The Online Photographer

The Sharp Edge

I'm going to be ready for spring. In previous springtimes, I spent most of my time driving around thinking, if I had a camera, and I were photographing, this would be perfect light and a great opportunity. (In fact if I were feeling cynical, which I'm not right now, I might say that's the state in which I have spent my life and in which I have mostly experienced the world.) But this spring, I'm going to be ready. I have my camera and its parameters in place; I've had some practice processing the files; I have an entire protocol worked out, from the kit I carry, to ingestion, to soft display of the results...so bring on the good light. I'm ready this time.

The thing is, though, I have to keep shooting now. Now. Because I need to keep in practice. Shooting with a camera is like shooting pool...every day you have to get over the initial rust and get back into the flow. Real pool players, if they haven't been shooting much, work intensively for some number of days—like, ten to fourteen hours at the table—because that's what it takes to get back "in stroke." Pool skills aren't just something you have and carry around with you and can deploy right away, cold, whenever the spirit moves you. It takes constant honing of the knife edge. Same thing with most skills that have a physical component. Most instrumentalists have to practice every day. Even vocalists. Athletes have to stay in shape by regulating their training. They can't just knock off for weeks and expect to stay right where they were.

Same thing with photographing. Most good shooters shoot every day. And even shooting every day, it takes a while to get back into it. And you still have good days and bad days. If you want everything you do to be natural and easy, you've got to keep your edge. I've heard plenty of stories of great photographers going out and shooting nothing for a while just to keep the hand and eye sharp. It's easy and cheap now, but you've still got to do it.

When I was learning zone focusing by feel with the Leica, I made it a habit to get the camera out every night and practice with it for ten minutes. Look at an object somewhere in the room, focus on it by feel, check for accuracy, repeat. It's not a bad idea with any camera. Take it out, pick out something to photograph, prepare to shoot whatever you're looking at...see how long it takes you to get ready to shoot. What are the sticking points that are slowing you down? Work on those things. If you have a spouse, go for a walk and ask your spouse to point to subjects. "That pine tree, vertical. That church over there, horizontal. Those flowers. That doorway, vertical." Whatever they call out, take a picture of it as quickly as you can—just for practice getting the camera around, holding it correctly, setting it, setting the lens, focusing, getting all ready to hit the shutter. Then put it back over your shoulder or back in the bag and do it over again.

Stay in practice! Whether with actual shooting or with exercises and drills. Shooting is a skill. Camera handling is a skill. They're not something that comes in the box. Touch the camera every day.

I'm going to be ready for spring.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2023 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 or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Cliff McMann: "Just a thought but combine the two. Back when I was at NOVA taking photography classes, Sally Mann came and showed us her work organized by project. Some famous and published at the time like pictures of the kids. Some more personal such as her father after his passing, at rest in her home before his remains final disposition. Her regular pictures of her pregnancy as it progressed. The project that captured the struggling photographer in me was a series of still lifes. Objects partially submerged in water. It was beautiful subtle work, she was generous enough to share a lot of near misses, along with a few that she was happy with. I was inspired and spent a lot of time shooting really bad still lifes between my scattered opportunities to shoot natural light posed portraits (my true love in this hobby.) Every one of those still lifes was awful. But in retrospect made me better. A lot of them were shot in our basement, pictures of pool balls on a terrible cheap Sears pool table. I owe a lot of my 30+ year love affair with this craft to an hour or two of Sally’s unflinching willingness to share her process, and to a cheap MDF Sears and Roebucks pool table. I guess I’m thinking: practice on what’s close, especially if it’s something you love. There’s no obligation to share, but even your misses may have value to someone. Her willingness and honesty certainly affected me. Yours has too. Thanks to both of you."

Mike replies: I used to teach at NOVA! And I know Sally, and have experienced a few of her demonstrations of process. She should make YouTube tutorials....

Stan B.: "Robert Frank was supposedly the Steph Curry of camera handlers, could get the shot from whatever angle—and look good doing it!"

Mike replies: When I interviewed Ralph Gibson he told me some great stories about Robert's camera-handling skills. The best one: he told Ralph he was going to show him a trick, took Ralph's Leica, pre-focused it, set the timer, and carefully tossed it up in the air. Ralph swore he had a contact sheet with a focused picture of himself and Robert standing on the ground looking up.

Chris Kern: "Most good shooters shoot every day. And even shooting every day, it takes a while to get back into it....

"If you want everything you do to be natural and easy, you've got to keep your edge. I don’t think you actually need a camera to 'keep your edge' as a photographer. You can practice photography virtually by keeping your eyes open and visualizing images without making them. In fact, there may be some advantage to employing that approach to maintain or improve your photographic skills because thinking about the pictures you might shoot frees you from the mechanical distraction of operating the camera. The value of imagining a picture ('imagination' and 'image' are cognates, after all) shouldn’t be underestimated."

Olybacker: "You are quite correct. I have found after a lapse of some time, especially when doing 'street' or documentary photography, lack of every day practise soon shows up. The eye might be there but everything else that goes with it, timing, getting the feet in the right place, having the right camera settings, even speed of getting the camera to the eye quickly can all be gone. Even shooting landscape photos requires continual practise or the mojo goes away."

Dan Montgomery: "This post might as well be directed to me personally. I've never been a full-time photographer, but there have been stretches during which I had my camera with me all the time, and I used it as you describe. All for the better. Now I go days, sometimes weeks, without using a camera, but when I do, I need stills and video, run-and-gun style, often in bad light in tricky settings. Inevitably, in all the switching of settings and lenses, the hooking up, unhooking and re-hooking up of lavalier mics, of using, then not using, a tripod, and of shooting this part with video lights but this part with room lights, I end up with one or another camera setting all wrong (to be discovered only after it's too late), or I leave with the feeling that I didn't 'work' the assignment enough, or both. I tend to blame, at least in part, the overabundance of buttons, toggles and menu settings, but you are right, the bigger problem is my waxing and waning expertise at using those buttons, toggles and menu settings. (For the record, everything has always turned OK, but I know that everything could have been better.) Right now, the cameras are out, and I am going to practice just for the sake of practice. Thanks for the post."

Bryan Hansel: "Great post! In winter months, I use warm but bulky leather gloves to keep my hands warm. I can turn every dial, push every button, change lenses, add filters, and do almost everything needed with those gloves on. It's only through practice that that's possible. I've had other photographers laugh when I say that if I'm not shooting a lot in winter, I'll watch TV at night with a camera in hand and gloves on just to keep that muscle memory active. And then we go outside in –15°F temps and I watch them struggle with their cameras, take their gloves off often, and get freezing cold hands. The practice is worth it!"

Open Mike: Sleep Apnea

UPDATE: Today I joined a gym that has six different kinds of cardio machines. My insurance covered the entire cost. My son has been very encouraging—he's very athletic and likes to exercise. I'll publish updates every couple of months. Thanks so much for all the good and informative comments—I learned a lot. —Mike 

Just wanted to report for those who might be interested that I'm doing much better after resuming treatment for sleep apnea.

Art Photographers and the Camera Market

[Ed. note: TOP takes the day off on Saturdays, so I can pretend I'm doing housework and paying the bills. Oh boy.]

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To conclude the discussions from earlier in the week, in the posts "I Don't Want to Farm" and "The Rest Is History"—if you're an art photographer or fine-art photographer, you really don't have to worry. (Before I go on, "art photographer" is a useful term and not just a snooty claim-staking one, and I don't mind it. If you do, you can substitute expressive photographer or some other unfamiliar phrase, although if you use uncommon terms you run the risk of people not understanding what you mean.)

I suppose professional photographers of various types have always had to concern themselves with an understanding of a broad range of current mainstream tools, and they're the most likely to be heavily invested in one or more solutions, so they have to care about the camera industry to a certain extent. But art photographers don't. We have always been on the fringes, and we have always gone our own way and done our own thing. Finding the right camera is part of the creativity of creative photography, and it can range from a fanatical and involved pursuit of specific needs, all the way to the other end of the scale, namely, not giving a damn. Plenty of art photographers down through the years have used cameras they built themselves, cast-off cameras from earlier eras, common mid-level commodity cameras, toys, the latest fashion, custom or luxury offerings, or whatever they started out with and got used to. They might switch between formats with abandon like Mary Ellen Mark or use the same camera for decades like Henry Wessel, use a cheap plastic Diana like Nancy Rexroth or oversized 8x20-inch "panoramic" view cameras like Michael A. Smith. Alfred Stieglitz used a shabby old view camera on which the bellows sagged so much he had to hold the middle of it up with a loop of string during the exposure. Joel Meyerowitz might still be using his 8x10 Deardorff that was manufactured the year he was born. On the other hand, Alfred Eisenstadt was ceremonially presented with a custom Leica by the company, and the glamour and pinup photographer Peter Gowland invented and built his own cameras. Then there's the woman whose name I don't recall, who sent me a marvelous portfolio at the magazine I worked for. When I asked her what kind of camera she used, she replied, "I don't really know. Do you want me to go look?"*

With the advent of Internet communication, a lot of people got interested in learning about the camera market, and a lot of today's enthusiasts are deeply into "what's coming next" and the fate of specific companies from a business standpoint. But art photographers have always been a minuscule percentage of the camera-owning population, and we've never been much at the mercy of the direction the mass market is going. When the market switched from rangefinders to SLRs in a big way, a lot of us followed—and some of us didn't. Burt Keppler of Modern Photography said SLRs felt to him like coming home, and he happily made the switch. Were all of us suddenly doomed when point-and-shoots took over the market in the 1980s? Not at all, but Daido Moriyama adopted point-and-shoots and made art with them. Was it a disaster when digital came along? Not at all. Most of us just kept shooting film until we felt like making the switch—a switch that even Charlie Cramer, an expert dye transfer printer, eventually made. But John Paul Caponigro dove into digital right from the very earliest days. And a huge number of people were enabled by digital who hadn't been photographers before. Yet you can still outfit and run a B&W darkroom today, even one based around sheet film and a view camera, if you're one of the few who choose to.

Michael A. Smith with his 8x20-inch view camera.
Photo by Hans Bol.

We go our own way and do our own thing. While occasionally there is a photographer who abandons the work because of some shift in the technical winds, like Frederick Evans did when commercial platinum/palladium paper went out of production because of WWI, and you can't say we're not affected by the camera market at all, we've never been particularly attached to it. And certainly never at its mercy. Nowadays we have all sorts of choices: old film cameras of all types, old digital cameras, a broad range of new digital cameras in a broad range of sensor sizes, phones and other "devices," drones, on and on. If you can't find something to use to get yourself to where you want to be, you'll create some other possibility. Creative people find what they need.

Wherever the industry goes, it won't affect us. It doesn't matter if one company disappears or another does something revolutionary. Right now there are great photographers nobody's heard of quietly building bodies of work made with smartphone cameras; others are doing the same with aging 35mm film cameras. If someone builds a new 35mm camera, a few people will do good work with that. But it won't have much if any effect on the market as a whole. Part of the reason all this doesn't matter is that there will always be choices for those who are alert to them, and there will always be creative people willing to explore what they can do with whatever tools happen to interest them. If they can't do one thing they'll think of another. Their choices will be quirky and idiosyncratic, inventive, adaptive, and innovative. Because they always have been.

So while change might not go our way, it never really has. Is it anything to mourn, or moan, or worry about? Nah.

Mike

*Sadly, I never got to publish that portfolio, and I don't recall now what the reason was.

Original contents copyright 2023 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 or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Bassman: "Artists use the technology that’s available to create the art they want. The manufacturers are often behind the curve on the possibilities offered by their offerings, sometimes way off the mark. An example from the guitar world: when electric guitars were first being used widely during the 1950s and 1960s, most manufacturers were trying to make the electric instruments sound like the acoustic guitars they were replacing. After all, the whole point of electrifying them was to allow them to be louder. That the electric guitars didn’t sound like acoustic instruments was seen as a flaw to overcome. Artists, on the other hand, embraced the electric sound and the distortion the amplifiers exhibited to create the sound of rock and roll. They didn’t care about sounding like the older technology; they saw infinite possibilities with the new technology."

JH: "Bravo to Bassman, driving what he enjoys. People like him were the typical Porsche drivers until the mid-1980s when the new President of Porsche—who came from a US tractor company—started treating it like a brand to be milked for the highest profits. After I retired from racing in 2002 and did a couple of years teaching at track days for car clubs, I refused to take Porsche drivers as students. BMW owners were almost as bad. You could not instruct many of them—they knew it all....

"In several years of instructing, I only had one Corvette owner. After five laps with me driving at California Speedway, he got out of the car looking as white as a ghost and refused to drive the track himself...he'd had enough already. I quit instructing after a couple of years when I decided the majority of my students were trying to kill me. I live in a town full of posers here in California. The new big thing for posers is the 'urban rednecks' driving tarted-up giant pickup trucks. You can always tell a poser: they have pricey wheels and a cover over the bed of the truck to make sure it says perfectly clean."

Pieter Krigee: "On the picture Michael is not using an 8x10inch camera. Probably it is an 11x14inch camera or maybe even a larger one, a 30x50cm!"

Mike replies: It's an 8x20, and sorry. That was a typo. My brain thinks 8x20 and my fingers type 8x10 because that's what they most often do. It's like having a built-in malapropist spellchecker. Fixed now.

Bill Tyler: "I absolutely loved the story about the woman who didn't even know what camera she had, but was producing excellent work. Clearly, she had her priorities straight."

Anti-Posing

Tom Burke wrote about yesterday's post: "Good article! I greatly enjoyed it. I too obsess about things, especially when making a significant purchase (camera, computer). Interestingly, once I’ve made the purchase I tend to relax about it, and all the little pros and cons that I was obsessing about become unimportant as I just use the item."

Truer words were never spoken. Tom's right—it only matters while you can still change the decision. 

I suspect the "optimizing" attitude (which I definitely have, so don't think I'm being holier-than-thou) is usually based on two underlying causes: the desire to control something in our lives by having it be "perfect," because other things in our lives are not perfect (or maybe the flip side, to minimize the chance of buyer's remorse); or, for status: the desire to lend ourselves prestige by having the best of something and thus being the envy of our friends. 

That last impulse backfires, of course, when the possession in question brings an unintended association, as Keith Cartmell points out:

"Once upon a time I was a triathlete. Some of them obsess about bicycles, trying for weight savings measured in grams. They'll use an oval tube in their drink bottle, oriented to cut wind resistance. The bike itself was designed in a wind tunnel, weighs almost nothing, and can cost a substantial fraction of what a nice new car costs. No matter that the rider is by far the heaviest and least aerodynamic component. The best professionals can take advantage of such bikes, but most are sold to well-heeled amateurs who are mid-pack at best.

"We called such people posers."

Would I be a poser if I bought the Ukrainian chess pieces? I guess. Except I'm not sure anyone expects the sight of a chess set on display in the home to mean that the owner is actually a player. You can be an enthusiast of something and love it and still stink at it. I had a friend whose basement was filled with NFL paraphernalia and regalia, and she was never a football player—football was her bond with her Dad. Can you collect chess sets and not be a chess player? I don't see why not. I knew a guy who collected 1950s lunch boxes. People collect all kinds of useless things.

Pedaling faster
I used to really like the attitude that's the opposite of posing, too: the "make-do" or "can-do" attitude. That is, give me anything halfway decent and I'll make do. You don't need a good chess set to work on chess, you just need a serviceable set that doesn't actively irritate or embarrass you. And, pace Keith Cartmell, you don't need the absolute best, lightest bike, but you do need a good one that's light enough.

...And of course you need to be able to pedal it faster. Someone whose skills are top-flight doesn't actually need tools that are the very best. Like a skier whose skis are old and well-worn but who can carve moguls like a pro, or the skilled chef who has only two knives. I recall a story (maybe it actually was a short story) about a wealthy guy who goes with a friend to play golf. They're both outfitted beautifully and own the best of everything, from the latest shoes to the highest-rated golf bags, and they're carrying as many clubs as they're allowed to. Because they're only a twosome, they're paired to go out with a single. The single is a lanky guy dressed in old clothes who only has four clubs—a putter, a pitching wedge, a five-iron, and a three-wood. And he doesn't even have a golf bag; he's carrying the clubs in his hand as he walks. The two duffers with their splendid equipment scorn him and aren't very friendly to him. But of course they both hit in the high 90s despite cheating amicably here and there, and the lanky guy with the four clubs pins their ears back by twenty strokes. Because he's got one thing they don't. He's good.

Call it being an anti-poser. Is it still a pose, though? Maybe. Like the city biker with a fixie, or a barefooted runner.

Chess puts almost all of the emphasis on the skill and very little on the equipment. If you're a rock climber, on the other hand, you don't want anything but the very best equipment! Safety equipment, at least. Still, with many things, the anti-poser idea has a lot of appeal, at least to me. Don't have the best camera; be the better shooter.

Mike
Flickr page / New Yorker author page

Original contents copyright 2023 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 or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Aakin: "Collecting and Using are two totally different activities, with an overlap in that they use the same equipment. To do one, you don't have to do the other."

Aaron: "I think obsessing about perfection might not always be reducible to either compensation or 'posing.' It might just be a misinformed mismatch between expected outcomes and what the thing obsessed over is actually capable of doing. I'll confess this about cameras. In the not-so-distant-past I spent a lot of time obsessing over and even cycling through multiple cameras and formats to get the 'best' one because I thought doing so really would help my photography. It wasn't status (nobody pays attention to my cameras anyway), and it wasn't compensation (I'm under no illusions that the 'perfect' camera would somehow give me control I lacked elsewhere). It was just that I really thought this or that feature really would make a substantial difference in my photography. Of course, in nearly all cases, it didn't. Lesson learned. Now I obsess about cameras less."

David Dyer-Bennet: "I don't think I'm finding the 'perfect' product when I spend weeks researching something I'm going to buy. I think I'm making 'the best choice'—which is very different, in my head. (And that's 'best for me' of course.) I can tell you about the things on my 'fault' lists for cameras I had back to at least 1969, too (two of them were definite mistakes, even). A fair amount of the hemming and hawing and waffling is trying to decide which disadvantages will have less impact on my use of the product. I've probably done this most with cameras, but I also do it with computers and software. Well, and houses and cars and kitchen knives and sets of dishes and flatware and pots and pans and cutting boards and mixing bowls and kitchen scales and pliers and soldering irons. Not absolutely everything, though; the two bicycles I bought myself were both quite quick purchases."

JOHN B GILLOOLY: "Did a workshop in Cuba in 2001 with Antonin Kratochvil. He was using an old Nikon SLR—beat to hell. On it was a beaten, dented, 35mm ƒ/1.4 with scratches across the front element. His schtick, or his pose: None of that sh*t matters. Nor even does nailing the exposure or the focus! 'That's all bullshit, man!' He was certainly the anti-poser, but as you say, it was also his schtick. That's how he carried himself and how he wanted to be viewed as a photographer. And I loved his work. And he was a very valuable teacher to me."

Jonathan Morse: "From John Aubrey's Brief Lives: 'He was so eminently learned that all learned men made visits to him, and many of them would desire him to shew them his instruments (in those days mathematicall learning lay much in the knowledge of Instruments, and, as Sir Henry Savile sayd, in doeing of tricks) he would draw out a little Drawer under his Table, and shew them a pair of Compasses with one of the Legges broken; and then for his Ruler, he used a sheet of paper folded double.' 'He' was Rene Descartes."

Sroyon: "To your two underlying causes, I would add a.) what decision theorists call anticipatory regret, and b.) that some of us actually enjoy the process of researching and obsessing in its own right, even if we may not always admit it even to ourselves. Magnus Carlsen wrote some time back about discovering that he doesn't have a chessboard at home!

"The National University of Singapore Museum recently had an open call for a photography exhibition. Nine photographers were selected, myself among them (I honestly didn't expect it; I'm more of a writer and tinkerer than a photographer). My portfolio was shot with a homemade pinhole camera (cardboard box, Ilford photo-paper instead of film). Anyway, I like using digital cameras too, so I will try not to come across as an annoying anti-poser. But even as I type this comment, I realise how difficult it is.  :-) "

R. Edelman: "The topic of posers made me think of the Country and Western description: 'All hat, no cattle.'"

Benjamin Marks: "This can get pretty 'meta' in our culture of many choices. I am thinking of Rivendell bikes. I am totally susceptible to their anti-elite (but secretly elite) posture. They sell well-designed steel, lugged-frame bicycles, but their approach is to sell the idea that their refined, if traditional, designs and materials are superior to the current top-tech carbon fiber doohickies being sold to those mid-pack riders you mentioned in your post. Their marketing substitutes the concept of authenticity for whatever the other guys' claims are for their materials/designs and then flogs the heck out of that. Only jute twine! Pine tar soap for the real man! Headsets with bearings! Ride in Pro-Keds! It seems to me that in part what they are selling is disdain for the stockbroker who rides a $7K bike to average effect. Hey, I am not knocking it. I actually own one of their solid, steel lugged machines and have logged thousands of miles on the thing. So, yeah. I'm susceptible...maybe even a poster child. On the other hand, I have owned really awful bikes too, and of the two choices, I'd rather be on something that is well made. We have the concept of Velben goods, which is really about the social display qualities of luxury goods. I wonder if there is a similar shorthand for the simple pleasure derived from using the best-made tools."

Andrew Molitor: "In sailboat racing you polish the hull of your boat well past the point where it's doing anything to make your boat go faster. On purpose. We know that something like 800 grit is all you need, but everyone goes to 2000 or 4000. Because while it doesn't make the boat go faster, it makes you faster. It takes things out of the equation, like 'is my hull smooth enough.' You know it is. You put in the sweat, you looked at your own reflection. The hull is good. Now you can focus on some of the other several hundred factors. I've heard the same rationale for the 100-megapixel cameras. It's not that anyone needs those pixels, it's that it makes resolution not matter. You can just let it go; you're not going to run out of pixels. These are not entirely rational decisions, but performance has a large psychological, irrational, component."

Obsessing

I don't think of myself as a particularly obsessive person. There are other times, however, when I suspect that my broad interest in different subjects is just the result of my brain searching for new things to obsess over.

Right—I'm going to "tell on myself" here, at the risk of making myself look foolish. But then, as George Orwell wrote, "autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats."

Long story short: I might not be diligent about physical exercise, but I'm not shy about mental exercise. Some time ago I read that as we get older it's important not to get into mental ruts. The idea is that to keep your brain healthy you've got to exercise it by burning new neural pathways: accepting challenges, grappling with unfamiliar ideas, looking at the world in fresh ways. This notion was freeing for me, because I had always been too results-oriented. If I learned Japanese book-binding, it was because I expected to master it. Many things turn into disappointments that way. In the new regime, however, what's important is not mastery, but struggle. If you start learning Chinese on Duolingo, you're using it as a puzzle, essentially; a challenge for your mind—not necessarily trying to become conversant in tourist Chinese. So in recent years I've delved into a hodgepodge of seemingly disparate pursuits: learning to play simple tunes on the dulcimer, revisiting French, or struggling to learn touch-typing with the Kinesis keyboard—set up for the Dvorak layout no less. I got up to 20 wpm, and it took me months and many hours of working at it.

Most recently, having known since I was about eight that I'm bad at chess, I decided to struggle a bit with chess. It was that or Latin.

I'm taking a simple online course (at learnchess.net). It's been very interesting. I've also done a dive into chess culture, at least as it is presented online. If you want a sample, here's a fascinating video recounting a famous game. If you're not into chess, just follow along—it's not that hard to understand when you're merely observing while having everything explained to you twice, first by Garry Kasparov and then by GothamChess. To me it seems a good illustration, accessible even to rank beginners like me, of the kind of thinking involved in high-level chess. And it's pretty thrilling, frankly.

So then: several teachers recommend to learners that they get an actual physical chess set as they learn, so that they can leave a board set up to study, play against themselves, and so forth. Immediately I think, I am not going to invest money in that. I'll buy some unbreakable plastic pieces and one of those roll-up silicone chess boards.

So then what happens? Five days later, and I've got the basics of the entire universe of chess pieces all sussed out—weighted vs. unweighted, plastic vs. wood, handmade vs. mass produced, contemporary vs. antique, all the major websites, connoisseurs, collectors, aesthetics...and I'm this close to dropping hundreds of dollars on these:

And what are these? Why, I'm surprised you have to ask. Don't you know? It's a modern reproduction of a 1930s Soviet chess set, hand-carved by a husband and wife team of artisans who live in a battle zone in Ukraine who take custom orders on Etsy, of course. With the proper honey-colored white pieces appropriate to vintage Soviet-era Russian sets. Because you need that. Naturally.

So I'm just about to hit the buy button, when—talk about a flexible and resilient brain!—it occurs to me in the very nick of time that I don't know how to play chess. I'm pathetic at chess, presently. Of the 1,327 possible openings listed in the Oxford Companion to Chess, I currently have a grand total of zero memorized. I can't even score 100% on simple little quizzes like how to checkmate using two bishops. Not to mention that I live alone and don't even know anyone else who plays chess.

And there's more: chess pieces aren't even important to the game. They're just symbols. It's not like pool, where balls, cues, and the table have to be true or it will affect play. Chess pieces don't affect play. It's possible to play with a board you drew with a pencil, using scraps of paper with the names of the pieces scribbled on them. It makes absolutely zero difference to the game whether you play with a grubby old plastic set in the park or a £5,000 hand-carved set from Jacques of London.

Be sensible!
So how do we feel about people who obsess over equipage they can't even use? The guitar collector who can't play, the supercar owner who doesn't know how to drive, the hacker with the latest, most fashionable $600 driver? How about the Leica collector who doesn't use his pretties to, you know, take pictures? Has that ever described you? I fight against it, not 100% successfully.

Where photography is concerned, I've had to learn to be tolerant. I've been writing for a wide audience since 1987 when I had my first article published in a magazine. As far as I'm concerned, as long as they're not hurting anyone, anyone can do any tomfool thing they want to. I know people who buy new cameras about as often as most people stock up on toilet paper, people who haven't yet switched to digital, people who own 50 50mm lenses or 200 camera bags, even guys who ruin perfectly good color digital cameras by having the CFA stripped off the sensor at considerable expense. (Who would do that?) I've seen everything. No, scratch that: almost everything. Because I've also learned, if I've learned anything, that there's always one more surprise around the corner, something I've never, ever heard of anybody doing before. It's all good. As long as no one gets hurt.

As for me: no chess set for Mike. If I'm still learning chess one year from today, I'll buy a chess set I can comfortably afford. Somebody remind me, will you? And it will be just the right one. Until then, common sense shall pertain, and calm prevail.

Mike
Flickr page / New Yorker author page

Original contents copyright 2023 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 or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

ASW: "I'm right there with you Mike. If we need an extension cord, I don't just go to the store to buy an extension cord—I feel compelled to educate myself about the relationship between wire gauge and length and safe electrical load. Well, that seems reasonable. Then I start examining the little power sticker on every electronic device or tool that we own to see what sort of extension cord would be appropriate. Again, just being a safe home owner. Then I start to imagine scenarios where I might need to operate some high power tool that I don't even own (but might some day!) at the very edge of our property. Now we're talking about very long, very heavy duty, very expensive specialty power cords that you don't pick up at your local hardware store. Then (hopefully) my wife reminds me that we only need a 10-foot cord to plug in the 60-watt bird-bath heater and I've gone way overboard...again. "

Kenneth Tanaka: "'Obsession' is often cited as a negative, self-destructive trait. But the truly self-destructive disorder is 'obsessive-compulsive disorder' where one has lost self-control of one's obsessive urges and lets those urges run his/her life. Very bad.

"And, yes, plain ol' obsession can be debilitating and destructive, too, burning up all one's intellectual and emotional bandwidth. But, in fact, obsession is the force that has moved humanity (mostly) forward since humans stood erect. What if, say, Marie Curie, Nikola Tesla, Jonas Salk, et. al. had not been 'obsessive'? No, obsession is a very important driver throughout human history. A world without it would be sad to imagine. (Even insects and animals are instinctively obsessed!)

"And what about being an obsessed collector? Same story. Museums would have little to show the public without obsessed collectors disgorging their treasures post-mortem! And how sparse would the used Leica camera gear world be without guys obsessed with getting the 'best' lenses and cameras? (Blushing, as a guy who recently scored the new 35mm Summilux and the wonderful 35mm APO Summicron lenses.)

Albert Smith: "George Orwell wrote, 'autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful...'

"'I'm writing my unauthorized autobiography.' —Steven Wright

"My recent obsession involves this site. Your post from many months ago on watches was a tipping point for me. I had a half a dozen purely functional watches with a combined value of under $300. Since that article, I have 20 watches, and $300 is the average cost of each, some hitting $700-plus. I spend hours on YouTube watching reviews and planning my next purchase. Most of these watches have been worn once or twice, just to confirm operation, but I really don't need 95% of these.

"I never use to understand hoarders, but I may now.

"Good luck with your chess sets."

Carl Coryell-Martin: "Thank you for not linking to the hand-carved-in-Ukraine chess pieces. I have a perfectly serviceable set thank you very much."

Bob G.: "This might be worth perusing: 'Chess Set Made from Camera Lenses: Canon ƒ/2.8 to Nikon ƒ/4, Check!'

Mike replies: Count on LensRentals to be way ahead of us. That's hilarious. And check out that rental price!

Keith Cartmell: "Once upon a time I was a triathlete. Some of them obsess about bicycles, trying for weight savings measured in grams. They'll use an oval tube in their drink bottle, oriented to cut wind resistance. The bike itself was designed in a wind tunnel, weighs almost nothing, and can cost a substantial fraction of what a nice new car costs. No matter that the rider is by far the heaviest and least aerodynamic component. The best professionals can take advantage of such bikes, but most are sold to well-heeled amateurs who are mid pack at best.

"We called such people posers."

Eoin: "Mate with two bishops is hard! I played in leagues and tournaments all through school (even winning a few) and took up chess again recently—and I only just learnt how to mate with two bishops."

SteveW: "Thanks for this. I think. I just (obsessively) made a list of 10 chess books and (obsessively) ranked them in order of preference and will be (obsessively) looking in my storage bins in the garage for my old chess board. Sigh. —Fellow Obsessive"

Cateto/Jose: "On this very topic, I remember reading recently a comment from a doctor, a psychiatrists specialized in older people. He advised that, contrary to the common idea, the best way to keep your brain healthy is not to engage in mental activity, bur rather to keep as much social activity as possible: to interact with other people, be it family, friends, colleagues, and keep that relationship as active as possible, along your whole lifetime. And honestly, I think it makes sense."

Frans Evenblij: "Fantastic to have the intricate details of the Kasparov–Karpov match explained. The funny thing is, your remark that chess pieces are just symbols that do not affect the game sounds perfectly sensible. I expect that for somebody at grandmaster level this is perfectly true. A lot of grandmasters don’t even need a board at all. They do it all in their head.

"And yet…for me, I find that a full-size tabletop chess board with the classic Staunton pieces give me a much more serious presentation of the game than when I would play with small icons on a video screen or an equally small portable travel chess set. Somehow as a beginner level player I do not seem to be able to take the game seriously when the board is small and toylike. Same effect you have with your monochrome-converted Sigma camera. Somehow the camera properties, for you, and the way the chess board looks, for me, changes the way we think. So what would the knowledge about his driver do to the fine motor muscle control of the golf player?"

Mike replies: A good point. We've always placed a high value on simply liking a camera being a good reason to own it. Of course you're also enabling me a little.  :-)

The Story of 'Grace'

A 1918 photograph goes viral in a big way. The story is interesting—even if the truth behind the picture might be a little disillusioning. But then, we all know that things are not always what they seem in photographs, right?

Interestingly, I'm not aware of ever seeing this image before Jay Townshend sent me this video a few days ago. (Thanks to Jay.)

Another link people have been sending me: "You're Pointing Your Camera the Wrong Way," by Margaret Renkl. A quotation: "My son and daughter-in-law, who are frequent campers, have seen people queued up at least 50 deep to take phone selfies at popular national park waterfalls and rock formations."

Mike
Flickr page / New Yorker author page

Original contents copyright 2023 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 or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Jon Peterson: "We had it in our home. As a young lad just getting interested in photography (1970s), I used to joke with my mom that I wanted to steal the frame and put my own photo in it. Decades later, that same water-stained print in the same cheap, chipped frame hangs on my wall. Makes me think of my mom."

The Rest Is History

If you haven't seen this stunning animation yet, you need to. Not a big investment, takes only a few tragic seconds to look at. It tells a tale of many things. From Visual Capitalist, via Dan Carnagey.

Sadness and despond!

But I have my Sigma contraption (I need to name the blunt beastie) armed and ready for the return of the good light in the springtime. Never say die, never give up!

Mike
Flickr page / New Yorker author page

Original contents copyright 2023 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 or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Dogman: "I'm even more of a dinosaur than I thought!"

Greg Adkins: "Interesting, although it's important to note the inherent bias in comparing sales of dedicated cameras to that of a device with many features in addition to a camera. People choose and buy smartphones for a variety of uses that are unrelated to making photos."

Joe: "As long as Nikon keeps repair parts in stock for my Nikon D850, I'm happy."

Nick: "A smartphone camera is still a (very good) camera, and do we really care what sort of cameras are being sold to the masses, as long as the sort we want (flexible, controllable etc) are easily available? The advanced cameras and lenses available today are better than they have ever been, and the total number of photos being taken every day are more than ever before. I don't see anything tragic unless the major specialty camera manufacturers start to go out of business."

R. Edelman: "When I consider some of the tricks that my iPhone 13 can do, for example very low light hand-held images, I wonder why these tricks can't be incorporated in digital cameras. I understand that digital cameras and their lenses have image stabilization, and there are some with pixel shifting, but the iPhone seems to have software that enables it to perform photo miracles, such as taking a photo in very, very low light levels, that, if applied to larger digital cameras, would really add value to those cameras, and perhaps boost their sales to people who would like to move up to the next level of acquiring images."

Keith Cartmell: "Yes, smartphones have dramatically outsold both film and digital cameras. They have also outsold alarm clocks, portable radios, and other devices too numerous to name. But it's a bit of an apples to grapefruit comparison. Many of those phones are forced purchases because the completely adequate in most ways old one cannot run the newest software or is crippled by it, or the network was removed. (It happened to my wife and she's still cranky about it.) Or there is some new gewgaw offered that attracts the attention. (Look, shiny!) For many of them I suspect the camera is just one aspect of the overall functionality, but they didn't buy the phone because of the camera functionality. Maybe I'm wrong. Seems like most of the actual photographers I know are busy switching out their old DSLR for a new mirrorless camera, complete with new lens, and software that can already talk to our new AI overlords. Me? I'm happy carrying around my MMM cameras, metal, manual, mechanical."

Thom Hogan (partial comment): "...The thing no one is talking about in that animation is at the very end: smartphone sales peaked and are in an erosion pattern now. That's the reason why Apple wants to try to sell you a hardware subscription to the iPhone these days (yearly 'free' updates). What goes up, must come down. It's just a matter of time."

Ed. note: The full text of "partial comments" can be read in the full Comments Section, accessible in the footer of the post.

Eamon Hickey: "Miniscule point that nobody but me will ever care about, but the figures in that animation for periods before about 1980 are completely unreliable. The author clearly relied on CIPA historical data, because it's the only such data available, as far as I know. But it counts only Japanese cameras. Millions of cameras from American, European and Eastern Bloc manufacturers are not included. The graph shows 75,000 as the total cameras sold in 1951. That's way, way, way too low. Kodak by themselves would have sold many times that total just in the U.S."

I Don't Want to Farm

I was a Reedie* for a miserable year in the long-lost '80s, and met a Reedie when I was there who had developed a human developmental theory based in Gilligan's Island. The concept was that every human being can be explained by a major and a minor inflection of one of the Gilligan's Island characters. Gender did not have to match. So in his view I was a major of The Professor with a minor of Mary Ann. In other words, mainly distracted and remote, unbalanced in the direction of excessive intellectualism—too "heady"—but with a partially compensating dose of niceness and wholesomeness on the side. I hated to admit it, but....

An alternate theory of aggregated human wisdom is: there's a Mitch Hedberg joke for everything. The one that concerns us today is "Can You Farm?"

The video/stills divide
That's how I'm starting to feel about photography these days. (Oh, you like photography? What do you think of AI?) If you read behind the lines in the recent short interview with Panasonic's Yosuke Yamane published at DPReview (he gives a similar interview pretty much every year around this time), you get the sense he's being careful not to insult still photographers, while at the same time saying that Panasonic cameras will be ever more concerned about video. "Mirrorless, which has a strong affinity with video, is used in a wide range of applications, from professional video production, such as cinema production, to individual video production, such as YouTube. We believe that the need for individual video production will increase in the future." DPReview went on to comment that while there remain people who only take stills, "[Yamane] didn't make it sound like Panasonic would be the company to address that need."

You work your ass off to become a good cook. And then everybody wants you to farm. As Mitch put it, "that's not fair."

Mike

*Here's a recent article by Colin Diver, a past President of Reed College, about the oppressive consequences of the U.S. News and World Report college rankings and Reed's decision to buck the system.

Original contents copyright 2023 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 or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

David Elesh: "As a Reedie myself, one of the things I am quite proud of was Reed's decision not to supply data to U.S. News. It may have been the first to make that decision. Stanford followed. I don't know how many institutions refuse now. When I checked the U.S. News formula some years ago, it placed significant weight on the percentage of alumni who contributed. I found that appalling and still do. It has little to do with academic quality. Yes, it is a significant factor in the decisions of those applying to college (and their parents), but so is the success of their athletic teams. At the university for which I taught, I saw that our basketball teams reaching the final four raised applications and fall enrollments by substantial amounts. I don't recall the exact percentage of the increase in applications, but I think it was around 20%. But the increase wasn't evidence of the students' academic ability."

Arg: "I grew up using Polaroid cameras and took perfectly photographic photos with them...only to discover that everyone wants me to go into a dark room and play with noxious chemicals. Don't want to. That's not photography."

Dan: "I’m going to sound like an old man yelling at the sky, but what improvements in still cameras do we need? They are already so good that even old ones far exceed artistic demands. Perhaps making then more fun to look at, fondle and use would actually be more effective at selling more units. Video is the next horizon and improvements there would be visible and marketable."

Peter Cameron: "I have little interest in video and, to he honest, I don’t even know if the video function worked on most cameras I’ve owned. Over the last 20 years I’ve probably taken fewer than 20 videos and most of those were B roll for the video department of the company I worked for. I realize wanting a stills oriented camera is niche these days, but I do appreciate manufacturers that let you reassign video buttons to other functions (or at least let you disable them so you don’t accidentally end up shooting video)."

Stephen S.: "For anyone chasing views/engagement on Instagram, it has been true for a while that the best way to do that is to forget about posting photos, and instead post short videos. That's right—Instagram is not for photos anymore."

Phishing Message? (OT)

When you get an email that appears to be from a friend, that contains an enigmatic message and a link to an ad or some sort of come-on, and obviously didn't come from the friend, that sometimes has a long send-to list, what is that? What should you advise the friend? Does anyone know? From time to time this happens to me, and I never know whether I need to warn the friend or even inform them. Do any of you computer ninjas out there know about this?

Thanks for any help—

Mike
Flickr page / New Yorker author page

Original contents copyright 2023 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 or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Luci: "The 2FA [two-factor authentication —Ed.] is a very good path to go down. Let the friend know of the email misshap via a different 'channel' (i.e. not email). Always, always look at the actual email address sending the email (in your email client check something like 'Show original' and if the name and email username don't agree—mail from John Smith <[email protected]> —mark it as spam. Let the friend know that an antivirus is useful. If they have one, recommend them to start with a full disk scan."

psu: "For what it's worth, it is very easy to forge email from any sender you want because in most email systems the From and Sender headers are not authenticated in any way. So it's not necessarily the case that your friends' accounts are hacked; it's just that someone else copied their address out from some other source and forged a message to you or others using it. Unless there is some reason to believe that the mail account was actually hacked/stolen somehow, it's probably best to just delete and ignore this kind of forged message."

Open Mike: One More Wee Piece of Advice (OT)

["Open Mike" is the anything-goes, often off-topic Editorial Page of TOP, which used to appear on Sundays and sometimes still does.]

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Before we leave behind the subject of the advancing years, one wee bit of advice to younger people: never stop exercising. I've come to believe that the important thing about exercise is doing it without stopping. Consistently, over the years, from when you're young to when you're old.

Mostly I say this because it's the opposite of what I've done, and I've had troubles because of it.

My observation has been that people typically exercise in two "shifts" in life: in one period when they're young adults and emphasizing secondary sex characteristics for the purpose of advertising abundant health to attract partners; and in another period when they're "young old people" and it finally hits them that they'd better take care of themselves. Personified by the late-fiftysomething out walking while doing that thing with their arms where they hold their forearms and hands up and swing them back and forth to signify that they're not just walking, they're exercising. In the years in between, life gets in the way and many of us don't exercise much. Except briefly in the wake of resolutions and spells of determination, or on vacations maybe.

...Or maybe that was just me. When I was 57, I reconnected with a woman I had carried a torch for "in another life," twenty years earlier, and we began a relationship. She was a marathoner, and went to the YMCA at a truly ungodly hour (4:30 a.m.) three times a week to exercise. I went with her. She suspiciously dubbed this "courting behavior," to which my reaction was, of course it was courting behavior—I was courting her, wasn't I? I also made the bed every morning after she went to work and did the breakfast dishes, and that was courting behavior too. (The campaign failed despite my exertions, alas.) Long story short, I made repeated attempts, even after she left me, to get back into running, which I had enjoyed throughout my youth in various ways. It began one morning—one very early morning—while she was "spinning" for an hour. ("Spinning" means furiously pedaling a stationary bike going absolutely nowhere.) Left to my own devices, I decided to run around the 1/8th-mile track. I ran hard for one lap, and then walked a lap to recover. It felt marvelous. It reminded me of youth, reconnected me with my long-ago love of running, and powerfully inspired me. So I repeated the process—eleven times. 

The next day, my knees were in such ferocious pain that I could barely make it down the stairs for breakfast. And my knees hurt for so long—like, six weeks—that after three weeks I was convinced I had damaged myself permanently. That's my tendency, I will admit—go overboard with a new idea and overdo it. 

Eventually my knees fully recovered, thank God. Over the next four or five years, I made repeated attempts to get back to running. Again and again, the same pattern repeated: I would start slowly, gain strength and stamina, gradually increase my workout, and then something would go sproing and I'd injure myself somehow. Sprained ankle, aching or "trick" knee, something called "pes anserine pain syndrome," back trouble, inflamed toe, whatever. Then I'd have to take two to five weeks off to recover, and lose whatever progress I had made. It happened again and again. My only success in that period was walking two miles a day interspersed with very short stretches of mild jogging. I made a conscious effort to jog like an old guy, in a sort of shuffle, to minimize impact, and I'd only go one or two hundred feet before resuming a walking pace. That worked, or seemed to.

But it stands to reason that people can run in the their late fifties, sixties, seventies, and even older—you see it and hear about it all the time. Why couldn't I? I finally concluded that it was probably because I had just taken too long a time off in the middle of my life. When I was in my late teens and twenties my habit was to jog three miles a day in the three months of the spring and the three months of the fall. My idea, even at the time, was that it would be good to get into the habit of running regularly and then carry the habit into older ages. But I probably only sustained that for five or six years. Then I didn't run for three decades. By the time I got back to it, it was too late. That was just my experience—"your mileage may vary."

I did the same thing with a car once. Neglected normal upkeep for 40,000 miles in the middle of its first 100k, and then got slammed with everything going wrong at once.

It just seems to me that the people who successfully exercise into their older years are the ones who never stopped. I acknowledge that it's better to exercise than not to, and now is always a good time to start, for any value of "now," regardless of how long you've been a butt in a chair. But if you are young and planning your life, somebody ought to tell you that a little exercise consistently over your lifetime is probably better than a whole lot of exercise for a short period every now and then. Start early and keep at it. Make it a habit. And do it continuously.

Push-ups
A while back I talked to Nick, the kindly young man who used to help me load dog food purchases into the trunk before the True Value went belly-up. On doctor's orders, I'm not supposed to lift more than 50 pounds because I have shoulder impingement in both shoulders—what they would call "rotator cuff injuries" if you happen to be a baseball pitcher. I asked Nick if he did pushups, and he told me a typical story. He said he he had very into doing pushups for a while in high school, and improved for a while, but then he hit a wall at 95(!) pushups, got discouraged, and quit.

That seems typical. Young people get all into something, do it to excess, and then never do it again. It would really be a lot better if you started doing three pushups every day when you're fifteen, and just add one more every year on your birthday. By the time you're forty you'd be doing 28 pushups a day and not thinking a thing of it. It would really be much better for you in the long run.

None of this is science. It's just my belief. "An observation amplified," as Thom put it recently. As to whether it's really true, "more studies are needed," I guess.

Mike
Flickr page / New Yorker author page

Original contents copyright 2023 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 or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Aaron: "I hate running, but there's a history in my family of heart troubles. I'm 46 and so far my heart is fine. I decided that I should start exercising while I can. But, I know myself. I won't stick to a running plan that requires very much of me. So, I decided that I could run for 10 minutes a day. I'll hate every minute of it. But, I can make myself do it for 10 minutes a day. I'm doing it on a treadmill, so I've raised the incline so it's at least hard work. I've started out very slowly—I don't even get to a mile in my 10 minutes. But, so far I've stuck with it because I can make myself do something hard for 10 minutes. Then I'm out. And, while it's still well short of recommended exercise time in a week, it's more than I was doing before! Well, that's not quite true. I love going for walks and do that pretty regularly."

Franz Amador: "I hear you, brother, though I suspect you're going to get a lot of responses from people who have always been active and still are suffering from increasing injuries as they get older. It sounds like you could really use a good physical therapist. Also, something cheaper and more convenient that I really like is Coach Eric's videos from Precision Movement. There are paid options, but he has lots of free content on YouTube. Highly recommended, in some ways even more than a PT."

mark: "Your thesis about old age and exercise is spot-on. My father, who died at age 93, fought diabetes to a standstill for the last thirty years of his life with daily trips to the gym. He was, by decades, the oldest regular there, and garnered support and admiration from youngsters in their 50s. His weights and treadmill regimen was successful, with diabetes and related problems catching up only after a fall prevented him from going to the gym. My own plan involves cycling until I can no longer do it, and then some combination of walking and weights. Maybe yoga, too. I don't think my knees would tolerate much running. As to you own plan, just remember that pool isn't exercise."

DavidB: " I started running in high school. I quit for a few years while in college but have been running...or walking when injured...ever since. Now in my late 60s and so...so...slow that it bothers me if I think about it. So I don't think about it. I just run."

Not THAT Ross Cameron: "Could I please add to your observation. I attend exercise classes run by a woman of similar age to me (mid-40s). She has people in 30s–60s attending. Her view is that in general, you need both exercise and stretching / flexibility. As a sweeping generalisation, men tend to focus on strength and ignore the flexibility, while and women tend to focus on flexibility and ignore the strength. The thirties and forties are the years to establish good habits. It gets increasingly harder to pick them up after that; the body takes longer to get fit, and longer to recover from injuries, with increasing age. I’m still working through some functional issues that result in sore back/shoulder. Having a young child isn’t helping. Trying to establish a routine is an exercise in futility (sorry, pun not intended). I really miss the jogging too."

Kirk: "Walk. Bike. Swim or do something else to get your heart rate up for an hour straight. Start now. Do it every day. Or don't. But the evidence and studies are abundant and clear. Exercising is vital for maintaining health and mobility. No excuses apply. Never stop. Never stop. Never stop. And don't neglect things like yoga to enhance flexibility. Also vital for healthy existence."

Damien: "I'm only 37, but I've had my version of all your injury stories! There is something in there that is not strictly about age. Muscles grow fast and recover in the blink of an eye; tendons and ligaments need way, way more time to adapt and to recover—months or years instead of days. I remember a certain story about patience in the darkroom; well, this also applies to the gym.  ;-) 

"My new rule is, any novel inflammatory joint pain means: ease off until it's gone. That's the only way I've been able to break the cycle of one step forward, two steps back."

High Plains Farm

I have some interesting news to pass along—the deluxe signed and numbered slipcased edition of one of my favorite books is suddenly available, in limited supply. It's not a reprint—it's part of the first edition. The book is High Plains Farm by Paula Chamlee. The project is simple to explain: it's a selection of a large project Paula did to document the prairie farm where she grew up. She used an 8x10 view camera and made contact prints on silver chloride contact-printing paper. The entire project comprises 299 photographs and a full set is housed at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, the gift of a collector when Roy Flukinger was Department Head and Senior Curator of Photography and Film there. Eighty-one of the pictures are featured in the book. The pictures are quiet, loving, nostalgic, and elegiac. I think it's fair to say that it's one of the best books of authentic Americana; of the West; of Texas; of large format; of documentary photography; and on the subject of home. I also love the essays in it. I'd personally rank it among the best books of American documentary photography of the second half of the 20th century. To me the pictures made me feel like I actually know the place in person. The farm is way out on the vast Texas plains, high up in the panhandle, in territory once controlled by the Comanche and the Kiowa. It goes without saying that the work is deeply personal. When the photographs were made, Paula's parents, then in their 80s, were still farming the 1,100 acres by themselves. Paula's parents, who are pictured in the book, are gone now, the old family farm sold. (Her mother lived to be 101.) Paula herself is in her 70s now, I believe. She's a lovely person and a lovely soul, and an accomplished artist.

The show and the book got a tremendous amount of press and attention when it was published in 1996. The exhibition was shown in many major museums, and it traveled for years. It was featured on PBS. Of course I own the standard hardcover, purchased around the time it came out. The deluxe edition, which I didn't know existed until a few days ago, was originally meant for collectors who bought a set of 12 original prints of their own selection; it was included as a complimentary addition to their purchase. Later, the deluxe edition and a print were available for something like $750. I don't think the signed and numbered deluxe edition copies have ever been available alone.

Now they are. I spoke to Paula this afternoon, and she has right around 100 copies left, sitting in storage at the Pennsylvania arts compound and home she and Michael built together. The price is $95 for the remaining standard hardcovers like I have, and $250 for the last copies of the deluxe edition. Both contain the same printed matter, so the pictures are identical in both, and the paper is the same. Paula and her late husband Michael A. Smith were and are book publishers who never made, or make, compromises with excellence; all their books are extremely, some might say fanatically, well printed. The pictures were printed by Gardner Lithograph in California. I also enjoyed Paula's discussions in the book about making the pictures.

This is not a TOP sale and I'm not receiving anything for sales. I've had to lash myself to the mast—I would really love to have one of the deluxe editions. But I already own the standard edition and my bookcases are full and then some. It's just one of my longtime favorite books and I wanted to pass the tip on to you. Here's the order page for both editions.

Mike
Flickr page / New Yorker author page

Original contents copyright 2023 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 or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Mom's Advice: The Ten-Year Trick (OT)

[Ed. note: This is just a comment and reply from yesterday, but it's an idea I thought deserved "promoting." Good advice and easy (and free) to carry out. P.S. I'm feeling better now—much more energy—I don't think I realized how run-down I've been, literally for months—and will get us back on our usual track soon! —Mike]

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Jeffrey Hartge wrote (partial comment): "I trail you by about a decade in age. In many ways I see you as a mentor. Your discussions about 'mid-life crises' were invaluable for me. I was able to recognize, acknowledge and deal appropriately with the onset in my own life because of your discussions. Thank you!"

Mike replies: Glad to hear that!

My mother was a career counselor. One (of several) of her foundational pieces of advice for clients had two aspects. One was to visualize yourself and your life ten years in the future. She suggested writing down a list of objectives ("objectives" meaning intermediate or transitional goals) that might help you get to what you envisioned; and the other was to find one or more role models who are ten years further along than you are, to help you better understand what your own life might be like a decade down the line.

The idea is that we humans tend to cling to "the way we are right now" too much when it comes to our self-conception (and we tend to lack objectivity the most when it comes to ourselves). We identify too strongly with the age we are now, as if we're going to stay that way, and fail to prepare consciously and forthrightly for the inevitable next phase of our lives.

Sometimes we don't even acknowledge that we will soon be older. My mother and stepfather remodeled their "getaway" Maine farmhouse when they were 75, and constructed an office for my stepfather at the top of a custom-made, hardwood circular staircase that even I, age 53 at the time, thought was a bit perilous. A few years later he was having trouble with the stairs in their year-'round home, and by the time he was 86 or so, I was present when a physical therapist came by to give him a lesson in how to negotiate those stairs, both hands on the railing. I don't know exactly when he stopped using the treacherous circular stairs, but I'm sure it was years before they sold the farm.

I found a picture of the stairs in the real estate listing.
Beautiful, but not the sort of thing you commission
if you're looking forward to being 85.

Another example: my father, in his mid-eighties, took a brutal fall. He tripped on a seam in the sidewalk and fell off the curb, breaking his fall with...his head. It left him with a black eye the size of a hardball and alarming blood-filled bruises on half of his face. The pictures were dreadful. I sent him a "care package" with six or seven items in it, one of which was a cane. He promptly returned the cane, because he had a decades-long contempt for "feeble old guys" who have to use canes! My thought was, even if you think you're too young and virile for it now, couldn't you at least stick it in the corner? Maybe you think you don't need it now, but you're not going to be 84 forever. Fell on deaf ears.

With luck, in ten years we're going to be ten years older. And that will be a different age. So we might as well drag that fact out into the open and face it down squarely.

According to Mom's insight, I should be visualizing what I want my life to be like, where I want to be and what I want to have done, as well as preparing for whatever challenges I might face, as a 75-year-old, and I should be finding 75-year-old role models to learn from. So, Jeffrey, what you say is true of you and me might be something that all of us should do, regardless of age. At least according to Mom!

Mike
Flickr page / New Yorker author page

Original contents copyright 2023 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 or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Ken Bennett: "Bravo to all this advice, Mike. We are lucky enough to have numerous friends who are 10–20 years older than we are, and we've been paying close attention to how they are navigating their lives. They really are role models for us as we retire and try to figure out the next chapter. The downside to having so many close friends in their 70s and 80s is, of course, that they don't stick around forever."

ugo bessi: "This reminds me of a letter of Petrarch to one of his doctors, Giovanni Dondi dell'orologio; he got this surname because he built a clock with the movements of the planets; Petrarch knew a lot of swell guys. Giovanni said: 'Now you are older; that's a big change and you should change your habits too: you should begin to believe in medicine.' Petrarch answered: 'But doctors order me to drink wine (you say water has no use in medicine), stop fasting a day a week and, horror, stop eating veggies and fruits. And meanwhile my friend Lombardo has planted in my garden the choicest cultivars. No way!'"

Hélcio J. Tagliolatto: "It's unbelievable how the situations you reported about your parents are repeated among the most diverse people. In my family it is happening now. And, yes, how hard it is for me to make that ten-year projection your mother advised, and face the fact of the inescapable limitations to come."

Omar: "My 60-year-old thoughts about the stairs and the cane:

"You effectively tried to tell your father to act his age. He instinctively knew if he did that, he would become older faster. I'm out doing things well beyond what I ever considered possible for my age (five to 10 km runs, 30 km plus trail walks on some rugged terrain, 140 km per day bike rides). I do things like put my socks on standing up to keep my balance fine tuned. It's fun now and keeps me feeling better today. But I also know pushing myself now will pay benefits years from now.

"I live in a two story house. I have thought I would want to switch to a bungalow before my agility dropped. Reflecting on your father makes me wonder about that. Climbing the stairs to go to bed will keep my ability to climb stairs much longer. Yes, at some point, no amount of determination will get me down the steps, but I suspect I will age better if I can maintain it as long as possible."

Yoshi Carroll: "The example of your father is, sadly, extremely common. Two Harvard Graduate School of Education faculty members—Professor Robert Kegan and Lecturer Lisa Lahey—have named the phenomenon The Immunity to Change. Searching for the term brings up their book, which describes a process that can make the situation visible to the people suffering from it. It's become popular, so many resources are available. The key idea is that we have open commitments, like 'I want to live a long and healthy life,' which we don't act towards because of conflicting hidden commitments like 'I don't want to feel like a "feeble old guy."' And we're more committed to our hidden commitments, often because those hidden commitments have served us well as defense mechanisms against unexamined worries and assumptions."

J T K: "Re: 'and I should be finding 75-year-old role models to learn from.' OK Mike, I am about to be 75, so using me as a template you will be...

• At the gym 5:00 a.m. every weekday morning
• Walking at 4 mph for at least 40 minutes, and doing some weightlifting
• Driving an 18 year old Lexus

"Worse than that, you will be only 5'10" tall. (And weigh 175 lbs.)"

Nick Davis: "I agree with Kirk on this. Old age is a state of mind as much as anything. I'm not trying to be 21 again but equally I flatly refuse to be 'old.' I just carry on with my life as usual. Indeed there has been a big study in Scandinavia which suggests that people who ignore their actual age and simply get on with life (even with underlying health conditions) live 6.2 years longer than people who decide they are 'old.'"

Dan Khong: "Once a fall starts to occur, it is a milestone to remind us that we have turned the corner in life. My friend, an anesthetist, has this to share, 'The fall is a harbinger of death. I lost my father three years after his first fall.' In Atul Gawande's book, Being Mortal, he wrote that people on five or more chronic medications are three times more likely to suffer falls. People who live past 85 are in 'Falls Territory.'"

Mike replies: Plus, "Hip fractures are associated with significant morbidity, mortality, loss of independence, and financial burden. In usual care, the reported 1-year mortality after sustaining a hip fracture has been estimated to be 14% to 58%." (According to this paper.) In other words, lots of people over sixty die within a year of a hip fracture. So, you don't want to break your hip. I personally experienced a sudden increase of falls in my mid-50s, so I made two responses: I started working on my balance by "walking the tightrope" on a skinny floorboard every morning (the good news: working on balance markedly improves it, at least in my experience) and I started being more careful about my footing. I fall on average only once a year now—took this year's fall just the other day in fact, because I walked down a grassy slope that was sodden with rain and didn't realize how slippery it was until it was too late to turn back. Down I went. But at least the wet hillside was soft.

Stray Thought (OT)

All of you know this already (all of you that it pertains to, anyway—not you young-uns, in your forties, or younger than that), but I thought I'd try expressing it anyway. It just strikes me that as we get older, we have to be harsh with ourselves and just do whatever's needed. You have to adapt.

I know a guy in his 50s who is not adapting at all. He acts just like a twentysomething free spirit. Girlfriends all over, needs to get laid every night, drinks to celebrate every occasion and, when there's no occasion, drinks. Carelessly blows his paychecks. Lives in a group house where they're sometimes late with the rent and sometimes get the electricity cut off. Every drug anyone can get, he's up for it and into it. He strikes me as the sort of guy who might die of drinking because he prefers that to becoming a grownup.

Because you can't live to be too old acting like a young person. At some point the body just can't take the wear and tear. (Not to mention that your brain shrinks. Did you know your brain shrinks as you get older? Terrifies me—my brain was barely large enough to begin with. Bah-dum-pah.) Anyway, what I'm saying is, you have to make changes as you need to. In 2018, I had to give up coffee on account of a-fib. I was unsentimental about it, despite having been so far into the bean that I even roasted my own private-stock Kona* for a while. All in all, I drank coffee for forty-five years, starting when I was sixteen and had to go to work one Sunday morning on zero hours sleep. But at the end it became obvious it was bad for my heart, so I walked away. All I did was tell myself that I had enjoyed coffee, but the time for it in my life was over. Don't cry.

We have to do that as we age. Stop drinking alcohol, change our diets, start exercising. Or dial back our exercising, whichever's called for. Or start to consider mere walking to be exercising! Take pills, get hearing aids, wear a hat so a bald spot doesn't get too much sun. Whatever it is. Acquaint ourselves with strange new kinds of healthcare providers. There must be a thousand ways it can manifest itself. We each have specific deficits or infirmities, but everybody probably has something. Nobody gets out of here alive.

You have to be hard about it. Unsentimental and matter-of-fact. It requires a quality prized by long-gone generations and not much in favor now: self-discipline. You can hold aging back, stave it off, refuse to give in, but then one day you have to accommodate it, and at that point you just...do it. Whatever it is.

So now I have to adjust to the CPAP machine again. A crazy Rube Goldberg contraption that makes you feel like an invalid and is about as dignified as clown shoes. As David Vestal used to say, "So, okay." It's time for that, I need to do it, so just do it. No complaints, no self-pity. Other people deal with worse things. And it's better than the alternatives.

Here's an exercise that was suggested to me by the example of my late friend and pool-playing compadre Loyle Egger, who died a few months ago after a long life and a short illness: try to go a week without complaining. About anything. It's an instructive experiment! Loyle seldom complained. Hell, I walk around the house complaining aloud to myself. I'll just warn you: not complaining about anything for a week is as tough as living for a year without buying anything made in China. It almost can't be done. Sure makes you think, though.

Remember the words on Yeats's tombstone: Cast a cold Eye. That's the spirit!

Mike
Flickr page / New Yorker author page

*Provided by a photographer / reader / coffee grower on the Big Island, Phil Rosenberg—thanks again, Phil. It was a lovely experience.

Original contents copyright 2023 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 or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Albert Smith: "For me, my real wake up call to get serious about preemptively doing good things for my body after acting 'bulletproof' for decades was being my Mother's care giver in her final two years. The things she never did for herself, not out of selfishness but to make sure everyone else in the house was taken care of, caught up with her. To see a strong, never too tired woman unable to get herself across the room with her walker was heartbreaking. I accompanied her to multiple stays in rehab facilities and was surrounded by people just as physically incapable as her, many dozens of years younger. No one escapes; it's just a matter of when and how severe.

"The positive things that you don't do today (or years ago) will come back to haunt you some day just as surely as all the negative things will lead to problems. I saw that and made my changes accordingly. Never smoked, but gave up drinking. I exercise religiously; this will stave off many ailments that cause older people problems. Watching someone who can't get off a toilet will motivate you to do your squats now.

"Can't say it's never too late. It just might be. But control the things you can control while you can."

Stan B.: "IF (big if) you keep yourself in shape, you can front till you're sixty. But no one comes outta that decade unscathed. Yeah, accommodations, sacrifices, out-and-out pain—they will become your new partners in crime, and your body the crime scene. Not an easy concept to contemplate, not an easy reality to live with. You deal with it best you can…."

dan: "You have to do what it takes, which is 'more.' More exercise. More discipline about eating and sleeping. More learning about truly new things. Age is the most destructive of excuses because once you accept the idea of 'dialing back' you go into a death spiral."

John Maxim: "I never did, and still do not, understand what the lines on the tombstone mean. Perhaps you can elucidate?"

Mike replies: There are a great many interpretations out there, and mine is no more special than anyone else's. First, the lines come from the poem "Under Ben Bulben," published shortly after his death, Ben Bulben being a beautiful mountain in County Sligo near the churchyard. So the first step is to read the poem a few times until it starts to seep into you. He had written a number of elegies for others; in this poem he sings his own elegy. He first wrote the epitaph, however, as a marginal note in a volume of essays by Rilke, whose ideas about death "annoyed" him (that's Yeats's own word). The marginal note, in verse, was:

Draw rein; draw breath.
Cast a cold eye
On life, on death.
Horseman pass by.

That first line, in other words, being, hold on there dude! You need to take a deep breath!

So I take a rather forthright impression from the epitaph, approximately this: "Look, we're animals, we're born, we live some allotment of years, make of them what we make of them, and we die. It's not a tragedy, it's just nature. So if you're in front of my grave, don't weep, don't mourn or be sentimental. Just move along."

This shortchanges the transcendental nature of the poem and its mystical allusions, though. For Yeats the "indomitable Irishry" casts back to before Christianity and the ancient pagan times when mountains were the remote homes of gods. Yeats said in his Autobiography, discussing mountains, "Have not all races had their first unity from a mythology, that marries them to rock and hill?" To look into it further than my simple take on it, I'd probably counsel reading some interpretations of "Under Ben Bulben," starting perhaps with the Wikipedia article, then moving to a closer reading of the poem like this one at Litbug, and from there to more serious essays of literary criticism, which I don't know well enough to recommend. Sorry I can't be of more help.

Bear.: "Ah—mortality—don't want it but can't live without it!"

Jnny [Wednesday morning]: "I weaned myself off CPAP by sleeping upright in a recliner. My (world class) snoring and apneas disappeared, and my back feels so much better."

Mike replies: I've been attracted to that idea for a while—I looked into getting a "hospital" bed a few years ago with the idea of sleeping halfway sitting up. I'd love to try it. I worry, though, that it would just be another of my expensive enthusiasms. I have too many of those!

Tom Duffy: "I've been a volunteer EMT for 18 years. Probably about 60% of our calls are 'old people' calls. The lesson that gets driven home to me over and over is that Mobility Equals Life. Stay active and exercise!"

Tom Burke: "Re coffee drinking: I can't comment on whether stopping drinking coffee was the right thing for you to do or not. However, I will say that the cup you gave me when I visited TOP World HQ in April 2016 was the best I have ever drunk. It was a great coffee and I still remember it. Thank you!"

Blog Note

Small announcement: Mike has been semi-sick recently, nothing too bad. But if I'm a straight-six normally, I'm running on three cylinders temporarily. (Kirk and Thom are V-12s, maybe you could visit them.)

I just posted Featured Comments to the last two posts. Sorry to be so late. But they're good, as always.

Hopefully will finish another post today, but maybe not. Got my foot on the gas, but the engine ain't pulling like it's supposed to!

—Mike the majordomo and one-man band

P.S. The diagnosis was that my heart problems are probably caused by sleep apnea (tests are ongoing). So I dusted off the consarned CPAP contraption and resigned myself to that fate. Fella's gotta do what a fella's gotta do.  :-)

UPDATE: I used the old CPAP (I used it for as much as a year previously) for the last two nights, and, while night one was miserable, I have to admit I felt more rested yesterday and didn't feel the need to take a nap. Last night went better. I feel like normal energy is returning.

Original contents copyright 2023 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 or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Thom Hogan: "No, I'm a turbocharged 4. I make very loud noises and run hot when I'm active and on the accelerator, but am not all that impressive otherwise."

Wayne: "Maybe it would help if you just think of the CPAP machine as a supercharger—Weber carbs on top, gear driven from the crank, the whole works. Anyway, best wishes. I bet things will improve quickly."

John Hunter: "Re 'consarned': Love that. I thought I was the only one around who remembers that word. Thanks for that. Be well, Mike. We're all rooting for you. "Never mind the [troubles: atom bombs, etc.]. Let's put on the kettle and have a nice cup of tea.'"

Mike replies: I was drinking my morning tea when I read that!

Luck, Good or Bad

When I was a kid I hit a robin at a hundred and fifty feet with a Daisy pump-handle BB gun, which are accurate to, at best, about thirty feet...after calling the shot to my friends. The only reason I mention this is because afterwards, I really struggled to understand whether it had been good luck or bad luck. Good, because it was an amazing fluke of a shot that I could never repeat if I'd had a thousand more tries, and my friends were amazed and impressed. Bad, because I had no intention of killing the robin for no reason, meant the robin no harm, and wished I could undo the damage I had done after I did it.

This morning I had to go to the cardiologist. And it snowed, starting just before I had to leave and ending just as I got home. And it had not snowed here yet all month. What are the chances it would snow just for the three hours I had to drive three towns over? Bad luck, right?

But the snow was amazing. A light, wet snow with wind, blowing and misting everywhere with a sort of half-fog. The sky the same light gray as the ground. The fields lightly frosted, the windward side of objects and buildings and trees and even a giant heap of spare railroad ties shaded with white. And, quite honestly, if I didn't have to go to the cardiologist I never would have left the house. Good luck, right?

It was a target-rich environment. I should have been shooting. There were picture prospects everywhere—almost literally everywhere I looked. But I didn't have my camera with me. And I couldn't have stopped anyway, because I was, you know, going to the cardiologist. And couldn't be late for my appointment. Bad luck.

Very quickly I decided to simply enjoy the sights, and I did. One more amazing experience added to my stock of beautiful visual experiences in the Finger Lakes. All of which I'm very lucky to have seen.

On the whole, though, overall, I still don't know quite how to feel about the trip. It was either lucky or unlucky. I still don't know which.

I have health stuff to go do now—calls to make before everything closes—but here's an unrelated snap of Butters last night. It was a rainy, cold, inhospitable evening. Earlier in the afternoon he had gotten to play with his big buddy Wex and fetch his favorite toy, a rubber discus Wex's owner brings with her. He was tired out and pretty contented lying there by the fire, except that he didn't want to be bothered to look back at the camera.

Mike
Flickr page / New Yorker author page

Original contents copyright 2023 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 or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Bill Tyler: "In an almost unrelated incident that I still remember more than 50 years later, I did a physics lab where the goal was to measure the charge on an electron. My measurement came out correct to at least two more decimal places than it had any right to do, and I remember commenting on my lab report that this was due to luck, not skill. Sometimes you just hit where you have no business hitting. In a further bit of good luck, no robins were killed in my experiment, and even the electron survived."

Bill Bresler: "Glad you could enjoy the scene without stopping to make photographs. "I decided to simply enjoy the sights, and I did." This really resonated with me. There will be other photos for you to make. You're on one helluva roll with your new black and white work and a day off won't hurt. When my kids were small, back in the late 80s, I decided I had to buy a hellishly expensive video camera with a hefty VHS recorder that hung from my shoulder from a wide strap. I videoed the kids for 2 years or so before it dawned on me that I wasn't a part of the 3 year old's birthday party. I was merely the videographer. So I put down the videocam and recorder, and joined the party. I've never regretted that. "I decided to simply enjoy the sights, and I did.", is sometimes a great choice."

Dave Glos: "That is a darn nice environmental portrait of Butters. Can easily sense the indifference from your partner—'whadda ya want, I am quite enjoying this fire.' The tonal disparity between the blue dusk outside, and the orange glow from the fire inside, confirm which side of the wall is more hospitable. While I love B&W, this one deserves color."

Ken Owen: "Curious seating you have there next to the fire. I don't think I've seen anything quite like it before."

Mike replies: Those are auditorium seats that came out of a Mason's Hall in a town about 50 miles from me. They were installed about 1850 and removed in 1911, then spent the next century in storage in the attic of the Mason's Hall. Finally they were sold and a bunch of antiques dealers in this area all got various quantities of them. The woman I bought those from said they were her last ones and almost everybody else's were gone too. They're very steampunk—the metal casting is ornate and the bentwood seats have decorative patterns in them made with small holes. The seat fold up just like modern theater seats. Here are a couple of better pictures (sorry about the doghair drifts on the floor—I have a bad housekeeper):

They're actually quite sturdy and comfortable!

Mike Peters: "A photographer without a camera is just a pedestrian. When you leave the house, take the camera. Every single time. Even just walking Butters. If you have to go somewhere, leave a half hour to 45 minutes earlier, so you have time to stop if you want. However if you don't stop along the way, now you'll have time to get out of the car and walk around a bit once you get to your destination. You just might find something that you weren't expecting. Or you'll just have a bit of a walk. Either way, you'll immerse yourself in your environment. But, if you leave your camera at home, you can be guaranteed that there will be no photographs."

Robert Cole: "Mike, unusual events gave you a rare experience with ephemeral beauty. You recorded it with your head and heart, and conveyed it to the world through your words. Good luck indeed, for all of us."

Mike Ferron: "I am glad you wrote this Mike. Several times I shot at things when I was a kid and actually hit them. Bothers me to this day as I am not a hunter and no good came from my actions. Maybe the hunting instinct lives within us, but for me? I do not like it."

The Life and Work of Sid Grossman

If you like 20th century B&W photography: Oren recommended a recent remainder to me—friend o' TOP Keith F. Davis's The Life and Work of Sid Grossman, co-published in 2016 by Steidl in Germany and Howard Greenberg Gallery in New York. I'm sorry I didn't know about it early enough that Keith and the publishers could benefit from sales, but you can get it for fifteen bucks from Hamilton Books.

Sid Grossman was an interesting character. In essence a teacher, he was one of the founders of New York's Photo League. (I believe the last surviving member of the old Photo League just died, but I've lost the reference.) Sid died young—he was only 42. His friend N. Jay Jaffee said his attitude was "arrogant and aggressive." He was a social activist who was denounced as a communist in the '40s—which also eventually spelled the end of the Photo League. His widow, Miriam Grossman Cohen, said that his inclusion in the show "The Radical Camera" at the Contemporary Jewish Museum, in 2013, "has pleased my bruised heart. At last he was vindicated. He was not a Communist spy. He was not anything but a brilliant photographer, a beautiful teacher and a good guy to those who loved him."

Sid Grossman, Aguadulce, Panama, c. 1945, from the back cover of the book

His tonal palette is grimy, darkish, and blurry, and his compositions are claustrophobic—in many of the pictures in the book he crowds the edges till you get a feeling like you're getting jostled on the subway. When the book arrived I made a conscious effort to put away my old categorizing prejudices and look at the work with "new eyes." I found pictures that have a lot of life and movement and care for people in them, and a faith in the odd moments that flash past; they feel like glances, which was in fact his stated aim.

A few resources: The Steidl page is still up; Sid's artist page at Howard Greenberg; and there's a brief bio at The National Gallery, now archived. Perhaps his best-known picture is his portrait of Woody Guthrie.

Surprisingly, this is the first book ever published on Sid Grossman. Oren points out that a bonus in the book is several portraits of Sid by none other than our (his and my) old friend David Vestal. More on the book, which is of fine physical quality, after I read the essay, perhaps.

Mike
(Thanks to Oren Grad)

Original contents copyright 2023 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 or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Shelley Stallings: "Mike, one of the many reasons I read TOP every morning while drinking my coffee is your dedication to sharing the work of other, often unknown to me, photographers. Sid Grossman is one of those previously 'unknowns' for me. Now he is not, and when Keith F. Davis's book, The Life and Work of Sid Grossman, shows up on my doorstep in a few days (from Amazon, as it seems to be sold out at Hamilton Books), I will get a chance to become much more acquainted with the life and photography of Sid Grossman. Thank you again for all you do to promote the love and knowledge of our chosen expression of art. Written from a rainforest island off the coast of Southeast Alaska, where light is elusive this time of year."

Kenneth Tanaka: "This is an excellent book, well worth getting if you're at all interested in that period of mid-century New York street/social photography. The Radical Camera, the catalog associated with the show Mike mentioned, is also worth reading for a good contextual overview of Grossman's world in those years. Grossman's rep as a 'teacher' was perhaps not terribly well anchored in actual performance practice. He charged worshippers a few bucks to listen to him aimlessly rant sometimes for hours. He had some real issues. Better with a camera, at least for a few years, than with people.

"As an aside, may I recommend the late Helen Gee's book Limelight for a rich depiction of Grossman and so many other New York photo characters of the mid-century. Gee established the first gallery / coffee house devoted solely to photography in New York, and the book is her account of those years. I recently finished my second reading of Limelight. I think many TOP readers might enjoy it, too."

Matt Haber: "Almost on topic...my mother's cousin Sonia Handelman Meyer was a member of the Photo League, and died this past September, at 102. Maybe she was the last surviving member?"

Mike replies: I was aware of Sonia (and sorry for your family's loss), but I think there was another who died even more recently. A reader sent me a link to the obituary. I just can't find it now.

Scott Kirkpatrick: "All of the folk singer portraits that turn up at your Woody Guthrie link are worth a look. It's practically the Great American Songbook, right there. The names are familiar (if you like that music), but pictures are not easy to find, and these are clear and not over-dramatized."

Steve Wilcox: "I just picked up the Sid Grossman book at a used book shop in London. Great book of an otherwise lesser known mid-century photographer. But, Sid was listed in the seminal The New York School book by Jane Livingston and Sid is listed and covered as one of the leading personalities of that movement. Saul Leiter was also covered in this book which was way ahead of it's time. It was printed in 1992. It is the one photo book I would likely keep above all others."

Mike replies: That is a pretty fabulous book if you like that sort of thing. But John Gossage made up the idea of the "New York School"—David Vestal, who is one of the photographers included, said none of them ever called themselves that or thought of themselves that way. Still, it's defensible to group artists together like that even when they didn't think of themselves as a group. The book is beautiful.

Seeing the Future

Sorry for the radio silence recently. I wasn't sick, exactly, but something was going on*.

Mitch Alland points out that we might want to read Thom Hogan's take on the NYT article about old digicams becoming popular with Gen Z. Thom's article is called "The New York Times Prints Junk Articles Too." If you're feeling too languid to click over, here's a brief quote that sums it up: "My problem with this article is that people are treating it as some sort of carefully researched study or write up, when it’s simply a limited observation amplified."

Bingo. The premise still might be true, for some definition of "true," but "a limited observation amplified" is a trenchant four-word indictment that fits.

But then, styles and fads are all just fingers to the wind followed by blowsy talktalk, aren't they? When my mother's Cambridge house sold, the realtor who managed the staging of the house, while he was explaining to us that we weren't going to like what he was going to do to it, told us that the walls not only had to be white (my mother's dining room was Chinese Red, darker than blood, and there was a lovely antique wallpaper in the living room), they had to be the specific shade of white that was in fashion for 2022. Otherwise, he said, other realtors would be able to tell something wasn't right. Well, okay, but I'll bet that wasn't a scientifically tested proposition...

...Although we decided not to bet a house on it. We followed his advice, all of it, and the house sold for more than half a million over its asking price. So we're not questioning his insights or, er, beliefs.

Could happen
As a bonus, while you're at ByThom, his year-end predictions are back (yay. I always enjoyed those). This year's are deliberately outlandish, as we know because he keeps repeating the word "outlandish" throughout the piece, and the piece is titled "Outlandish Predictions." These aren't quite as fun for me as his old ones, but, his site, his rules.

One big personality difference between Thom and myself: he tries to guess what will happen, whereas I tend to imagine what should happen. Which is to say, I'm an idealist, by personality type. For example: many people have predicted that there will be a Sigma fp with a FF Foveon sensor at some point; whereas I sit there enjoying the passing clouds wishing there would also be a production B&W-only fp based on that Foveon sensor. My hope isn't a prediction. It's just seeing horsies in the clouds.

Seeing the future
Speaking of fads (and horsies), my latest YouTube enthusiasm: chess.  That sounds absurd, as I never had any aptitude for chess and was actually tested at one point as having a low degree of foresight, the aptitude that allows us to be ready for what's coming. It was explained to me by the tester, lyrically, that the past, for me, is a detailed landscape of mountains and valleys and rivers that is always worthy of exploration, whereas the future is like a flat, arid, featureless plain. Gulp. Although that also kinda hits the nail on the head. For me, all things are like the pandemic was for you and everybody else: didn't see that coming. I see nothing coming. I'm lucky if I can see that I'm moving my knight right into the path of the opponent's bishop.

Chess is a rich world, though. (No, it's not that I have a grandpa crush on Anna Cramling.) It's got a history and a culture, rankings and competitions, stars and scandals; and although I thought I knew "how to play," it turns out I didn't. I realized one thing: that we, meaning the public, heard a lot about chess when it used to be an aspect of Cold War geopolitics, and not so much lately. The current World chess champion is Norwegian.

So why get into chess at all, when I have little aptitude for planning ahead? Well, same reason I worked to get up to 20 wpm on that Dvorak keyboard, and struggled to learn a little Chinese on Duolingo, and tried to learn to play the dulcimer: just trying to give my brain challenges. They say it's good for you. And of course, as an idealist, I'm into self-help.  :-)

Mike

*My heart was skipping a beat every three or four beats, and I couldn't get my extremities to feel warm no matter what I did, and I didn't seem to be able to breathe as deeply as normally, and I was extremely tired and sleepy: on Sunday I took four naps! And still was able to get to sleep that night. Anyway I just didn't have any energy. After repeatedly struggling with working, I finally just decided, mid-course, that I needed a break. Sorry again.

Yesterday I was back to a steady heartbeat, fingers and toes warm again, and my abnormal awareness of my heartbeat went away. Back to the usual me. Knock wood! UPDATE Wednesday afternoon: I did get an appointment with my cardiologist for Friday morning. Thanks to everyone who commented or emailed in concern—I read every one, and I appreciate your experience and expertise. Thank you!

Original contents copyright 2023 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 or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Dave Jenkins: "Your symptoms sound somewhat similar to those I experienced in the first decade of this century. I got a pacemaker in 2011 and all has been well since."

Jeff Hughes: "I read this post after just having watched a chess video on YouTube. Last week I checked out a book at the public library which I recommend called How To Play Chess for Kids by Jessica E. Martin. If you have an account at chess.com (my user name is 'jeffhuggies') then perhaps we can play one idealist against another. It is a mind-bending, humbling game."

Mike replies: I got the book. It's free for Prime members.

Jeff: "I know you’re not a TV guy lately, but the award-winning Netflix series, 'The Queen’s Gambit,' from 2020, was one of the absolute best productions that I, and countless others, have enjoyed watching. The lead character is a young, smart and attractive female chess genius. Fabulous acting and storyline. It’s worth seeking out, however you might manage that. You’ll be hooked; guaranteed."

Dogman: "My problem with Thom is that he doesn't think anything old is of any value. His gear assessments always indicate the newest camera is the 'best' and serious shooters should upgrade often. That attitude smells of industry shill—although I don't believe he is, it just has an odor. Certainly new gear is best if you're only measuring technological innovation; however, everyone's photography doesn't always depend on constant innovation. I really hate this consumerist approach to everything today. (Just to be clear, I mostly use old Nikon digitals and outdated Fuji gear, I love old lenses and I use an iMac with an operating system Apple no longer updates.)"

ASW: "I don't think Thom Hogan needs anyone defending his honor, but I have to respectfully disagree with Dogman's statement that Thom 'doesn't think anything old is of any value.' I've been reading Thom's website(s) for a decade or more (right after I open my TOP tab), and for as long as I can remember he's been saying (paraphrased) that if you can't produce an excellent desktop printer-sized print with the current equipment on the market the problem is not the camera. Regarding upgrading, he regularly writes that there is little benefit in churning through every generation of a camera line or in switching back-and-forth between brands to have the hottest new camera/lens on the market. Pointing out that an updated camera/lens is better than an older model (and detailing the reasons why) is not the same as saying the older gear is suddenly no good."

Richard Nugent (partial comment): "Thom consistently and currently writes that he considers the Nikon D500 and D850 (both at least five years old) to be among the best APSC and full frame cameras available even in the mirrorless era. Second he never lists a camera as “best” in his reviews, simply designating each as “highly recommended”, “recommended” or he does not make a recommendation if he thinks the camera or lens isn’t up to his standards. As for promoting frequent upgrades: that assertion is just false. Thom consistently advises readers to think carefully before upgrading gear to obtain better results. Rather, he urges that we invest our money in workshops or other educational means to hone our skills."

Ed. note: Richard asks, in another comment, why I would feature Dogman's comment. It's for the same reason that I highlighted Thom's reply to the NYT writer in the first place: because that's his opinion. Assuming that there is a variety of opinions in the first place, I've always tried to feature a variety of viewpoints and not "guide" the Featured Comments (or the comments in general, using censorship) toward any one opinion or conclusion—especially not toward my opinion. Quite often you'll find comments with opposing viewpoints next to each other. That's healthy, IMO. Also, I do kinda have a grandpa crush on young Ms. Cramling.

Steve Aitch: "I think part of the difference (advantage?) of older digital cameras is that prior to about 10MP, they used CCD rather than CMOS sensors which, combined with the different software, produces images with lower noise and a different colour 'feel.' For reasons we needn't go into here, I collect 10MP cameras, most of which are CCD based (I also have a Foveon based one—let's not go there!) and the colour reproduction from them is different."

Go, Gen Z! (Or, Got An Old Digicam You Want To Get Rid Of?)

Now would be the time, according to a new article published in the New York Times today. You'll get a lot of it from the title: "The Hottest Gen Z Gadget Is a 20-Year-Old Digital Camera."

I'll quote a few choice quotations from the article*:

"The cameras of Generation Z’s childhoods, seen as outdated and pointless by those who originally owned them, are in vogue again."

(GenZ or "Zoomers" refers to the generation born between 1997 and 2012, meaning, people between 10 and 26 years of age right now. The generation currently being born and under age 10 are called "Gen Alpha," a term I would swear I never once heard till today. Although maybe it went in one ear and out the other.)

"Gen Z-ers grew up with smartphones that increasingly had it all, making stand-alone cameras, mapping devices and other gadgets unnecessary. They are now in search of a break from their smartphones."

The article immediately goes on to say that they're spending too much time online and want to get away from it—and then, that what they're doing with their "blurry, overlit" early-digicam pics is posting them on TikTok and Instagram. Online. But then, fashions 'n' fads don't have to follow internal logic.

"...People are turning to thrift stores and secondhand e-commerce sites to find cameras with sufficiently vintage looks. On eBay, searches for 'digital camera' increased by 10 percent from 2021 to 2022, with searches for specific models seeing even steeper jumps, said Davina Ramnarine, a company spokeswoman. For example, searches for 'Nikon COOLPIX' increased by 90 percent, she said."

Old and in the way

In other words, if you periodically look at the 10- to 25-year-old digicams in your camera closet and think to yourself that they're utterly useless to anyone now and you'll never be able to get a dime for them—well, their moment has come; 10- to 26-year-old digicams are in demand among 10- to 26-year-old people! Time to slap those quaint old artifacts up on eBay and get in on the action. 

And let's applaud the trend. This is how some of tomorrow's great photographers are going to get their start. One last quotation:

"Young people are reveling in the novelty of an old look."

...In images that have character, distinctiveness, and feeling rather than sterile perfectionism. Sometimes, in the words of the old Dave Edmunds song, bad is good.

(The article was written by Kalley Huang.)

This was kinda how Leica got so famous
The trend has historical precedent. Looking for cheap, available alternatives that are funky and have an identifiable gestalt is why the generation of photographers who got famous in the Photo Boom of the late '60s early '70s—the cohort profiled in Gilles Mora's 2007 book The Last Photographic Heroes: American Photographers of the Sixties and Seventies, who dominated photography (and photography teaching posts) for the next half century—used Leica rangefinders and valued the "snapshot aesthetic" and the photojournalistic ethos. SLRs took the camera market by storm starting in 1959 and continuing throughout the 1960s; by the late '60s and early '70s, the used shelves of camera stores were lousy with the old rangefinders that had been popular in the '50s and early '60s and that nobody wanted any more. (I think I first heard this from Bruce Davidson, in one of his books or an interview or something). Among these, Leicas were built like a cross between a Tiger tank and a 1980s Mercedes, and hadn't even started to break down. (Another reason for Leica's rise is that its sturdy shutter design was bulletproof, in an era when Zeiss, which had once been the overpowering market leader, settled on a shutter design that was overcomplicated, delicate, and finicky, and unreliable as a result. But let's not get too far into the weeds here.) Those old 'fifties M3's were plentiful and cheap, and of course they still worked. What better for impecunious young photographers with artistic aspirations who couldn't afford the latest Nikon F?

Another precedent was the view camera craze of the 1970s, when commercial photographers all had to have sleek metal monorails, and discarded fuddy-duddy old wooden Deardorffs were going begging. My friend and former art school teacher Paul Kennedy bought an 8x10 Deardorff in very nice condition for $300 in that era just because it was too cheap to pass up—he didn't even really want it; he did his commercial work with a Hasselblad and a Nikon F3 named Darth. (He called my F4 "Luke.")

And so on. There's the life, and then there's the afterlife.

Speaking of an afterlife, I'll trot out a story many of you longtime readers have heard from me before, about another occurrence I consider extraordinary. The desire for a distinctive look is what drove the recent fad among cinematographers for my onetime favorite lens, the old Olympus OM Zuiko 40mm ƒ/2. Time was when that wee little lens with its very distinctive imaging properties was on closeout forever in the tiny print of the classified ads in the back of the big camera magazines. It listed for as little as $69—nobody wanted them and retailers could hardly give them away. Yet, recently, old used ones were going for three grand and up on eBay! Why? Because modern lenses approach perfection, and are starting to all look the same. With a look that is "samey." And what is that look? One my friend Oren once referred to as "analytical/clinical," which is, in the end, just one more look among many. (The demand for the Zuiko 40mm has cooled a bit since then—discarding the high and low outliers, the last ten that sold on eBay have ranged from $1,000 to $1,700. Still pretty astonishing for a lens that Olden camera couldn't unload for $69 forty years ago.)  

Any of you youngsters want to buy my 10-year-old Sony NEX-6? Works fine. Cheap!

When it comes down to it, there's never a magic bullet: mere equipment isn't enough to make pictures sing. But what people—well, some people—really seek from gear is character, not perfection. Having fun with funky old cameras nobody seems to want is one way to get there. This trend, if it really is a trend, is hilarious. But it's also wonderful, and I wish to cheer it on. Go, Gen Z!

Mike
(Hat tip to Gordon Lewis and many others)

*I've been working on setting it in my mind that "quote" is the verb and "quotation" the noun, and I'd been looking for a place to include both words in one sentence. Learning never ends.

Original contents copyright 2023 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 or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

David Raboin: "My fifteen-year-old daughter has expressed interest in digital point-and-shoot cameras from the early 2000s. She told me that those old cameras take better-looking photos than current cellphones, that phone pics are too detailed or the colors and contrast are so boosted that the photos look unrealistic. She also said that on-camera flash is a popular look on TikTok. We found my old Canon Powershot S30 in a box in the attic but couldn't get it to turn on. The battery wouldn't charge. Too bad."

Mike adds: Can we (collectively) help David's daughter? Does anyone have an old digicam that works that they would be willing to give her? If you do, contact me (mcjohnston at mac dot com) and I'll put you in touch with David.

Richard Alan Fox: "About those 'bullet proof' Leica cloth shutters. Back in the mid-seventies I was the manager of the Brooks Camera repair shop in San Francisco. Annie Leibovitz and Jim Marshall, both Leica users, were among our clients. I remember several Leica shutters (not belonging to AL or JM) coming in with pinholes burned by the sun focused through the lens. Got a Leica? Get a lens cap."

Mike replies: Hmm, would we classify that under "user error"? Seems so. I'll note in passing that the unusual viewfinder on my Sigma fp-M comes with a cap for the eyepiece printed with a bold warning to never let the sun shine through the eyepiece onto the viewing screen. So it's obvious that's a potential problem.

Jeff: "In dictionaries I checked, 'quote' is also properly used as a noun, meaning 'quotation.'"

Mike replies: Yes, my dictionary also acknowledges that the two tend to be used interchangeably in colloquial writing. But I like those subtleties and try to at least be aware of them. I have a Webster's Second. Although I seldom refer to it.

(Re Webster's Second: one of the best-known controversies in lexicography was the publication of Webster's Third New International Dictionary in September 1961, which switched from a prescriptive [i.e., strict/"we'll tell you what's correct"] to a descriptive [permissive/"anything goes and we'll just tell you what people do"] approach. Many sticklers for language were outraged—well, at least troubled—and kept their old Second Editions rather than capitulate to the barbarians at the gate.)  

Dale: "You didn't mention another retro trend that seems to be going on. Anecdotally, the last few times I've been walking around in urban areas (Seattle and San Francisco), I've encountered younger people (20s–30s) carrying film cameras. I recently visited a photo processing lab in Berkeley, California; there was group of people going in as I was leaving, and they all looked to be in their early 20s."

Mike Plews: "I am on the middle of a project that has me printing pictures going from last month back to scans of K25 slides from the '80s. Two older digital cameras are reminding me of why I enjoyed them so much. Of the 61 landscapes I ended up printing, five were shot on a Canon S95 and 15 on a Nikon D70. You can get either one now for under a hundred bucks and the files from both are really gorgeous. The D70 files are lush. It meters snow scenes better than my D7100. Go figure."

Bill Tyler: "That search for imperfection and a distinctive look is what drove art photographers to the Diana way back when, and later to the Holga."

hugh crawford: "Digicams do daylight fill-flash competently, which phones and cameras that don't start with the letter H pretty much fail at. That's what I keep them around for."

Mike replies: Kind of ironic, isn't it, as flash was considered a weakness of point-and-shoots when they became popular. Built-in flashes on point-and-shoots and digicams were puny and weak, and being too close to the lens they produced the dreaded red-eye, which various makers tried to find solutions for.

George: "Perhaps I am now more 'in' than I thought? I still use a Sony NEX-5R as my main camera. When they were on clearance, being replaced, I bought a second body (which is still untouched in the box), in case mine ever breaks."

Mike replies: You are a hipster now, George, no question.  :-)

Mark Sampson: "Ha. In 1978 I was an 'impecunious young photographer with artistic aspirations' when I went into a local camera store, thinking to buy my first top-level camera...a Nikon FM, or perhaps an Olympus OM-1. Yet I walked out with a 1959 Leica M3. Never realized until today that I was part of a trend. I seldom met another Leica user, and after 44 years of professional photography (and a few artistic accomplishments) that Leica still sits on my shelf."

Update: Wi-Fi (TP-Link Deco XE75)

A short time ago I mentioned (in this post) the problem I had with Wi-Fi in the back room. Readers Vince and John Abee (and others whose names I can't find) recommended a mesh system.

So here's what happened.

I got a nice New Years present from B&H Photo, a gift certificate to thank me for being an Affiliate. I used it to buy a two-piece TP-Link mesh system, the Deco XE75. The two units are identical. One is used as a router while the other is a satellite. I needed to replace the Apple Airport Time Capsule ($600, replaced once by Apple) which Apple stopped making in 2016.

I could not be happier right now, just after installation. Using one Deco on the landing of my basement stairs where my modem is and one on the windowsill in my "problem" back room (a converted one-car garage with concrete walls under the new paneling), not only do I suddenly get coverage all over the house—a first—but it even reaches to the outdoor balcony, the covered porch in back, and the pool table shed in the back yard, where there was zero signal before.

SpeedTest of my Wi-Fi on the porch—
the highest numbers I've seen out here

Also, the speeds are suddenly much faster. The worst speeds with the TP-Link are better than the best speeds with the Time Capsule. I didn't even do any experimenting with the placement of the second unit—I just stuck it on the windowsill where it was handiest, and it works fine.

The Deco looks nice, too. Hence the name I guess.

My experience did deviate from that of some reviewers, in that setup was not so straightforward for me. I live in a rural area in a complicated 1880s house. I had to spend a lot of time on the phone with Chris from Spectrum, who was patient and cheerful. We did get the Deco running. I'm still not quite sure how. Lots of fiddling, basically. All is well now.

I haven't even had these set up for one day so far, so I can't speak to reliability. For performance, I'm more than happy.

Big kudos and thanks to the B&H Customer Service rep, identified as Michael M on the chat, who I talked to prior to buying these. Michael did a thorough job running down my options, and recommended these along with two other options at different price points. He told me I was going to see big gains in performance.

And he was right.

Mike
Flickr page / New Yorker author page

Original contents copyright 2023 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 or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

John Abee: "Exactly the unit I use and couldn't be happier, but...for those on a tighter budget or those unsure about the mesh approach, Amazon currently has a crazy-good deal on the 3-puck Google mesh wifi system (~$125). This is not the latest version but is a solid performer. It was my house system until I bought the TP-Link Deco system, and is still serving us well at our place n North Carolina. Google manages the network through their Google Home app which is simple, powerful and bulletproof. Highly recommended if you just want to see if mesh is for you."

Ross A: "I’ve been running a mesh system for about seven years. First a Netgear Orbi system, then just about eight months ago I upgraded to a newer Asus. We had a technician install the first one, and he was laughing when we checked the before and after speeds—ten times faster than before. You’ll love it, Mike."

Greg Boiarsky: "I have had a love/hate (OK, mostly hate) relationship with Wi-Fi for what seems like centuries. First, I just suffered through bad range and rebuilt my digital life around the spots in the house that had signal. Then, I got a powerline Ethernet setup that would crash weekly. Finally, I got the Deco system. Like you said, it's a game changer. Highly recommended.

"Your upload speeds should be much faster. ISPs routinely throttle them, but they don't have to. If you aren't locked into your current ISP, I recommend finding one that could run fiber to the house. Given your location, this is highly unlikely. So, the next best thing is to get on the horn with Spectrum and renegotiate your current service to get higher upload speeds. I'm almost certain you could both improve your throughput and save money. As a general rule, you should renegotiate every two years or so."

Readings and Viewings

"Tony Vaccaro, 100, Dies; Photographed War From a Soldier’s Perspective," at the World's Best Photography magazine (the New York Times. You get ten free articles, but you should subscribe, because they publish a broad range of meaningful photographic content, from articles like this to original commissioned photojournalism and many other things besides). I had never heard of Tony Vaccaro before, but I like his work and I enjoyed this article. I especially liked reading the descriptions of his shooting technique. As an idle aside, if you had to choose between Karsh's photograph of Georgia O'Keefe and Vaccaro's picture of her looking through the piece of Swiss cheese, which would you choose? Those are two very different modes of what we call "photography."

# # #

An interesting picture of Dr. King from 1959. What's interesting about it is that it was taken by a Black photographer, Calvin Littlejohn, the chronicler of Fort Worth, Texas, who lived from 1909 t0 1993. A trope of modern criticism is the idea of the "gaze"—in other words, that the view cannot be separated from whomever is doing the viewing. To me it seems clear from the evidence that this was how Dr. King looked when he felt comfortable with the person who was taking his picture. Compare this with the more serious look we're used to seeing from Dr. King in his public role, when the ones doing the viewing were mostly representing the white-dominated media and, beyond them, the white world they worked for. For more about Calvin Littlejohn, see his bio at blackpast.org.

# # #

As long as I am on old pictures, readers of, er, a certain age will remember a famous picture from LIFE magazine of Lt. Col. Robert L. Stirm returning from a North Vietnamese prisoner of war camp and being greeted by his family on an airport runway. The picture is known by the title "Burst of Joy." A print, signed by the photographer, Slava "Sal" Veder, brought in by Stirm's daughter, known as "the leaping girl" or "the jumping girl," was appraised on the most recent episode of Antiques Roadshow. This link should take you to the segment, but, if it doesn't, the segment starts at 36:26. Sal Veder won the Pulitzer for his shot.

# # #

Mystery Man: Who is this? Hints: his arrest was for possession of more than 650 grams of cocaine, and he served two and a third years in prison following the bust. And the guy was really a Dick. (I'll post the answer tomorrow.)

UPDATE Thursday afternoon: A lot of you guessed this. It's "Tim 'The Tool Man' Taylor," a.k.a. actor/comedian Tim Allen, who was born Timothy Allen Dick. He was also the voice of Buzz Lightyear in the Toy Story movies, and now has a net worth that Fox Business reports to be $100 million. Allen was the only comedian I ever saw in concert, and his language was so blue and his subject matter so filthy that I vowed to stick with clean comedians thenceforward. (Current favorite: Nate Bargatze.)

I guess this was an easier "Mystery Man" than I thought. I didn't recognize him from this picture and couldn't make it look like him even after knowing who it was!

# # #

"'Art is dead Dude'—the rise of the AI artists stirs debate," from the BBC. The quotation is from one Jason M. Allen, who went on to say, "It's over. A.I. won. Humans lost." Not sure if this really has anything to do with photography. But I'll just point out the famous quotation attributed to the French painter Paul Delaroche, who, upon first seeing a Daguerreotype in 1839, said, "From today, painting is dead." (Although one would suppose he said it in French, and I haven't been able to find that.) Curiously, Paul Delaroche's historical paintings looked a bit like A.I., don't you agree?

# # #

Photographers we lost in 2022: photojournalist Dirck Halstead, 85; fashion photographer Patrick Demarchelier, 87; art photographer Jerry Uelsmann, 87; war photographer Tim Page, 78; Letizia Battaglia, who bravely documented the Sicilian Mafia, 87; paparazzo Ron Galella, 91; editorial and advertising photographer Kurt Markus, 75; Fred Lyon, photographer of San Francisco, 97; advertising photographer Melvin Sokolsky, 88; art photographer and filmmaker William Klein, 96; celebrity photographer Douglas Kirkland, 88; and editorial portraitist Eamonn McCabe, 74—among many others. Consolations: everyone gets their favorite camera in heaven, the photo opportunities are limitless, and you never, ever miss a shot. R.I.P.

Mike
Flickr page / New Yorker author page

Original contents copyright 2023 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 or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Gordon Lewis: "It might be that Dr. King was more relaxed around black photographers. It might also be that this image was taken in 1959, before all the major stressors in his life happened, such as the Freedom Rides, March on Washington, FBI harassment, violence in Selma, etc. To put it another way, as the years wore on he had a lot less to be relaxed about. He was assassinated nine years later, in 1968, at age 39."

Chris Kern: "Re 'As an idle aside, if you had to choose between Karsh's photograph of Georgia O'Keefe and Vaccaro's picture of her looking through the piece of Swiss cheese, which would you choose? Those are two very different modes of what we call "photography."'

"A better comparison, it seems to me, would be with Vaccaro’s 1960 photograph [here's a link —Ed.] of O’Keefe holding one of her paintings in a field in New Mexico, with its unorthodox, arresting composition: the subject in perfect profile, revealing the characteristic contours of her face; her hands cradling the painting to signify that she is its creator; the painted canvas bleeding into the left side of the frame; and the mountain in the background conveying a distinct sense of place. The image is also technically outstanding—well-illuminated, with wide tonality and excellent color, and with the figure and canvas in sharp focus and just enough bokeh in the background to keep the viewer’s attention on the subject. Offhand, I can’t recall seeing a superior posed photographic portrait."

ASW: "I'm sure others have already answered, but that's Tim 'The Tool Man' Taylor (aka the actor/comedian Tim Allen) in the mugshot. I hope he didn't drag his friendly neighbor Wilson into the drug world with him."

Winfried Heyland: "I can only recommend Tony Vaccaro's work. i.e. Entering Germany."

hugh crawford: "Re: Leap of joy There’s a whole lot of misery in that photo. [That's worth reading. Thanks. —Mike]

"Dick? I thought the guy was a tool.

"I’ve been playing around with AI art and I find it sort of like street photography crossed with surrealist art practices. You have a vague expectation of what you might get, but no control, and the outcome is something of a surprise. I don’t think that AI software like Stable Diffusion, which I am working with, is as much a threat to photography as Photoshop and the current generation of photo editing software."

Ed Hawco: "No shade on Karsh, but I’ll take the Swiss cheese shot any day of the week."

Steve Jackson: "Mike, I was kind of stunned that you didn't know about Tony Vaccaro. Although his B&W photos are better known, some of his color portraits are amazing. This is a link to one that I think really shows how to use environment and depth of field in a way that rivets you to the subject: Picasso. Compositionally and technically it is a lesson for all of us. Here is a link to that image (but I would suggest you look at all of them at Monroe Gallery)."

Mike replies: I did look at all of them, and I'm pretty convinced I've never seen any of them before. (I no longer think I can remember every photograph I've ever seen—I used to think so—but I usually get a sort of spidey-sense if I've seen a picture before.) I'm glad to find out about Tony.

Bruno Gonzalez: "Hello Mike, 'À partir d'aujourd'hui la peinture est morte.' The following is an extract copied from the French Wikipedia page about Paul Delaroche; the text says the quotation is probably apocryphal. 'Après avoir vu pour la première fois un daguerréotype il aurait prophétisé, selon Gaston Tissandier: «À partir d'aujourd'hui la peinture est morte.» Cependant, cette citation, sans doute apocryphe, est contestée par Stephen Bann, pour qui il n'existe pas de phrase plus ressassée et plus fallacieuse.'"

Mike replies: Thanks! For others, the French means, "However, this arguably apocryphal quote is disputed by Stephen Bann, for whom there is no more rehashed and fallacious phrase." (Google Translate.)

It's odd, but at some point, does it actually matter if someone said certain things or not? The quotation is so widespread, and so consistently attributed to Delaroche, that I'm not sure it matters if anyone can prove he said it. Also, I've noticed that quotes (and facts) that have a literary rather that oral origin tend to be much more readily accepted. For an example of oral transmission, take the famous "Serenity Prayer." The earliest recorded version is from 1933, by a student of Reinhold Niebuhr, quoting Niebuhr. Niebuhr himself might well have used it before 1933. He didn't publish a version himself until 1951, but he was known to have used it in many sermons and was quoted many times between '33 and '51. For this reason, many different wordings and forms came to be accepted as the "real" Serenity Prayer, and various sources are still modifying its wording. My thought would be, how do we know that Paul Delaroche didn't speak his famous quotation orally and that it spread the same way?

In any event, if he didn't say it, he might as well have.

Rod S.: "I'd already taken your advice to subscribe to the New York Times and had already read that obituary on Tony Vaccaro. Imagine one morning finding and photographing a fallen soldier's body mostly covered by fresh overnight snow, and then realising that it was your friend. Imagine being in a French town so delighted in being liberated from war that its women linked arms and danced in a circle around a little ceremony in which a small girl and a foreign soldier kneel on the ground and kiss. Hard to imagine? Tony Vaccaro photographed it."

darlene (partial comment): " I was once an New York Times subscriber but grew tired of their political undertones. It may go unnoticed if you like their politics, but it isn't very pleasant if you are an independent thinker."

John Camp: "Timothy Dick. Another photographer took a photo that is virtually identical to Sal Veder's. Veder won the Pulitzer for it, the other guy didn't. I think it had to do with which one went out on the AP wire first."

Mike replies: The Turnley twins have a version of that story. They both took the same picture, more or less, and one of them won a prize for it, the other one didn't. I'd have to look up the details. And according to one of my favorite books on photography, there were about 15 photographers present for the crash of the Hindenburg. The famous picture is the one that hit the wire services first; the rest are virtually unknown.

James Kirkpatrick: "The mystery man and I attended Seaholm High School in Birmingham, Michigan. He was year behind me so would have graduated in 1970. I only found this out years later looking in my yearbook. A very funny and talented man in later years."

Franz Amador: "From the article on Tony Vaccaro: 'Private Vaccaro improvised as he moved through Europe, finding his film and his processing chemicals among the ruins of camera shops in towns his unit passed through. He developed the film in Army helmets and hung the negatives on trees to dry when he wasn’t on night duty. He carried them in his backpack.' Dang!"

Mike replies: I was struck by that too. And have you ever photographed with an Argus? Very awkward camera, but Georgia O'Keeffe was impressed with the speed with which Tony Vaccaro used it.

Keith B: "Can I choose the portrait of Georgia Ansel Adams took with her and Orville Cox at Canyon de Chelly?" [Sure. Here's that one. —Ed.]

Dan Gorman: "The 'mystery' man is Tim Dick, otherwise known as Tim Allen. My in-laws knew his family—he grew up in suburban Detroit."

Jerome: "AI can't create art, because AI has nothing to say about anything. It can imitate what humans have said about something, but that's like repeating a poem in a language you don't understand. AI is a pattern-matching machine. It will recognise patterns and re-arrange them, but has no idea what it's doing."