The Online Photographer

Open Mike: Can't Eat Enough

Hmm, two 'Open Mikes' in three days is not good. But I want to pass along another link.

The article is "Challenge to the Insurance Industry: A Solution to Significantly Reduce Health Care Costs," by Ken Beckman, July 2016. (It was featured recently on nutritionfacts.org.)

A brief review of U.S. health care costs, from the paper: "Total expenditures exceed $2.5 trillion and have grown from 5% of GDP in 1960 to about 18% of GDP today. Heart disease remains the most common and costly condition, with over 1,000,000 bypass surgeries or angioplasties annually. Nearly half of individuals 65 and over are taking prescription drugs for high cholesterol and the total direct cost of treatments for cardiovascular disease (including high-blood pressure) is approximately $200 billion. About 45% of the U.S. population was overweight in the early 1960s compared to 75% today, with the proportion of obese individuals up nearly 200% over the same time period. This has contributed to an increase in the incidence of diagnosed diabetes from less than 1% in 1960 to nearly 7% in 2010 resulting in annual direct costs of over $175 billion. In total, about 85% of health care spending is for individuals having one or more chronic conditions."

Yikes.

What are "chronic conditions"? The "diseases of affluence" are roughly:

• hypertension (high blood pressure)
• obesity
• asthma
• cardiovascular disease
• dementia
• diabetes
• cancer
• depression

All of these are at least moderately affected by diet and least four of them (hypertension, obesity, heart disease, and diabetes) are highly affected by diet—basically, eating mainly plants and avoiding meat, dairy, eggs, refined carbs, and oil. Heart disease, named as "the most common and costly condition," is not only curable, it is reversible with diet alone. But we do what we do, (most restaurants in my area feature cuisine I've dubbed "meaty cheesey greasy") and eating plants, by contrast, is culturally considered "extreme" and "radical."

Caldwell Esselstyn responded to that:

...The truth is, the nutrition that is extreme or radical is the one that results in 1.2 million coronary stents being done per year in this country; 500,000 bypass operations where your entire chest is divided in half, [and] veins are taken off your leg and put in your heart. And they may last several years and at the end of that, you will have to have another procedure. Or, maybe it’s a little bit more extreme or radical when you spend $25 billion in statin drugs, $5 billion on stents, an epidemic of obesity, an epidemic of diabetes, an epidemic of heart disease. This is the diet that's radical and extreme.

I followed a plant diet pretty strictly for 18 months, ending in June 2021, so I could write about it here. The result was, well, radical and extreme: I lost 43 pounds (down a whopping 76 pounds from my peak, which I believe occurred in about 2014) and all my health markers improved markedly: my blood pressure went down to 110/60, my cholesterol went way down, and my sleep apnea, energy, and mood all improved very noticeably. Alas, I got depressed after my brother died and I couldn't—well, didn't—keep it up.

Head case
There were two main reasons for my failure: I'm addicted to sugar, and I can't cook. But another reason is one I still find quite odd: I couldn't eat enough. There are more or less a hundred foods you can eat without restriction on a plant diet, and, strangely, the more you eat the better. You're not supposed to eat small portions. You're not supposed to skip meals. For some reason I just couldn't get my head around that. I had "dieted" so much over the years that I just seem to associate "healthy eating" with restricted eating. Smaller portions and fewer meals. That's just not what you're supposed to do on a healthy plant-based diet. You're supposed to eat all you want, as often as you want, and the more the better, because it keeps you satiated and it displaces whatever bad foods you might be tempted to eat.

Mennonite whole wheat bread. Rosemary sets it out
at noon and it was still warm when I bought it
just now. Not WFPB, but hard to resist.

A big task in healthy eating is to come up with basic go-to meals: I need 1–2 breakfasts (one is okay), 2–4 different lunches (three is fine), and about 12–16 dinner meals (the optimum seems to be about 14*). After that the game is just to get your number up. You eat 21 meals a week; the more of those that are plant-based the better. Right now I'm eating about 13 healthy meals a week, out of my 21. That's not enough; I need to get to about 18 or 19.

Oh well. The initial challenge when transitioning to healthy eating is to stop gaining weight—the first thing to do is get a good scale, weigh yourself twice a day (before bed and just after getting up), and hold the line. Most people who are overweight or obese are continually gaining weight, and Job One is to put a stop to that. It's the old "if you find yourself in a hole, stop digging." So far I've gained nothing in the past two months, so that's a step in the right direction. (If the analogy is getting back on the horse that threw you, I have a foot in the stirrup.) But I'm still eating out too much, backsliding on @#$&! sugar, putting butter on vegetables, failing to resist the siren call of Mennonite bread, etc.

More updates eventually.

Mike

*Research indicates that even people who can cook and who cook whatever they want tend to settle down to a basic rotation of about 14 or 15 meals that they enjoy a lot and can whip up without too much bother, with an experiment thrown in every now and then for the sake of adventure or novelty, and perhaps a restaurant meal every week or two for variety.

Book o' the Week

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

These book links are a portal to Amazon.

Today at B&H Photo

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

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

JOHN B GILLOOLY: "I consider myself an anti-extremist. I'm 51 and been active/athlete my entire life. I too am probably addicted to sugar. I have never been on a diet, but I certainly do pay attention to all of my food. I am genetically lucky in that I could probably eat uncontrolled and max out at 210 pounds (6'1")? I am currently 177 pounds and while not nearly as fit as I would want to be, I can attribute my relative leanness to two things: first, I can honestly say that I refrain in some way at every meal to reduce the low hanging fruit. I would love a Coke, but drink water or unsweetened tea. I would love pizza or the chicken parm or the burger, but will opt for the swordfish, chicken and vegetables, etc. Would LOVE the full dessert, but literally carry around my own 70–80% dark chocolate so I can get my 'sugar-fix' in a more controlled manner.

"Second, drinking alcohol really is no longer part of my life. I will probably consume 2–3 drinks per month. I've been asking 'regular' people lately how many alcoholic drinks they consume each week and am shocked to hear that most seem to fall in the 17–25 per week range which I found shocking! Aside from the negatives of alcohol, I've found that a couple of drinks often comes with bad food choices and skipped exercise. When I say 'regular' people, I mean 45–55 year old active/involved parents who are also mostly high-earning career people."

ASW (partial comment): "My extended family on both sides was full of uneducated manual laborers: farming, logging, construction, etc. People who worked hard, all day, every day. No one ever worried about their diet, which was stereotypical Midwestern meat and potatoes with a side of meat and pie for dessert. A bigger worry was having enough food for all the kids (Catholics!). Yet, if we set aside the long-term smokers and the (many) alcoholics, they all lived into their 80s and 90s. Heck, a lot of the smokers and alcoholics made it nearly that long too. When I look back at old family photos I see thin, wiry women and sunburned, muscular men with nary a bulging belly in sight.

"My generation moved up in the world: college, sedentary jobs, sedentary lifestyles, expanding waistlines, health issues. I doubt that many will make it into their 90s.

"I'm in the middle. I got the education but don't like sitting still. I'm in my early 40s but I'm the same weight I was in high school when I played sports and worked on the farm.

"My wife and I eat primarily vegetarian (meat is an infrequent treat), mostly for environmental and ethical rather than health reasons. We try to avoid processed food, and luckily my wife loves to cook (I do not). We do not count calories or worry about portion sizes. I eat a shocking amount of food. I have been (kindly) asked to leave a Chinese buffet. I have been (less kindly) asked to leave a pizza buffet. What?

"I have run every day this year (minimum two miles; maximum twenty miles). I do pushups every day which is a habit I learned from my dad. I'm over 40,000 for the year. Although I sit in front of a computer for a job, I incorporate 'work' into the rest of my day whenever possible. I mow my one-acre yard with a battery-powered push mower. In the fall I rake the leaves by hand and carry them to the compost mountain in a wheelbarrow. I pretend that elevators and escalators don't exist. If I have to drive to a store I park at the farthest corner of the lot (also saves on damage to my car). More often than not I ride my bike into town when I'm going to the public library or to grab a few groceries. It's only two miles, which doesn't even get the car warmed up but is easy aerobic exercise for me. We go for walks and hikes with our dog for fun. Yes, it takes sweat and effort to increase your output, but that's the point.

"I always encourage anyone trying to make themselves more healthy, but I think too many people overthink it. Michael Pollan offered simple advice for the input side: 'Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants' (from The Omnivore's Dilemma [quality hardcover and paperback; Kindle edition and trade versions; Young Readers Edition. One of the most enjoyable books of any genre I've ever read, by the way. —Ed.]). Note that when he says food he means real food: meat, grains, nuts, and veggies, not processed junk.

"On the output side, make an effort to do some sort of 'work' every day. You don't have to be a runner or a competitive body builder, but almost everyone can go for a walk and do some sort of body weight exercise. If you're stuck at a computer, use a standing desk for part of the day. Go for a walk while eating your lunch. When you head down the hall for a bathroom break, do a lap up and down the stairs afterwards. If you love watching TV at night, get an exercise bike and pedal slowly while watching. Push things, pull things, lift things, carry things (including yourself). Then do it again the next day."

Daniel: "How about the list or a reference to the list of the 100 veggies/fruits we can eat without limit?"

Mike replies: I looked around for that too and was frustrated. It's a claim from the linked article.

I can take a run at it, though. "Healthy food" is relative. Olive oil is bad for you (oils are the sugar of the fat world), but it's better than vegetable oils loaded with saturated fats. Beef tenderloin is bad for you (here's the lowdown on protein) but it's a lot better than processed meats like hot dogs, baloney, sausage, and Slim Jims. Milk is bad for you but it's better than soda pop. And so forth. Improving your food will help you even if you're still eating questionable foods.

The seven healthiEST foods are: 1. greens; 2. vegetables; 3. fruits; 4. legumes (beans, chickpeas, split peas, and lentils); 5. whole grains; 6. nuts and seeds; and 7. spices. A fair amount of these real foods are necessary for human health no matter what else people eat and no matter how cockamamie and compromised their food beliefs are. These seven things are the most nutritious foods. They supply the thousands of phytochemicals your body needs to thrive.

It's very difficult to eat a diet of ONLY the healthiest foods—I've tried—but the good news is that small amounts of "bad" foods won't hurt you in the long run. So whatever you're emotionally attached to doesn't have to be banished completely and forever. You can still eat meat once in a while as long as your gut microbiome isn't adapted to make poisons out of it; you can still eat small desserts after a meal unless it triggers cravings for more sugar; you can have pizza a few times a year; and you can even have a sugared soda pop, if you must, although a handful of times a year seems like a prudent limit. (I ate ice cream five times in 2020.) Exceptions like these are repugnant to vegan true believers and purists, and also to those who eschew animal food for ethical and humanitarian reasons, but, scientifically, where health alone is concerned, it seems reasonably clear that they don't appreciably affect health outcomes. You're an omnivore and you can survive on the world's worst foods for shortish periods—it's a tribute to our extraordinary adaptability that it's even possible for humans to survive on McDonalds meals and highly processed foodlike substances from gas stations or convenience stores. You won't thrive, but still, we're amazing.

Peter Croft: "Keep writing about food and healthy eating Mike. I really enjoy your articles and opinions."

Have Camera Manufacturers Fallen Victim to Audience Capture?

Sroyon wrote: I feel like Leica (for example) has to some extent fallen victim to audience capture. The basic M design was so revolutionary, and attracted such a loyal following, that they're condemned to repeating it forever and ever with only minor tweaks allowed.

In the post below this we were talking about "audience capture," which theportal.wiki defines as "a self-reinforcing feedback loop that involves telling one's audience what they want to hear and getting rewarded for it."

Berny Belvedere wrote about a term called "intellectual capture":

It is very important to me to be able to avoid intellectual capture.

By that I mean putting myself in a position where I have to professionally censor what I really believe due to investors disagreeing with it, or advertising people not approving of it, or an audience not appreciating it. It is of paramount importance to me to avoid ever being in a situation like this.

That’s not because I have particularly explosive beliefs. It’s because the lifeblood of a writer is being able to think and write freely.

That used to be called being "co-opted" in the 1960s, if I'm not mistaken. If you were co-opted, you sold out—joined the oppressors, abandoned your higher principles, self-censored, etc.

The business of business is business
As far as business is concerned, it seems obvious that "capture" of some sort is part of the very nature of enterprise. You give your audience what they want because they will buy it. And since the goal of business is not something amorphous like "doing good" or "having integrity" but simply making money, there's a pretty coarse test of concept right at hand: if something sells, you were right, and if it's a dud in the marketplace then it's a fail. You are pursuing customers who will pay, and you'll give them whatever they will want to pay for. So of course businesses are "captured" by their audiences—at least, that portion of the audience that actually buys their stuff. And they want to be captured.

There are a lot of ancillary issues around this that have intermittently interested me, and we can't parse them all here. As you know, though, an issue that preoccupies me these days is complexification—the continual addition of features in order to vie for customers. As soon as one manufacturer adds GPS or dual card slots or slow-motion video or built-in Bluetooth or whatever, then everyone has to do it, and they get slagged in reviews if they don't. And no matter how many features the makers lard into their infernally cunning little computerized cameras, the mavens always laser down on the ones that are missing, which might include things nobody knew they wanted two years prior. The overall result has been that most consumers now just sidestep cameras. Because instead of making life easier, the ever-increasing trend toward extreme capabilities just makes things too complicated for mere humans to master during the shortish lifetime of any given product. When was the last time you read and mastered a whole camera instruction book? I used to do it as a matter of course. Now it's too much like taking a semester-long college course.

I personally think that cameramakers have painted themselves into a corner in this regard. They've catered to the neverending nattering of the nabobs until even experts don't know all the capabilities of their own devices. "Audience capture" has led them into making products that are fundamentally unappealing except to an ever-shrinking pool of hardcore mavens. The public, meanwhile, given a viable alternative in smartphones, is drifting away. Most potential buyers of cameras don't even know what an ƒ-stop is, or that best focus in a fixed-lensmount camera is a plane parallel to the plane of the sensor. How are they going to master 28 pages in the IB on AF setup?

I do agree with Sroyon's point about the M, although I like the camera. But here's the funny thing: given my preoccupation with complexification—more accurately put, my yearning for radical simplification, for purity—I actually think Leica is the one company that has not been captured by its audience. It's the only company that has the cojones to go against the crowd and make fundamentally simple cameras.

I wish it weren't so, because Leica is also our industry's only maker of Veblen goods, the one company that frankly caters to the carriage trade. Nothing wrong with that, except for me, because I can't/won't participate. I've only bought cameras that cost close to $3k twice in my life, and both times it just drove me crazy to have that much cash hanging from a strap.

You know what they say: Oh well.

Mike

P.S. I once actually painted myself into a corner. In an outbuilding at my grandparents' summer cottage there was a chauffeur's room upstairs, because in the early days of the automobile it took three days to drive from Indianapolis to northern Michigan and my great-grandparents hired a driver to cope with the crappy roads and the incessant tire changes. (This would have been in the 1900s and 1910s.) Back then they stayed all summer and went home in the fall. And of course the driver had nothing to do once they got there but to hang out and wait for the drive back. So the little room above the workshop was for him to live in. I suppose it was only used for that purpose for a few years; roads and cars improved dramatically in a relatively short time. Anyway I and my friends used that room as a hangout, briefly, in my early teen years, and I found a can of green enamel down in the workshop that was still good, so, in the spirit of decorating the hangout, I happily painted the floor of the chauffeur's room green, ending up in a little aperture in the corner that led to the space under the eaves. After realizing what I had done and heartily experiencing the feeling of being an absolute dunce, I had to walk across the freshly painted enamel, repairing the footprints as I went, and then leave my now green-soled tennis shoes in the sun to dry so I wouldn't inadvertently leave a green footprint somewhere I oughtn't. So the expression "painted into a corner" has long been a vivid one for me. An older cousin later moved that old outbuilding down the shore to his own property. I don't know it for a fact, but I'd wager that little upstairs room still has a green floor.

And by the way, one of the things I once treasured that is now lost is a scrapbook my great-aunt Margie made when she was a girl that documented one of those three-day trips to the cottage. There were a lot of pictures of punctured tires being changed at different locations. The car was an open touring car with a tonneau cover of a type that was common then. A Pierce-Arrow similar to the one above. According to family lore, my great-grandmother was the first female in Indianapolis to learn to drive; she made her chauffeur give her lessons on the little winding roads of Crown Hill Cemetery.

Book o' the Week

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

These book links are a portal to Amazon.

Today at B&H Photo

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

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

Sroyon [OP]: "Ooh that's an interesting way to look at it! I like simple cameras too. I have the good fortune of owning an M3; I love it to bits.  :-) 

"I recently did a few photoshoots with dancers: DSLR, multiple speedlights, wireless trigger, the works. And the technology is marvelous, no two ways about it. But today I was taking available-light photos with a manual-focus Minolta SLR, just for myself. Sweet delight."

Dogman: "You know those camera reviews? The ones that list the 'Pros' and 'Cons' of the camera under review? Yeah, those. I always read the 'Cons' first. They always tell you what the camera doesn't have. That's what I'm interested in. I like not having all those things."

John Camp: "I agree with you that some of the over-elaboration of cameras can get silly, but I've never understood you obsession with 'simple' cameras. I have four complicated cameras (wait: when I think of it, I have five; no, six.) But they're all designed to be made simple. Yes, you have to thumb through a complicated instruction guide, but still: they can be made simple for whatever your particular definition of simple may be. Given the likelihood that no two photographers are exactly alike, the question becomes, which photographers would you leave out with your simple camera, because you don't value what they do? Astrophotographers, maybe? Or wildlife? Or bird? Or night shooters? Or those who prefer square aspect ratios, or 4/3? Or those who prefer legacy lenses because they like them or because it's all they can afford, and need to be able to shoot manually instead of with automation? How about sports shooters who value bracketing? What about people who do three or four different things, and value one-button assists to switch modes? I mean, really, who would you choose to leave out?"

Mike replies: I hear objections like this a lot, and in some ways of course they're valid. But they're also like saying, "when Leica made the Monochrom, they ignored the needs and wishes of the millions of people who love and crave colors!" Or, about the Miata, "aren't you forgetting about people who have large families? Which children would you suggest they leave at home?" You get the drift. Just because a few cameras are pared-down and purist doesn't mean others can't be "do-everything." And if some cameras were specialized tools in one way it doesn't mean others can't be specialized for other uses.

Put another way, I've never said all cameras should be simple.

Kenneth Tanaka: "There's a vast chasm between 'audience capture,' as it's been portrayed here, and customer responsiveness. The former is a symptom of a psychiatric / emotional disorder that compels attention seeking...with no direct reward other than the momentary attention of an 'audience.' The latter is a business tactic usually deployed in order to retain / attract customers who pay for your products or services. Each of the top camera manufacturers has proven to be responsive to their customers; that's why they're 'top' companies. And that especially applies to Leica, whose customers tend to be very involved with the response loop."

kevin willoughby (partial comment): "Re 'I actually think Leica is the one company that has not been captured by its audience,' I respectfully disagree. Leica did try to build a different / better rangefinder camera: the M5. The Leica M audience rejected the camera. Leica had to drop back and issue a more M3-ish design: the M6. The audience rejected the M5 and demanded the M6. Leica did what the audience demanded."

Open Mike: The Perils of 'Audience Capture'!

If you are reading this, it appears I owe you more of a debt than I thought! This is one of the strangest articles I've read in many a month: "The Perils of Audience Capture," by Gurwinder, who is described as "Writer exploring the ways we are fooled in the Digital Age." I'd say this is a "must-read"—it applies to all sorts of things, not least of all politics—and thanks to Navin Upendran for the tip.

"Audience capture" means that a performer is changed, and becomes trapped by, the demands of his or her audience. I think you will appreciate that the top two photos are shocking. They show a young man ("Nikocado Avocado") whose previous identity (Nicholas Perry) became blurred into his online persona (or "brand" as the article has it). But isn't his story just a sad tale of slow-motion suicide by a form of addiction? Addiction to food, and self-destruction via food, but also to approval. To me it simply smacks of mental illness of some sort. Is it really a characteristic of...well, of people like me?

I've always thought something approximately the opposite of myself. I started my own website (in November, TOP will celebrate its 17th birthday) because I wanted to create a "space" online that would reflect my values. I was tired of what used to be called "flame wars." My belief is that I've attracted the audience I want, rather than that I've twisted or distorted my real self into a pretzel to meet your demands.

However, I do know about the seductive lure of having a large audience. Yesterday TOP got about 6,700 pageviews, although that's down a bit because I've been on vacation. But I wonder what I would be willing to do for an audience of 100,000, much less one million. I do think it would be a temptation to "do anything" for that. I mean, I hope I wouldn't—I hope I would still be my authentic self, and have integrity, and that I wouldn't abandon my values for popularity. But I get the attraction of it, is all I'm saying.

I'm going to be very interested to hear what you think about Gurwinder's article. As I've gotten older I've noticed that it sometimes feels like I'm "living in the future." The ideas in this article seem almost freaky in their bleak futuristic feel. And unfortunately it's a dystopian future. Anyway, about that debt I mentioned: thanks for not goading me into going crazy over all these years! Not that you would do that.  :-)

Just Plain Mike

Book o' the Week

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

These book links are a portal to Amazon.

Today at B&H Photo

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

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

robert e: "MWAHAHAHAHA! Give it time. Just kidding, of course. I think of TOP as a 'Field of Dreams' type situation. It's got such a distinctive ethos that your audience is mostly self-selected, plus you've trained us well—gently but firmly. You also put an awful lot of work into keeping order. It's too bad that you have to, but it also reflects your priorities. We your audience then try to emulate your standards, because we like how it is here. That then contributes to the distinctive ethos, which...etc.

"In other words, this is the positive version of that feedback loop. I think it's a matter of priorities and sticking to your guns. And in your case about being quite transparent about them and why they matter to you. You clearly think about it often. Others have lost their way or were in it for the attention from the beginning, but their priorities run in a different direction. Have no fear, Mike, you're in control, as long as you want to be."

David Dyer-Bennet: "Sometimes it's the approval. Performers of many types all report encounters with it with live audiences (and there's a range of dependency on it, not surprisingly). Also sometimes it's the money. You have made your living at this for some time. One or two orders of magnitude more page views would presumably make rather a difference to that as well. It's hard to convince somebody to disbelieve something when their standard of living depends on believing it!"

Nick Reith: "To say that the article and especially the before and after pictures shocked me would be an understatement. Equal feelings of pity, revulsion and despair all combine in a hopeless attempt to make any sense of this."

David Miller: "The final passage in Gurwinder's article sums it up: '…if you chase the approval of others, you may, in the end, lose the approval of yourself.' This caution was appropriate long before computers or the internet existed, and is applicable to how we make photographs and how we live our lives."

Gordon Lewis: "'The Perils of Audience Capture' is about so-called influencers, which you are not. You're a blogger and, by your own admission, text blogs have lost popularity to video blogs. You have also proven yourself immune to reader requests to change your blog format, show more photos, stay on topic, and so on. One can only imagine how more radical suggestions might be received. So I think you're safe for now."

Mike replies: I also turned down a lucrative ad from Nikon when the D3 was introduced, because of my existing decision not to allow flashing or animated advertisements. That was in the days when advertisements supported the site—that is, me and Xander—and it was very hard to turn down that big check, let me tell ya. The advertising agency was incredulous and very annoyed that I would take such a stand, and Nikon never approached me again. But I think moving ads are distracting to readers, so that was that.

James: "After reading both articles I saw the title of the feature book as 'Home Fries.' I only realized my error after reading the description and looking at the title again in confusion. I’m not sure if this was the power of suggestion, hunger, or both."

Mike replies: Too funny!

Scott Abbey: "Clearly, the poor fellow in the article has severe problems. And the consensus of this readership is that he made bad choices. But this really has nothing to do with the Internet. Let’s be honest with ourselves: we all bend to the will of those who pay us to some degree. It can range from what we generally consider acceptable, like a dress code or working hours, or it could be more impactful on our person: jobs with physical risks, jobs with mental risks, jobs with moral risks. One can hope that they make mostly good choices, but we all deal with this.

"In my case, I traded time at home with my wife for (a lot of) business travel in order to enjoy a challenging and financially rewarding job. Was I succumbing to unreasonable demands? Some might think so, others not. What about people with hazardous jobs? Are coal miners making a bad choice when it is the best paying job in their area? What about football players risking brain damage? What if the guy who ate himself sick felt it was the only way he could raise the money to pay a loved one's medical expenses? Again, this is not an Internet problem, but a problem of life choices in pursuit of one’s livelihood. It existed long before the Internet."

Basic Camera Functions

I'm back from my trip. The purpose of it was for my son and his mother to meet for the very first time, 29 and a half years since his birth. He has a sprawling family on her side, and we met only a fraction of them, but there were a lot of new faces, and some I remembered from the old days. And I got to meet my son's new girlfriend, Kate, for the first time. Nobody knew in advance how it was all going to go, but it seemed to go as well as it could have. There was a nice spirit all around; one of reconciliation, and compassion, and forgiveness, and generosity. Kate is pregnant, and has experienced intermittent feelings of illness, and she is taking very good care of herself and their as-yet-unnamed son-to-be, but we managed some touristy activities as well. The high point was the National Aquarium in Baltimore's Inner Harbor, which is absolutely an A+ attraction—Kate and Xander both especially like aquariums, and I enjoyed it far more than I thought I would. Despite having lived in the area all those years ago I had never been there before. It's really well done. If you're ever near it and find yourself considering a visit, don't hesitate.

Visitors at the National Aquarium in Baltimore,
which was remarkably crowded on a weekday.

I took the Sony A6600 and tried to use it, although I forgot to bring it in from the car on the Aquarium visit. Although I took only a couple of hundred exposures, it was really the first time I had used the A6600 since I first tried it as a loaner from LensRentals. I'll show you a few pictures from it tomorrow.

Wait for it
One of the surprises, not a good one, is how slow it seemed. Of course one of the many "vexations" (I like that obsolescent word) of the iPhone is that it's so slow and awkward to use—if I see something like an airliner against a while cloud or a speedboat passing a perfect position in a lake composition, I've learned to not even try to get the iPhone ready, but just to observe the sight. Well, unfortunately, I have some of the same feelings about the A6600. It just seems to take a while to go from off to on and ready, and even if it's in the "On" position it takes too long to wake from sleep. Shutter lag also feels long, although it might not be.

One of the great advantages of the classic film Leicas—M4 through M6—is how responsive they could be. Shutter lag (the interval between pressing the button and the film being exposed) was famously short—if memory serves, 19 milliseconds vs. ~80 ms. for a pro SLR and 150 and up for an amateur SLR (many were around 200 ms.). But of course you don't have to turn on a film camera—it's always on. With the Leica, I got into the habit of zone-focusing it by feel depending on the situation I was in—at the Aquarium, for instance, I might have set it to six or eight feet and just carried it that way. Then when you raise it to your eye you have just a little adjustment to make. At any rate, good film cameras were "shutter-button priority"—there were a number of things you had to do to get ready to take the shot, but if you pressed the button the shutter went off and that was that. It didn't refuse to fire until the settings were all set.

It struck me that it's kind of curious that for all our "measurbating" and comparing of features on digital cameras, we don't really make a big deal of the basic responsiveness numbers, although AF speed might be an exception. I guess because these are so hard to measure, and differ based on circumstances. Does anyone know of a site that has compiled a comparative list of functions like turn-on time, wake from sleep, AF speed, latency, buffer clearing, and other responsiveness traits? I do see these mentioned hither and yon, but as I say I'm not sure we pay these things sufficient attention.

Anyway I did notice that with the A6600 slumbering on my shoulder, hanging from one of Al Stegmeyer's UpStraps, too many beats pass before it agrees to take a picture. Repeatedly, things changed before I could get a shot. Part of that is down to my rusty chops, but part of it was the camera's fault.

If you'll excuse a digression (of course you will, because those who don't are long gone by now!), the UpStrap is by far the best camera strap I have ever used—and many famous photographers starting with Jay Maisel agree with that. My new one is the "Friendship," and it's the best small-camera UpStrap yet. I have several similar older UpStraps, but I have other cameras now and needed a new one for the Sony. The only one I've ever found that stays on my shoulder without fuss.

Everything has an arc
And incidentally, while I am on the subject of responsiveness, the new iPhone is definitely worse than older ones. The auto-turn-on feature is a pain—I'm going to turn auto-turn-on off if it turns off—and the swipe commands are too many and too touchy to be convenient, although I suppose a few adroit young people will have them mastered. My brain doesn't work that way. Plus, the camera is now so configurable that it's actually possible on the phone to get into that dreaded state where I've done something and don't know right away how to undo it, which is the tell-tale curse of all overly electronic-i-fied devices. And face recognition is worse than the old fingerprint recognition, because it assumes you will be shining the moon of your mug directly at the screen at all times, which I often am not. So the iPhone-as-camera is leaving its signature strength—simplicity—behind. That trend will continue, because it always does.

More about "what I did on vacation" tomorrow or Monday. At any rate, I am back.

Mike

(New Book of Interest coming on Sunday[?])

Grit and Grace: Women at Work in the Emerging World. Unfortunately, this will be the posthumous swan song of the indefatigable documentarian Alison Wright, whose untimely death at 60 in the Azores this year meant she never got to see it published. Wright's photography was inextricably entwined with her life's dedication to social justice, a sense of acceptance of humanity, and a roving search for beauty and color.

Our link to 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:

robert e: "What a momentous occasion. Glad it turned out well. Best of luck going forward.

"My Canon M is as slow as it gets. Like other commenters, I've trained myself to touch the shutter to wake it up before I even lift it. It helps, too, that I often have a manual-focus and -aperture lens on it. My biggest 'vexation' with it is the lack of a viewfinder."

Jim Arthur: "It’s good to have you back and I’m glad the trip went well.

"I agree with you on the importance of responsiveness. I still shoot with an old EOS 6D and the combination of an optical viewfinder and back button focus allow me to grab a shot in the blink of an eye. I guess I take it for granted.

"Back in the day, DPReview included a Timing and Performance section in their reviews. I imagine this became less relevant once people got used to the idea of digital and digital performance improved across the board. I just took a look at their 2004 review of my Olympus C-8080 and there is an entire page dedicated to timed camera operations."

Omer: "The wake-up lag and the settings info lag in the viewfinder has been a Sony issue for a long time. DPReview has reported it many times and only recently has Sony deigned to change it but only in the more expensive full frames. The reputation that Sony does not understand what photographers need in cameras is justified by exactly these issues. As for the shutter lag, the E-first curtain shutter mechanism actually has one of the shortest lag times in the industry. The thing is, only the closing mechanical shutter is heard and so the perception of lag stems from not hearing the two curtain shutter mechanism. If you use the A6600 enough, you'll learn to either press the shutter before lifting it up, or in the settings keep it from going into sleep mode."

Tim Swan: "Nothing has been faster between intention and photo than my Leica M6. But here's a tip for faster iPhone camera start-up. On your iPhone, go to Settings > Accessibility > Touch. Scroll down, then select Back Tap. Select either Double Tap or Triple Tap and set it to open the camera. Now, as long as the power is on (even if you're not logged in) you can double-tap the back to open the camera app."

Mike replies: Wow. Excellent. Thank you for that.

Friday's Journey Through the Past

Double entendre here. Not only are we visiting a long-ago post from August 2009, but the post itself is a reminiscence, about the first "good" camera I ever used. It was long ago in my life, but the camera, a Zeiss, was old even then.

"The 'Use Me' Appeal of Cameras," it's called.

Sadly, that Zeiss was stolen, as the post will relate, although it was entirely my fault. I still dream of losing cameras, to this day. I wonder, do thieves still steal cameras? I don't think they're popular targets like they once were, but I don't know, not being a thief.

Mike

(TOP doesn't post on Saturdays any more—even famous bloggers have to do housework—but Mike will return on Sunday with exotic tales of his time off.)

Thursday's Journey Through the Past

I always think I have to link to long posts. But here's a short one.

"Oil Shots," from April of 2008.

I haven't done this in a month of Sundays. That's a pity. It just means I don't put myself in shooting situations very often any more.

My father used to call these "B-clicks," because he didn't like to waste film on them. He'd set his mechanical Konicas on "B" and pretend to take pictures with no film in the camera. But that made me antsy; I was too superstitious. I was convinced I'd see a fantastic picture go by and I wouldn't have gotten it. Fate is a trickster in my world.

But however you do it, it works. You get into the flow and after a while you don't feel self-conscious or shy any more. You're just "in it." It's a nice feeling.

Mike

(Mike is on vacation this week. But the week is almost over.)

Wednesday Journey Through the Past

Today, we delve into a curious area...commentary on the vast number of photographs taken of the same thing:

"'Most Tourists Take Pictures from the Same Spot,'" from February 2011.

These composite pictures are intellectually but not visually interesting. They meld together hundreds of publicly-available photographs of standard scenes taken from more or less the same place. It's curious too that we (Ctein too) immediately got into the issue of copyright...because of course we identify with the photographers whose photographs have been used without their knowledge. Of course, no one could prove that their picture was one of the ones used in the composites. How would you possibly know?

Then again, if you release a photo into the world, you never know what's going to happen to it—I miss the stories from that era of photographs posted online showing up in weird places, do you remember that? It was sort of a low-level meme at the time. Like Justin Watt's Incredible Encounter, which I also posted about that same month and year. The weird thing about that one was not so much that his photo was used, although that's pretty unlikely, but that he encountered and identified it.

Mike

(Mike is on hiatus this week. One reader said, "one week is not enough," but I'm not sure I've taken more than a week off since George W. Bush was President. Comes with the territory.)

Tuesday's Journey Through the Past

Cameras! Cameras! Cameras! I thought you could do with a memento mori of the vanished past. Most old reviews hold little interest for the present, but this is the no. 1 most-viewed post in TOP's storied history:

"Sony vs. Nikon vs. Canon," from December 2008.

It received a whopping 73,000 pageviews, the all-time one-day record for TOP. I have no way of guessing how many people came to look at it after the day it was published—or in subsequent days—but traffic was stout the day after, too. Blogs are not as popular now—videos have taken over. Cameras are not as popular now either, come to think. And of course the cameras in this post are historical as well...although you may recall one or the other of them fondly. Digital cameras were a "frontier market" then, wild and woolly as they say, and DSLRs were coming into their own at the time. Everyone and his uncle—and his brother, and his uncle's brother and his brother's uncle—wanted to know what to buy. Those were the days?

I rather think these are the days, but you know what I mean.

Mike

(Mike is on holiday, like Monsieur Hulot. He will return anon, refreshed and revived. I hope I am keeping up with the comments, but, as I write this on Friday, present me cannot know what future me is doing.)

Monday's Journey Through the Past

Mike has skulked off on holiday, as our British friends call it. It being Summer and all. But a long-forgotten post has turned up when you least expected it:

"The Case of the Purloined Prints" by Jim Hughes, January 2014

In which a puzzling mystery is described. But not solved; because that's the way life is sometimes—although it would never do for fiction, which truth is stranger than. On the other hand, all's well or well enough in the end, as you shall see.

Mike

(Mike is on vacation this week, recreating. Seeing his son and sundry others. Comments may be left, and that's all right.)