The Online Photographer

More on Those $6,000 and $7,000 Cameras

ChrisC wrote, yesterday: "I’m not sure if this is something you have already posted about, but to add to your comments on economics: Boots Theory.

Cool.

Here's The Boots Theory, in case you don't want to follow that link: "The boots theory comes from a passage of the 1993 novel Men at Arms [by the late Sir Terry Pratchett], the second novel to focus on the City Watch, in which he muses about his experiences of poverty as compared to his fiancée Lady Sybil Ramkin's conception of poverty:

The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles. But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet. This was the Captain Samuel Vimes "Boots" theory of socioeconomic unfairness.

I've never heard of "Boots Theory" per se (thanks for that) but I've written about that very thing, for instance in the first paragraphs of this post from 2015. Three points by way of commentary: I heard once that the MacArthur of the MacArthur "genius" grants made his fortune in insurance, but that he self-insured his own cars. It might be apocryphal that he said "insurance is a ripoff" by way of explaining why. Next point, consider that my father, when we moved to Washington, D.C. in the 1970s so he could work for NASA, paid $200k for our house in Maryland just across the D.C. border (Zillow "Zestimates" its current value at 11 times[!] that), and he paid cash. (He was Dave Ramsey before Dave Ramsey was Dave Ramsey.) Then consider that for most middle-class people, the no. 1 or no. 2 expense of their entire lives is the interest on their house. As I said in that 2015 post, "the reality of having no money is that it costs more. Not 'more' in any diffuse general sense, taking into account intangibles like limitations on life choices and personal satisfaction: it just costs more in plain ol' money." The third point: my grandfather, an investment banker whose lifestyle I like to semi-humorously describe as "Downton Abbey at one-quarter scale," used to say you should "buy the best." When I was a young teenager, I asked him why, and he said "if you buy the best you only have to buy it once." There's Boots Theory right there...

...And a bit of advice I probably should have followed when it came to cameras!

And believe me, I've often thought about what might have been. I actually wrote a manifesto-style little essay in the 1980s declaring that I wanted to be like Eugene Atget, and continue doggedly with one technique for my whole life, except in my case it would have been what I called my "Photo 101 technique": a 35mm camera, fast B&W film, and smallish prints reproducing the whole negative out to the blackline:

Photo-101-technique prints. Paper size is 11x14 inches.

At the time I couldn't even image how such an ordinary technique would be come obsolescent, although of course now it has. So what might my life have been like if I had stretched for that out-of-reach M6 at Industrial Photo off the beltway in Maryland back in 1984, and then kept using it and actually fulfilled my little manifesto? I might still have it today, and be using a newer one or an M7 or something. Would I still be at it?

If I had bought an M6 and three lenses back then and kept using it, I would have been way ahead of where I actually am. I can't estimate how much I've wasted spent on cameras since then, but $20,000 is way too low an estimate.

Of course, it's a moot point, because I turned out to be a writer—a magazine/Web writer—rather than (primarily) a photographer. I didn't know that's what was going to happen, at the time. (Funny, though, I still consider "Photo-101 style" B&W my "real" work. I've never been able to completely "own" digital inkjet prints in color as being wholly "me.")

My point here is smaller than you think
And an answer to Thom and everyone else who suggests used gear: it's been my observation that a certain subset of hobbyists prefers used gear, probably because it's a financial win: it's cheaper, still useful, and satisfies an urge for thrift that's important to them. But by "hobbyist" I certainly didn't mean "rank beginner." They're not hobbyists. Yet. A hobbyist would more likely be someone who already has a number of older cameras (the older they are, the older their old cameras). I would counter the "buy used" approach with another subset you're very familiar with: those who are so eager to own the latest thing that they'll discard superseded models that are still in great condition and still have a lot of life left in them. (Y'all know who you are. Haven't we all done it at least once or twice?) The ones who own an X-Pro2 and just have to have an X-Pro3 as soon as it appears. That's a big group too.

I won't ask Thom how many times in his career he himself has been satisfied to buy a 5-year-old camera for his professional and personal work. It's not a fair question, as I well know, because we have to write about the newest gear and we need to be familiar with it, he much more than I.

Several readers took me to task for creating a litany of "apex" cameras and not considering the reasonably-priced alternatives that are good enough. D B wrote: "Re: the question 'are hobbyists being priced out of the hobby,' I agree with Ken T.: you (we) are not. What the heck do you (we) need a Z9, A1, or GFX 100S for?"

But that's an interesting aspect of this: how can an enthusiast site survive if it doesn't consider the best gear in the field at least occasionally? But it's been getting sort of pointless. If I write about a $6,000 camera body, the portion of readers with a real interest in the product is just so small, for the simple reason that most of them would not spend that much on a camera even if they can. I know I wouldn't. Some of you would read it anyway and might even enjoy it, but, well, there's that "what has this got to do with me" reaction that I worry about, too. The equation has gotten more...fraught, let's say.

All I was really saying with the post is that the trend to five- and six-thousand dollar camera bodies might be putting a damper on enthusiast participation in the hobby, merely because those prices close off what is conventionally considered to be the most interesting and most desirable end of the market to a greater proportion of us—that is, the total set of "all hobbyists" or all enthusiasts. I do think that's true to some extent, notwithstanding a.) those who don't desire the apex cameras, b.) those who are satisfied to buy five-year old cameras, and c.) the existence of capable intermediate-priced models. (I'm also saying that those models wouldn't exist at all if we lived in a more egalitarian society, but that's just theoretical musing.)

As John Camp wrote, "Your complaints are reflected in virtually every hobby that equipment freaks have come to dominate—hi-fi, photography, music, horse competitions, computer gaming, sporty cars. But at the extremes, except perhaps for a very, very tiny professional minority, it's all Veblen."

Anyway, I don't mind if you disagree with me. It was actually a smaller point than many people took it to be. It's just a bit of a practical problem for me these days, that's all—since I ought to be making smart decisions about what to write about.

Mike

Book o' the Week

 All About Saul Leiter. The Amazon writeup for this book says "Photography lovers the world over are now embracing Saul Leiter"—and oh boy, is that ever true of me—"who has enjoyed a remarkable revival since fading into relative obscurity in the 1980s." One of my favorite photographers. Beautiful photopoems. Saul's Early Color (which you can still get for around $300) was one of our all-time bestselling book links. (I bought two, one to thumb and one to not touch!)

This book link is a portal to Amazon.

Link to B&H

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:

Nick: "When I started reading about cameras and photography in earnest, ca. 2009, I coveted the near-top models: Not the huge, pro-grade cameras, but the higher-end enthusiast cameras, like the Nikon D70. I talked myself down a bit ('for the time being,' I said) and bought into Micro 4/3 for a fraction of the price. I figured I'd sell it and get a 'real' enthusiast camera in a couple of years.

"Now, 13 years later, my income is higher, but I've stopped reading gear sites almost entirely. I just made my first gear purchase since the pandemic started: A $320 used OM-D E-M10 Mark II to use as a second body. My last purchase before that? A $320 used OM-D E-M10 Mark II to replace a Mark I that died a week before a scheduled trip to Japan. I make a good bit more now (even inflation-adjusted) than I did then, but between the rapidly increasing prices of enthusiast gear and my contentment with what I had on hand, my covetousness dwindled to almost nothing and my priorities shifted. My (still limited) disposable income goes to getting to new places to take cool photos (see above about the trip to Japan), not on the gear with which to take them. From my point of view, the lack of focus around here on gear, especially stratospherically-priced gear, is definitely a feature, not a bug."

Mike replies: I'll tell you what else pertains: consistency. Once you've done 13 years of Micro 4/3, you might want your new pictures to continue to look like your old ones. I understand this isn't always the case; sometimes people are eager to make a break and create work that has a new look. But sometimes we don't want that.

Stephen S.: "I have owned thirty Micro 4/3 camera bodies, from the bottom of the range to the top, all purchased used. Regardless of how much they were used (going by shutter count and cosmetics,) the factor that most determined which ones would fail was how much they originally cost. The lower-end cameras were far more likely to have shutter failure, command dials that didn't respond, broken battery doors, and LCD screens that blanked out, sometimes at varying degrees of tilt. It seems to me some corners were cut in their design, in order to cut costs. When they were new, it may have had made sense to save several hundred dollars by buying a lower-end camera that could produce the same images, even if it was lacking a few features. However, if buying older gear used, it now only costs a little bit more for the higher-end models, and in my experience they are far more reliable. With warranties expired, and in some cases even paid repairs completely unavailable, this is an even more important factor."

MIKE: "Boots Theory? So true, but instead upgrade to Furniture Theory. Do we imagine that the rich have to go out every two or three years to replace their IKEA furniture? Or do we conjecture that the family probably hasn't bought a new table in centuries, not since great great great great (you get the idea) grandfather bought the Chippendale table that's still in the dining room. My Dad always said the Rich live cheap."

David Lobato: "Several years ago there was an article about tripods. Photographers often bought cheap ones to start. Then when its limitations arose they bought an incrementally better tripod, and so on. Turned out that it was much more cost effective to initially buy an expensive tripod."

Mike replies: It's about the only thing I've done right. I bought a very expensive Gitzo Studex in maybe 1982, used it for 30 years, then replaced it with a very expensive carbon fiber Gitzo Mountaineer which I'm sure is my last tripod.

Are Hobbyists Being Priced Out of the Hobby?

Cameras and equipment have pretty much always been expensive to me. I caught the photo bug in 1980 (it's not contagious but it hits you hard when you get it), and by 1984 I was researching my first* camera purchase. I was taking classes at the University of Maryland for a semester, including a fantastic class on optics which I took because of my photography interest.

Midway through my journey home from College Park there was a large camera store just inside Washington's Beltway. So I'd stop off a couple of times a week after classes, kicking tires endlessly while befriending the countermen. They were very indulgent, probably because they were just as geeky about cameras as I was.

I almost bought a Leica M4-P (the M6 was new and out of the question because of its high price—you could tell because all the discount ads in the back of the big photo magazines said, "Leica M6—Call!"), but decided against it. The reason was that I could only afford a 50mm for it, and couldn't foresee being able to purchase the other two lenses to round out a conventional set of wide, normal, and tele. I mean, c'mon, just the 50mm ƒ/2 Summicron already cost $290! (It was $250 from the mail-order discount sellers. 1984's $290 adjusted for inflation would be $807, which gives you a better sense of why I thought it was at the outer border of reasonable for an ƒ/2 normal lens back in that Orwellian year.) That was bad enough, but a 90mm Elmarit was $450 and a 35mm Summicron was over $500.

Well over $900 for only two more Leica lenses?! Crazy, man. I decided to become a Zeiss guy instead, and bought a Contax.

The have-too-muches and the have-not-enoughs
America's golden years, according to Thomas Piketty, were 1950–1980. Now, the top 10% have it better than ever (actually, the higher you go in the top 10% the better they have it, all the way up to no. 1—it's like that cartoon of the successively larger fish about to eat each smaller fish), but for the less fortunate of the "vested" among the rest of us—the 50-through-70 percent, say—things are getting tight. (Tight being a relative thing, mind you.) As one writer put it, people are falling from the middle class to the lower class "like raindrops," and for most families it's getting more stressful to tread water.

And if you're in the bottom 50%, you're still better off than a third-world peasant. To be in the bottom 50% you have approximately a household income of $27k or less, or a net worth of $93k or less, whichever way you want to look at it. If you're in the bottom 50%, you share a measly 2.5% of the nation's wealth between all 165 million of you (most of it clustered at the higher end of your half), and the top 1%—1/50th your number—has fifteen times as much wealth as all of you put together. (You need a minimum net worth of $11.1 million to enter the bottom end of the 1%.) "Wealth inequality" is emphatically not just a campaign slogan. As if that weren't enough, the bottom 50% have been disproportionately hurt by the pandemic.

And if you're in the bottom 10%, heaven help you. You live hand-to-mouth, never save a dime, are beset by stress and insecurity of several sorts in that you can be wrecked by a single unforeseen expense, and have a negative net worth—you owe more than you own. You're teetering on the edge of disaster almost all the time—and that's only if it hasn't already befallen you. Here's Orwell's classic book about that (I mean Down and Out in Paris and London), with many memorable scenes (you can't forget the account of the fancy restaurant, although you might want to!), and here's a similarly enlightening (and entertaining, I have to admit) newer one.

This ever-worsening situation is manifesting itself in a variety of ways. The "average" full-time worker can no longer afford the "average" new car, for instance—so competition for used cars is stiff and they're expensive now too. Can't win. The housing supply is tight, house prices have skyrocketed, and mortgage rates are rising, so it's getting more and more difficult for most people to simply move, whether you want to move for a job or because of changing housing needs (kids are coming, kids are grown and gone, you want space for your pool table, etc.). It's particularly difficult to move to certain more desirable areas, because prices in most such places are disproportionately so much higher. And there's never been more difference in the fortunes of those who are already vested in a house and those who haven't bought one yet. I know a very frustrated young couple in California, new parents, who are looking at "crappy" houses that cost up to a million dollars. The woman has a very specialized job, unfortunately tying them to a very exclusive area.

Inevitably, the economy has been bifurcating—you've heard of the "two economies." A "haves" economy for the rich and a "have-nots" economy for everyone else. For the have-nots, products, services, and opportunities are all getting worse, because there's no longer enough money in it to bother about. So you have "food deserts" (whole communities with no grocery stores), people who have no choice but to quit work to care for special needs kids or aged relatives, or predatory lending and banking practices targeting the poor ("it costs more to be poor" as I used to say). For the haves, opulence and excess are getting more and more extreme, as the supply side competes for fatter sales from smaller numbers of customers. So you see things like million-dollar-plus cars, multi-million-dollar city condos that sit vacant most of the year because their owners split their time between many different homes, and million-dollar-plus teardowns (and, ahem, $12.4 million being paid for one old Man Ray print). This is just a symptom of what one writer called "too much capital sloshing around the world," and what other commentators call "money in search of meaning." It's really the same problem as either the old European aristocracies, or third-world countries like Egypt that have simply given in to having societies composed of tiny, prosperous oligarchies controlling, and having to be protected from, a mass of ordinary citizens who subsist in grinding poverty and can barely get by.

In our little backwater it ain't that bad
We've been seeing the echoes of this in our camera market in recent years. Our market has only one true Veblen goods supplier—Leica, although many ardent, ambitious, and accomplished photographers also use them for real work—but many companies seem to be concentrating on high-end offerings that are priced higher than ever. The strategy changed when the camera market changed from growth to negative growth. That Leica 50mm Summicron I thought was at least within the ballpark of reasonable at $290 is now two different lenses: a garden variety six-element double-Gauss design for poor people—very plain-Jane lens, really—that costs $2,900, and a more proper one priced at $9,400 to keep the hoi polloi off the grounds. Release the hounds!

But consider Tom Burke's Featured Comment in the previous post. He wrote, "In the UK the Z7II retails for a shade under £3,000, and that lens adds another £1,000+. Far too much for my budget these days. And of course if you want the ƒ/2.8 zooms, you need to take a deep breath...call it £7k for the set." Don't we all need to take a deep breath, no matter what we yearn for? The Leica SL2 is $7,000. The Sony A1 is $6,500. The Canon R3 is $6,000. The Nikon Z9 with adapter is $5,700. The Panasonic S1R is $3,700. The 100-MP Fujifilm GFX 100S medium-format camera, which B&H says is selling strongly, is $6,000. Gulp, and gulp.

Are hobbyists being priced out of the hobby?

It just makes me wonder. It feels like cameras have gotten too expensive for me again. When I look back, that might not really be true; as I said at this beginning of this post, it's really always been the case that the gear has been a stretch for me, for one reason because my wishes expand to exceed my budget, whatever it may be. Or, my problem might be mainly my wimpy, unmanly, no-money-having, skinny-wallet self, and look no further. So maybe I'm not grasping this accurately.

Like many guys (I mean specifically males) of my generation (Generation Jones), I used to be way into stereos. But I was finally done in by the relentless pressure of the enthusiast magazines toward more and more expensive equipment. In about 2007 or so, I was reading an article about a $40,000 power amp in an issue of either Stereophile or The Absolute Sound, I forget which. When I got curious and checked, there were two more articles in that issue reviewing single components (of which you need three to a dozen to make a system) that each retailed for multiple tens of thousands of dollars each. At which point I just thought, "what has this got to do with me?" That was the sunset for me—haven't read either of those publications in years (and I wish I had an easy way to get rid of all the equipment in the basement).

I no longer read articles about so-called "supercars," either. I still would like another Miata someday, I will not lie. But why should I care about exotic bespoke supercars that go 200 miles per hour? They just have nothing to do with me, that's all. They're mostly for the jejune offspring of the superrich to use to show off, endanger pedestrians, and wreck without a care.

So I'm a little worried—photography has always been one of my "things," but there it is again—a $9,400 manual-focus normal lens is that $40,000 power amp again. It's got nothing to do with me. And $290 to $9,400 is a much bigger journey than can be justified by any rational rationale. Even across 38 years. Sets off this little alarm in my head: uh-oh.

Steal
Good thing I've still got my trusty current go-to, the Sigma 30mm (45mm-e on APS-C, i.e., a normal), which is a pleasing lens to my tastes. It costs $264, right in the neighborhood of the Summicron from 1984 in constant real dollars. Adjusted for inflation ($95), a steal. And should you want the classic trio of wide, normal, and tele, that's available too.

So I'm okay. For now.

Mike

*My father had given me a Konica T3 for my 16th birthday—thanks Dad—and I used that on and off for 11 years, until 1984.

Book o' the Week

 All About Saul Leiter. The Amazon writeup for this book says "Photography lovers the world over are now embracing Saul Leiter"—and oh boy, is that ever true of me—"who has enjoyed a remarkable revival since fading into relative obscurity in the 1980s." One of my favorite photographers. Beautiful photopoems. Saul's Early Color (which you can still get for around $300) was one of our all-time bestselling book links. (I bought two, one to thumb and one to not touch!)

This book link is a portal to Amazon.

Link to B&H

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 (partial comment): "Forget the income inequality thesis, Mike. If it really applied to the photo hobby there’d be very few pictures on Facebook, Instagram, Flickr, etc. This is absolutely the golden age for the photography hobby, whether you're of modest means or wealthy."

[The full text of partial comments can be seen in the full Comments section, accessible in the footer of each post. —Ed.]

Thomas Walsh: "Mike, I live in San Diego where 'crappy houses' do sell for $1,000,000. I am dismayed at the inequality that has resulted in a myriad of tent cities of the homeless. But, most distressing is the plight of children who are food insecure in a country where a meal at an elite restaurant or the price of many camera lenses could easily feed entire families for a week or longer. Yeats had it right, '...the centre cannot hold....' How can it?"

Mike replies: That poem is eerily prescient. Has haunted me for years.

D Ross: "If you are even a semi-serious hobbyist, you almost certainly have a camera, right now, that is good enough. More than good enough. It might be time to double down on the images themselves, rather than the gear. And, more than ever before, make images to please yourself, not others.

"If this sounds a little preachy, I'm preaching to myself as much as to anyone else. GAS never really goes away. You just try to keep it under control."

John Krumm: "So many people are feeling it. We just had a friend with a big family (four kids and a husband) evicted from her rental house of eight years because the owner wanted to cash in. They barely were able to make it out in time, juggling storage rentals, a U-Haul, a temporary stay, and a new, much smaller rental. She has a halfway decent income, and is the primary earner. In the decades you describe they would be homeowners and comfortable, but not today.

"By the way, another friend of ours just gave us a very, very good deal on a 2000 Miata, which my wife has always wanted. One of the first things we noticed, besides what a blast the car was, was how much closer we felt to downtown corner panhandlers as we turned, less able to insulate ourselves and avoid eye contact. Maybe that's good. It's time to do something. I was in the homeless shelter last week, dropping off a food donation after an event, and the thought that came to my mind was, this is the best we can do?"

Trevor Johnson: "I think you're wrong; let me explain. In 1976, for my 21st birthday, my father very kindly bought me a new Olympus OM-1n body, and I chose two used but mint OM lenses, the 35mm ƒ/2.8 and 100mm ƒ/2.8, to go with it. Total cost then, £290, and adjusted for inflation, £2,250. Today, I can buy a Canon RP body, a Canon 35mm ƒ/2 and Canon 85mm ƒ/2 IS lenses, all new, for £2,168.10, from Wex photographic.

"Leica M are very expensive new, but you don't need one to make great images. And I have used that Canon combination on a free loan and very, very good it is."

Crabby Umbo (partial comment): "I absolutely believe that most people are being priced out of equipment replacement or upgrade. At least, pros are. As a 'real pro,' not an engineer or business exec playing at photography, I can tell you in the last moments of my corporate career, before I decided to kill the struggle and retire, I was being paid the exact dollar amount managing an in-house corporate studio I was making 30 years before at a different one. Back then, it was OK money. A few years ago, it was not good money at all. You would have not been able to save enough to fund going into the freelance business. In addition, some of the best freelance photographers I knew, with good portfolios and business, spent the last 10 years of their careers making less and less, until they had to drop out and find employment in other industries. You cannot just extrapolate the cost of something against what it is today, you also have to extrapolate your income. I did the numbers one time and figured that getting a new Fuji 50-megapixel medium-format body and a few lenses might be about what I paid for my Hasselblad set up in 1985 when adjusted for inflation, But, I was clearing double the money in 1985 as I did ten years ago, and that was not extrapolated. When you worked the numbers, it meant that my income ten years ago had the buying power a quarter of what it did in 1985!"

Nigel Voak (partial comment): " I share your opinion concerning the world of HiFi. The editorial policy of reviewing extremely expensive if not overpriced gear, just makes the average reader feel inadequate after a while, and most give up reading these magazines and, perhaps brainwashed into thinking their gear is just inadequate, lose interest in HiFi and just give up and join the Spotify crew.

"Are we going the same way with cameras, but in a very different way? The reviews gloat over ever increasing frame rates and focus modes for trains, birds and such. The keyboard warriors on DPR forums try to convince themselves and everybody else that without all this stuff in the most expensive models, you just cannot take decent pictures. I fell like a pauper reading some of the posts there where thousands of Euros/Dollars are spent to get those 'Ducks in Flight' shots down at the local park with the latest gear and bazooka lenses. Who knows where we are going in our little world of photography."

Mike replies: You know you're not supposed to criticize the ducks-in-flight shots...they're just test shots. (Snarkily says the guy who has published hundreds of test shots himself.)

Thom Hogan: "Wait, didn't you just build a pool hall for your hobby?  ;~)

"But the simple answer is no. The reason is that you're looking a new prices. Look at the used prices. If you really wanted to be a serious photography hobbyist, there's a huge inventory of relatively low cost, highly competent, gear available. This is also the answer to the question I keep getting ("Q: Don't the camera makers have to have entry-level models?"). As long as good used gear is available at low prices, it's easy enough for someone to get started."

Matthew: "As an old guy who leans on the counter at a camera store, it's routine to see twenty-year-olds coming in with 40-year-old cameras and spending $30–50 to buy, process, and scan a roll of film. But what other option is there for 'a real camera' when an unsatisfying digital compact costs $1,000, and a 'starter' interchangeable-lens camera is double that? There are plenty of good and interesting reasons why this is a good time to be using film. (I'm a B&W guy, myself.) But new photographers being priced out of the camera market has to be considered as part of the reason for film's renaissance."

ChrisC: "I’m not sure if this is something you have already posted about, but to add to your comments on economics: Boots Theory.

"As for being priced out of photography, perhaps it is more a case of prices returning to their past levels, and we have just been lucky to have lived through the period where cameras became consumer electronics and benefited heavily from Moores Law and the real price drops of many similar products. In fact the real price drops in consumer electronic products are part of the reason we get told inflation is low despite seeing grocery prices rising regularly."

Stan Makes the Big Time

Longtime TOP reader and frequent commenter Stan Banos, who comments here as Stan B., is the subject of a new article on A Photo Editor. Impressive.

You might recognize Stan's "Red" photo from our "It Must Be Color" Baker's dozen.

And, you can see/buy the book here.

Congratulations Stan!

Mike

Book o' the Week

 All About Saul Leiter. The Amazon writeup for this book says "Photography lovers the world over are now embracing Saul Leiter"—and is that ever true of me—"who has enjoyed a remarkable revival since fading into relative obscurity in the 1980s." One of my favorite photographers. Beautiful photopoems. Saul's Early Color (which you can still get for around $300) was one of our all-time bestselling book links. (I bought two, one to thumb and one to not touch!)

This book link is a portal to Amazon.

Link to B&H

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:

The Nikon Z7II, UFOs, and Icebreakers

Dave Levingston showed up to visit a few days ago. He's a reader from Ohio who has an uncommon ability to pursue dedicated photographic projects. One is environmental nudes; he was on his way back from Maine (to his wife—he's happily married) where he reunited with the model of one of his famous pictures 20 years after the original photo was made.

He tells me, "my models seldom get paid. Most are volunteers. I try to make sure they don’t have any costs involved with shooting with me. I give them gas money and buy lunch, etc. But I’m serious about sharing the credit for the work. The models get all the photos and full rights to use them. I share copyright. I consider them co-creators of the photos we make together. It’s just a manifestation of the old hippie in me."

Dave Levingston

You might remember that in his work life, Dave was a civilian Public Affairs official for the Air Force. An interesting part of his purview was that if you called Wright-Patterson AFB looking for information about UFOs, Dave was a guy you might end up talking to.

Dave has a new project he's gearing up to start. He's going to be documenting his hometown, Perryton, Ohio, where he grew up seven decades ago. As a photo-historical note, "Perryton is only a few miles from another tiny town, West Carlisle, where Clarence H. White, Sr. grew up. His family moved to Newark, the 'big town' about 15 miles away, when he was a teenager."

Perryton town has only 92 residents and he hopes to photograph as many of them as he can. He'd like to photograph all of them, but he has enough experience to expect that, inevitably, some people will balk and refuse to cooperate. So it goes.

Mighty nice Nikon
He'll be doing the new project with a Nikon Z7 Mark II, a 45.7-MP full-frame body. Dave started with Nikon in 1968 with a Nikon F and stayed with them till he got frustrated waiting for mirrorless, when he switched to Micro 4/3. So now he's back with Nikon, although he says he's not giving up his Micro 4/3 gear, which he loves.

He reported only two downsides to his Z7 II, apart from the time he spent waiting for the backordered 24–120mm lens: first, it's too complicated, such that he doesn't quite feel comfortable with it, or trusting of it, quite yet; and second, that with camera and lens he's noticed pronounced diffraction for the first time in his experience. He avoids ƒ/16 and ƒ/22 with the combination. You can see some samples of this at the blog at his website.

Believe it or not—I know they've been out since 2018—but I have never seen or held any Nikon Z-series camera before.

I was pleasantly impressed. Ergonomically it fit my hand like a glove and the materials felt "warm" and hand-friendly (in contrast to the Sony A7 III, which I felt had unpleasant surfaces and was awkward to hold), and the body seemed to be decently light (615 g, 21.7 oz.). The viewfinder gets out of the way, and the controls are well placed as far as I could tell.

But the thing that really impressed me—I do know this is "old hat" to those of you who have been following the lineup more closely—is the marvelous "third ring." Well, it's the third ring on Dave's zoom, but you can assign different functions to the focus-by-wire ring even on the primes. Dave had his camera set up so that the third ring, which on his lens is the one closest to the camera body, controls exposure compensation (EC).

Now, I know not everybody chooses to shoot this way, but for many years my preference has been to use EC to fine-tune exposure. On many mirrorless cameras you can choose to see the effects in the electronic viewfinder (EVF). (On film cameras, you just had to guess, based on experience.) Well, Dave had his Nikon set up to use the third ring for EC. It was, in a word, marvelous.

Setting EC is the thing I like least, by far, on the Fuji X-H1. I liked my original X-T1 because of the nice dedicated EC dial, but the X-H1 turned that plus into a distinct minus. The fiddly, balky, inconvenient EC setting on the X-H1 makes EC an afterthought and, for me, a continuing annoyance.

But Dave's Nikon? Best EC control ever, in my experience of cameras. It would be worth switching for. (Time for Odysseus to tie himself to the mast again, I guess.)

Pictures as icebreakers
After dinner we walked down to the waterfront in Hammondsport, where I idly made a pano as we were standing there:

That's only about a fifth of the length of our long, skinny lake (I live about a long Aaron Rodgers pass from the shore, 14 miles or so north of where this picture was taken). A while later, when it had gotten darker, a couple came walking along and passed us. While the woman went on down the wharf to explore, the man helpfully improved my composition by walking into my earlier picture:

I kind of liked it on the phone screen, so I just asked the man if he'd like to have it. I sent it to his phone. Turns out his name is Joshua and he's from New York City, where he's a political science professor at a small college. His wife, Erin, who soon joined us, is a physician's assistant. She regaled us with horror stories of the pandemic, which was dire in New York in the early days. They met in California. We ended up talking for quite a long time before the encroaching darkness brought an end to the conversation. Interesting, intelligent, likable folks.

So pictures can be icebreakers! I like to engage strangers in conversation, but I've found it works better when I'm with someone. When I'm alone, people seem to be too wary, or maybe "leery" is the word. There's something about being with a friend that reassures people that you're okay, and loosens them up a bit. If I were photographing my old hometown, I'd hire a high school girl to be my assistant. She wouldn't actually have to do much of anything. People are just more relaxed if they can see that someone else finds you trustworthy.

Maybe I just look creepy? That's a possibility too I guess. I've learned on Zoom that when my face is at rest, I look stern. Here I am with Dave's Z7II:

Another example of that honorable old genre we all have examples of, "the photo friend across the dining table." (I am no longer adding to a different but similar genre, "test shots of camera store counterpeople.")

Dave made it back to Ohio, and Emily, without incident.

Mike

Book o' the Week

 All About Saul Leiter. The Amazon writeup for this book says "Photography lovers the world over are now embracing Saul Leiter"—and oh boy, is that ever true of me—"who has enjoyed a remarkable revival since fading into relative obscurity in the 1980s." One of my favorite photographers. Beautiful photopoems. Saul's Early Color (which you can still get for around $300) was one of our all-time bestselling book links. (I bought two, one to thumb and one to not touch!)

This book link is a portal to Amazon.

Link to B&H

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: "A month or so ago I bought a Z6 just to try it, lightly used and a good deal. Handling wise, I think it's my favorite mirrorless, more like a compact DSLR, with good build quality and a clear viewfinder. Fits me just right. Plus, the IBIS seems a little better than my Fuji IBIS, which is surprising. It's a keeper. And the Z 50mm ƒ/1.8 S I bought for it is one of the sharpest lenses I've used. I'm also on the waiting list for the 24–120mm."

Tom Burke: "I'm sure that Nikon is a fine camera—all these mirrorless cameras are—but it's not small, is it? Especially with that lens. I checked some weights earlier today: 700+ grams for the body, and 630+ grams for the lens, making about 1.35 kg. That's approaching three pounds.

"And talking of pounds, they're not cheap either, are they? In the UK the Z7II retails for a shade under £3,000, and that lens adds another £1,000+. Far too much for my budget these days. And of course if you want the ƒ/2.8 zooms, you need to take a deep breath...the standard trio (14–24mm, 24–70mm, and 70–200mm) are each over £2,000—call it £7k for the set. I was thinking of putting my Canon 90D up on eBay recently, but I suspect the announcement of Canon's EOS R10 and EOS R7 APS-C mirrorless cameras a week or so ago will have eviscerated secondhand values for the DSLRs, so I might as well hang on to it.

"But more and more I'm using the iPhone. I took the 90D to Dubai in February and didn't take it out of the hotel room, whereas the iPhone got a lot of photographic use."

Camera Face

I know, pool, but this isn't a pool post. Bear with me a sec...

Take a look at just the first fifteen seconds of this match between Josh Filler and FSR. When the video opens we see the stills photographer set up and ready, with just a few seconds to get his "grip and grin." Watch how the competitors perform their roles by putting on "camera faces," as they've done many times before, and then taking them right off again. Josh Filler in particular, as a child phenom who transitioned to major champion, is practiced at this—even though he's only 24, he's been in many finals.

I don't know, it just struck me as something you try to avoid when taking more personal pictures of people. Although it's perfectly appropriate in the circumstances. My mother had a distinct "camera face" that she put on when the camera was pointed at her.

Compare that to, say, Braylen Dion's portrait of sculptor Simone Leigh in The New Yorker. The picture appears to be casual and almost offhand, which I tend to like. The portrait had me studying her face for clues to her personality. Simone's expression is not a camera face.

Braylen's portrait (here's a great shot at his website) reminds me of a tip from a famous photographer I read many years ago—I think it was Brassai, although I'm not sure. (Ten years ago I would've remembered where I read it.) What he said was something about trying to steal an exposure of his subjects "in between" the faces they put on for the camera, so that their real selves could come through.

I might not know where I read it, but I've always remembered the thought.

Mike

Book o' the Week

 All About Saul Leiter. The Amazon writeup for this book says "Photography lovers the world over are now embracing Saul Leiter"—and oh boy, is that ever true of me—"who has enjoyed a remarkable revival since fading into relative obscurity in the 1980s." One of my favorite photographers. Beautiful photopoems. Saul's Early Color (which you can still get for around $300) was one of our all-time bestselling book links. (I bought two, one to thumb and one to not touch!)

This book link is a portal to Amazon.

Link to B&H

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:

Peter Conway: "At the risk of turning this political, which is not at all my intent, I've always felt that Donald Trump was the unhappiest president in my lifetime. Sure, you could find thousands of photos of him smiling, but they all looked like plastic, 'put-on' smiles, just like in the video. Then one day I came across this article in The New York Times, with a picture of Trump playing catch with Mariano Rivera, and it struck me that this was the first picture I had ever seen of him smiling, where he appeared to be genuinely enjoying himself. In the end it did nothing to change my opinion of him, but still, on some level, it was nice to see someone who never really seemed to show joy, appear to be happy in the moment, with no camera face."

Dave Richardson: "This post showed up in my Apple News feed. That’s two of your articles there in the last couple of weeks."

Mike replies: Cool.

David Glos: "Once again, you have sent me into a beautiful rabbit hole. Despite a strong affinity towards art, I don't follow the modern art world to any degree. But, that article was a beautiful portrait of a powerful force of humanity, and stirred a longing to seek out the work out of Ms. Leigh.

"I was also able to find the image mocking Oscar Wilde that Simone is making a tableau of. See here. Looking forward to her sculptural interpretation of the scene."

Bill Poole: "It's hard to escape the notion that the Braylen Dion photo is intended as a triple portrait of the sculptor with the two sculpted heads. Brilliant environmental portraiture."

Patrick J Dodds: "Resting Bitch Face? Welcome to the club."

Mike replies: I'll link to the original video, since it's such a classic,—featuring Milana Vayntrub, who was "Lily" in the AT&T commercials. (You can tell I haven't had a TV recently—even my TV commercial references are outdated.)

TC: "It's an interesting question, and I've been contemplating writing an article on it. From a filmmaking standpoint, some of the most 'authentic' reaction shots I got in a feature I directed came from actors in between takes."

A History of Our Baker's Dozens

I should write introductions to our "big" posts here. I sometimes forget that not everyone has been reading regularly since George W. Bush was President!

So, to explain: the "Baker's Dozens" are small virtual group shows here on The Online Photographer. I ask for submissions on some theme or other, readers send submissions, and then Yr. Hmbl. Ed. juries a presentation of a dozen pictures with one extra added for good measure.

Themes in the past have been:

"Smartphone Photographs," November 2017;

"Leica Lenses," also November 2017;

"Black and White," January 2018, with an extra post here;

"It Must Be Color," which attracted more than 300 submissions and was presented in three parts (Part I, Part II, and Part III), in May 2018, which also inspired a related post, "Yellow Over Dark Blue" (the title of a Mark Rothko painting). We also had some discussion over whether Jan Kwarnmark's "Emma" (inset) actually needed to be in color to work. You can see some B&W conversions in the Featured Comments to Part I, and I discuss some other readers' opinions in this post;

"Yellow," June 2018, with a separate post for comments;

"In the Museum," July 2021;

"Grandkids," September 2021;

"Objects," April 2022; 

And "Camera," below.

I'm already planning the next one.

Mike

Book o' the Week

 All About Saul Leiter. The Amazon writeup for this book says "Photography lovers the world over are now embracing Saul Leiter"—and oh boy, is that ever true of me—"who has enjoyed a remarkable revival since fading into relative obscurity in the 1980s." One of my favorite photographers. Beautiful photopoems. Saul's Early Color (which you can still get for around $300) was one of our all-time bestselling book links. (I bought two, one to thumb and one to not touch!)

This book link is a portal to Amazon.

Link to B&H

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:

Baker's Dozen: Camera(s)

[Dedicated to the memory of Jeffrey Goggin,
a.k.a. JG, camera-builder extraordinaire.]

-

Carsten Bockermann

"I'm from Bonn, Germany. Here's my website.

"When I received this custom-made camera strap from Hyperion, it immediately occurred to me that I needed to photograph it on my Fuji X100F, wearing a bowtie in matching red."

Bob Rosinsky

"The posterior of my erstwhile Olympus E-M5 Mark II (it was a great camera). The photo was taken with an Olympus E-M1 in 2015 at Siesta Key beach in Sarasota, Florida."

"I currently live in Boulder County, Colorado. I do not miss the ocean."

Pal Kossowski

"I live on the outskirts of Tokyo.

"I always carry a small portable camera with me to capture these unexpected and fleeting moments as they may play in front of our eyes. They later serve as mental remainders…tacks on the map of time…this one being a self-portrait taken in a harsh light with a Nikon 1 camera and a 10mm pancake lens back in 2013…but I still remember the exact place I took this picture while walking some short distance to a car parking after Sunday’s lunch at Denny's."

Mark Hobson

"I live the Adirondack Park near Lake Placid, New York, USA. My web address is: lifesquared.squarespace.com.

"a r g o f l e x Seventy-five—A picture of the making of a picture from the picture maker's point of view."

Richard F. Man

"I live in Palo Alto, California.

"The short version of the story is that our car had a catastrophic failure and fire consumed the car in minutes. No one was hurt but I left my Leica M9 and the iPhone 10 in the car. More photos and a bit more detail at my website. The Summilux was my first and favorite Leica lens. I doubt I can afford to buy another one.

"While I was cleaning whatever is left of the camera, I made up fictional sales descriptions:

My conservative rating for this camera is near mint. A CLA will make this back into a formidable shooting machine.

This M9 has slight sensor corrosion, but Leica should be able to replace it for free.

The Summilux 35mm produces lovely images with great bokeh. Slight coating damage but that adds dreamy signatures to your images.

The shutter curtain is rated for 200,000 actuations and is as precise as when it left the factory 12 years ago.

"Taken with a Hasselblad 203FE with CFV II 50C digital back."

T.C. Lin

"I'm from Taipei, Taiwan.

"A Leica M3 I borrowed from a friend, c. 2008. I was experimenting with Sigma's new DP1 at the time, and took a shot of the Leica on my office desk in the afternoon light. Always loved the Sigma's rendering, even if the camera was frustrating to use."

Irene Burnes (submitted by Terry Burnes)

"I live in Gardnerville, Nevada, USA. Here's my website.

"This is a self portrait taken by my mother Irene with her Speed Graphic in the 1940s. My parents met at Lowry Air Force Base in Denver, Colorado, during WWII, where my father was an Air Force photography instructor and my mother was a civilian student of his, having come there from her home in North Dakota looking to help with the war effort. When my father was later deployed to the Pacific, my mother moved in with her parents, who had moved to San Diego. She started a photography business there that ended with the war, while also working at Convair Aircraft.

"My father was a good technical photographer but I think my mother had the creative gene. My interest in photography and whatever ability I have is directly attributable to them. There were always cameras, and occasionally darkrooms, in our homes."

Barry Prager

"From San Fancisco, California, USA.

"This photo was taken of a camera obscura which resides where San Francisco meets the Pacific Ocean near Seal Rock. There is a lens mounted in the top of the camera which rotates 360 degrees every six minutes and reflects down to a 150-inch mirror which is mounted to an observation table, which gives an oddly beautiful image.

"The photo was taken with a Sony NEX-7 and ƒ/3.5–5.6 18–200mm zoom lens which was converted to shoot in infrared."

Marco Alpert

"From California, USA. Here's my website.

"Shot in Central Park, New York City in pre-plague days."

Bruce Walker

"Where: Mississauga, Ontario, Canada. URL.

"Title: Portrait of a self-portrait.

"This studio shot is from a creative I did in 2015. Camera in the shot is a Kodak Junior Six-20 Series II. Shooting camera is the Pentax 645Z, and the lens is the wonderful 645 90mm ƒ/2.8 Macro at ƒ/11, 1/125th second, ISO 100. A single strobe is suspended directly overhead in a seven-foot silver umbrella. Model is Molly Fassbender."

Chris Bertram

"I'm in Bristol, United Kingdom.

"This is a shot of the inside of a camera, or, more exactly, an accidental camera obscura caused by my poor fitting of the curtains in our bedroom. We were astonished one morning by the patterns on the wall and then realised they were the inverted image of the houses opposite.

"My photography."

Willem Numan

"I'm in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

"This is at the annual market for all things camera-related in the town of Doesburg in the Netherlands. Image was made with an iPhone SE on 20-08-2017."

Gary Nylander

"I'm from Kelowna, British Columbia, Canada. Here's my website.

"This is my Tachihara 8x10 view camera with a Schneider 300mm ƒ/5.6 lens. I made this photo to illustrate some of the different film cameras (including digital) that I use as part of my overall work on my social media accounts. That's me under the dark cloth. I had set up my digital camera on a tripod with a set of low wattage lights, the exposure time was 25 seconds allowing me plenty of time to walk behind the view camera and stay as still as possible while the digital camera was recording the image.

"This is a camera that I have owned since 1991. The 300mm lens I bought a little earlier, around 1990. I wanted a short telephoto lens for my 4x5 view camera; I didn't realize when I bought this lens over the phone from a camera store in Vancouver, British Columbia, that it would be so big, and that it actually covered 8x10 format. Since I now had a lens that covered the larger format I figured I might as well get myself an 8x10 camera. Easier said than done in my part of Canada.

"The first 8x10 camera I purchased, which was used and also a Tachihara camera was through a mail-order ad in the back of a photo magazine for a camera dealer in California. It was listed as 'mint' and priced a couple of hundred dollars less than a new one. After several weeks it showed up at my door and I excitedly unboxed it only to find it was hardly mint, but well used. I sent it back and got my money back. Then I ordered the new one from a popular camera store in New York City. The new one was perfect of course.

"Although I don't use it that much these days, as I often use my more practical 4x5 camera or my digital camera, I still enjoy hauling out the big rig to make a few photographs now and then. It's fun to use and gives me a unique view of my subjects that I would not normally get with my other cameras."

-

And one more for good measure...

Rob de Löe

"I live in Guelph, Ontario, Canada.

"My friend Jeffrey, whose passing in early April of this year was noted in a column on TOP, was a person who viewed any object produced by someone else as a starting point for his projects, rather than an ending point. Over many years of conversations, I absorbed that ethos, and now run with it for my own camera building projects.

"This ugly creature is my enormously functional 'MAB Camera.' The foundation is a Mamiya 645 Auto Bellows (hence 'MAB'). I'm sure that Mamiya's engineers considered their product 'done.' For me, it was the starting point. My MAB Camera lacks the huge range of movements available on my Toyo VX23D, but it has the ones I need to do most of what I need to do. It weighs only 780 grams, and it can mount my Pentax-A 645 ƒ/3.5 35mm lens, my two Mamiya G lenses, and various enlarger and technical lenses. Jeffrey, whose finished 'FrankenKameras' always had a professional and polished appearance, would have politely appreciated my dedication to 'function over form.'"

+   =   +   =   +   =   +

Thanks to everyone who participated! As always, if your picture didn't appear, I should remind you that it's not a contest. I'm just doing my best to create a varied and entertaining set. Many other pictures would have done just as well, but these are the ones that looked right together to me.

A few honorable mentions (the other selects that I shuffled and diced to create the final set): Terry Letton, Jonathan Hayes, Mark Gregg, Rodger Kingston, Bruce Polin, Larry Sumners, San Warzoné, Reese Robinson, Rolf Behrends, Stefan Kassel, Richard Alan Fox, William Harrison, Greg Heins, Sean Felhofer, and Rich Beaubien. If your name didn't appear here, it might simply be because I got several submissions with a similar motif or that I thought would serve the same function in the set, and I had already chosen another one for the finalists' cut.

As I said earlier, I especially appreciated the stories and the memories.

"Good light" to you—

Mike

Book o' the Week

 All About Saul Leiter. The Amazon writeup for this book says "Photography lovers the world over are now embracing Saul Leiter"—and oh boy, is that ever true of me—"who has enjoyed a remarkable revival since fading into relative obscurity in the 1980s." One of my favorite photographers. Beautiful photopoems. Saul's Early Color (which you can still get for around $300) was one of our all-time bestselling book links. (I bought two, one to thumb and one to not touch!)

This book link is a portal to Amazon.

Link to B&H

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:

Coming Up! (Update)

Thanks to everyone for all your submissions. I initially thought this one might be one of those things where people are "over it" and not interested, but not at all—I got a large number of submissions. Many will not make the final 13, but I enjoyed so many of them just the same. A lot of camera "portraits" came along with a personal story about the camera or what it means to the sender, and so many of those were good to read. I can relate, of course.

I've been working all weekend, but...not on TOP. But I am going to get to the Baker's Dozen later today and I hope to have it up as early as tomorrow. I think this one will be easy; almost no matter what I pick it will be fun.

[UPDATE Monday 3:30: I've gotten it down to 28 finalists, so it's going well. Lots of cool stuff left out, but that's the game. —Ed.]

[UPDATE no. 2, 10:30 p.m.: All selections made, pictures loaded and labeled. I'll add the captions tomorrow, and post.]

[UPDATE no. 3, 11:30 a.m. Tuesday: It's up! That took a solid day of work. I'm not as fast as I used to be.]

Mike

 

Last Call!

Don't forget the deadline for the "Camera" Baker's Dozen is today (Saturday, May 21). It went very well; we've gotten a lot of quirky, interesting, and varied submissions. Lots of good "camera portraits" and lots of pictures featuring smartphones, when I'll only have space for one or two, maybe three, of each. That's not to say yours can't be one of the chosen ones. But those are the overpopulated categories where the competition will be toughest, in case you're still deciding what to submit.

If you could get yours in by, say, noonish, EST, good enough.

By the way, my favorite camera picture I've ever done is the one of my friend Kent's M4 which I posted here. But I doubt it would be special and different enough to be part of this Baker's Dozen! A picture of a camera for a contest needs a little something extra, to stand out. (I wonder if there's a post there...the effect of contests on what and how one might shoot. Because contests do have different standards than purely personal artistic direction. And obviously not all the effects are good. Sorry, just thinking out loud.)

This one is pretty light, just fun. But hey, this is the place.

Last chance!

Mike

Book o' the Week

It's Not About the F-Stop by Jay Maisel. Jay was suggested by Moose and this book was suggested by Albert Smith. I got to meet Jay Maisel once. Everybody should meet him in his books, if they haven't already. Might help; cannot hurt. Jay's is some of the most positive, hopeful, and generous picture-taking advice you'll find.

This book link is a portal to Amazon.

Link to B&H

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:

New All-Time Record Set for a Photograph

There's a new "most expensive photograph ever sold," for the first time in 11 years. Like eight of the top ten most expensive photographs, it was sold by Christie's, the auction house founded in 1766.

The original of Man Ray's much-reproduced Le Violon d'Ingres sold for $12.4 million last Saturday in New York in its first-ever appearance at auction. The pre-auction estimate of five to seven million was more than the previous high record for a photograph, the $4.3 million set by Andreas Gursky's Photoshopped riverscape Rhein II in 2011.

The Man Ray was the top offering from the collection of Melvin and Rosalind Gersten Jacobs, art collectors who had connections to the surrealists. They bought the work directly from Man Ray himself in 1962. Melvin was a former CEO of Saks Fifth Avenue. After his death in 1967, Rosalind, who had been an executive at Macy's, continued the collection.

Man Ray has a strong auction record and an obvious appeal to major collectors, having sold several other works for multi-million dollar prices. (Elton John, who paid the then-world-record price for a Man Ray in 1993, says "If I'm going to die, I'll be killed by a falling Man Ray," because the picture hangs above the headboard in his bedroom.) Wikipedia tells us that "le violon d'Ingres" is a French expression for a hobby or pastime; apparently the French neoclassical painter Ingres (roughly pronounced, according to Jeff in the Comments, "ANG-ruh") played the violin when he wasn't working on his art. And as James Sinks pointed out in the Comments, "The title and the image itself also reference 'The Valpinçon Bather,' one of Ingres' most famous paintings," Valpinçon having been the name of one of the painting's owners.

The auction battle was between two anonymous bidders on the phone, one represented by Christie’s New-York-based photographs specialist Darius Himes, and the other by its Paris-based photographs specialist Elodie Morel-Bazin. Her bidder won, but it hasn't been announced who either of them are.

The artwork was first published in the French surrealist magazine Littérature in June, 1924. The model was Alice Prin, a.k.a. Kiki de Montparnasse, an artist's model and libertine who became a celebrity of the Années folles (crazy years) of Jazz Age Paris. She and Man Ray had a tempestuous eight-year affair, and he took hundreds of pictures of her. "It bothered me a little to take off my clothes," she wrote in her memoirs, "but it was the custom." Le Violon d'Ingres, whether or not it was intended as a sort of sneering dirty joke (play her like a fiddle, or, perhaps, she's my hobby), or merely a comment on the similarity in form between a stringed instrument and a woman's body, is one of the best-known works of surrealist photography, and a symbol of the movement.

Mike
(Thanks to James Sinks)

Book o' the Week

It's Not About the F-Stop by Jay Maisel. Jay was suggested by Moose and this book was suggested by Albert Smith—it's actually my favorite too (I got mixed up before). I got to meet Jay Maisel once. Everybody should meet him in his books, if they haven't already. Might help; cannot hurt. Jay's is some of the most positive, hopeful, and generous picture-taking advice you'll find.

This book link is a portal to Amazon.

B&H has this!

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:

Neils: "There are a couple of interesting TATE-produced videos of Elton John's photography collection on YouTube. One scene that stuck to my mind was the one where he proudly points to a Man Ray photo for which he paid a world record price in 1993. His response to the question of why he paid a record price was (besides 'I love it') that it was with this purchase he realised he was a serious collector (at 2:15).

"I first thought it strange to see his pride in having paid a record price—after all, how hard is it to place the highest bid if you have a lot of money? Upon reflection, my most expensive book purchase two years ago, was a special edition of Elliott Erwitt's 'Pittsburgh 1950' signed with a signed silver gelatine print for GBP 750. A significant amount of money for me and probably, in retrospect, also a time when I had to accept I was not just a collector of random photo books any more.

"Elton John's comment above makes it clear that nothing in collecting is logical and value is only relative to what you have available. Another good video of EJ's collection."

Mike replies: The top item on my admittedly very short bucket list—I'll never see Patagonia—would be to visit Elton's photograph collection. I'll never get to, but I sure would like to.

Mark Sampson: "When I worked as a museum assistant at the Phillips Collection a few years ago, they held a major Man Ray retrospective. As my job required me to stand all day in the galleries, I became very familiar with a great deal of his work (including 'Le Violon d'Ingres'). I'll admit that I didn't spend any time wondering about the sale value of any of his works, but I did (and still do) wonder if the print on the walls at the Phillips was the only example ever made. Given the astronomical price it sold for, it might very well be. If not...."

Dogman: "Whoa! Big money for the Man. I downloaded a low-res JPEG of this photo back in February—actually on my birthday. Maybe I'll print it and proclaim myself as the winner of the bidding as a birthday gift to myself. I think Man Ray would appreciate the gesture."

Trump Makes Headlines

...But not in a good way. Click past the break at your discretion. (Don't want to make anyone upset.)

B&W Over the Years

First off, as the kids say nowadays, this is the first GIF I've ever made. After working online since the late 1950s (perhaps I exaggerate). Proving that you can teach old photo-dawgs new tricks. Even if those "new" tricks are already like 25 years old—GIFs first became common in the late '90s and early 2000s.

These are a couple of images I made back in 2006 (hi, Nari and Mark! Mark is as skinny as a rail now, by the way) to illustrate the difference between old look B&W and new look B&W. I could probably do better now, but I had these and I wanted to see if I could make a GIF in Photoshop. It's not just a change in contrast...the curves are different and the spectral response is different.

The very small point for today: current digital B&W doesn't just reflect changes in the technology. Tastes have changed. People are trying for a radically different look now. It's a matter of what's in fashion and also a matter of what's being modeled as the generally acceptable standard. As I've said before, Shorpy.com is an excellent way to calibrate your eye to the look of old-style tonality, although it's also conflated with the look of large and medium format film. I love it.

Dorothea Lange, Young family, penniless, hitchhiking on
U.S. Highway 99 in California...., November 1936.
Via Shorpy. Rolleiflex TLR medium-format neg.

Check out this one I found the other day. I love Dorothea. Things sure were slow back then, though, weren't they? Imagine having motion blur problems in sunlight that's casting hard shadows! Unless she made some sort of mistake. Wow.

Here again is my simple trick for instantly improving the tones of many digital B&W pictures: open Curves. Grab the straight line of the Curve in the middle. Pull it upward a bit in a direction perpendicular to the Curve, to suit visual taste.

Viola, as Phil Davis never used to say (he misspelled "voilà" once and I used to tease him about it, which he didn't think was at all funny): increases shadow contrast, raises the often radically lowered middle values, and softens the contrast of highlights, all at once. This is just B&W Tonality 101, nothing for you experts out there.

Anyway, if you're not seeing that GIF change every five seconds, please let me know, and the old dawg shall go back to the drawing board.

Mike

Book o' the Week

It's Not About the F-Stop by Jay Maisel. Jay was suggested by Moose and this book was suggested by Albert Smith—it's actually my favorite too (I got mixed up before). I got to meet Jay Maisel once. Everybody should meet him in his books, if they haven't already. Might help; cannot hurt. Jay's is some of the most positive, hopeful, and generous picture-taking advice you'll find.

This book link is a portal to Amazon.

B&H can do it all.

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:

Baker's Dozen Deadline

Happy to say that I'm getting some excellent submissions for the "Camera" Baker's Dozen already.

The deadline will be next Saturday, May 21, at noon Eastern U.S. Time, because Saturdays are the slowest days of the week around here and it will be fun to be able to do the first pass through these on Saturday afternoon. I will accept late submissions, but not too late.

I'm certainly seeing some very interesting cameras already. This is going to be a fun one for sure. Here's the information again.

Mike

This is Actually a Different Book o' the Week

It's Not About the F-Stop by Jay Maisel. Jay was suggested by Moose and this book was suggested by Albert Smith. I got to meet Jay Maisel once. Everybody should meet him in his books, if they haven't already. Might help; cannot hurt. Jay's is some of the most positive, hopeful, and generous picture-taking advice you'll find.

This book link is a portal to Amazon.

B&H walks the walk.

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:

Pierre Charbonneau Comes to Visit

You know a bit about me, if you've been reading this blog for a while. From time to time I also get to meet you. I got to meet TOP reader Pierre Charbonneau on the 3rd. You might have seen his name in the Comments. He came by on the first leg of a planned four-week journey taking pictures and visiting friends around the United States. We had lunch at the Chat-a-Whyle restuarant in Bath, which seemed apropos.

Pierre has had a successful career as a commercial location photographer. He started out in magazine and fashion photography, but eventually decided that his clients in that world tended to be fickle and influenced by who's in style at any given moment—he found that corporate clients are more loyal and less influenced by who happens to be "hot." He's almost exactly my age (65), and has been in business in Montreal, Canada, for 42 years. He said a typical assignment for him is doing all the publicity and instructional photographs for new commercial and private jet planes; he recently completed an extensive job doing all the photography for a new Gulfstream.

He's been reading me since very early on—since way back in Camera & Darkroom (originally Darkroom Photography) days. That's been a while. I took Jack's M10, hoping to show him a cool camera he hadn't seen before.

Pierre

No such luck. He had his own M10. He works with two lenses, a 50mm and a 35mm, one on the camera and one in a pouch on his belt. 

This is his answer to the question "what's your favorite M lens."

We met for lunch in Bath after he toured the Corning Museum of Glass. He speaks excellent English with a strong French accent. He's charismatic and knowledgeable and told me he's a photo hobbyist in addition to being a longtime pro. I really enjoyed lunch and I wish you well on the rest of your photographing trek, Pierre! Please stop by on your way back if you can.

Mike

This is Actually a Different Book o' the Week

It's Not About the F-Stop by Jay Maisel. Jay was suggested by Moose and this book was suggested by Albert Smith. I got to meet Jay Maisel once. Everybody should meet him in his books, if they haven't already. Might help; cannot hurt. Jay's is some of the most positive, hopeful, and generous picture-taking advice you'll find.

This book link is a portal to Amazon.

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:

Funny Guy (OT)

I'm something of a connoisseur of standup comedy. I really enjoy the ones I really enjoy. When you think of it, a connoisseur is someone who likes almost nothing of something. A lens connoisseur likes almost no lenses; but he appreciates the ones he likes.  I've listened to hundreds of comedians and I like almost none of them. But I appreciate the ones I like.*

Now, algorithms are introducing me to new comedians. Suddenly my YouTube feed will have a young comedian and I'll think, oh, good, someone new. But no, they're not new. As I watch more videos I'll realize they're already old—YouTube just started me out on their early videos from years ago.

Then, because I watch the ones YouTube suggests, it starts shoveling more at me. So I go from never hearing of someone to having seen every bit they've ever done in like two months.

Left: What Nate Bargatze looked like when YouTube
first started showing him to me two months ago.
Right: What he looks like this month.

Anyway lately I've been seeing just about everything that Nashville, Tennessee, comedian Nate Bargatze has ever done. He's grown older in the two months I've heard of him. At this point the game becomes, are there a few bits of his still out there that I've never seen? Maybe.

Here's a signature set. If you haven't heard of Nate yet, I thought you might enjoy knowing about him.

Mike

*One weird thing: if I like a set, I can listen to it again and again, just like I can listen to my favorite songs over and over. I enjoy it just as much the fifth time as the first time. Don't know what that says about me.

This is Actually a Different Book o' the Week

It's Not About the F-Stop by Jay Maisel. Jay was suggested by Moose and this book was suggested by Albert Smith. I got to meet Jay Maisel once. Everybody should meet him in his books, if they haven't already. Might help; cannot hurt. Jay's is some of the most positive, hopeful, and generous picture-taking advice you'll find.

This book link is a portal to Amazon.

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:

New Baker's Dozen Call for Work: 'Camera'

This is either going to be wildly popular or be a total flop, or something in the middle.

(Sorry, it's an old Mitch Hedberg joke.)

Our next theme for our lovely little readers' pictures portfolio is: "Camera." Any picture that has anything to do with a camera is fair game. Hopefully we will have some fun here.

How to Submit

This is a call for your own work, and you must own the rights to it, so please don't send me anything but that.

By submitting, you give me permission to reproduce the small JPEG of your picture on TOP and that's it. Your copyright remains yours.

To submit, use the subject line:

BDCamera

Just like that...no spaces, spelled exactly like that, no variations. Capital "C" in "Camera." The reason is that when I begin building the post, I will search my large email stack for that phrase as the subject, and if your email doesn't come up, then I won't see your picture.

Please pay attention to that. Last time, people really did...almost nothing got lost. Which I appreciated.

A dog does not have to appear in your picture. Although my philosophy is, it never hurts.

I'll announce the deadline when we get near it. No promises when the results will appear...I've learned from experience that these features just take time to build, so it'll get done when it gets done. There's only one little man behind the curtain pulling all the levers.

Email one or two JPEGs, 800 pixels wide, saved in sRGB. Include in the email your name, where you live, any technical details you care to share, your website URL if you want me to publish it, and whatever you want to tell other TOP readers about your picture.

Lots of people write a paragraph explaining their picture (see the "Yellow" portfolio for examples), so if you don't, just be aware that your picture might seem a little "naked" after it gets picked. (Because of course yours will get picked.)

My email address is mcjohnston at mac dot com. Replace the "at" and the "dot" with the proper symbols and get rid of the spaces. This modest attempt at disguising my address will not fool the web-crawling bots, but oh well.

So, five components:

"BDCamera" in the SUBJECT LINE;
PICTURE (must be your own!), 800 pixels wide in sRGB;
NAME;
WHERE YOU LIVE;
Any COMMENTS you care to make about the shot.

Hope you are up to the challenge! Have fun and don't be afraid to be creative. Total dweeby gearhead geekishness is not required but is certainly not discouraged. You're among friends.  :-)

Mike

Book o' the Week

Jay Maisel: Light, Color, Gesture. This was suggested by Moose. I got to meet Jay Maisel once. Everybody should meet him in his books, if they haven't already. Might help; cannot hurt. Jay's is some of the most positive, hopeful, and generous picture-taking advice you'll find.

This book link is a portal to Amazon.

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:

My Inadvertent A-B-A Experiment (OT)

This could be ugly, but in a week or two I'll be able to report to you on the results of an A-B-A experiment I've made but didn't really mean to make.

An A-B-A experiment (actually it's a design in Applied Behavior Analysis, from the field of psychology), as you might know or maybe can guess, is when you change something to see the results, (A—>B), then change it back again to see if the results go back to the way they were before (B—>A). It's a way of checking to see that your results are direct consequence of the change.

For example, when I had an episode of atrial fibrillation, I was told that coffee consumption might be worsening it. So I quit coffee for three weeks (that's the A to B part), and my a-fib got better. Then I went back to my old coffee habits again (B back to A), and my heart issues got worse again. That proved it to me; so I quit drinking coffee, after, I think, 46 years. Haven't had a sip of coffee since about mid-2018.

Anyway, a few years ago I went on Dr. Greger's daily dozen diet, a modified whole-food plant-based (WFPB) plan. As you might remember, when I first advocated it and people asked how it was working for me, I asked for six weeks to go on it strictly so I could be more sure of the changes. Well, I ended up staying on that diet for just about exactly 17 months. But then I did some traveling and had to go off the diet, and my brother died and I got depressed, etc., etc., and I gradually regressed back to a modified version of my old eating habits.

It's been almost exactly a year since then. I haven't been eating badly, really, but I've been eating out a lot, eating sugar again, being lazy. "Eating conveniently" I guess you could say. Eating according to the SAD (standard American diet) and the prevailing "food environment," meaning, what's easily available and offered everywhere, such as at standard "meat, cheese, and grease" restaurants.

So in the interests full disclosure, I figure I'll be honest with you and tell you what happened. I'm not currently due for a checkup, but I asked the good Doctor Anderson, my PCP, if he would order bloodwork for me, and he acquiesced; I'm going to fast tonight and overnight and then go in to have blood drawn tomorrow.

That way I can give you an A-B-A report: the effect of the original change, and the effect of my backsliding.

The Daily Dozen diet is an outcomes-based plan. It's not a cuisine, like the Mediterranean diet; it's not a "food ideology" like strict veganism; it's not a fad diet, like keto; it's not a diet based on an imaginary fantasy, like paleo; it's not primarily a slimming diet where results are judged only by weight loss. It's merely an attempt to eat in a way that leads to the best health outcomes, according to the consensus of the best available science. That means both ongoing health markers and also statistical health outcomes in the long term—like, are you going to get diabetes, heart disease, etc. Obviously I can't report on long-term outcomes, only on biomarkers, outward effects, and how I feel.

I already reported the good part—the changes I experienced after one year of healthy eating. (I continued on that diet for another five months after that post, till about this time of year in 2021). When I get my bloodwork back I'll tell you what's happened to me in the year since then.

Mike

Book o' the Week

Jay Maisel: Light, Color, Gesture. This was suggested by Moose. I got to meet Jay Maisel once. Everybody should meet him in his books, if they haven't already. Might help; cannot hurt. Jay's is some of the most positive, hopeful, and generous picture-taking advice you'll find.

This book link is a portal to Amazon.

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:

Apology from Management (Blog Notes)

The previous post was...erm, not very good. The examples I picked confused rather than clarified the issue I wanted to highlight, and my thought process was a bit confused, and, as sometimes happens, I learned only during the ensuing discussion what I would have needed to know to write the post well in the first place.

I guess after 9,781 posts there are still going to be a few duds. And I still enjoyed the conversation. Thanks for the thoughts. So now onward!

—Mike the Ed.

 

Open Mike: The Dan Stevens Effect

This is a curious phenomenon that I've noticed a number of times over the years. Briefly, it goes something like this:

1. Someone wants to be an artist of some sort.
2. They get a big break and are part of a big success.
3. It's not enough for them, or they think they are above it in some way, so they spurn it and either leave or quit.
4. They never go on to do anything as famous or popular afterward.

The phenomenon could be called The Dan Stevens Effect. Wikipedia says of Stevens:

In 2010, Stevens got his biggest break when he was cast as Matthew Crawley in the ITV series Downton Abbey, created and written by Oscar-winning screenwriter Julian Fellowes. The series went on to be a global sensation and has been nominated for several Emmy, BAFTA, Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild Awards since its debut. The central love story of Matthew Crawley and his distant cousin, Lady Mary Crawley, played by Michelle Dockery, was enormously popular. Determined to ruin* his career, Stevens chose to leave the series after finishing the third season and the Christmas Special in 2012. His exit caused a huge uproar with fans, who notably took to Twitter and other social media sites to express their anger at the character's death. Fellowes later explained that Stevens did not give sufficient notice for a less drastic departure.

*Okay, actually Wikipedia says "move on with."

I should explain, for those of you unfamiliar with the British prime-time soap opera costume drama, that Stevens' character had to be abruptly killed off in an automobile accident...which of course also prevented his return in the various lucrative reunion movies either released or planned. Since leaving his biggest success he has "gone on" to do such things as: play a supporting part in Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer, a movie that earned a big $5.2 million at the box office; do a lot of voice-over acting; and play a robot in the German-language science fiction romance I'm Your Man.

I would have milked Downton a bit longer, personally. And not ruined the plotline for millions of fans, what about them?

Chevy Chase left Saturday Night Live after just one season. Sally Kellerman, who played "Hot Lips Houlihan" in the original movie of M*A*S*H, turned down the role in the television series, to her later regret. Neil Young felt his huge hit Harvest, the best-selling album of 1972 in the USA, was "middle of the road"—he said he was afraid of becoming John Denver—so he famously "headed for the ditch."** Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had a "love-hate" relationship with his Sherlock Holmes stories, considering them to be lowbrow entertainments; when he first entertained the idea of killing the fictional character off, his own mother said, "You won't! You can't! You mustn't!" He also raised his prices dramatically to discourage new commissions, hoping to "kill" Sherlock that way; but he found the magazines paid his prices anyway, helping to make him one of the highest paid writers of his day.

Arthur Conan Doyle, who considered his greatest literary
accomplishment to have been the 14th-century historical
novel The White Company. Not quite.

Then again, the reason The Hound of the Baskervilles is the best-known Sherlock Holmes story is that it was a reprise that brought the famous character back after a long absence. 

Whenever I think of this idea, it brings to mind the old-timey barn-dance saying, "You gotta dance with who brung ya." Sometimes you just have to be who you are, do what you can do, and give the people what they want. Luck is fickle.

Mike

**I do have to admit I like the ditch trilogy better than Harvest. Do kids today know who Neil Young is? I wouldn't be surprised if they don't.

Book o' the Week

Jay Maisel: Light, Color, Gesture. This was suggested by Moose. I got to meet Jay Maisel once. Everybody should meet him in his books, if they haven't already. Might help; cannot hurt. Jay's is some of the most positive, hopeful, and generous picture-taking advice you'll find.

This book link is a portal to Amazon.

B&H is the place to buy

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:

Kevin Crosado: "I've heard of Neil Young. I bought one of his CDs from a discount bin at the local big-box store. It was defective, so I took it back for a refund. Never bothered about a replacement."

Mike replies: Well, there are more modern ways to go about getting a taste, you know. Here are a few favorites:

Change Your Mind

Pardon My Heart

L.A.

Motion Pictures

Fountainbleu

Razor Love

If you need more, I've got about 150 bootlegs in the barn.

Bill Tyler: "Having read both Conan Doyle's The White Company and all the Holmes stories, I can confidently say that the worst of Holmes is better than the best of The White Company."

Zyni Moë: "You confuse two things.

"Thing 1: person has some initial success; head grows enormously big, think this success is too little / too lowbrow for them; walks away from that success...oops.

"Thing 2: person has great success; person realises they will never need money again; walks away to do what interests them instead.

"People driven by money find (2) very hard to understand, as do people who do not understand that enough money means you can choose what you do.

"Neil Young is perhaps example of (2): long time ago he made enough money to do whatever he wanted to...so that is what he did. Recently sold half the rights to his back catalogue for probably $150 million: he has been very rich for a very long time.

"Perhaps Robert Plant is another good example: presumably very rich man makes occasional highly-regarded records which sell...some copies, but Led Zeppelin reunion and probably hundreds of millions of dollars...not so much.

"Charlie Watts is example of someone choosing not to do (2): at any point since say 12 May 1972 [the day Exile on Main Street was released —Ed.] he could have quit the band he played with and done whatever he wanted to for the rest of his life. But he chose not to, probably because he enjoyed playing with that band: certainly not because he needed the money.

"From my generation same for any of the stars of the Harry Potter films (although Daniel Radcliffe has gone on to do interesting perhaps-not-profitable things sometimes, not needing the money)."

Mike replies: You make excellent points, and your analysis may be right—it does feel like my thinking on this is somewhat confused. However I would say that what is more interesting to me is people misunderstanding the nature of their success, or success itself. I recently did a quirky little post about Calvin and Hobbes—Bill Watterson is an example of someone who had enough money and retired at the top of his game and near the peak of his popularity. I have no problem with that (or with his contemporary Gary Larson, who wrote and drew "The Far Side," who did the same). Nor do I have any problem with Yusuf Islam, who used to be Cat Stevens, who walked away from a successful career as a folk singer and pop star because he wanted to live a more committed religious life. And you can speculate that Dan Stevens wanted something different too—that perhaps he preferred to pursue a number of small, interesting, quirky roles in a variety of productions at a lower level, and he considered a standard ITV costume drama to be a potboiler and beneath him. Perhaps he shouldn't have accepted the role in the first place then. Just consider a.) how difficult it is for an actor to land a lead role in a TV series, and b.) how rare it is for a TV series to be a big hit. It's likely or certainly possible that D.S. will never achieve anything near that level again. It doesn't look to me like he has done so since. I'm speculating too, but I don't think he understood what he had.

It could also be that what I am objecting to is a deep level of self-centeredness on his part—his insistence on disrupting the entire series right in the middle of its run for his own ego, or his own personal reasons whatever they were. With zero regard for the creator/writer and his creation, the cast and crew, and the audience. Of course Jessica Brown Findlay did the same thing, and other creative people do similar things all the time.

If Arthur Conan Doyle had retired the Holmes series because a.) it was too difficult to keep coming up with plots, b.) he was getting burned out, c.) he didn't want the series to grow stale and repetitive, or, as you say, d.) he had made enough money and didn't need any more, I don't think I would remark on his case. The interesting feature to me is rather that it looks like he just didn't grasp the rarity of what he had accomplished—he was still locked into old standard ideas about plays and historical fiction being more "serious" and more prestigious, and hence more worthy of him, and magazine stories about a detective being frivolous and lowbrow. When in fact he had created one of the iconic literary characters of his century. But then, I am not very respectful of assertions of cultural prestige and status and hierarchy—for me, Bob Marley is the equal of Mozart, for instance.

I just think some people seriously misjudge their actual talents and the true nature of their accomplishments, that's all.

If you would like to write a reply to this I will post it below!

Zyni replies: "Sorry I did not read your note on my comment earlier. In summary: you are right, what you describe does happen. I can give example from my own field. I have a very dear friend who was (is) a gifted physicist. He could also have been a gifted mathematician perhaps, but he had not trained as one and that is a thing you must train to be. Well, he decided when picking his Ph.D. that he would do a very mathematical bit of physics which he really was not equipped to do, but he would do it because it was 'purer.' And of course he struggled, got depressed, gave up, left physics and deprived everyone of (I believe) his great gifts.

"He did this all because he misunderstood his talents or anyway what he could achieve from where he was.

"This is a tragedy I believe (he does not now rate himself so highly: I am allowed to!), and also ate some significant amount of funding of course. So certainly you are correct in your analysis: this happens. But I believe something else also can happen which looks similar on surface but is not the same, and is admirable where the first thing is not. (Now I must go and apologise to my friend for using him as an example...it's OK, I did ask first.)"

Patrick: "Whenever I think of people who got too big for their britches and made a poor career decision, I think of McLean Stevenson leaving M*A*S*H. From his IMDB entry—'After leaving "M*A*S*H," Stevenson headlined in a series of failed TV shows.'"

Sean: "I’ve never watched a single episode of Downton, but I have seen Dan Stevens in many things, and he’s usually the most watchable actor in the scene. I last saw him play an AI companion in the German sci-fi film Ich bin dein Mensch. Stevens really brought the character to life. I'll get me coat."

Jim Arthur (partial comment): "Here’s a great quote from the ditch where Neil Young is talking to Rolling Stone in 1975. It seems he wasn’t all that concerned with returning to fame or popularity. 'Nobody expected Time Fades Away and I'm not sorry I put it out…I didn't need the money, I didn't need the fame. You gotta keep changing. Shirts, old ladies, whatever. I'd rather keep changing and lose a lot of people along the way. If that's the price, I'll pay it. I don't give a sh*t if my audience is 100 or 100 million. It doesn't make any difference to me. I'm convinced that what sells and what I do are two completely different things. If they meet, it's coincidence.' (From the Rolling Stone website.)"

Mike replies: Neil is a "keep going" type, like Bob Dylan and Paul McCartney. There are some stars who just keep at it. Most fade away, and most of those who do don't have any control over that...there's an interesting recent article at The Guardian called "'That's it? It's over? I was 30. What a brutal business': pop stars on life after the spotlight moves on" by Nick Duerden.

The ultimate comment on the fickleness of fame might be a short YouTube video from 2005. It shows Tara Reid, who was an "it girl" in Hollywood following her role in the Coen brothers' The Big Lebowski in 1998, getting stopped at the door of a nightclub. As she argues with the door supervisor, the then-current 2005 "it girl," and Tara's former friend, Paris Hilton, comes striding down the sidewalk arm-in-arm with her new bestie Kim Kardashian, who was relatively unknown at the time. A word to the doorman and in they go, while Tara continues to wait. The fickleness of fame in a minute and 35.

Pity we don't have a 2022 video of Paris getting stopped at the door while Kim K. and her unknown new best friend go right in.

My brush with this sort of thing happened when my son was about five. The mother of one of his school friends was dating a guy who used to be a rock star—I don't remember his name, but he had played drums for a variety of bands including Thin Lizzy. He had started a limousine service with his rock-and-roll money, but he was getting out of that and wanted to buy a Burger King franchise. Evidently one of the requirements was that prospective franchise owners had to work the counter of a Burger King for a certain number of weeks so they would know what it was like. So the four of us, in high spirits, went down to the busy local Burger King to get waited on by the former rock star, who was none too happy to be where he was—maybe it was my imagination, but I thought he had a distracted, sort of "how did it come to this?" expression on his face.

rick l: "Of the several friends of my grandchildren, they know far more of music from 50 years ago than I do of their music from 50 days ago. that, I think, is my error, not theirs."

Miguel Tejada-Flores: "I have to respectfully take issue with the idea that Dan Stevens has never really done any acting roles of note since leaving 'Downton Abbey.' In fact, he played the leading role in the stunningly complex sci-fi series, 'Legion,' which was created, written and produced by Noah Hawley, the brilliant storyteller behind all of the 'Fargo' streaming series. Stevens' character, 'David Haller,' has been mistakenly diagnosed as an extreme paranoid schizophrenic, but as the story evolves, we learn that his misdiagnosed schizophrenia actually is due to his extreme psychic powers, and that his paranoia is all too justified, as he becomes the unwitting pawn of a brilliant and evil cabal who will go to remarkable lengths to convince him he is 'crazy,' which will allow them to manipulate his powers. The series ran for three years (2017–2019) and has been justifiably critically acclaimed, as well as attaining near-cult status in serious sci-fi circles. At its heart, Stevens delivers a complex performance as he brings Hawley's disturbed protagonist to life. Some, including myself, believe that the opening hour-long pilot episode of the first season is one of the finer standalone paranoid science-fiction thrillers ever created. I'm not suggesting that his other roles and oeuvre is on that level, but Stevens' performance in 'Legion' has, I think, helped establish his reputation in the acting universe, in ways which his role in Downtown Abbey never could have."

My Two Favorite M-Mount Lenses

I've used many Leitz and Leica lenses over many years. I've owned about eight of them and used another...ten, maybe? I can't really recall all of them now, although at one time I could have given you chapter and verse from memory. To that you can add another dozen or so non- Leitz/Leica third party lenses, from makers such as Minolta, Zeiss, Voigtländer, and Konica. But this doesn't make me an expert overall—there are too many lenses for my ~30 to be more than a sampling. However, I'm not unfamiliar with M lenses.

I've generally not used many of the "cost-no-object" statement lenses, with a few exceptions: one picture in my portfolio is a portrait of my friend Oren Grad taken with the now-rare pre-1994 35mm Summilux Aspherical Type 1. It's called either the "Aspherical" [or "ASPHERICAL"—thanks Jeff] because it's written out that way on the lens barrel, as opposed to "ASPH.," or sometimes the "double-aspherical" because it has two such surfaces (the successor lens has one asphere). I believe that it was designed by Walter Watz, that the aspherical surfaces were hand-ground, that Leica had either one or two technicians capable of doing that work, and that either 1k or  4k lenses (I found both numbers on the internet—the former sounds more likely to me) were produced between 1988 and 1994. It's now very rare and considered exclusively a collector's item. There's currently a somewhat worn sample for sale from Alex Yuzbasiyan's Setadel Studios, a reputable reseller, for $25,000. (If you are a Leicaphile and have better information on this lens, please do contribute to the Comments section accessible below.) And I'm currently using the 1994–2010 ASPH. Summilux on my friend Jack's M10 Reporter, compliments of my friend John.

Anyway, please don't ask "what do you think of the [insert name of current high-end Leica lens]?," because I won't know. Except to say it's probably excellent if you don't mind the handling and the cost, because I'm pretty confident that can be said of any of the top current Leica lenses.

Some of my preferences 'n' principles go against the grain. For me personally, handling with an M-lens is more important than optical quality. The advantage of a Leica in the olden days was that it was a small camera that made little noise and attracted little notice. So a small lens with simple controls you can memorize made more sense than any of the "statement" lenses such as the Noctilux. Zone focusing by feel was also important to me when I owned my Leicas—with just a little practice, I learned to set the focus distance without looking through the camera at the rangefinder. The skill worked best between about five feet and infinity, and of course made more sense in good light when you can stop down and exact focus is less critical. Also in my opinion, slower lenses made much more sense than fast ones. Not only are they more likely to be small, but a brighter view isn't necessary for focusing. Of course, it depended on what you were trying to do. But I'd rather have a slow lens on a Leica than a big heavy fast lens that blocked part of the viewfinder view. Other people can think whatever they like.

Collapsible 50mm 7-element Summicron

My two faves
Among the ones I owned or tried, I had two favorites. The first was a sample of the first-generation collapsible 7-element 50mm Summicron that had been custom-multicoated by a previous owner. I don't have a picture of my lens but that's the same kind, above, and here's one on Kent P.'s M4: 

The seven-element 50mm Summicron, first available in a collapsible mount and later called the "Rigid" because it was adapted to a non-collapsible mount, was remarkable for two reasons: first, it was the lens that really established Leica as a top lensmaker; Zeiss had a stronger reputation in the '50s and Leica was one of many companies that played catch-up. The 7-element Summicron came along just when magazines were beginning to do lens tests, and it got attention as the best lens ever tested by some big magazines. Its second claim to fame was that it was the preferred lens of Henri Cartier-Bresson for much of his career. He tended to use the latest M camera, whatever it was at the time, but he stuck with his favorite 50mm (I believe, on no other evidence than looking at the pictures, that Leica might have multicoated his lens[es] for him, too). It's often pointed out that Henri carried other lenses, but, regardless of that, almost all of his pictures were made with the 50mm. He only very rarely made a picture with any other focal length. I was told this by Henri's good friend and fellow Magnum photographer Erich Hartmann, who was among the second group to join Magnum after the founders.

All told, I owned five 50mm Summicrons: the collapsible; a rigid; a Dual-Range, which I got cheaply because it was missing the "eyes" and thus of no interest to collectors (best-built lens I ever saw, matched only by a couple of Zeiss Contarex lenses); and two modern ones I bought new. One of those was a German-made 1979–1994 Type 4 and the other was a 1994–2013 Type 5. The last two were pedestrian-but-classic Planar-type designs originally intended to be economical but were very well made. And since construction and QC are half the battle with lenses, both were quite nice.

All my 50mm Summicrons were good lenses, in fact, and I got some exceptional pictures with each of them, but there was a non-Leica, non-M-mount 50mm I liked better than any of them. The collapsible was a bit finicky; it had some spherical aberration and flared a bit more easily than modern lenses (despite the multicoating, which might have been fairly basic and not designed specifically for the lens), and it was poor wide open. Stopped down and used with care it could be almost magical. I never should have sold it, but the way I managed my gear hobby in those days was to sell things to buy something else. That's life.

My other favorite, as many people guessed, was the Minolta 40mm ƒ/2 M-Rokkor for the Minolta CLE. John Kennerdell (whom I haven't heard from in a long time, although he used to write marvelous posts for this site) said he once encountered a Japanese connoisseur who referred to it as "the water lens" because its images were so smooth and liquid. It was the only lens I ever owned that routinely got compliments from non-photographers. (Usually, not to throw any cold water on the enthusiasms of gearheads out there, people just don't care.) It's still available pretty reasonably, but it's not very practical, because of course most M-mount cameras don't have 40mm framelines. The CL (Compact Leica) and later CLE (Compact Leica Electronic, although it was sold only by Minolta) was made for a basic set of 28mm/40mm/90mm.

The, um, king
A special mention must be made of the main lens I bought new when I bought my first M6, the 35mm Summicron-M (1979–1996, called version 4 or the "pre-ASPH" since it was replaced by the first aspherical version). I loved that lens when it was new, and its handling is superb on the M cameras, except for the M8 which changes its effective angle of view. It did have a lot of falloff, but since I edge-burned all my prints anyway I considered that a feature rather than a bug, and it was really only a problem with thin-emulsion films anyway. That's the one I learned how to zone-focus by feel, and the images at first were really wonderful. Although the bokeh at wider apertures and closer in wasn't very good, when stopped down and from middle distances it had remarkably coherent bokeh with beautiful transitions. This isn't how people judge bokeh these days, of course—now it's popular to shoot everything wide open no matter what (see The Dog's Nose). Which to me defeats the whole purpose of buying a good lens in the first place, but oh well. (By the way, I'm the person who originally dubbed that lens "the king of bokeh," and I apologize for that. Who knew the phrase would still be permanently adhering to the lens 25 years later?)

I would probably still be using that lens today if it weren't for one thing: on mine, tiny paint chips started flaking off the aperture blades and collecting on an inner element of the lens—right in the center of the optical path! Eventually this became quite noticeable, both when looking into the lens and also in the pictures, because all the flecks of dirt in the middle of the lens cut contrast. Not enough for normal people to notice but just enough for me to notice, which made it seem like I was being tormented by the Universe. I can't remember now whether I had it cleaned once or just meant to, but basically it just pissed me off—here I had paid a premium for a well-built lens, from a maker that gassed on and on in a superior way about how they were better at lensmaking than anybody else, and the one I sprung for had a flaw caused by basic incompetence. Just made me irritated is all. It's not like other lensmakers don't make lenses with problems from time to time—the original AF-Nikkor 35mm ƒ/2 had persistent problems with lubricant leaking onto the aperture blades, for instance (corrected in the ƒ/2D version). But that's why I sold it. I'll tell you what I wish—I wish I had shot Tri-X in my M6 with that lens from that day to this. But of course if I had, I never would have been a magazine writer about gear, for one thing (you gotta churn gear if you want to write about it).

I also owned or used several other 35mm M-mount lenses, including the M-Hexanon, a Zeiss, and various Voigtländers. And the one in the Konica Hexar AF, which wasn't shabby.

"The" lens
That said, here's my opinion—just one enthusiast's opinion—: a 35mm Summicron makes so much sense on any M camera that it should be considered the default lens. Of course, many famous Leica photographers (such as Garry Winogrand) preferred the 28mm focal length, and many preferred 50mms, and that's cool. But the standard viewfinder is perfect when using the 35mm framelines, the 35mm focal length is a perfect match for the kinds of photography a Leica is best at, and there are too many drawbacks to lenses much faster than ƒ/2—which make most of them more trouble than they're worth, and you just don't really need 'em. If you want to shoot with a Leica, get a 35mm Summicron or a third-party equivalent, and spend your time, effort and money learning how to use it!

Here's what I'd recommend:

Voigtländer Nokton Classic 35mm ƒ/1.4 II

Budget options: Voigtländer makes three options of interest—four if you count the two versions of the fast lens—and you should try 'em all for yourself before deciding. There's the wicked sweet tiny little Color-Skopar 35mm ƒ/2.5 P II (I had one of the originals, and it looked great with fast B&W film), the Ultron Vintage Line 35mm ƒ/2 Aspherical Type II VM, and not one but two versions of the Nokton Classic 35mm ƒ/1.4 II, marked SC and MC, for single-coated and multi-coated. (The reason is that some Japanese lens connoisseurs—who put us to shame—think that single-coated lenses are better for black-and-white film.) The Nokton Classic looks like it would handle the most like the old pre-ASPH Summicron, although I don't know firsthand.

Used option: C'mon, if you're going to use the now-garden-variety (did I just say that?) 35mm Summicron-M ASPH., find a used one! Unless you already have yours. These days new ones are too expensive for what you get. Anybody know how much they cost at B&H when they came out in '96? Anyway that pinpoints the year that Leica got too expensive for Yr. Hmbl. Ed.

Zeiss C Biogon 35mm ƒ/2.8 ZM

Zeiss options: Zeiss makes two nifty M-mount 35mm lenses: the C Biogon T* 35mm ƒ/2.8 ZM and the Biogon T* 35mm ƒ/2 ZM. (Well, they make a third, too, but I wouldn't try that.)

Leica Apo-Summicron-M ƒ/2 ASPH.

Top option: If you really want to go balls-out present-day Leica to the manner or the manor born, go all the way: and that means the Leica 35mm APO-Summicron-M ƒ/2 ASPH. You should buy two, so you can casually say, "of course I have a backup that I keep in the box, in case I misplace this one somewhere."

Vintage option: Find one of those v.4 pre-ASPH's I talked about above. They tend to get wobbly in time, and some of the Canadian ones aren't quite as well built as their German counterparts; and they're lenses that got used, so they can be pretty beat. Caveat emptor. Get explicit return privileges on the one you buy, so you can try it before committing.

Maybe I should put the M-Rokkor 40mm on the M10 and see how it does. Like I haven't got enough to do to make me behinder....

Mike

UPDATE: Look what made Apple News this morning! Cool. (Thanks to Dave Richardson for pointing this out.)

Book o' the Week

Jay Maisel: Light, Color, Gesture. This was suggested by Moose. I got to meet Jay Maisel once. Everybody should meet him in his books, if they haven't already. Might help; cannot hurt. Jay's is some of the most positive, hopeful, and generous picture-taking advice you'll find.

This book link is a portal to Amazon.

B&H has M lenses galore

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:

Josh Hawkins: "To this day I appreciate that you taught me zone focusing/pre-focusing on the M glass. Thanks. I still focus while pulling the camera up to my eye. And personally I’m a fan of the 50mm Dual Range and 35mm Summicron from the pre-aspheric days. Now I need a body to use it on. Maybe after the kids finish college."

Cristoph Hammann: "Re 'Leica 35mm APO-Summicron-M ƒ/2 ASPH. You should buy two, so you can casually say, "of course I have a backup that I keep in the box, in case I misplace this one somewhere."' Had to laugh out loud at that! Devilish advice in view of the current supply situation."

Jeff: "Mike, didn’t you already do enough to pump up the price of the v.4? At least you didn’t call it ‘king of vintage.’ By the way, a fine (Double) ASPHERICAL (in caps) can easily run $35k these days. One Leica forum member has several, which he uses."

Mike replies: Arthur Kramer, the onetime lens guru of Modern Photography magazine and the guy who introduced me to Jay Maisel, had a rare 105mm APO-El-Nikkor enlarging lens cast in lucite that he used on his desk as a paperweight. Not sure that counts as "using" it, though!  :-)

hilm: "Not a fan of the 35mm lens, but every once in a while, I read that it is the lens to shoot with on a Leica rangefinder. So I do shoot a few rolls, develop them, and go back to shooting with a 50mm.

"My k-of-b type IV (bought used), developed the same black paint specks in the center axis. Sherri cleaned it up for me. My favorite lens is a pre-asph 50mm Summicron. Also the Dual Range, and I have the matching eyes. But if I had to keep just two lenses, I would keep the DR, because it does so much so well and feels so good, and the 35mm, 'cause you have to have one if you have an M-Leica."

Mike replies: So far, Sherri Krauter and Malcolm Taylor have been mentioned in the comments. Those are some pretty august names among Leica repairpeople! Malcolm was chosen by Leica to service the original Ur-Leica, potentially the most valuable camera in the world. Leica Camera AG will never part with it, of course, but if they did, no doubt it would set an astonishing record at auction—surpassing the 1923 Leica 0-Series no. 122 which holds the current record for World's Most Expensive Camera at $2.97 million. The Ur-Leica, for those who don't know, was Oskar Barnack's prototype of the first Leica that he used himself from 1914. And by the way, Malcolm Taylor has stated that the lens on the Ur-Leica was a 40mm, not a 50mm!