that I heard from) actually carried it out.

Nevertheless, I followed it up with "The Digital Variant: One Camera, One Lens, One Year" on November 11th, 2014. I prefaced this with a note about prescriptiveness called "You Must Do This" on the same date.

I don't know how I can possibly qualify my comments any further than that, but please: these were suggestions, and it was assumed that you would take it or leave it based on your own free choice. If you have a canned rant about your OCOLOY hatred, put that can opener down. It's not for everyone and it doesn't have to be for you. It was just a suggestion. Take it if you want it, leave it if you don't. It's all good.

Anyway, the reason for this post today is that one more person—Patrick Medd—has actually done the "Leica as Teacher" year that I never thought anyone would do. And he has written an article about his experience, at 35mmc. Patrick also answers readers' questions in the comments. Here's the link. Patrick used an M3 and a 50mm lens.

My new editor is also doing an OCOLOY, with a Q2, which is a perfect camera for it—you can't change lenses even if you want to.

Finally, Bruce Haley, whose book is the "Book of Interest" right now, also did those books as an OCOLOY—of sorts. It's a little complicated, so I'll let Bruce explain it:

The first volume contains 70 photographs, all shot in 2014 with the Sony RX1 that I wrote about for TOP those many years ago. The second volume contains 120 photographs, with images from seven different years (2014–20). The RX1 from Volume I was used for the Volume II images from 2014, 2015 and part of 2016; by Autumn 2016 I had upgraded to a Sony RX1RII, so the remainder of the images were taken with that camera.

So technically it is not exactly seven years of OCOL (removing the OY for the sake of accuracy)—but close to it. It is basically the same fixed-lens camera model, and of course the same Zeiss 35mm lens. One could also say that there is more than a year of OCOLOY with each one of the two cameras.

Bruce is sending along the two volumes so I can see. I've also purchased two of the recent "Books of Interest" and "Books of the Week," so a group book review is in our future.

The RX1RII is just as good as the Q2 for an OCOLOY. And of course you can decide what you would use.

I did do a "Leica Year" a long time ago—hence the 2009 articles—and I'd like to do an OCOLOY again. But then people do super-kind things like send me Leica M10 Reporters to try, and who can stick with just one camera with a camera like that sitting on the kitchen table? Ah, temptations. "Do what I say, not what I do"?

Mike

UPDATE Patrick Medd adds: "Thank you for the mention and link to my article Mike, and thank you for suggesting the idea in the first place. I really enjoyed the project. Writing the article now, nearly two years after I finished doing it, has helped me reflect on it from a distance. I am hugely indecisive and spend far too much time over-agonising about which option to pursue. The nicest thing about the year was having the choice of what gear to use taken away from me and just focusing on making pictures."

Book of Interest this Week

Home Fires Volume II: The Present. There is of course a Volume I: The Past.  TOP reader Bruce Haley has produced documentary work relating to conflict, humanitarian crises and environmental/industrial/land use issues for 30 years. He received the Robert Capa Gold Medal for his coverage of the ethnic civil war in Burma.

This book link is a portal to Amazon.

Today at B&H Photo

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: "Many people have done a OCOLOY. It is whatever lens came on their phones. But ah, now, they have multiple lenses. So what are the rules about phone cameras? Does anyone dare do a OCOLOY with their phone cameras disabled?"

Mike replies: Very good question. I don't have an answer. I'm still struggling with the issue of the phone replacing the "carry-camera" even when I intend otherwise.

robert e: "Here's a theory: Once you do one OCOLOY, you don't need another whole OY to get the same benefit from the next OCOL. It's like how you don't need to go back to kindergarten to switch careers, or don't have to relearn design to learn a new painting medium. The first experience made you a better beginner, so you'll get more out of the next one more quickly. How much more quickly? Well, I think that depends on the person, and how different the second OC or OL is. I bet some people could totally grok a new OCOL in OM, whereas I might need TY (two years). The key, though, is to be a beginner, not a macho know-it-all. But that shouldn't be problem, because one thing the first OCOLOY teaches is humility."

Stan B.: "I did extended OCOLOYs in my youth from 50mm to 20mm, mostly out of economic necessity—I'd have to sell one lens to help finance the next as the focal lengths got progressively shorter, and more expensive. Best teaching experience in my book since being forced to deal with each lens strengths and limitations in every situation under everyday conditions serves as an invaluable resource to help previsualize your image for the rest of your life.

"And Home Fires Vol. 1 is one of my favorite photo books of the last several years!"

Steve: "I basically use one old film camera and one lens (50mm), unless the camera is in for a CLA, in which case I use an older camera with one very old lens (50mm). I have a nice Voigtländer 35mm lens, but I haven’t used it since probably 2013 or so. Given my compulsive tendencies, the less thinking involved, the better off I am. It's truly liberating, not restrictive."

JG: "I have both volumes of Home Fires and recommend them without reservation. They're great examples of documentary photography that doubles as fine-art photography. Apropos of today's OC/OL/OY topic, they're also great examples of how one lens can be used to great effect, as I'll bet few readers would've noticed Bruce used a fixed-lens camera to photograph them if Mike hadn't mentioned it."

Andy F: "I did my own OCOLOY a few years ago and it really helped me get past my dislike of the 50mm-e view, to the extent that it’s now one of my favourites. I even got a one-off book made of the project, of which I’m still really proud. Since then a lot has happened, including the birth of my daughter, and given how I’ve been rather lax with my photography of late, I think now’s a good time to try another OCOLOY, this time with something different, my Ricoh GRIII. 28mm-e is another view I’ve never been comfortable with, so I’m curious to see what sort of pictures I get from it by the end. As a bonus, the camera is tiny, so taking it everywhere is easy. I’m really grateful to you, Mike, for the inspiration your words have provided over the years, thanks!"

Sherry Snyder: "I am a 70-year-old amateur who loves B&W, and has been converting from color for years. In November 2020, I saw the specs for the Leica Q2 Monochrome and ordered one sight unseen. I had never held a Leica, looked through a monochrome-only viewfinder, or shot with a 28mm lens. After it arrived the learning curve was huge. I shot with it exclusively for months before my brain finally engaged. Now it is my favorite tool and I am making the best, most creative images I have ever done. What a gift I gave myself."

Are You Ready for an Electric Vehicle? (OT)

The annual "Best & Worst Cars, Trucks, and SUVs" issue of CR arrived yesterday, and I've had a chance to browse but not peruse. Perusal being quite a major project with this issue.

A mild upset: Subaru took the pedestal in the "Best and Worst Brands" ranking, with former champion Mazda (I'm a Mazda partisan) nudged to the second spot. BMW tied with Mazda, with Honda and Lexus rounding out the top five. At the nether end of the list of 32 manufacturers (not quite the butt end as several makers didn't even qualify to be judged), Jeep four-wheeled it through the mud and the muck on the floor of the dank sub-basement, the lowest of the low. GMC, Mitsubishi, Land Rover, and former #last Alfa Romeo round out the bottom five. Of the rest, among the surprises are that Tesla ranked only 23rd but got the top grade in owner satisfaction—meaning what, the cars aren't reliable but the owners don't mind?—while Kia, which has the highest-ranked model in the entire magazine (the Telluride, a three-row SUV), struggled only as high the middle of the pack.

The gas mileage champion overall (plug-in electrics not counted of course) is the Honda Insight, at 54 miles per gallon, in the Small Cars category. The best hybrid and gas models are listed for each of eight categories. Of the ones named, there is little overlap: only the best gasoline-powered cars vied with the worst hybrids.

Best photographer's vehicle
Among "CR Green Choice" cars, the Hyundai Tucson got high marks, along with the hard-to-get Toyota RAV4 Prime (current average wait time: six months).

Kia Telluride in copper black. Best—if
you go places with five other people.

In the individual model reviews, the Telluride dominated with a 97 score. The only other vehicles to crack 90 are the Hyundai Tucson, the BMW X5 two-row SUV, and the Toyota Avalon—that last being curious, because this is the Avalon's last year. Guess it was so good Toyota had to kill it? CR claims the Avalon's ride comfort is better than that of any Lexus. And the lowest score among all vehicles of all types? Let's just say Jeep Wrangler owners will probably want to skip this issue.

"Best Photographer's Vehicle" is the Honda Odyssey van with optional PRP (photo roof platform, with ladder). Yeah, no (as the kids say), that's not real.

The dense "Predicted Reliability" charts are impossible to sample, since not only is it divided into 17 different areas (Engine, Major; Engine, Minor; Noises/Leaks; Fuel System; In-Car Electronics; etc.), but each model is divided into specific model years. It's a welter of information. However, it's obvious that the '19, '20, and '21 Lexus GX take the cake there, with a sold dark-green bank of top marks and no stumbles. Recent Subaru Crosstreks and the '20 and '21 Forester also do very well, among others. Certain models and years are highlighted with a gray box...I presume these are "not recommended" used cars, but I couldn't find a legend explaining the gray box anywhere, so maybe not.

Top ten (not TOP ten)
As for the top recommendations overall, there are 10 "Top Picks." A surprise was that two Nissans made that list, the Sentra and the Rogue Sport, and CR had plenty of nice things to say about the Honda Ridgeline, which may be a pickup truck for those who want to be seen driving a pickup truck but don't really like pickup trucks. (Consider the Odyssey—vans are more useful than pickup trucks for most people, although they lack the machismo.) The Honda Accord was there as it always is on 10-Best lists—the only way you could go wrong buying that car is if you want, well, a pickup truck (maybe that's why they make the Ridgeline). The Ford Mustang Mach-E also made CR's honor roll, but that's another one that will take some patience to buy—seven month wait.

This only barely scratches the surface of all the information they present and all the cars they rate in the issue. Many more topics are covered. Available at newsstands? You can also buy it from Amazon. Expensive, but a huge amount of work went into this.

The world goes electric, better late than never
Probably the most surprising thing? A sidebar called "The Coming Wave of Full EVs." It lists a total of no less than 37 new EV models set to be released within the next two years, from a total of 23 makers. Wow. There's that, then—it's a-comin'. Are you ready for an electric vehicle? The inflection point on electric vehicles might not be too far away. 'Bout time, says Earth.

Mike

[CORRECTION: This post was edited to remove a footnote. —Ed.]

Book of Interest this Week

Home Fires Volume II: The Present. There is of course a Volume I: The Past.  TOP reader Bruce Haley has produced documentary work relating to conflict, humanitarian crises and environmental/industrial/land use issues for 30 years. He received the Robert Capa Gold Medal for his coverage of the ethnic civil war in Burma.

This book link is a portal to Amazon.

Today at B&H Photo

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:

Sixblockseast: "I assume the Hyundai Tucson you refer to as the CR Green Choice is either the hybrid or plug-in hybrid option. We bought the hybrid in August and absolutely love it. I'm no car connoisseur but I'm very happy with this purchase!"

Aakin: "I believe that the reason Teslas rank the way that they do is that they tend to have issues, but they are cosmetic; very rarely do they have mechanical problems, because they don't actually have a lot of mechanics to break down. And the thing with most of their issues that people do have is that they can be fixed by their mobile mechanic team; you rarely have to take it to them, unless it needs to be lifted up. For everything else, they come to you at a time convenient for you, and do the work and leave. Its a great experience compared to everyone else, hence the satisfaction."

Rick in CO (partial comment): "Lots of politically-motivated misinformation out there on EV's. A dual-axle-motored EV will leave any gas-powered supercar in the dust from 0–60. Now that's fun!"

[For the full text of partial comments, see the full Comments section accessible in the footer of each post. —Ed.]

Henning (partial comment): "CR ratings require an understanding of their proclivities and biases, as with any other reviews. Seating for five will trump seating for four; seating for seven will trump seating for five. Larger is better. Smoother ride will trump handling. See the Toyota Avalon. It is the ultimate expression of the '60s/'70s American land yacht. Large, roomy, easily mistaken for a living room sofa with a variable scenery mode. If you like a Miata, you will not like this. It is not for driving; it is for moving through the landscape, preferably forgetting that driving is involved. Once in a while CR will toss most of its criteria and award a car an extremely high score mostly based on enthusiasm. See the Tesla S. Highest score ever, by a long shot at the time of testing! It was definitely a significant and groundbreaking car, but by far the best four-wheeled vehicle ever? Over the last eight or so years they've tried to backpedal, but since that doesn't look good and would hurt their image, they've just occasionally made some comments around the edges that it might not be as great as initially stated."

David Dyer-Bennet (partial comment): "While the electric power train should last a lot longer than the vastly more complex internal combustion power train...I've never gotten rid of a car because the power train wore out. It's body rust and interior degradation, usually. Those will probably go just the same on EVs, or worse, they may go faster because all those new manufacturers don't have it quite right yet. (Yes, you'll have to replace the battery pack once or twice in the life of the rest of the vehicle; that's a chunk of change, but it's reasonably predictable and can be planned for.)"

James Allen: "I wouldn't buy an electric vehicle unless they adopted a system of interchangeable battery packs. Then I could drive into a station, pay my fee, and swap out my discharged pack with a charged one. I expect that could be automated to take about the same time as a conventional fill up. And it would get rid of the problem of using an electric car to travel very far. Yes, they'd have to standardize on a few pack sizes, etc., but it seems do-able to me."

Mike replies: Totally with you there. So obvious it's painful.

John: "CR is the last place I’d look before deciding on a car. Their choices are always the most boring cars around, the ones I avoid like the plague."

Alan: "People are missing the white elephant in the room with EV cars. Where do you think most of the electricity comes from? Fossil fuels. Coal and gas. Please don't tell me it's from alternative sources. The energy density is not even close. There is so much disinformation on this green direction. The net result is no real significant gain in emissions reductions. Of course that all depends on who you want to listen to. (same goes for Hydrogen cars as it relates to total life cycle emissions, reformation of methane/natural gas as the most cost effective way to create hydrogen). I know. I have been involved in development/building hydrogen fueling centers for the last seven years. The other big issue is when this onslaught of EV cars hit the streets, we are not prepared for the electricity demand from the grid. Get prepared for brownouts. Just sayin'. Doubt this will hit the 'Featured Comments.'  :-) "

Robert Roaldi: "I have the transcript from a meeting of blacksmiths from 1905 in northern New York state. Here's part of it: 'Now they're trying tell us that we're going to replace all those horses and carriages, build gas stations on every street corner, train thousands of automobile mechanics, find and refine oil from all over the world and deliver it to all those gas stations! And who is going to build all those engines. Where are they going to get the money to do all that? And who's going to put out all the gasoline fires? It'll never happen, just a big hoax to get money out of suckers.'"

Mike replies: Is this real or are you making it up?

Herman Krieger: "The 27 solar panels on my house help with charging the batteries on my plug-in hybrid camera, bicycle, and car. In addition, they help shade the roof during the Summer."

hugh crawford: "Keep in mind that CR used to downgrade Nikon F series cameras because the viewfinder would show all the way out to the edge of the frame showing stuff that got cropped out of machine prints or hidden by cardboard slide mounts. A German friend says that German car reviews used to be very critical of cars with gas gauges that indicated empty before the car actually ran out of gas. The moral is that you have to know what the priorities of the testers are. Also those reliability ratings are really about what brands have the most picky customers with the highest expectations."

Ronny Nilsen: "Took delivery of of a Tesla model Y last week, my first EV, and I love it! Here in Norway more than 80% of all new cars sold are pure EV. And most of the rest are hybrids. In January there were more Porsche Taycans (EV) sold that all petrol cars combined. And Tesla model 3 and Y is the top seller here I think."

Thomas Rink (partial comment): "At least here in Germany, an increasing amount of young people lose [i.e., have lost —Ed.] interest in cars. In the generation of my sons (14 and 18 years of age), already about 25% refuse to even obtain a driving license. Car traffic is often considered as a nuisance among them, and cars have definitely lost their appeal as desirable possessions."

MikeR: "On ratings and reliability, and indeed reputations of such—about three years ago I replaced an Alfa Romeo Giulietta, which had been faultless, with a Subaru Outback, which has been absolutely the most unreliable thing (let alone car) that I have ever owned. Whoever is responsible for their quality control must have been off sick the day my car was built and someone put the work experience kid in charge...."

Clive W: "There are a lot of comments here, so I may have missed this point elsewhere, but it's worth bearing in mind the massive difference in thermal efficiency between an ICE and an EV—enough to invalidate any obfuscation about how the electricity is generated. A litre of petrol contains about 34.2 megajoules. A very economical ICE car will burn about five litres in the course of travelling 100km. That's 171MJ. (If readers want this in bushels per furlong, I'm sure there's an online calculator.) A kilowatt hour is 3.6MJ. Even a relatively hungry EV will go the same 100km on 25kWh, or 90MJ. So even if the electricity is all from coal (which it very seldom is) that's half as much fossil combustion as the ICE car, before you count the fossils burned in the fuel distribution chain, or the chasm in capability between the vehicles.

"IC engines turn fossil fuel into heat and noise, plus a little incidental motion. Yes, my fossil car can travel 3–4 times as far between stops as my EV, but it does it by carrying 3,000MJ in fuel, against the EV's 151MJ—20 times as much. Summary: an EV requires far less energy per unit distance travelled, so it reduces CO2 emissions regardless of how its electricity is generated."

Open Mike: How I Read 'The New Yorker'

Ken Tanaka wrote: "I've had a digital subscription to The New Yorker for many years but, somewhat embarrassingly, I seem to spend relatively little time with it. Its longer-form writing seems at odds with my increasing elderly A.D.D. syndrome."

Mike replies: Here's what I've lately been doing with the magazine—my "double writing life" having cut into my reading time quite a bit*. I take the print magazine, page through it from front to back, and systematically read the first two paragraphs or so of every article. Then decide which ones to read. I probably read three or four articles from every issue. (Okay, sometimes it's two or three.) But often, the ones I read, I read twice. This is a conscious decision because social science is revealing that people increasingly feel their attention frazzled and partitioned, "competed for" if you will, and our attention spans really are shortening. (I know you were joking, Ken, but it really isn't just age or A.D.D., it's a real thing, for all of us.) I still want to engage with my reading, though, so I decided I had to make an extra effort to pay attention.

(As an aside, I started doing this when I read a random article online that claimed that most people read only about a third of every online article they "read," even short ones. That instantly got me resolved to read the articles I start all the way to the end, and to pay settled and focused attention to them despite the ever-present pressure to flit off somewhere else. I'm a bit contrarian in ways like that. It's stubbornness, basically.)

Sparklers
The reason for my recent strategy with The New Yorker is that I find I can seldom guess from the title and the subject which articles are going to reward my attention. My goal is to find that one article in every issue or two that sparkles for me or puts previously half-formed thoughts into words. They're always there. Sometimes a great article will take me to worlds I had not imagined existed, or expand my understanding in satisfying ways. I'll give you two recent examples. One is "Thrill of the Hunt" by Abe Streep, from the March 14, 2022 issue. (Online as "The Great American Antler Boom.") It's all about the trafficking of antlers that are shed by elk every season. Never had the faintest foggiest, as my grandmother used to say, but it was really interesting (and only mildly disturbing) to read all about this hitherto hidden "industry." The second example is "The Fairy Tale War" by Anna Holmes, from the Feb. 7, 2022 issue. (Online as "The Radical Woman Behind 'Goodnight Moon.'") On the face of it, I would have thought I had perishingly little interest in the children's book Goodnight Moon and its previously-unknown-to-me author, Margaret Wise Brown. Wrong-O, plush-rabbit-breath. Anna Holmes hooked me from the sentence, "In fact, Brown was a seductive iconoclast with a Katherine Hepburn mane and a compulsion for ignoring the rules," midway through the first paragraph. The article was utterly fascinating. Who'd have known?

The corollary is that when I'm bogged in an article I don't want to be in, I don't doggedly slog to the end as I used to; I trigger the ejection seat. On the life's-too-short principle.

So I've basically acknowledged that I don't have the stuffing (the moxie, the grit) to read every article in every issue, but I still find it engaging and rewarding to pick and choose, then purposely concentrate.

Mike

*For those who aren't from here, TOP's fortunes have slid quite a bit in the last five years, in parallel with the plummeting digital camera market and the encroachment of YouTube, and I realized a little bit ago that I was going to have to find other ways to earn a bit o' money from the only dang thing I know how to do, which is write. My retirement plan being "to keep working" as I always say. Followed by, "that sounds like a joke and I only wish it were."

Book of Interest this Week

Home Fires Volume II: The Present. There is of course a Volume I: The Past.  TOP reader Bruce Haley has produced documentary work relating to conflict, humanitarian crises and environmental/industrial/land use issues for 30 years. He received the Robert Capa Gold Medal for his coverage of the ethnic civil war in Burma.

This book link is a portal to Amazon.

Today at B&H Photo

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:

Ray Hunter: "In the December 17, 1990, issue of The New Yorker I encountered an article entitled 'A Single Person Making A Single Thing.' [Only available online to subscribers. —Ed.] It was the profile of Richard Benson, who was just concluding his MacArthur genius year. It was a remarkable story of an individual's dedication and pursuit of excellence, and is still a good (and pertinent) read today."

Mike replies: I remember that. I wonder if a compilation of The New Yorker's articles on photography over the years would make a good book...hey, we can dream.

A Few Working Notes

I apologize, but I'm going to need a few more days to finish up the "Objects" post. The reason is that there are two distinct trends in the submissions—pictures which contain objects that the photographer remembers fondly, and pictures that are "portraits" of objects, not necessarily ones the photographer has any personal attachment for. The latter tend to be clean and descriptive and not necessarily personal, and the former looser, more personal, and less centered on the object. The two strains mix like oil and water for me, and my first efforts to distill them into a coherent portfolio haven't satisfied. Going all-in one way or the other is just unfair to the other approach, but I'm still working out a way to combine them. This work is visual, not thought-based. You have to look at things together and see—using the word literally here—how they're working.

I know it's not that big a deal, but I feel I should be responsible to your work.

Tina Brown and the Talk of the Town
In other news, my first piece for the New Yorker (I've submitted three now) is going into the queue for copyediting and fact-checking today (or yesterday or tomorrow), and evidently it's already been turned over to the Art Department for illustration. Apparently the photograph I talked about in the piece (this one) will be represented by a drawing. "Illustrations create a little imaginative space for the reader—that’s why we use them in Talk of the Town, for instance, instead of photos," I was told. "It’s like the idea of the photo, rather than the photo itself."

All pretty exciting! Although nothing's a done deal yet. You're not published till you're published.

Photographers might reflexively take exception to replacing a photo with a drawing (like the color photographer Kim Kirkpatrick used to hate the phrase "original in color" under a B&W reproduction), but I see the wisdom. People do have a tendency to take things too literally, and will sometimes assume something is intended as probative evidence when actually it's just a fer-instance. Then they'll "argue with the illustration," and the illustration becomes a distraction. That's why Ctein is always saying some variant of "believe what I say, not what you see." I learned never to illustrate photo contest announcements, because people will assume it's an example of what you're looking for and will send in more of the same.

Plus, there's a history. The New Yorker originally never used photographs. Unless I'm mistaken, Tina Brown (fourth editor, 1992–98) was the first to allow photographs in the magazine—at least she was the first to use them extensively, and the first to hire a staff photographer (Richard Avedon—in fact he was on assignment for them when he suffered a cerebral hemorrhage and died in 2004). If I'm not wrong, no editor has yet dared to use a photograph on the cover, praise the ghost of Ross, and that's a Rubicon I hope is never crossed. Traditions aren't all sacred, but some are just part of a publication's identity. The New Yorker is one of the last magazines—maybe the last, I don't know—that uses original art and no blurbs on its cover. Clean and strong. Integrity, since 1925.

Anyway, "they're the NFL," as Michael Wexler said to me, and whatever they want to do is cool with me. I'll keep you apprised.

Mike

Book of Interest this Week

Gregory Crewdson: Alone Street. "Filmic" seems the best single adjective to describe Gregory Crewdson's work; his directed and carefully managed tableau are the still photography version of scenes in movies. As such they are hyper-real; more beautiful than life and more poetic, and more concerted. They're also very easy to enjoy and a pleasure to look at.

This book link is a portal to Amazon.

Today at B&H Photo

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:

Kenneth Tanaka: "Preliminary congratulations to you, Mike. I am very eager to see your article published in The New Yorker. I've had a digital subscription to The New Yorker for many years but, somewhat embarrassingly, I seem to spend relatively little time with it. Its longer-form of writing seems at odds with my increasing elderly A.D.D. syndrome. Maybe your features will be just the dose of Ritalin that gets me back into The New Yorker."

Mike replies: "Preliminary congratulations" is just the phrase, and thanks. They do want me to write short pieces, targeting 1,200 words, so the danger of long pieces is slim. I'll be writing for the website, newyorker.com, which I'm told is actually doing as well as the print magazine now, and growing faster.

Richard Skoonberg: "Such exciting news! I wish you the very best! I think you are a wonderful writer and I have enjoyed your posts for years. So good luck!...or should I say 'break a leg?' Whatever, I am rooting for your success."

Print Sale Update / Ctein's Thoughts on Mac Studio

I'm still working on the Baker's Dozen, I haven't forgotten. Very wrapped up in this piece I'm trying to put together for that other outlet. I might submit it tomorrow, so that'll be that one done.

Ctein wrote to say that all the infrared prints from the sale have shipped. If you haven't gotten either your print(s) or a notification from USPS that it's on the way, please contact Ctein at [email protected].

I invited him to write a column giving us his thoughts about the new Mac Studio, and below is what he replied—written as a casual email, mind you. I have his permission to share.

Ctein: "I wouldn't mind writing something about the Mac Studio, but at this point I have nothing coherent nor useful to say. My thoughts are too muddled. I need to straighten them out before I'll have anything worth adding to the chatter.

"The two things that are most messing with my head (there are others) is that, first, I have little interest in the M[x] chips. The switchover, in fact, will cause me problems when I'm forced into it. Which is, hopefully, not going to happen any time soon.

"The second is that I am unreasonably fond of the 27" 5K iMac. And I do think it's unreasonable. My last-year's 16" MacBook Pro runs rings around my now-ancient (2014) iMac, along with providing me with a dual monitor setup (I have the LG 5K 27" monitor), which has better color and a larger gamut. Plus having twice as much RAM as my maxed-out iMac. There is no sensible reason why I should prefer working on the iMac. Well, I'm allowed to have my idiosyncrasies, but I don't understand this one and it makes it hard to write usefully about the New Apple Order.

"The likely reality is that if my iMac were to give up the ghost tomorrow, I'd go out and buy the final-generation 27" iMac, either refurbished from Apple or used from one of the reputable dealers, in the minimum RAM configuration, populate it with RAM from Other World Computing, and I'd be spending half as much as a Mac Studio would cost me. And that would likely carry me for another 6–8 years... or until Apple decides to stop supporting the Intel chips entirely."

Note that Ctein does professional printing and restoration, so he falls into the pro user category. I believe he paid top dollar for his 5K 27" iMac when it was the very latest thing, so it's nice to hear that he got his money's worth out of it, both in terms of years of use and his positive feelings for it.

By the way, I'm far from an expert on computers—actually more the opposite—but I read enough of Daring Fireball yesterday to find out that it's pretty well accepted that the 27" iMac is now dead. I had two of them, the second being a 2011 that's still sitting here looking for a home. The only reason I went to a separate CPU and monitor was that I work on a porch, surrounded on three sides by windows, and I needed a monitor that could cope with glare better. I still can't do critical work on photos in the daytime. But my NEC MultiSync PA272W solved the glare problem—it has a non-glare surface and a hood.

And in local news...
It's like mid-Winter here today—five or six inches of fresh snow and 17°F (–8°C). The difference is that we're due for a warm-up tomorrow. The anti-icing wires on the pool table shed are working nicely, so no ice dams! Personally, I count today as the first day of Spring, despite the weather. With Daylight Savings Time newly returned, it should be light till 7:00 or even a little later, and don't think I'm not grateful. Those dark Winter evenings can feel awfully lonely. The seven Temperate Months (capitalized out of reverence), roughly April through October, are the reason to live in the Finger Lakes. Bring it on!

27-inch 5K iMac new at B&H Photo: i5, 8 GB RAM, 256GB SSD, $1,799; i9, 32 GB RAM, 2TB SSD, $3,699 (that's the low end and high end; there are other configurations in the middle).

Mike
(Thanks to Ctein)

Book of Interest this Week

Gregory Crewdson: Alone Street. "Filmic" seems the best single adjective to describe Gregory Crewdson's work; his directed and carefully managed tableau are the still photography version of scenes in movies. As such they are hyper-real; more beautiful than life and more poetic, and more concerted. They're also very easy to enjoy and a pleasure to look at.

This book link is a portal to Amazon.

Today at B&H Photo

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:

Thom Hogan: "I'm with Ctein for the most part. A recent 27" iMac 5K Retina configured properly is an excellent tool that should be long-lived (though Apple's yearly macOS updates have many of us living behind the times intentionally).

"Thing is, the 24" M1 iMac fills the need for those who want a lithe all-in-one, and as Mike has noted with his need for a separate monitor to get glare/positioning benefits, a Mac mini or lower Mac Studio model with the proper 4K/5K monitor is probably a perfect replacement for the 27" iMac.

"Those of us with iMac 5K's almost certainly have a small farm of peripherals hanging out on the desk (mine are about 3x the area of a Mac Studio), so the notion of a separate box really isn't an issue. Macsales.com has some very nice boxes that would stack under a Mac Studio and actually take up less space than my current drive boxes when all is said and done.

"As far as I'm concerned, Apple has done a good job of rationalizing the M1 Macs. Portables in 13, 14, 16" sizes, mini, Studio, iMac 24", and later this year a Pro. This is the best set of choices we've had in a long time. I'm not sure that a 27" iMac M1 adds much to the lineup. Indeed, if Apple were to provide one, I'm pretty sure that it would have to be Max/Ultra and the 24" would have to remain plain M1, which is what the mini/Studio distinction is right now."

John Krumm: "My Sierra Juniper just arrived and it looks fantastic. Off to the frame shop."

Bill Beebe: "I certainly understand a strong attachment to any technology or tool, especially if that tool has served you well and allowed you to make a living in your chosen profession. I have experienced the same, but from a pure engineering viewpoint. (I use a camera, and my output can be charitably described as hobbyist).

"What Ctein might be reacting to is the cost of the new M1 variant Mac minis. Let me speak to cost from my perspective.

"I'm fortunate enough that I have a 2019 16" MBP fully equipped with an i9, max memory, and 4TB SSD. That cost $6K. It's a workhorse given to me in 2020 to help complete a contract, and believe me I put it to very good use. Later, I was able to pick up a 2020 13" MPB with the basic M1 (i.e. just 8 cores), on sale for $1.5K. That became my field computer because the idea of carrying $6K of computer out of the house became untenable.

"I can say, without exaggeration, that the 13" will keep up with the 16" with 1/4 the memory, even if the 13" has to hit swap. There are use cases for which the 16" has to be used due to its 64GB memory. But for a lot of other basic use cases, I can't tell the difference in performance.

"But I can certainly tell the difference in battery life. What makes the 13" such a keeper is the speed combined with its very long battery life while out testing in the field. I can run at least eight hours of solid work before I even have to think of hitting the charger. The 16" by comparison sucks down a battery like it's going out of style.

"I understand and appreciate why Ctein uses what he uses, but I hope in the future he'll see that the Apple Silicon based Macs will benefit him even more than Intel based Macs, especially when mobile."

Research Question

Wonder if you could help me with a calibration question for one of my articles...if you photograph in public / on the street, and often include strangers in your pictures without specifically asking their permission, would you say things got more difficult for you after Princess Diana's death in 1997 and 9/11 in 2001? Did you get hassled more, by random people and/or anyone in some sort of official capacity? Or do you think that was more or less constant, before and after?

Thanks for any responses!

—Mike the Scrivener

Moment of Prayer

Ukrainian immigrants to France in prayer at the Ukrainian
Cathedral in Paris last Sunday. Photo by
Peter Turnley, March 6th, 2022.

Our friend Peter Turnley crossed the border into Ukraine today.

If you're the praying kind, spare a thought for him. You can't tell Peter he's allowed to take it easier now. He's 66, but remains true to the life he chose as a kid, when he and his twin brother David were determined to become photojournalists. When COVID-19 slammed New York City, he wrestled with his fear, but then got right out into it. Now he's in Ukraine to help people tell their stories. Here's a small portfolio of Peter's photographs of Ukrainians in peaceful times. He's active on Facebook and Instagram, where you can follow his current work.

I'm off to work on the "Objects" portfolio. If I don't get it up tomorrow, I'll keep working on it till it's done.

Mike

UPDATE: I heard from Peter from inside Ukraine. He told me he's focusing on the extraordinary flow of refugees, calling the work Exodus from Ukraine. He said he's photographed refugees in many circumstances for forty years, but has never seen anything like what he's seeing now—because of its scale, for one thing, and because it has "a sort of World War II feel to it" because it's happening in Eastern Europe, but mainly because the exodus consists almost entirely of women and children. The men are staying behind to fight. 

When you look at this, imagine yourself saying a temporary goodbye to your own children as you see them off on a train to an uncertain destination—knowing that there's a possibility you might never see them again.

Peter is a photojournalist, still, but something more. His activities seem more like a calling than a job at this point. Increasingly, over the years, his allegiance is to the people he photographs. They're all he spoke about when we talked. No one sent him to Ukraine, although he'll find places to publish the work. People in extremis do not want their suffering obscured—they want, and need, witnesses.  —MJ

Book of Interest this Week

Gregory Crewdson: Alone Street. "Filmic" seems the best single adjective to describe Gregory Crewdson's work; his directed and carefully managed tableau are the still photography version of scenes in movies. As such they are hyper-real; more beautiful than life and more poetic, and more concerted. They're also very easy to enjoy and a pleasure to look at.

This book link is a portal to Amazon.

Today at B&H Photo

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:

Kristine Hinrichs: "If that image doesn’t melt your heart, nothing will. What a powerful image."

Kenneth Tanaka: "I am eager to see what Peter captures inside Ukraine.

Bad Weather Makes for Good Photography

"You’ve certainly heard this old chestnut If you’ve been involved in photography for a long time. And it’s true. But a variant of that is also true: Bad Times Make for Good Photography. Right now we’re bathed in the humanitarian horror that a madman has unleashed on the world. It may be hard for any of us to get past the reflexive revulsion of the events for a while.

"But as a momentary relief try to abstract yourself from the reality and just look at the photography that’s conveying the story to you each day. Right now coming from the top news sources and press agencies we’re seeing a daily flood of truly exceptional reportage imagery from the best-of-the-best. Of course familiar names Lynsey Addario and Tyler Hicks are appearing on many of the best image bylines. But there are a great many more unknown names appearing, too. This is a moment for the best photographers to make (or lose) their careers.

"That means it’s also a perfect learning moment for avocational photographers, young or old, to really see how the best snappers put a strong image together. Compare their images with yours. You may immediately notice that their goal tends not to be compositional rules (which were really created for additive arts such as painting and drawing anyway). Their primary goals can be called constitutional; putting the most meaningful stuff in a frame to make it congeal and cohere at-a-glance.

"You won’t be a bad person for using this bad moment as a learning / self-improvement medium. And it might provide you with some needed psychic relief, too."

Bill Stothers: "Mike—Most of what I've seen from Ukraine has been in color. Interesting to see Peter T.'s B&W work (and that of brother David T. who also has crossed the border). What do you think about B&W vs. color here? Lindsey Addario has been doing extraordinary work in the NYT. Do the Brothers T. compete with one another? Collaborate? They seem not to acknowledge one another on IG."

Mike replies: You can hear about their relationship from their own parents, no less, in the "60 Minutes" profile.

Jack MacDonough: "Peter’s words on Instagram are as powerful as his images. And his images are so poignant."

The Biggest News from Apple in Years

The all-new Apple Mac Studio computer

I can hardly believe my senses, but Apple yesterday appears to have introduced an all-new computer designed and aimed exactly at us—PHOTOGRAPHERS. Excuse the shouting.

The all-new Apple Mac Studio looks like a bulked-up and pumped-up musclebound Mini with two supercharged versions of the high-performance M1 chip—M1 Max ($2,000) for still photographers, M1 Ultra ($4,000) for videographers. With industrial-size fans. The M1 Ultra chip being basically two M1 Max chips joined at the hip, thus requiring less power than two separate M1 Max chips. 

Its shape is kinda reminiscent of the Power Mac G4 Cube that appealed to me so much back in 2000. Neat, clean, contained, smallish and easy to site on a desk. John Gruber wrote of the Cube in July 2020: "The Cube was a worthy failure, deserving of our utmost praise in hindsight. Powerful computers needed to get smaller, quieter, and more attractive. The Cube pushed the state of the art forward." Apple could have called the Studio the Cube II—except that the Cube, which was before its time, was a commercial failure.

There's a matching monitor, the 27-inch 5K voice-and-video-ready Studio Display that has its own A13 Bionic chip onboard. It has a nanotexture glass option to cut glare and an adjustable-height stand as an option. Suitable for graphic arts professionals who use their monitors all day.

The Mac Studio's memory is "unified," (i.e., not user upgradeable), but you can choose 32GB or 64GB for the M1 Max version and those options plus 128GB on the M1 Ultra version. 512GB SSD storage is standard with options available from 1 to  8 terabytes. According to Apple, the new Mac Studios are significantly faster than the 27" iMac and the existing Mac Pro, from 50% to 3.8X.

Both the Mac Studio and Studio Display will start shipping March 18th.

Yay, I say. Although I can't afford one myself.

Pet peeve no more
And—OMG, be still, my beating heart—not only is there a built-in SD card slot on the Mac Studio, but it's on the front.

I couldn't believe my eyes—sat there blinking stupidly—but then I remembered, oh yeah, Jony retired. Apple has always wanted everything to be designy and clean even at the expense of usability, so it insisted the ports be on the back, out of sight. Bugged me for years, but then, the world is the world. The card slot on the front won't mean much to most people, but to me it's a flag that proclaims changed intentions for this product and renewed respect for the needs of photographers. Oh, okay, "creatives." (Man I hate that word.)

Because not only is an Mac Studio an all-new computer, for today's Apple it's an all-new computer category. For years you have been dutifully enduring my griping:

• Apple didn't make a good midrange desktop for a separate monitor, so we could upgrade separately and/or use third-party graphics arts monitors such as my NEC. Apple's choices were too much (the Pro) or too little (the Mini). High end or low end, nothing in the middle.
• Apple's focus was on lifestyle and the high end, and what photographers needed was a good solid middle-range workhorse, affordable but capable.
• Apple had forgotten the graphics arts market that had once been its most loyal constituency.
• Apple always put the bleeping card slot on the side, and then on the back, so we could get irritated just a wee bit every single time we had to get up and lean over and crane our necks to put a card in or pull a card out. Which was often.
• Well, then it solved that problem by eliminating the card slot altogether. Of course, we all still use cards on a nearly daily basis. So they cleaned up the sleekness of the computer just a tiny bit...at the cost of the outboard docks that now sit on our desks. Thanks for that.
• Couldn't we please get one or two ports on the front, where they'd be accessible, for frequently swapped peripherals? We already have cords all over our desks, we really don't mind one or two more. Ours are working offices.
• Apple's Mini, post-2014, was designed for switchers (from PC) and thus could be crippled. Didn't need the latest or best chips, didn't need upgradeable RAM. The fan could be an afterthought and too small, because grampas and soccer moms and humanities majors were only going to use the thing for email and YouTube—and now Zoom—anyhow.
• In short, Apple didn't deign to make a computer for us...or so I b*tched, when of course the iMacs worked well enough and I shoulda stopped my kvetching and gone along with that program like a good sheep customer. (I do have an iMac, upstairs.)

Happy day, Apple has just shut me up entirely. By addressing all those criticisms. In one fell swoop.

A win for photographers and we might as well shout it
The Studio is ours. It's for us. Finally, that midrange workhorse utilitarian monitor-less high-connectivity accessible affordable PHOTO-CENTRIC computer I always thought Apple should make for photographers. And for videographers. (It's for musicians, too.)

I'm getting carried away, so I'll just say thank you, Santa Apple, and go calm down.

But oh, happy day. This one's for us.

Mike

P.S. I have no connection to Apple except as a customer, and was privy to no prior notification or information about any of the products introduced yesterday.

UPDATE: Thom Hogan has weighed in on the Mac Studio. One thing he points out that I should pass along is that the previous photographers' workhorse, the Intel 27" iMac with Retina 5K display, has been discontinued by Apple and is a bargain from resellers who still have stock (I believe it's what Ctein uses). Check out Thom's article. (Thanks to Richard Nugent for pointing this out—I hadn't caught up with it before he did.)

Book of Interest this Week

Gregory Crewdson: Alone Street. "Filmic" seems the best single adjective to describe Gregory Crewdson's work; his directed and carefully managed tableau are the still photography version of scenes in movies. As such they are hyper-real; more beautiful than life and more poetic, and more concerted. They're also very easy to enjoy and a pleasure to look at.

This book link is a portal to Amazon.

Today at B&H Photo

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:

Richard Parkin: "I solve the problem of the connections at the back by simply having the back at the front so all the ports are accessible."

Mike replies: Ha! I did the same thing with my subwoofer for my desk system...it's downward-firing, so I simply turned the front to the wall so I could access all the controls and connections.

Yuan: "Although it's drool-worthy, I'd rather call the Mac Studio video-centric. For the majority of still photographers, even the $2k version is over-kill. Nowadays you simply don't need to spend $2k to get a perfectly fine still photo computer."

James: "It's $2,000 before a screen. Five of those and you can have a pool shed."

Mike replies: True, but the Pro is $6k and up, and a Fuji X-Pro3, Panasonic S5, or Sony A7III are all the same price, and you could also spend the same on a Sony FE 50mm ƒ/1.2 GM or a Fuji XF 8–16mm ƒ/2.8. And some people already have monitors. But sure, it's not for everyone.

Michael Fewster: "SD card slot at the front! Loud cheers. Let's hope that the cheers are heard by laptop makers. In recent years SD card readers have almost completely disappeared from the laptops we photographers like to take when we travel. A MicroSD card reader doesn't do it."

Steve W: "This is good news. I have a 2018 Mac Mini, and I'm getting close to wanting to upgrade. The current Mac Mini has even fewer ports: it's been reduced from four Thunderbolt/USB-C ports to only two. That's not going to cut it. The Mac Studio is configured almost perfectly, and the SD card slot is frosting on the cake. The price seems about right given that a 14" MacBook Pro costs $1,999 as well."

Rob de Loe: "I used to teach in a lab full of Macs. Someone who wanted a nearly endless bounty of free SD cards could be happy in that room. There they were in the back of the monitor, forgotten by the previous user, waiting to be collected. There probably was someone coming around harvesting them each day, like the people you'd see running from pay phone to pay phone checking for uncollected change."

Mark replies to Rob: "What's a pay phone?"

Danielsroka: "I am just as excited as you are. My beloved 'trashcan' Mac Pro has been a workhorse, and served me well. But it is now eight years old now, and I've been waiting for a solid professional desktop Mac to come along to replace it. It feels like this machine was designed with the professional photographer in mind. Fast, efficient, and bang-on with the price. I calculated that $3–4,000 will get me a fast (but not outrageous) setup, which is the same price range I've paid for my high-end Macs in the past. And these new M1 Max chips are proving to be groundbreaking in speed and energy efficiency, a significant upgrade from the old Intel framework. Can't wait!"

Larry Angier: "Faster, cheaper, better continues! In 1984 my original Mac 128 with external floppy and ImageWriter printer cost (then) about $2,500 and it had a nine-inch monitor, 128 KB ram and 400 KB floppies.... Things keep getting better and better for us!"

Apple Point-Counterpoint

John Camp: "I'm typing this on a 2015 MacBook Pro, which will be my last Apple product, other than cellphones, and I'm taking a hard look at those. Most (maybe all) of what Studio will do can be replicated much more cheaply on Windows machines, although the Mac OS still seems easier and more intuitive that even the latest Windows 11. My problem is, if you interface (cliché) with the business world, the business world uses Windows, and even identically-branded software is not the same between the two worlds. I could no longer put up with the problems created by using Word for Mac when sending a manuscript to a publisher who is totally on Windows. Microsoft frequently updates Word, but not so frequently Word for Mac, which means there are always incompatibilities, and some of them can drive you crazy. So I'm forced to change.

"The Studio, it seems to me, is for professional videographers and perhaps professional still photographers, because Apple systems are widely used by 'creatives' (another cliché.) For artists and enthusiasts, who may only be dealing with couple of dozen photos a week, an expensive computer makes little sense. For somebody like Kirk Tuck, who may take several hundred photos at a single public event, with an ad agency demanding instant returns, the Studio may be something to seriously consider. IMHO.

"I will concede that changing operating systems is a pain in the ass, and I'm currently experiencing that. There is certainly a solid value in staying within a familiar, comfortable system, which is why I still shoot Nikons along with my Micro 4/3 stuff. But for me, from here on, it's Windows."

Alex Mercado: "I'm a staff photographer and certainly welcome the Mac Studio.

"My department is currently making use of a small fleet of Mac Minis from 2018 and, while the Mini I use exhibits no significant performance issues—as I have the luxury of only running Capture One—my colleagues in production have been feeling the limitations of theirs for some time. The suite of applications they need to run simultaneously on any given day visibly taxes the hardware of their 6-core Mac mini. And we even ponied up for them to have the maximum of 64BG of RAM from the start.

"If it were possible to cram even more RAM into the Mac Mini to help things run more efficiently, the dated CPU would still have trouble juggling the multiple threads of all the updated, and increasingly processor-intensive, applications. If the CPU could be upgraded, then every other part of the motherboard would likely become a bottleneck. The notion of long-term upgradability for an affordable computer is not terribly realistic; there will always be a component, either hardware or software, that will fail to deliver to the peak performance of the computer as a whole.

"This lack of upgradability for most of Apple’s current computers is a non-issue in our 'corporate' setting by the simple virtue of having to work within the recommendations of the IT department. Ours require us to update the OS and software regularly to keep up with security updates and network compatibility; meaning we eventually need to replace the computer to keep up with the times. Today’s Adobe Creative Cloud applications running on Monterey isn’t nearly as speedy on our Mac mini as the 2018 suite was on Mojave.

"Our replacement options before the Mac Studio were: The 2020 Mac mini. For $1,300, it has two additional CPU cores, but the RAM tops out at 16GB. It will logically struggle to keep up with demands rather quickly.

"We use Eizo displays so considering any iMac is basically pointless.

"Lastly, the 'base mode' 8-core Intel Xeon-based Mac Pro with 48GB of RAM will cost $6,500 (the next step up is 96GB for $7,200!) and is just overkill in more ways than one. Also, how long is Apple really going to keep supporting x86?

"Now, $2,600 for a Mac Studio with its 10-core M1 Max and standard 64BG of RAM is the Goldilocks Mac we’ve been waiting for. And I suspect it will remain usable for more than the four years we've managed to squeeze out of the Mac Mini."

Ed Hawco replies to John: "Another counterpoint to John Camp's point that 'if you interface (cliché) with the business world, the business world uses Windows, and even identically-branded software is not the same between the two worlds.'

"John says he wrote that on a 2015 Macbook Pro, and I think his thesis is also from 2015, if not earlier. I work in the business world, and have done so happily for over a decade on Macs. At my employer we're pretty much evenly split between Macs and Windows machines, and it is exceptionally rare to find any issues crossing platforms. My macOS MS Office interfaces flawlessly with MS Office files from Windows users. Ditto other applications we use.

"The only exception I'm aware of is the screenshot application called Snagit from Techsoft; the native image format on macOS is '.snagproj' and on Windows it's '.snag,' and they are not compatible. This is a very weird thing in 2022. Six or seven years ago I asked one of their product managers why they don't make the formats compatible across OSs, and the reply (which I don't remember verbatim) left me a bit stunned, as it implied the person did not understand what the 'use case' was for having cross-OS compatible files. Whaaaaaaa?"

Thom Hogan replies to John: "Message to John Camp: stop using Word on the Mac. The best, most compatible word processor on the Mac is Nisuswriter Pro. Has been for years as Microsoft slowly let their Mac software slide. But that should tell you something about reliance on Microsoft software in the first place. Office is a lowest common denominator product now, and as such is going to have problems long-term even for an all-Windows user."

Eric Brody (partial comment): "Like Larry Angier, my first Mac was purchased for US$2,500. I got it on April 18, 1984! 400K single-sided disks, no externals. My first external drive was a 20 megabyte, not terabyte, drive that cost hundreds! It always seemed to me that one spent the same $2,500 every few years, but got a lot more computer power."

Mike replies: My first computer was the 512K Macintosh, 1984–86, which I got for a graduation present from art school in May of '85. It was called the "Fat Mac" because it had, woo-hoo, 0.000512 GB of memory, which was a lot. Like you guys, my Macintosh and an Imagewriter daisy-wheel printer cost about $2,600. For the same dollars you can get a Mac Studio with a 2TB SSD, which can do even more than my old Fat Mac could. (I kid, don't yell at me.)

Blog Note: Bash It Out and Up It Goes

So I can't really say much about this, but, a while back, out of the blue, I got invited to write about photography for a major publication. Actually it's one of the most famous, prestigious, and storied publications in the English-speaking world. Not to displace TOP; in fact, the editor specifically said he didn't want to distract me from TOP. The proposition was that I would contribute short pieces to them intermittently.

I've written two things for them and am currently grappling with a third. Nothing has come of it so far. For one thing, it's like skipping from pickup games at the friendly neighborhood sandlot straight to the Major Leagues. My mojo has always been that I'm fairly good at stringing words together—I've gotten praise for my writing since grade school—but that's baseline for them. Even their little throwaway pieces just glitter with writing talent. You don't realize how much until you try to do it yourself. For another thing, my bloggerish habits have gotten pretty ingrained. You'd never use a word like "bloggerish" with them, for example. Based on a 365-day year, I've published an average of 1.6 times a day for 16.5 years, and haven't had a vacation that's worthy of the word since George W. Bush was President. That creates...let's call it a groove. lol.

I would say those bloggerish habits are: first, everything's grist for the mill here, so everything gets tossed cheerfully in, down to those ferocious, human-averse little brown-black fisher-cats lurking in these woods; second, everything's done and up. I bash it out and up it goes. I haven't been able to identify it, but I think there's an old black-and-white Spencer Tracy movie (if I were writing this for them I'd have to go research that) in which he plays a journalist, and in one scene he rushes back to the newsroom, plops down at the typewriter, bashes out a page at high speed, rips it out of the typewriter and has a kid run it down to the printing press. If that scene doesn't actually exist, it should. That's like blog writing.

Except they had rules.

And oversight: editors. I haven't worked with an editor for a long time. Direct and immediate feedback from an erudite and informed audience, however, functions excellently as a form of oversight too—it has matured me, and honed my sense of the way what I say will be received. I've personally moderated over 300,000 comments—imagine a magazine writer receiving that many responses for his or her articles. Without, I mean, being driven around the bend by it.

I think my main weakness, and I hope not my Achilles heel, might be that I get all first-persony. Like I am now. I talk to you as me, and that's sketchy in real journalism. Except perhaps in carefully measured little amounts. When writing for a newspaper or magazine, you do get the byline for the reader to ignore (fact: bylines are magically invisible to the eyes and craniums of all but very few readers), but it's best to think of your writerly "voice" as if it's the publication talking, not you. Keep your triflin' self outta sight, you bum. If you don't, it's like physically inserting yourself between two parties who are standing talking to each other. Rude and awkward. So I'm having to relearn some old...manners.

On the other hand, I'm not 100% sure I should. Writing as myself might not be a deliberate didactic choice, but it's certainly the way my style of writing about photography has evolved organically. Who am I to parade my opinions as if they're objective truths? Who is anyone? I don't think it's justified. No one owns photography. Even though everyone thinks they do. Photography is a huge, baggy, sprawling medium, and saying that you know it is like saying you know the ocean or the stars. It can be used for anything, but it's not even constrained to being useful; there are a thousand paths into it and ten thousand things it leads out to. Consider this: a single human lifetime is no longer long enough to look at as many photographs as are made in one single 24-hour day. Photography and everything it contains is even more subjective and personal than, say, cooking, or clothing, where at least there is a semblance of consensus about what's good and bad within various groups in various cultures.

I had a good chance to become a critic. I took a one-on-one class at the Corcoran in writing criticism from a working art critic, and she was quite taken with me and with what I wrote for her. While I was taking that class I engaged in a broad "tasting" of art criticism from all over and from many eras, sampling writers from Lady Eastlake to Susan Sontag, John Ruskin to John Berger, Vasari to Clement Greenburg. I don't need to go into it here, but my conclusion was simply that I didn't want to write that way. It was a conscious decision. I remember where I was when I made it. I was already being published in local publications in D.C. before I graduated, and then, after graduation, the Washington Post offered to hire me to review local photography shows. I was to write two reviews a week. Visit the shows, talk to the gallerist, interview the artist or artists, brush up on their work and its context, and write it up newspaper-style so that it could be cut to fit space. I suppose I should have accepted, but it would have been about a half-time job and they wanted to pay me $100 a week. That wasn't much even then. I was poor as a church mouse at the time and simply needed a real job, so I turned them down. It would have dovetailed nicely with teaching, more's the pity, but I hadn't landed my first teaching job yet at that point.

Hubristic as it may be to say this, and it does make me wince, but I'm an original thinker on photography, for better or worse. I only mean that I have my own opinions, tastes, values, beliefs, conclusions, and photo-pertinent politics; I decided, again very consciously, that I wanted to write for practitioners, people in the trenches grappling with the problems. It ended up being a replacement for teaching. Writing for enthusiasts doesn't join in the conversation with what you might call the establishment gatekeepers, by which I mean the academics, critics, theorists, cultural commentators, curators—the real writers. Traditionally, enthusiasts got exposed to those people through the writeups on museum walls and in the prefaces and introductions to monographs. And I used the phrase "in the trenches" as though it's close to the front lines, but that's a conceit. I was never in any vanguard. I really only mean that I wanted to live closer to the border between photography and the public. I think (hope?) I developed the way I write about photography because that's the way I think it's most valid to write about it. I want to be a specific personalized individual in my writing. I want readers to see an individual engaging on a personal level with the medium. As if it means something to me and matters to me. I want you to see how I feel about it viscerally and not just what I think and what I can think of to say. I want you to know your opinions and tastes do not in any way have to align with mine, yet I do want to model a person who does have strong opinions and distinct values.

If all that is tl;dr, then put it like this: maybe I'm more of a columnist-type than a reporter, essayist, or author of articles. Someone who'd fit better in an Op/Ed section than in an Arts section. I don't know. In any event, I printed out the latest piece I wrote for that publication, lit up every instance of firstpersony with a highliter, and am currently cutting all the me Mike and I out of it, systematically and methodically, like a surgeon with a scalpel. It's harder than it looks.

When this first happened, I was high on hope for a while. Then, during the long delays, I had to accept that maybe nothing would come of it. Had I failed at something I didn't even ask to do?! But I know my editor is on my side—I've submitted, as I said, two pieces so far and he's consistently said he likes them. So something still might happen. I'll keep you posted.

Bottom line, though: sure is fun. When he approved of something, my late brother's late banjo-playing friend Jimmy-James Rollins used to say, laconically, "fired up!" And this has lit a fire under my katuschka, no doubt. I feel like I'm in it. I like to write, and I consider myself lucky that I get to. (It's thanks to you, too, and thank you again.)

But what the hell was I thinking, turning down the Washington Post when I was a wet-behind the ears newly-struck BFA grad? I had forgotten that. Was I crazy? Who did I think I was? That would absolutely have been worth the slog for six months just for a single line on the resumé! It's quite possible to argue that when it comes to career, I'm an idiot. Really. I'll try my best not to be an idiot this time, but please, keep your fingers crossed for me on that, would you? Because that's always going to be touch and go.

Mike

P.S. This piece: not counting breakfast and not counting my little jaunts out to the pool shed with Butters to rustle my creaky bones: 1,663 words, ~3:45 from concept to completion, ~45 minutes between finishing and posting. That's how that goes, in Bloggerdom.

Book of Interest this Week

Gregory Crewdson: Alone Street. "Filmic" seems the best single adjective to describe Gregory Crewdson's work; his directed and carefully managed tableau are the still photography version of scenes in movies. As such they are hyper-real; more beautiful than life and more poetic, and more concerted. They're also very easy to enjoy and a pleasure to look at.

This book link is a portal to Amazon.

Today at B&H Photo

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:

Alex Mercado: "Re 'one of the most famous, prestigious, and storied publications in the English-speaking world': OMG!!! YOU'RE WRITING FOR TIGER BEAT?!?!?!?!?!?! Seriously though, you're a crackin' good writer. I feel confident in saying that's the reason why we all come here. I will be crossing all my fingers for you."

Mike replies: Tiger Beat? Let's not get too carried away. A guy always needs something out of reach to aspire to in the future.  :-)

Dave Levingston: "First, I have to say I do love your writing. That's why I come here every day to see if there is a new post. It's the best writing about photography that I've ever encountered. Second, you reminded me of one of the greatest feats of writing that I've ever witnessed. It was many, many years ago when I was a newspaper photographer. There was a breaking story right at deadline. The best reporter in the newsroom sat down at his manual typewriter and started writing. When he would finish a paragraph he would hit the carriage return several times, rip off the paragraph using the paper bail, hand the paragraph to a copyboy who then ran with it to the line-o-type operator. He then wrote the second paragraph and repeated the process. He wrote the entire story in about 10 minutes without ever being able to refer to what he had already written. And it did not pass through an editor. It just went straight to the line-o-type and on to hot type and the front page of the newspaper. I was awestruck watching it happen."

Mike replies: The real-life version of the movie scene!

Kenneth Tanaka: "I hope this opportunity becomes a thing for you, Mike. I think it would be very productive and constructive for you to work under the pencil of a top large-market editor occasionally. About ten years ago I backed-into doing assigned photo work for one of America's top modern and contemporary art galleries and one of the world's top living sculptural artists. It was a sobering, draining, educational, and exciting experience of self-discovery for a guy in his mid-50s who thought he knew everything about himself. I would chew my left leg off at the hip rather than do any assignment photography again. But I would not trade those experiences for anything. I made life-long friendships and got quite a bit of my work published, too! I think this experience might have similar results for you.

"One more thought; I think writing about photography for a non-shutterbug audience would also be a strong experience for you. It will almost certainly force you past your own tendency toward personal retrospection, past photography's techie-ness, and put you front-and-center with explaining the fundamental essence of a photograph. Cold shower, anyone? Refreshing!"

darlene: "Mike my fingers are crossed for you. I do believe writing is your calling no matter how big the space, the topic at hand, or the argument. You got this!"

MarkB: "If some editor at a publication that-shall-not-be-named-but-can-be-surmised, ahem, explicitly asked you to write for them, isn't that request solely based on what you've written here, in all its bloggerish glory? So be yourself and run it up the flagpole! Editing yourself while you write is like driving a (real) car without using the clutch pedal—just makes noise and smoke and damages the machinery, IMHO."

Mike replies: Well, they certainly allow for stylists. But there has to be respect for the general tone and approach of the publication. The integrity of the publication comes first. Publications have a culture, you might say—history and tradition.

Maybe the main thing I have to relearn is to how to take my time on a piece, let it percolate, and be willing to rework it substantially—you know, what's called "writing" to most people. For example, so far I can't help but organize the piece in my head and then whack out the whole thing from beginning to end in one sitting. Which is a little funny. I don't have to do that with these, but it's almost a reflex at this point.

Chuck Albertson: "I was wondering when the Times was going to replace the Lens blog. Now, if they could just bring back a chess columnist...."

A Touch of Spring

Look—I got another bird card from Jim Arthur, whose cards I've shared before. (The last one was an owl—five life points if you remember.) The little JPEG squeezes all the subtle colors out of it—the print is much prettier. Jim's cards always remind me that while I don't love online digital pictures particularly, even though they comprise 99% of the pictures I see, I love inkjet prints made from digital files. Well, when they're well made. Which reminds me, I have some more reader prints here sent in for critique—we're going to get back to that this year.

I have some catching up to do this coming week! I made myself too scarce last week. I spent a lot of time working on my other writing projects. I hope everybody realizes I'm not really retired. That was just a joke.

May I just say that I've definitely hit upon the hardest part about trying to write a memoir: you have to relive it all again. It dredges up a lot of old muck that might be better left settled on the bottom of your clean-running river. It's one thing if you're Keith Richard and have enjoyed your life. It's something else when things didn't go so well. (Keef gives the lie to the old joke that if you remember the '60s you weren't there. He was there and he remembers everything.)

We had a number of dustings of snow here in the Finger Lakes in February, and one reason I like them is that I have a deck and a wooden walk that leads to the barn, and in new snow there's a report of the animals that used the walk during the night. I've seen the tracks of housecats and coyotes (not simultaneously!), raccoons, rabbits (under my deck is a rabbit hotel), gophers (ditto, under the small shed at the edge of the property), possums, skunks, fox, and a strange track that I associate with a mysterious black catlike animal the size of small dog that I've seen from a distance, running, a few times. [UPDATE: A fisher! See Geoff's comment, below.]

So the other morning, deer tracks! For the first time ever. Small ones. That amazed me. I've never seen a deer down here so close to the lake; there are plenty of them around and you see them all the time (my friend Mike, who "drives big truck" as he puts it, is expert at spotting them from surprisingly far away—it's great to have him spotting on an after-dark drive back from a meeting) but I'm told they tend not to like to get themselves hemmed in between the two-lane highway and the lake.

Today is our first springlike day, 69°F, sunny, and windy. People are strolling by dressed in summer clothes and the ground is still partly covered with snow and ice. The three days we're in the middle of will get rid of much of it. We're in the days when winter eases its grip.

                                                       ...Winter is winter,
Gnawing the Tyrrhene cliffs with the sea’s tooth.

—Horace, translated by E. Pound

The freeze/thaw cycles have raised a little havoc; I expect to lose some grass. Our long, narrow lake freezes most readily at the northern end, where it's shallow, and in recent days a vast panel of ice the size of many World Football (soccer) fields (do you call them fields?) detached from the frozen end and came drifting down the lake. Floating chunks of ice anywhere from the size of a suitcase to the size of a tennis court have jammed up along the shoreline, causing damage here and there. Some people have "bubblers" that roil the surface of the water and keep the areas around their docks from freezing, but I would never do that. In the wintertime the ducks and geese congregate by the hundreds in the open water around a bubbler. All that concentrated bird poop can't be sanitary, if you ask me. 

Spring reminds me that when I taught photography, way back in olden times, the gang darkroom on the fourth floor of the building that housed the art department would clear out on days like this. Enlargers that were in high demand all winter were suddenly deserted. Down below, the grass of the Quad would be sprinkled with kids, lying around, talking, reading, throwing frisbees, chasing each other, hanging out. Among them were the students who would parade their excuses past me at their next class, explaining why they didn't have their prints made. Like I couldn't see why.

The only other thing I have to report was two very cold nights recently when the air was uncannily clear and the stars in the otherwise black sky seemed to glitter. I could wish I could see them a little better; I have some astigmatism, which gives me a bit of a false report. But that's without glasses, so who would complain? I hope you can see stars in the night sky, where you are.

Mike

Book of Interest this Week

Gregory Crewdson: Alone Street. "Filmic" seems the best single adjective to describe Gregory Crewdson's work; his directed and carefully managed tableau are the still photography version of scenes in movies. As such they are hyper-real; more beautiful than life and more poetic, and more concerted. They're also very easy to enjoy and a pleasure to look at.

This book link is a portal to Amazon.

Today at B&H Photo

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: "That black cat-like animal is likely a fisher. They're a large weasel that has made a comeback here in the Finger Lakes after being largely extirpated by trappers 100 years ago. We've seen one on our trail camera several times. They have a (mostly) undeserved reputation for killing pets, though they are pretty ferocious, apparently the only predator that will regularly kill a porcupine. They're extremely wary of human beings and eat mostly rodents, rabbits and the like."

Mike replies: Geoff, thank you! That solves a mystery. It fits what I saw perfectly—I saw one running against the snow of my hillside last winter. I've asked several locals about it and hadn't come up with a satisfactory identification because I just didn't get that good a look. All I knew for sure was that it wasn't any animal I was familiar with.  And the tracks I've found that I couldn't identify definitely match the track of the fisher. Thanks!

robert mckeen: "Lovely postcard, is it a hummingbird? Now to football or footie, soccer, fields are called pitches and can vary in size within certain boundaries. The largest in the Premier League is Brighton 105 x 69 metres, smallest is Wolverhampton at 100 x 64 metres. Liverpool's is 101 x 68 metres."