I've been distracted of late—caught up in the medical churn. Today is my last (I hope) big appointment, an hour and a half away at the "big hospital" in Rochester. (No pool today.) We have LOTS of good comments awaiting publication from the "Photographs Are Beautiful" post still awaiting publication, some of them quite long. I had hoped to get those done this morning but, alas, more distraction, and now the time is gone and the window is closed again. They will be top on the TOP agenda once I put this appointment in the rearview mirror. I might even figure out a way to make new posts out of several of them. Keep yer fingers crossed for me this morning! Really hoping for a clean bill of health and the go-ahead to exercise.
[UPDATE seven hours later: Thumbs up. No pacemaker needed, no followup necessary, [further boring details redacted]. And the green light to exercise. ::big smile::]
May I just say how much I miss Roger Ebert? He was for a time the nation's foremost movie critic. He was also a foursquare writer with a plainspoken style who never showed off, the kind of businesslike wordsmith I approve of. I only had contact with him one time, when I tried to commission him to write an article about movies that include photography in their plots. I had arranged to pay him what was, for the company I worked for, a lot, but which was probably too little for him. Even so, he was interested—he came up with a pretty serviceable list right off the top of his head. But in the end had to back away because he was overcommitted. I didn't get the sense that that was an excuse. He just didn't have time. A pity.
Last night I looked up an old rom-com about a May–September romance—As Good As It Gets with Jack Nicholson and Helen Hunt. Helen Hunt was a fine actress who seemed to vanish from public view at some point. For a while she was everywhere, then she wasn't. In her heyday she was one of my relatively few screen crushes. I endured many episodes of "Mad About You" because she was in it. I loved her. (Using that expression is a little embarrassing. As I write it, I hear my psychologist kid brother Scott correcting me: "You don't love her. You love her character.") When James L. Brooks made As Good As It Gets in 1997, Jack Nicholson was 60 and Helen Hunt was 34. That alone makes the romance unlikely. I looked it up the other day: less than 1% of intact couples have 28 or more years in age between them. The common cliché when there's an age disparity is that the man is always older (and usually rich), but it's not that uncommon for it to be the other way around. Mary Tyler Moore's husband of 33 years, for instance, was 15 years her junior.
Mary Tyler Moore, by the way, as Laura Petrie in The Dick Van Dyke Show, was my first screen crush—when I was eight years old! Looking back on it I think she (or rather her character, as Scott would be quick to point out) somehow ruined me for women forever. I'm not being serious. But I did think she was as beautiful as humans could get.
Of course, screen crushes aren't real, and "types" aren't determinants. Physical appearance alone is never enough to make a relationship. What really attracts me is another mysterious quality: soul. That's a vague and opaque word, one that doesn't communicate much. But I know what I mean. And I know it when I come across it.Women who truly attract me are rare, and only come along once in a great while. "Soul" as I perceive it is treasurable and uncommon. Strange that it often appears in women who don't know they have it—and who sometimes don't even think all that much of themselves.
Mary Tyler Moore, who stole my tender heart in childhood, was also the only screen crush I got to meet in person. Well, meet might be overstating it. I was visiting Hanover, where Dartmouth College is, and my old friend Jim and I went to the Top of the Hop, a big open lounge and event space on the second floor of the college arts center, to talk. We picked a pair of armchairs in an out-of-the-way corner, and talked all afternoon. As the hours rolled by, the room filled up. There was a buzz in the air. It turned out that Mary Tyler Moore was going to speak. So we decided to stay. We had inadvertently claimed the best seats in the house: after arriving late, she made her way over to where we were, to give her talk. I can tell you one thing: although she was famous as a girl-next-door type, in real life she was uncommonly beautiful. So there I was, right next to Laura Petrie, thinking of myself at age eight sitting in front of our black-and-white television in my pajamas watching her cook for Dick Van Dyke after he tripped over that same ottoman week after week.
Life is strange.
By the time she arrived, the room was packed. Downstairs, another crowd of people had gathered who were being shut out by the fire marshalls. Intermittently we heard rumbles and cries of complaint from the disappointed crowd below, and halfway through Mary's talk she was interrupted by a loud yell from downstairs: "F--- YOU, Mary!" After just a beat, in her best brave-but-querulous Laura Petrie / Mary Richards voice, Mary yelled back, with just the right inflection, "You too-ooo!"
But back to As Good As It Gets. Many of Roger Ebert's reviews spend a good deal of their allotment of space simply laying out the film. This happened, that happened. Yet he manages to hit the nail on the head time after time. If you happen to remember that now 25-year-old movie, read his review of it. He hits it on the nose. "If the movie had been either more or less ambitious," writes Roger, "it might have been more successful. Less ambitious, and it would have been a sitcom crowd-pleaser, in which a grumpy Scrooge allows his heart to melt. More ambitious, and it would have touched on the underlying irony of this lonely man's bitter life. But 'As Good as It Gets' is a compromise, a film that forces a smile onto material that doesn't wear one easily." A narrow miss, but a miss all the same. I'm going to watch it again tonight anyway, I guess.
Mike
UPDATE in the cold light of the next morning: I actually remembered very little of the movie, so it was entertaining a quarter of a century later. But it's also a weirder movie than I remember. Roger Ebert says, "[Nicholson's character] hurls racist, sexist, homophobic and physical insults at everyone he meets, and because it's Nicholson, we let him; we know there has to be a payback somehow." But in today's atmosphere, some of those "hurled" comments seem startlingly vile. The movie as a whole shoehorns what is a grim and sorry story—a desperate, lonely, beleaguered woman allowing herself to be manipulated by a much older, psychologically ill misanthrope, for purposes neither of them quite understands—into the gauzy, feelgood arc of the standard rom-com. That in itself is a little shocking. But there is very fine acting (I think Helen Hunt out-acts Jack Nicholson, frankly, although all the performances are good, even the dog's) and plenty of fine writing, and more than a few moments of genuine laugh-out-loud humor. I was less impressed with the romance aspect of it—even at the end when the big kiss happens, you still feel they're both making a terrible mistake and that there can't be anything but pain and strain in their shared future.
But hey, it's a movie. What are movies for if not for telling us unreal and entertaining concocted stories? So, okay.
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.)
Regarding that shocking—shocking for now, anyway—article at PetaPixel, "Popular Instagram Photographer Revealed as AI Fraud," I just wanted to recommend once again Greg Milner's 2010 book Perfecting Sound Forever, a history of sound recording. I guess you have to be interested in music and music reproduction to care about it. And I'm not sure everyone reacts to that book the way I did. The first part of the book describes the ever-improving progress of using technology to more fully and richly record real, authentic acoustic events, i.e., musicans playing and singing together into the air, all at once. The later parts of the book describes the increasing use of tricks, fakery, programming, and synthesizing to create sounds that exist only as recordings and have little to do with reality. It describes an upward-climbing graph line of progress and dynamism followed by a decline into decadence and artifice. I found the book very satisfying and gratifying in the early going as technical progress is made in recording, and then increasingly discouraging and dismaying as 'recordings' moved farther way from live performances. "Photography" looks like it's following the same path, or a parallel one.
I reminded me of a great line from an old movie, spoken by Peter O'Toole in the 1982 film My Favorite Year. It starts with a performer in period costume saying that he feels so good he can probably nail it in one take, at which point the TV producer tells him he has to get it right in one take, as he'll be performing live. After a few exchanges in which he professes not to know what "live" means, he cries out, "I'm not an actor, I'm a movie star!" That is, he can't actually act—he's dependent on technology to create the appearance of acting. In the way that some pop stars can't actually sing, and the AI fraud guy didn't even take his own pictures.
It was a line that became pretty famous at the time. As if a pop star had said, "I'm not a musician, I'm a recording artist!" The AI fraud guy, by the way, admitted he was trying to fool people but then tried to pivot, claiming he had to work hard on his AI fakes, making many tries to get a good one, even to the point of Photoshopping them. He thinks he has a right to claim them as "his" original artworks after all. I mean, just ask him.
Photography is moving farther and farther away from the era in which the aim was to accurately report what was in front of the camera, and increasingly occupying territory that was previously the domain of art. Mostly bad art, unfortunately. I've always been of the opinion that if you want to be a painter, you ought to paint. Photographs are only beautiful insofar as they are true. A minority opinion, I guess, these days.
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.)
It looks to me like Canon is revamping its lineup. I'm just not sure how, exactly.
I'm not an expert on all things Canon. I shot Canon only once, in prehistoric days when dinosaurs roamed the Earth and heroes were mighty and did great deeds, etc. The camera was called an EOS RT, and it was one of the slickest picturetaking devices ever created at that time, although mine had a propensity to stop working at inconvenient times. (The workaround was to take the battery out and re-insert it.) It had a pellicle mirror, which "the market" hates but which I loved. (The market repeatedly and decisively rejects pellicle-mirror cameras, despite various cameramakers' infatuation with them. I could tell you stories.) The pellicle mirror (a.k.a. beam splitter) permitted an extremely short shutter lag time, better than a rangefinder M Leica, which had been the king in that department at that time.
Anyway, not a Canon expert. And there are no easy go-to Canon experts out there, like Rob Galbraith used to be and like Thom Hogan is to Nikon now. So take this post with a pinch of sodium chloride.
You're aware that Canon recently introduced two new budget cameras, the R8 and R50. The R8 (right) is thought to be a replacement for the original budget R camera, the RP, although Canon says the RP will continue in the lineup, presumably because of the large price-point difference. The other one is the R50 (top), which has an APS-C sensor and takes all RF lenses but is made to match RF-S (crop sensor) lenses specifically. It is being discussed like the whole issue is whether it replaces the M50—as the name would seem to suggest.
If, like me, you're catching up here, the M Canons were Canon's grudging nod to mirrorless when it was kinda hoping mirrorless would go away. The M's were mainly paltry little amateur cameras, walled off in a little ghetto by virtue of having a separate lensmount, called EF-M, although they also accepted EF and EF-S lenses with an adapter, the latter denoting lenses dedicated to the cropped sensor. (Confused? Don't worry; everyone was.) The M line began in 2012. But then Canon eventually made the more purposeful and fuller-featured M50 (2018) and M50II (2020), which people liked and which sold inconveniently well.
Too many lensmounts do not a prosperous camera company make, so it makes sense to transition the EF-M mirrorless cameras to the newer RF (full frame) and RF-S (cropped sensor) R lensmount. That's what Internet thinks the R50 is: an updated M50 II in RF-S mount. The big question being asked out on the wilds of the Web is whether the R50 replaces the M50 II. My opinion about that: duh.
My question, one which Internet is not asking, is whether the R50 is actually the advance guard for the eventual replacement of the Rebels.
"Rebel" is one of Canon's most well-known names. It's been around since Andre Agassi had hair, no diss. And Canon didn't slap it on the R50. The EF-S Rebels—I count three of them as current products on the Canon USA page, the Rebel 8Ti (2020, $750), the even smaller and lighter Rebel SL3 (also $750), and the older Rebel 7 (early 2018, currently a price leader at $429 with kit lens)—probably still pull well for Canon, which can't afford to give away sure sales in a down market. And it doesn't matter that much if the Rebels are SLRs and still use the EF-S mount, because the casual and beginner photographers the Rebels are aimed at generally use just one, or at most two, kit lenses. And Canon can't afford to telegraph that the EF mount is losing support, because it still sells numerous FF DSLRs and has a large number of entrenched users.
Still and all, it makes sense that Canon should transition as much as possible to the RF mount eventually, and it makes sense that it would start with the lower-end models where the stakes are not so high. Anyway, my partially educated guess is that the R50 is not just the M50 II replacement; it's actually the Fort Sumter cannon of the new Rebels*.
Well, this is all just my take. As I say, not an expert. And I don't have any insider contacts at Canon since old friend Chuck Westfall died. (If you don't know the name, Chuck was the camera company tech rep par excellence, a paragon of the type, and famous far and wide in the hobby, to the point of being lampooned by a gadfly known as "Fake Chuck Westfall." Chuck was not amused at the spoof, by the way.)
So I'm not exactly sure how Canon is revamping its lineup. But then, maybe Canon isn't entirely sure yet either.
Mike
*You see what I did there.
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.)
Expressing enthusiasm for photography by way of brand fanaticism seems to be something that's receding in the rearview mirror now. I wasn't really aware of it existing—well, except among Leica fans—much before the 1990s. There were certainly aficionados of brands, mainly I think because you had to accumulate equipment and mostly people did it within one brand, or at least one brand per format—but most people weren't partisans. I blamed the onset of "fanboyism" (I always disliked the term, because it was a putdown) in part on the decision by CompuServe to divide its photoforums by brand—initially they weren't organized that way. (I wish I knew when that happened. Sometime in the mid-1990s maybe?) DPReview continued the same structure, and for a while it got kinda ridiculous—one way of attracting attention became the "switching announcement." Some guy would announce with great portent and much bloviation that X brand had finally disappointed him too grievously and he was decamping for brand Y, and everyone would happily fret and natter over it for a while, at their keyboards.
I never cared what other people shot with. A very early post on this blog read something like, "Should you shoot with Nikon or Canon?" And the answer was "Yes." That is, buy one or the other and go shoot. I still don't care what people shoot with. Make yourself happy; there are good and bad shooters within every brand, and for most cameras there are people who love it and people who don't. However, over the years I noticed that this blog would attract more people who were partisans of whatever brand I was shooting with at the time, especially if I stuck with it for a while and wrote about it frequently. I'd hop from Sony to Konica-Minolta to Panasonic to Sony to Micro 4/3 to Fuji, and people would somehow think that that mattered. It didn't, of course. I was just one guy with my gearhead hat on happily wasting money as we are all wont to do, with all the cool and pretty toys.
J'accuse! It went further than that: I started writing about photography in 1988, and wrote about all sorts of brands over the years. And at some point I detected that if I wasn't identifiably partisan about any given brand, people would spread the rumor that I had some sort of animosity toward it. So, if I wasn't an out-and-out Leicaphile, then I had to be a Leica hater. And so on. Over the years I came across random accusations that I supposedly "hated" almost every brand there was. At one point, I even got accused by multiple personages of loving and hating the same brand at the same time.
Is all that "fanboy" nonsense actually dying down now? It could be. It might also be that I'm personally just stepping away from it more and more, meaning I'm not as keyed into it as I used to be. But I learned a long, long time ago to keep my ear to the ground, the better to hear far-off hoofbeats, and that's long been second nature. And I sense recently that brand partisanship seems to be settling down quite a bit. It could also be that the all the disputation has simply shifted to some other venue that I don't keep up with. I have to confess I haven't watched a YouTube camera review in months now, and I couldn't even name the big channels. It's possible I'm just losing touch, is what I'm saying.
Another possibility is that nowadays we just want all the cameramakers to survive. To do well and thrive. I feel that myself.
Survivors and thrivers I went down the list of DPReview's "Cameras" tab and tallied the names that still seem to be around. There are 26 company names listed, and I disqualify Holga, a toy plastic film camera which for some mystifying reason DPReview includes. So there are 25 names. First, here are the names that haven't listed a new product since 2018 or earlier, along with the date of the last listed product:
Agfa (2009)
Casio (2016)
Contax (2002)
DxO Labs (2016)
Kodak (2016)
Lytro (2014)
Minolta (1998)
Rylo (2017)
Samsung (2015)
SeaLife (2016)
Xiaomi (2017)
YI (2017)
Zeiss (2018)
There are several missing from that list, for instance Konica-Minolta and Epson, and a number of small former digicam makers such as BenQ, Sanyo, and HP Photosmart. But anyway, that's 13, which gets us down to 12. Of the ones that remain, "Olympus / OM System" is certainly much diminished, although it's disputed as to how it should be considered now. Ricoh and Pentax, listed separately by DPR because they used to be separate, are the same company now. GoPro (last introduction 2020) is looking a bit like it might be a fad that's fading. DJI makes drones and the Ronin Cinema camera. So for the purposes of the list let's give OM System the benefit of the doubt, merge Ricoh and Pentax into one, and set the others aside. That leaves ten eleven remaining active companies on DPR's list:
Canon
Fujifilm
Hasselblad
Leica
Nikon
OM System
Panasonic
[UPDATE] Phase One
Ricoh (Pentax)
Sigma
Sony
That's just going from DPReview's "Cameras" tab. Are you aware of any that deserve to be listed as major going concerns that aren't included among those ten? I wouldn't be surprised if there's a obvious omission staring me right in the face. [UPDATE: Many readers suggested that Phase One is missing, so I've included them now. Although for some unknown reason DPReview doesn't seem to cover them.]
In the peak years (ILC and dedicated camera sales peaked in 2012), it might have been fun to pretend all the brands were fighting and that we had to help. Now, though, rather than fighting, it seems more like circle-the-wagons time. I don't want to see any of these ten eleven disappear. Do I want Olympus shooters to lose support? I do not. Do I want Ricoh to lose interest in making cameras? I sure don't; that would be a big loss. Do I want Fuji or Hasselblad to destroy the other as competition in medium format? Absolutely not. May they both prosper and live long.
Actually, rather than single brand partisanship, maybe now is the time for shooting more than one brand!
If so, maybe instead of "fanboy," we can call it being a "panboy." Pan being the prefix from the Greek πᾶν, pan, meaning "all." Okay, I've already admitted than my coinages are dopey and seldom catch on, bokeh being the only exception, so don't throw food at me, please!
That's all for today. Maybe it's already a little too much. :-)
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:
Mike Ferron: "I appreciate all brands and never liked the infighting that prevailed, especially between the Nikon/Canon sides. Then there was the format wars. So ridiculous really. If you are a pro, use what you need to use. If not, use whatever makes you feel good. Humans will divide over the silliest of things."
Albert Smith: "I'll admit to being a brand snob back in the day. I had little money, but I only bought top brands based on the technical data that use to be captioned under images in photography magazines and books in the '60s, '70s and '80s.
"I was a fan of certain photographers and bought gear based on what they used. For me, it was Nikon and Leica, and only lenses from those brands. I wouldn't be caught dead with a Vivitar or Tokina lens on my Nikon, and Leica M cameras had no third party lenses until Cosina under the Voigtländer moniker started in the early '00s, but not for me.
"It took a big leap for me to start shooting with Fujifilm cameras and to go to APS-C after only accepting full frame. My brand loyalty was challenged, and I now have dozens of Nikons and Leicas sitting unused with an arsenal of expensive lenses, collecting dust.
"You are right about the fanboy thing being less relevant based on the various sites I visit. Many people buy a four-figure body and are happy to put a sub-hundred-dollar Chinese lens on it. The lens was always the thing I'd never compromise on, but today no one seems bothered as long as you can appreciate the 'character' that the cheap lenses render.
"Today I ordered a TT Artisans 25mm ƒ/2 manual focus lens for my Fuji, $64. I guess I'm out of the fanboy club."
Michael Fewster: "You missed Phase One. This high end medium format company is very much alive. Arguably the best medium format cameras available. If you can afford them that is."
Aaron: "Clearly, you’re an OM System hater. :-) "
Juan Buhler: "Yeah, but you never really liked Pentax that much, huh Mike?"
Mike replies: Sigh. :-)
s.wolters: "Amazon is the owner of DPReview. You cannot buy PhaseOne via Amazon but all the brands on DPReview you can."
Tex Andrews: "Oh, and one more thing: 'fanboy' is a banned word at DPR!"
Mike replies: I didn't know that. I'm pleased to hear it.
JH: "Blame advertising and marketing. They are dedicated to creating demand for new or existing products and loyal buyers. The beginning of modern advertising is probably David Ogilvy in the '60s—the 'Mad Men' era, which focused on image, e.g. the happy housewife with her new space-age gadgets or 'the man who reads Playboy.' A major shift occurred in the early '70s when Al Ries and Jack Trout published Positioning, the original guide to building brands. In a later book, The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing, Law 4 says 'reality is nothing, perception is everything.' Advertising and positioning created a 'us vs. them' atmosphere: Nikon vs. Canon, MAC vs. PC, Ford vs. Chevy, McDonalds vs. Burger King, Coke vs. Pepsi, etc., etc., etc. Positioning created the idea of brands and the conflict between brands created the 'fanboys.' As long as we have advertising (especially with the 'influencers' on the Internet) and choices, I bet we will have fanboys."
Rob de Loe: "The whole concept of being fanatically loyal to the products of large corporations of any type is ludicrous to me. I have no loyalty to brands at all.
"They're tools. Make a good tool that does what I need well and I'm your customer."
Michael Fewster: "Wearing brands is another aspect of this. If you want me to advertise your brand with a large logo on my T-shirt or anything else, then pay me. Same goes for camera straps with huge Canon, Nikon, or Sony written all over them. I will never wear such things. If my memory serves me correctly, it was Camel that started this. Somewhere in the late '50s/early '60s they came out with a T-shirt with a large logo on it. Camel and the rest of the commercial world were staggered when it became a fashion thing. People bought them in huge numbers. The advertising world was incredulous. The public would actually pay to wear advertising. The rush was on."
I'm about to get myself in hot water. These days you're not supposed to make gender-specific pronouncements. It's not politically correct. By my experience has been that men and women tend to react differently to having their pictures taken.
As Atlanta, Georgia, photographer Kevin Ames says, "When I used to ask a potential client [if they wanted a makeup artist], women would answer 'No, thanks. I can do my own.' Men would give a look that said having makeup applied was an idea from a far distant planet." I'm male myself, and I have never had makeup on my face, not even when I played Gandalf in a school play in seventh grade, my one and only experience as a thespian. I have a friend (retired now) who was a TV weatherman and news anchor, and he went to makeup every night.
In fact, I could make lots of gender-specific pronouncements about photographing people, marking myself as an outdated troglodyte of an extraneous generation. For instance, with a male executive portrait or graduation portrait, you might have ten or fifteen minutes before your subject starts to look bored, whereas women tend to be comfortable being admired, and being photographed comes under the heading of being admired as long as that person doesn't feel insecure or anxious about her appearance. I encountered women and girls who seemed to have an infinite interest in being photographed, like that bear that was in the news a few weekends ago. (Now I'm making ursine-specific pronouncements. I'm bad.) I'm talking about normal citizens. Professional models—the highest level I ever experienced was one who charged $10k a day in the '80s, when the supermodels were making $25k a day—were amazing in their ability to turn it on and off.
I might point out that advertising for models is exempted from EEOC laws because discriminating by type is "job-related or necessary to the operation of the business." Saying you want to hire specific types of people isn't discriminatory. Maybe blog posts that are job-related could be exempted from being considered politically incorrect as well?
Anyway, here's what I wanted to say: I had a tendency to want to photograph people as they are. Men were typically okay with that because they didn't care (that was the sense I got, anyway). Women not so much. It's true, I am generalizing here, and people can be very different. But as a general rule, women tend to like to look good, and they don't mind if you take time and effort to make them look better.
But I got into trouble with this a lot. I used to ask high-school girls to come to their session with a hair brush and several different tops, and every now and then I'd have them re-do their hair—just so their hair wouldn't be exactly the same in every frame, just in case there was something about it they didn't like. One girl refused, saying she liked her hair being messy. Except she didn't—she hated her hair in all nine rolls I shot of her, and never bought a print. (That was before Photoshop when even small changes were difficult to make.) Another time, a man in a shirt and tie in a family portrait refused to pay for an expensive and time-consuming portrait session because the tab of his belt was outside of his belt loop instead of tucked underneath it. He ended up paying half. I lost $300, about $800 in today's dollars, for not hiring a stylist for the session. Although I've always wondered whether even a professional stylist would have caught the belt loop thing.
Atlanta photographer Kevin Ames solved this problem by making makeup artists mandatory in his portrait sessions. He was dissatisfied using Photoshop retouching only, so he uses both a hair and makeup stylist and Photoshop retouching. I didn't contact him to ask if I could use his illustration, but see his undated blog post "Makeup Artist Required!" and take a look at the three-frame comparison of Cheryl. I would be fine with the version on the left, "Clean face & hair." But most women, I believe, would be happier with the version on the other end, labeled "Retouched" (meaning hair and makeup done, and also retouched). (It's interesting how identical Cheryl's smile is in all three shots.)
It's been a long time since I did a portrait professionally—the last one was five years ago, and I probably went five years before that without doing one. I miss it. To be honest, though, I very seldomly sprung for stylists because I was working at a lower level than that. I wonder how much hair and makeup stylists cost to hire now?
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:
Paul Judice: "I've worked in fashion and beauty retouching for about 30 years and have always been conflicted by the way we create an unrealistic bar for physical beauty. Perhaps out of guilt, I went to career day at my daughter's school when she was in grade two or three. I showed before and after shots of a very famous supermodel (something that could have gotten me in very deep trouble) and let the kids look for the differences. Once all the changes were found and we discussed the process of creating false perfection, I asked the girls what they had learned from my presentation. The unanimous answer was, 'We want to look good!'"
Geoff Wittig: "In my limited experience, it's really not so much a gender-specific thing as personality-specific. That is, there are certainly women who are particular about their appearance in photographs, but plenty who aren't so concerned. And there are plenty of guys who are in their own way extremely particular about how they look. Plenty of business types really want to project dominance, to radiate being the alpha male. In my neck of the woods, it's most often a desire to project a bit of swagger and sneer. Call it the flannel 'n' mustache aesthetic.
"I get a skewed view of the issue, though. My lovely wife of 42 years photographs wonderfully...except that I have taken perhaps a half dozen good photographs of her in that time. In almost all the others she got her hands in the way or turned her back before I could trip the shutter. She's so attuned to the threat, she can hear the nearly silent focusing sound from my portrait lens and gets her hands in the way before things are sharp. Sigh."
Mike replies: I love that "so attuned to the threat." ROFL!
Seriously, though, you two might be good candidates for my "three-minute portrait" contract. See my New Yorker article under "Difficult Subjects."
Benjamin Marks (partial comment): "I always thought a portrait was a success if the subject either saw something authentic about themselves that he or she hadn't seen before, or if they felt it showed them as they thought of themselves, or the best selves. The problem is that none of us sees ourselves the way others see us. My own theory about this, at the most basic physical level, this is because we only tend to see reflections of ourselves, which are left-right reversed, whereas the rest of the world sees us as the eye sees us (right side on the right side). The other stumbling blocks are psychological. I, for instance, think of myself as a 190 lb. 24 year old, when in fact I am a 280 lb. 50-something. Photographic images of me insist on portraying the photons bouncing off the more well-padded current version of me, rather than the svelte version my mind is convinced I present to the world. Photoshop ain't going to do it, if you know what I mean."
Kirk: "I'm not ready to comment much on the basic premise of this blog; that women care more than men about looking good. But I can speak objectively about the costs here in Austin [Texas] of paying for make-up and hair professionals on a photo shoot.
"To keep to current times:
"In the first week of November 2022 I produced a job and photographed for a large medical/technology company which has an international reach. We spent several days on location at the client's Austin offices which included two complete operating suites. They use these to train doctors on cardiac procedures using their products.
"For the shoot we required two male and two female models which we got from a regional talent agency. The cost of the models for one day was $4,500 each. Or $18,000 for all four. Each talent or model was at the location for one day only. The fee included specific, limited usage rights. We hired a skilled make-up person and there was enough time in the schedule for her to also touch up hair. Her fee for each eight hour day was $1,250. She took an equal amount of time preparing the male and female models. I judged her fee to be in the middle-to-higher end of make-up artist's fees in Austin in 2022. You'll probably pay more for the same skills in film and video production....
"I should also mention that I did have one assistant on set. A professional who had worked for several years in NYC and who will probably transition to a full time photographer in 2023. His fee was $500 for an eight hour day.
"I recently (January) photographed both male and female attorneys for a different project. More of a conventional portrait shoot. Shot in their offices as environmental portraits. All came in business attire which meant suits and ties for the men and gender appropriate, corresponding attire for the women. All were impeccably dressed. None required any additional make up. The person most concerned with sartorial appearances was a male who was focused on the fact that his white shirt had 'wrinkles.' I think of a wrinkle as a creased bit of fabric but he was referencing the natural tendency of shirts to have undulating fabric instead of presenting as a fixed, single plane. I assured him that this would be easily fixed in Photoshop. He was relaxed after that conversation.
"I never, ever think of my subjects as 'being admired.' Which I interpret to mean 'judged by their physical beauty.' In my mind, after having done well over 10,000 paid portraits in my careers, my goal is to build a rapport with a sitter. To establish a give-and-take based on equal power. I consider a portrait successful when the sitter and I become comfortable enough with each other to move from 'posing' to the sitter feeling comfortable presenting themself authentically. It takes more time and effort to actually connect, but to my mind it's much more in line with what my clients want.
"Except that unlike your example of the sitter and client being one and the same, in my business the client is the corporate entity, publication or advertising agency that hires me. My hope, always, is that they hire me for both my style and my ability to look past physical appearance enough to establish a human rapport and relationship.
"I should also add that given our busy market, most make-up artists and stylists charge by the day, not by the hour. That means that successful studios that depend directly on individual customers as portrait clients can only cost-effectively use make-up people who are in-house, or the studios must be able to efficiently schedule a full day of portrait shoots to spread the costs across. It's different in advertising, as we can budget for a make-up professional to come in, hang out on set, and spend the day working in a few concentrated spurts. Clients are paying for these services as a line item in a much bigger overall budget.
"Family and friends? They're tough. They don't like to pay. I can't justify hiring a stylist when photographing casual images of B and B. (emoji implied)." [B and B are Kirk's wife and son. —Ed.]
—>If you've never heard Zella Day's cover of the White Stripes' "Seven Nation Army," it's a beautiful thing. She has a different take on it and makes it her own, in the manner of good covers. (I wrote a whole post on cover songs once.) It was famous. The cover came out in 2012; the original was on Elephant, which came out twenty years ago, and if that doesn't make you feel old.... Zella's real name is Zella Day Kerr, born 1995.
—>The late Jeff Beck put out a lot of music. A favorite of mine is the album You Had It Coming from Y2K. It charted well and won some awards but was a critical also-ran, the consensus being that the electronica drowned out the guitar which is what everybody wants to hear. But that was the point. Listen to "Earthquake" and the way he weaves an extended solo line into the electronica. It is tough even to pick out at first, but that's what's interesting about it.
—>There are a lot of quirky little bands that don't penetrate very far but usually have their partisans. One I'm a fan of is Beauty Pill, a Washington D.C. band whose leader, Chad Clark, has had multiple heart surgeries and is severely immunocompromised, which limits the band's activities a lot, through no fault of their own. Here they are on NPR's Tiny Desk Concerts. I love the song "Goodnight for Real," from their first full-length album, The Unsustainable Lifestyle, from 2004. I think the album did well and got a lot of attention but I can't even find any information about it on the Web. I guess there's only so much oxygen in the room.
—>We've heard a lot about the deaths of musicians lately, but one that fell between the cracks is rapper Trugoy the Dove, born David Jude Jolicoeur, who died last Sunday at age 54 of congestive heart failure. He was one of the three members of De La Soul, whose 1989 album Three Feet High and Rising is an offbeat masterpiece, sort of a cross between hippie-dippie flower-power adolescent goofiness and early hip-hop. It's a period piece for sure. There's something about the permissions and legalities that has kept the album all but unobtainable over the years. He also co-wrote the Gorillaz song "Feel Good Inc.", which won a Grammy in 2006. "Trugoy" is "yogurt" backwards. R.I.P. David.
—>First Aid Kit appears to be having a moment. Wikipedia says they're "a Swedish folk duo consisting of the sisters Johanna and Klara Söderberg, born in 1990 and 1993, respectively. When performing live, they are accompanied by a drummer, a guitarist and a keyboard player." A song of theirs I come back to is "Silver Lining." We all try to keep on keepin' on, don't we?
—>Several of the people mentioned here are my son's age, more or less, born in the early '90s. To add a taste of jazz to this motley, give a listen to Emmet Cohen, a pianist born in 1990 who currently lives in Harlem. The laid-back run-through called "The Lonliest" features Patrick Bartley on alto sax and Sean Jones on trumpet, along with Emmet's usual collaborators Russell Hall on bass and drummer Kyle Poole. You can sample the rest of the album Uptown in Orbithere.
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.)
Bob Zimmerman: "FYI: De La Soul's entire catalog gets rereleased on vinyl and streaming services on 3/3/23.
"I worked at the Tower Records at 2000 Pennsylvania Ave, after four years of college, starting at minimum wage. I was 25 and they put me in the cassette department. I remember we started off with 10 copies of the cassette of '3 Feet High and Rising,' Then 30, then 90, then 300 and 450 and...couldn't keep it in stock. Constantly played throughout the store. BTW, worked for Tower 18.5 years and ended my career as the Manager of the Lincoln Center NYC store. Best. job. ever."
Mike replies: I trust you've seen the marvelous Tower Records documentary, Colin Hanks' All Things Must Pass. Traces the whole arc of Tower Records. Really good on a whole lot of levels.
Andrew Lamb: "I was lucky enough to see First Aid Kit on the last night of their UK tour three years ago. They were superb. As it was their last night, they were wearing some really colourful and weird outfits. I think it was one of the sisters' birthdays that evening. Anyway, the other thing that impressed me was that they had a slideshow featuring photographs and video of them growing up. They were terrific photographs, really lovely, and a timely reminder that we should all be taking lots of photographs of our nearest and dearest."
Derek: "R.I.P., Trugoy. I hadn't head about his passing, and I'm very sad to learn of it. 'Three Feet High...' is a masterpiece, indeed! Regarding First Aid Kit, on the small chance you haven't heard their tribute to their inspirations, 'Emmylou' is another wonderful song of theirs."
This looked interesting. It debuted in 2009 although I've never seen it before. It's the modern day digital equivalent of the old gray card, and quite similar to the homemade "exposure boxes" that Zone System photographers used to make. Under consistent lighting, you set it up either hanging from its string loop, standing on a flat surface, or attached to a tripod. Then take an exposure for calibration purposes. Later, in your raw converter, use the brighter of the two 18% gray surfaces to set neutral tint and median exposure; use the white surface on the same side to set clipping; then set the "black trap" (the hole in the lower surface) to 100% black and lighten the black surface until it's distinct from the black trap. Those then become your basic settings for the rest of your exposures taken under that lighting.
Not sure how many peoples' work demands such exactitude and control, but it's a nice implementation of an old idea with a connection to classical methods of exposure and development. And it suits the slick and capable techniques of the moment better than an old-fashioned gray card. Although, the more things change the more they stay the same, et cetera.
Datacolor calls it a Spyder Cube and it retails for $54. Pretty cool, although I don't think I need one....
Mike
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Photo by N.A. and R.A. Moore (Nelson Augustus Moore and his brother Roswell) of Hartford, Connecticut, 1864
I never knew this until robert e pointed it out yesterday: there exist photographs of Revolutionary War veterans. Some of the youngest soldiers lived into the era of photography. Evidently no one thought to photograph them in the 1840s, but the Reverend E.B. Hilliard wrote a book in 1864 called The Last Men of the Revolution that recounted the biographies of some of the last remaining veterans, and the book contained six albumen prints. The Library of Congress has a set, in the Prints and Photographs Division.
Lemuel Cook, pictured above, lived through the entirety of the Civil War and died just after it ended at the age of 106, the fourth-to-last living Revolutionary War veteran. He fought with the 2nd Continental Light Dragoons in the Virginia campaigns and at Brandywine, and was wounded more than once. He was present at the 1781 surrender of Lord Cornwallis to George Washington at Yorktown. His discharge papers in 1786 were signed by General Washington. Cook lived out most of the rest of his life in various counties here in Western New York State.
Mike
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Featured Comments from:
Mani Sitaraman: "This is simply extraordinary. Seeing the photograph and reading the account gave me the chills. Thank you, Mike.
"And thank goodness for the French photographer Disderi's brilliant idea; he patented the idea of carte de viste photographs in the 1850s, which were trading-card-like photographs of famous people, for people to buy, collect in albums, or trade. That innovation ensured that so many portraits from that early age of photography have survived, as the commercial incentive ensured that numerous copies of each portrait were printed."
Carl Siracusa: "The closing exhibit of the Museum of the American Revolution here in Philadelphia, 'The Revolution's Veterans,' is a whole wall of photos of people who fought in, or simply lived through, that war. When I first saw it I had the same amazed reaction as most people, I assume—there are photos of them?!? Extraordinary, really. Worth visiting this excellent museum for that alone."
robert e: "Hi Mike, Just wanted to point out that even older photographs have turned up since the Hilliard book was published, including from the 1840s and 1850s. Some of them can be seen in this article. And I just learned today that Maureen Taylor, who calls herself 'The Photo Detective,' has published two volumes of photographs (and paintings based on photographs) of people who lived through the American Revolutionary War. The names of the over 100 subjects are on Taylor's own page about the project."
Michel Hardy-Vallée: "Reminds me of that comment by Roland Barthes about the photographs of the last surviving members of Napoléon's Grande Armée: 'these eyes have seen the Emperor.'"
Daniel: "One fact many don't realize is that until the invention of the permanent photographic image we do not know what anyone actually looked like. Many portrait painters through history did a good job but had to please the one who commissioned the painting. How accurate were these portraits? Maybe as accurate as many Photoshopped portraits being done now? Vanity interferes with historical truth."
Mike replies: Some of the Gnostic gospels refer to Jesus as being physically ugly, which might have been one of the reasons why those accounts were nixed at the Conference of Nicea and in St. Jerome's Vulgate.
A couple of short video links this morning, both good.
First, meet Julian Ward, a photographer from Wellington, New Zealand, born 1948. The short film by Hans Weston, "Julian Ward: Gifts from the Gods," which shows him working both on the street and in the landscape, is informative and companionable. It introduced me to the work of the painter L.S. Lowry, too. Julian's pictures were mostly new to me; so far I've only recognized three that I've seen before. There's lots by and about him on the web, and he's published several books.
Second, a film about a comprehensive analysis to determine whether a notorious photo is real: "Why people think this photo of JFK's killer is fake," from Vox. The main expert consulted by the filmmakers is Hany Farid, one of the country's foremost experts specializing in the forensic analysis of digital images and the detection of manipulated images. He's at Berkeley now; the last time I wrote about him he was at Dartmouth. "The visual system didn't evolve over millions and millions of years to reason about about a flat piece of paper," Professor Farid says at one point. I won't give away the conclusion.
I also attempted to watch the 2020 Dutch film "The Forgotten Battle," alleged to be the second most expensive Dutch film ever made (I don't know what number one might be), because one of the plot points is a boy taking pictures that will be useful to the resistance, developing them in his basement. The film is so relentlessly brutal and gory that I couldn't take it, and had to bail on it halfway through. So, no further comment.
Mike (Thanks to Allan Ostling)
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Featured Comments from:
Nico.: "World War Two, The Netherlands, Photography…
Tom Burke: "'Zwartboek'—Black Book—is apparently the most expensive Dutch film ever made."
Pierre Charbonneau: "The film on Julian Ward is most lovely. I found interesting that a man so charming and gentle has the boldness to photograph so close strangers on the street. How different from Bruce Gilden's approach. Of course, their respective photos are not the same."
Jim Simmons: "Thanks for sharing the Julian Ward movie. Julian is a treasure to New Zealand, with his decades-long dedication to recording our culture with his uniquely kind and curious vision."
Yesterday was the day of America's other Christmas, the Super Bowl. The Kansas City Chiefs won, but they had to have help from the refs. The game was high scoring and tied right near the end—both things we normally want to see in a Super Bowl—but then the game got ruined. With less than two minutes to go the Chiefs were given an unearned extra set of downs. So we'll never actually get to know what would have happened. Could have gone one way; could have gone the other. Lost to history now.
No dog in the fight. No connection to either team.
Herodotus, in Book I of his Histories, tells us that the great Athenian statesman Solon, one of the seven great wise men of ancient Greece, wouldn't call anyone happy until their life had ended; for only then could it be certain that no further catastrophe lay waiting. "O Solon! O Solon! O Solon!" cried poor doomed King Croesus on the pyre, "Count no man happy until his end is known!"
Great game, till it was ruined. Now it has a big fat asterisk next to it forever. Too bad.
Mike
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Featured Comments from:
Richard Barbour: "Sorry, I don't know where it's written that the refs don't call deserved penalties near the end of a game. Or even why anyone would question it."
Mike replies: Sorry, no sale. 1.) The refs hadn't been calling penalties for minor holding all game long. 2.) Neither the grab nor the hand on the back impeded the progress of the receiver or changed his course in any way. 3.) The ball was un-catchable, thrown way over the receiver's head. 4.) The ref didn't call the momentary jersey grab when it happened, but waited till he saw the play didn't work, which meant the Chiefs would have faced fourth down and a field goal leaving time on the clock. I can't speak to motive, so I won't, but it was a bad call.
The Chiefs got robbed as much as the Eagles. They were deprived of the opportunity to win the game on merit.
Albert Smith (partial comment): "I know that I'm in the extreme minority, but I have less than zero interest in any of these sports events, Super Bowl, World Series, World Cup, etc. ... When I was a kid there were many movies made in the '50s about WWII, and one recurring thing was when soldiers were trying to determine the authenticity of other soldiers encountered, they'd ask something like, 'Who won the 1939 World Series?' The German soldiers in American uniforms would be tripped up and exposed. The number of times that this trope appeared in movies made me think that I could never be in the military. I couldn't tell you who won any sporting event last week."
Jeff (partial comment): "Also no dog in the fight here. ... The Eagles could have won instead had they not: 1.) given up the longest punt return in Super Bowl history (and at a crucial time)…their special teams were horrible all year; 2.) committed the only significant turnover of the game, a fumble by the QB, resulting in an opposing TD; and 3.) failed miserably on defense in the always crucial second half, permitting the Chiefs to complete every pass attempt (except a deliberate throw-away), and allowing six yards per carry on rushing attempts, with every drive resulting in a Chiefs’ score."
—>Strawberries aren't berries, but watermelons are.
—>John Knox, an associate professor of geography at the University of Georgia, led a study in 2011 to see how far photographs can travel aloft in tornadoes. "They’re like little wings when they go up into the air," he said. The study found a photograph that was returned to its owner after being found 219 miles away from where it started out.
—>John Lennon (or "John Lennon"?) earned $14 million last year. Yet he's now been dead for longer than he was alive. In the arts, you don't need to be yourself anymore to do well.
—>Tyre Nichols, who was in the news following his murder—sorry, death—at the hands of Memphis police, was one of us: a photography enthusiast.
Photo by the late Tyre Nichols, R.I.P.
His website opens with a quotation by Joel Strasser: "A good photographer must love life more than photography itself." Tyre, we hardly knew ye.
—>Sign on all the televisions at my new gym:
"NO NEWS"
—>In 1830s America there was a brief fad among young people of initializing incorrectly spelled phrases. There were many of them, but the one that stuck around was short for "oll korrect," meaning all correct. OK, which today is believed to be the single most recognized English-language word the world over, is thus correctly spelled with two capital letters, because it's an acronym. But "okay" is OK too.
—>The world's largest camera collection is thought to be that of an Indian photojournalist from Mumbai named Dilish Parekh. He has at least 4,425 cameras.
—>Beethoven never saw the ocean.
—>"Signs of the apocalypse" were popularly considered to be omens and warnings that the world had turned topsy-turvy: birds flying backward, purple sky, and so forth. In case you haven't kept up with such things: the Most Valuable Player in the NBA for two years in a row has been a big awkward-looking white guy from Serbia. And arguably his biggest competition for the award this year is a white guy from Slovenia. Hmm.
—>For the first few decades after 1839, photographs remained relatively rare. Now, so many photographs are taken every day, week, month, and year that the numbers can't even be meaningfully estimated.
—>While you might think every photograph is on the web, this one isn't:
At least, not till now*.
—>Windsor Castle isn't named after the House of Windsor; it's the other way around. The British Royal family descends from the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. George V changed it to Windsor during WWI to distance his family from the understandably unpopular Germans, and to make the family sound more English. King Charles III's father, Prince Philip, is largely of German heritage, and spoke German fluently. (Whether King George I, who was German, spoke English in addition to his native German is still disputed.) By blood, Charles III might be more German than English**. Incidentally, Prince Albert of haus Sachsen-Coburg und Gotha, the German Prince who married Queen Victoria, introduced a German custom to England that the British took to heart: the Christmas tree.
—>Of the 25 most expensive photographs ever sold, seven are by Richard Prince, who makes straight (though usually enlarged) copies of photographs by other people.
—>The camera that is probably the most valuable in the world has never been sold. It's the first Ur-Leica, Oskar Barnack's camera of 1913 that was the earliest prototype of what was eventually, in 1925, dubbed the "Leica." It's on display at the Ernst Leitz Museum in Wetzlar, Germany. It made a negative 24x36mm in size and had a 40mm lens. It's been said that it might sell for 400 million euros, but no one knows.
—>Wasabi isn't, mostly. It's horseradish; real wasabi is too expensive for sushi restaurants outside of Japan to use. Real wasabi is so rare in America that the signature distinguishing characteristic of a sushi restaurant in Wisconsin, called Wasabi, is that they actually use wasabi.
Mike
*A lot of the photographs I publish have never been on the web, but this one pulled up nothing on TinEye and Google Image Search, which hardly ever happens to me.
**I'm sure our British friends will correct this entry if need be!
P.S. Got any more? I concocted this post after I ran into that fact about Beethoven, which really struck me for some reason.
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Featured Comments from:
Antonis R: "True, packaged wasabi is mostly horseradish. Wasabi is mentioned as the ninth ingredient in an S&B box—probably to justify the name of the product. Also true, an approximately 10"+ wasabi rhizome can cost $25–40 in a Japanese market in the US (if available at all). But another reason for substituting horseradish in the less expensive establishments is the work it takes to grind it to order. The spiciness and aroma of the root are only released in the moment the cells are broken when ground against shark skin or similarly shaped metal hand grinders. It only lasts moments. Even fancy restaurants can't prepare it ahead of dinner service. In Japan some restaurants serving soba (buckwheat noodles) include the root and the grinder with your order at the table and let you do the work. Unfortunately, there is no substitute for the real thing!"
Dan: "Unless someone has a better example, the world's largest camera collection was owned by a man (whom I should not name) in Ina city, Nagano Prefecture, Japan. When I visited his home in 2016 he had over 8,000 cameras. Most had been sent to him in inoperative condition over a period of 45+ years. He is a well known professor of entomology and many items were sent by his students and their families. In addition to his career in entomology, he was an avid photographer and gadget tinkerer. He was able to repair nearly all the cameras he was sent. When I toured his home it was cameras from ceiling to floor. You had to wind your way through halls made of hanging cameras and accessories. Additionally, his garage was stuffed with items that didn’t fit in the house. I visited him this summer only to find that nearly all the cameras had been sold off...to pay for an electron microscope! He’s in his late 80s, but he spent hours showing me images of some kind of mite he has studied for years. 'I’m the only person I know of with an electron microscope in my home.' I could only nod and agree."
Sergio: "Weird facts are always fun, the more arcane the better. But the one about Beethoven really impressed me. I revisited in one split second all of his music I've actually listened to trying to re-digest it in the light that he had never seen the sea. That in itself is a pretty weird fact."
Albert Smith: "'Strange but true, carpet is neither a car or a pet, but is actually some kind of floor covering.' —David Letterman"
John Wilson: "The 'pineapple,' one of my favourite fruits, is in no way related to a pine or an apple. It's actually a type of bromeliad that produces a cluster of 200+ berries fused together in a double helix that follows a Fibonacci Series."
John Krumm: "Boy did I tear up when I clicked on the link to Tyre Nichols' website, and then read his 'About' section."
Dave Richardson: "The Corvette being pulled from the water was pretty easy to find in posts earlier than yours."
Mike replies: Very curious. My own Google Image Search yielded zero results, ditto for TinEye. I still can't find the story anywhere.
Mani Sitaraman: "Dilish Parekh passed away ten days ago, on February 2nd, alas. R.I.P. He inherited a collection of about 600 cameras from his father, and then collected more on his own. He was a freelance photographer. I hope the following isn't an indecent speculation. Being somewhat acquainted with the photography business in India, I wonder how he could afford to build such a large collection. For instance, a luxury wedding photography assignment pays about $1,000. Most pay less than half that, for instance. and it's not an easy living over there, in U.S. dollar terms. On the other hand, I assume cameras in people's estates in various corners of India probably aren't that expensive either. He refused all offers for the collection. Here is one of several news stories about him."
We're preparing for severe winds tonight and tomorrow, which usually means power outages in our area, and I no longer have a backup generator. So I could be down for a little while. The winds haven't started yet. If I go quiet, I'll be back when I can.
And for the good news: I just became a grandfather for the first time! I can only describe the feeling as joy. Kate sent out a video of Xander holding his son for the first time, and what a feeling. Wow.
An undated picture of Katharine White. Photographer unknown.
Mess and sludge: It's fantastic to be back to normal. After a couple of weeks of sleeping well again, I'm feeling hugely better. My heart issues, which I guess were pretty serious, or potentially so, have all but gone away. I'm sleeping through the night most nights, and I've bounced back amazingly: normal energy is something you don't know you've lost until you get it back. Over the months (years?) that I was being affected by these issues, I was chronically sleep- and oxygen-deprived, which made me run-down and lethargic, and it was affecting everything in my life. I not only feel much better suddenly, I even look healthier in the mirror. Day by day, I'm back to chipping away at the mess and sludge created by neglect when I was "down." It's going to take me a while to get everything set right again, but I'm on the way and making progress.
Dropping in on a whim: The great open secret of all spiritual programs and systems that is that trying to help someone other than ourselves is actually a sure path to our own happiness. It's always been right there out in the open, but it always has also been, and still is, widely ignored—so strenously ignored it seems like the advice itself must be invisible. As a friend put it once, "I'm really not all that important, but I think about myself all day long." In this time when we're seeing untreated narcissism all around us, when bad actors of every sort are elbowing themselves forward through the crowd to claim undeserved attention and unearned reward, the more moral path is simply to turn our focus away from ourselves and offer it gently to others. Anyway I've been looking for a way to contribute to my local community; and yesterday I signed up to be a literacy volunteer. I don't know what I'm getting myself into. I guess we'll see.
It all happened sidewise: I got an email outlining the stern penalties that would result if I didn't get my car inspected; so I took the car to get inspected; and the inspection station told me my tires would not pass; so I took the car in to have the snow tires put on, because they're newer. Not that we're getting any snow. Anyway, I had an hour and a half to kill, and Literacy Volunteers of Ontario and Yates (local county names) was four or five doors down from the tire shop. I dropped in on a whim, and talked away the whole hour and a half with a guy my age named Phil, who lost three fingers in a lawnmower accident when he was three. He lives in this area with his wife because they find that "people take care of each other here." Before I knew it I had volunteered. By such small sideways steps do our lives follow their winding paths.
Serendipity: I meant to go to a local restaurant alone the other day and found I had left my phone at home, which meant I would have nothing to read as I ate. There is a rather mysterious organization across the street that gives away bread, and I think clothes too, and I had a vague idea that they sometimes put used books out on the sidewalk that you can take for free. So I went in, and they indeed had two bookshelves full of books to give away. One was Onward and Upward in the Garden by Katharine S. White. It collects twenty articles Katharine wrote about gardening for The New Yorker. Gardening as a topic is foreign to me—I can't keep a plant alive when I try—but, as I well knew, Katharine Sergeant Angell White was the legendary Fiction Editor of The New Yorker from 1925 to 1960, about whom William Shawn said, "More than any other editor except [founding Editor-in-Chief] Harold Ross himself, Katharine White gave The New Yorker its shape, and set it on its course." She was married to E.B. ("Andy") White, the author of Stuart Little and Charlotte's Web, who is one of my writer-heroes. I figured the book would have an introduction by Andy White. And sure enough.
I can't resist sharing a sample:
Writing, for her, was an agonizing ordeal. Writing is hard work for almost everyone: for Katharine it was particularly hard, because she was by temperament and profession an editor, not a writer. (The exception was when she wrote letters. Her letters—to friends, relatives, contributors—flowed naturally from her in a clear and steady stream, a warm current of affection, concern, and eagerness to get through to the mind of the recipient. Letters were easy. How I envied her!) But when she sat down to compose a magazine piece on gardening, faced with all the strictures and disciplines of formal composition and suffering the uneasiness that goes with critical expression in the public print—this was something else again. Gone was the clear and steady stream. Katharine's act of composition often achieved the turbulence of a shoot-out. The editor in her fought the writer every inch of the way; the struggle was felt all through the house. She would write eight or ten words, then draw her gun and shoot them down. This made for slow and torturous going. It was simple warfare—the editor ready to nip the writer before she committed all the sins and errors the editor clearly foresaw. Occasionally, I ribbed her about the pain she inflicted on herself. "Just go ahead and write," I said. "Edit it afterwards—there's plenty of time." My advice never had an effect on her; she fought herself with vigor and conviction from the first sentence to the last, drawing blood the whole way.
A tiny nugget of gold, of the sort which often pass by when reading E.B. White. The woman in the storefront said of the book, "that one has been here quite a long time." The book was free, so I donated five dollars to their cause.
Readings: As long as we are so far off topic, here are a few more essays I've come across recently. If you like movies, Molly Ringwald wrote a personal history called "Shooting Shakespeare with Jean-Luc Godard" that is vivid and charming. And if you've ever had an intimate but non-romantic relationship with someone of the sex you're attracted to at your workplace, you'll enjoy "The Bizarre Relationship of a 'Work-Wife' and a 'Work-Husband'" by Stephanie H. Murray. The former from The New Yorker, the latter from The Atlantic.
Eating crow: According to Wikipedia, "eating crow" means being humiliated by being proven wrong after having taken a strong position. Evidently crows don't make good eating, something rural Americans of a century and a half ago might have known firsthand but that we don't know any more, in the same way most of us don't know which plants in the local forest are edible. Supposedly the idiom "eating crow" comes from an 1850 short story, but I haven't been able to find the story. On the matter of compression socks—there's the alternative term I didn't know—I could not have been more wrong. I bought some Wellow socks at the suggestion of James Weekes. And they're great. They've already solved or helped with several long-term problems. Swelling, varicose veins, and my persistent problem with cold feet have all gotten markedly better in just this short amount of time. Plus, they're very comfortable. My only problem with compression socks now is that I didn't try them years ago.
Very little could be further from the topic of photography than this, but, still, I'm glad when I bring these subjects up: I always learn things I profit from. I hope you do, too.
Cheers,
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.)
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Terry Letton: "The story about Katherine’s writing reminded me of my own struggles with writing. In my day it seems like English teachers were not interested in teaching us a useful skill like writing but imparting some supposedly god-given rules about alphabet manipulation. Of course thes 'rules' are nothing but social conventions subject to arbitrary change as society changes. I finally learned to write when I realized that writing is simply talking with a pencil. Clarity of thought is what’s important, not obscure parts of speech."
I'm a lunatic, as you know. The moon is one of those things I love looking at that always makes me think I need a picture. Do we all react like that to some things?
The significance of this otherwise ordinary snap, taken on Tuesday evening, is that it was taken with my iPhone, handheld, in the dark, as I was on my way from the barn to the house with my hands full. And you can see a hint of detail on the surface of the moon. (Full disclosure, I did have to adjust the exposure manually.)
For most of photography's history, getting a clear, well-exposed, well-focused (and, in later times, color-correct) picture of all but the easiest subjects was often a challenge. The ability to achieve that goal consistently, especially under trying circumstances, was often enough, all by itself, to mark someone as "a photographer."
When I was a photography teacher in the ever-more-distant 1980s, I used to present a challenge to my more technically preoccupied students. It was a mental exercise (I'm big on thought experiments, as you might also know). "If you had a camera that could magically take a good sharp picture of nearly anything with very little effort, what would you photograph?" At that time, that magical camera was still entirely theoretical—my students had to expose Tri-X B&W film by setting their exposure controls and focus manually, then develop their own film and make 5x7 prints under the enlargers in the school darkroom. It was a long process that involved a lot of work, and one or two of the many mistakes it was possible to make along the way were often made. The pedagogical point of the thought experiment, as you no doubt apprehend on account of you are not chopped livah, was to get them to try to move their focus from the technical arena to the aesthetic one. For at least a few minutes.
We've had those magic cameras for a while now in our "standard mainstream AdAm cameras." But the other, lower end of the cameraverse was always the consumer product—the "Brownie, Instamatic, point-and-shoot, digicam" end of the market. Now, the magic camera that was only a daydream 40 years ago is, I think, fully present not only in enthusiast cameras that cost thousands of dollars for an outfit, but in the camera modules that are provided as a matter of course as a feature on a phone. The moon picture is a good test because I've been trying to take pictures of the moon since boyhood. I have lots of comps from across the last 50 years or so. It's a neat example of virtual science fiction becoming reality in a short period of time. More or less half the lifetime of some of the grayer beards amongst ye.
...But, of course, the real problem is still exactly the same as it ever was. If you have a magic camera that can take a sharp, clear, well-exposed, well-focused, and color-correct picture of most anything, what are you going to photograph? And, at a deeper level, how are you going to express yourself using photography in a way that is individualized or idiosyncratic to you specifically, such that other people can look at it and say "that looks like [X]'s work"? Because one of the real surprises to me of living in the middle of what once was the future is that personal expressiveness and a stylistic identity does not seem one bit easier to achieve than it ever was...and maybe even the opposite is the case now. And so it goes.
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.)
Re "standard mainstream" in regard to enthusiast cameras, here's how Canon Japan classifies its own cameras, translated from Japanese per its domestic market website:
'Professional': EOS-1DX Mark III 'High Amateur': EOS R3, EOS R5, EOS R6 Mark II, EOS R6, EOS R, EOS 5D Mark IV 'Middle Class': EOS R7, EOS R10, EOS RP, EOS 6D Mark II, EOS 90D 'Entry': EOS Kiss M2 (M50 Mark II), EOS M200, EOS Kiss X10i (Rebel T8i), EOS Kiss X10 (Rebel SL3), EOS Kiss X90 (Rebel T7)
Mike (Hat tip 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.)
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Stéphane Bosman: "Isn't that simply too many models? Five entry-level cameras! Twelve models for people who are between consumer and pro! Really?"
The new Panasonic S5II, one of a class of mainstream 24-MP FFM cameras
Consider a question: if there is such a thing at all, what would you say is the "standard, mainstream" camera among AdAms right now?
The concept interests me and might not interest you. "Standard mainstream" is meant in the sense of the characteristic, typical, central type of a product most accepted at any given time. Knowing what these are can illuminate the differences in time periods. Such as, say, the Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme was the best-selling car in America forty years ago in 1983, and the full-sized pickup truck is the standard mainstream personal conveyance in America today. (The top three best-selling vehicles in America in 2022 were all full-sized pickup trucks, according to Car & Driver.)
It's been a while
"AdAms," an old Kodak term that's short for "advanced amateurs," is precise, but not well known. If someone asks you what kind of photographer you are, and you answer, "I'm an AdAm," you won't be communicating anything to most people. You'd have to unfurl the abbreviation. Although I guess I can use it now, since I've just spelled out what it means.
Advanced amateur is the best term for what kind of photographer I am, in my own opinion. I like it better than hobbyist, enthusiast, maven, amateur, shutterbug, photog, lensman, or any of the other labels that might be used for non-professional photography buffs.
The changes are harder to track with cameras, because there are consumer cameras clouding the picture, as well as the fact that reliable public sales figures for specific camera models are hard to come by. But to me it seems like the standard mainstream camera right now is a full-frame, mid-line, 24-MP mirrorless.
If so, then this is a relatively new thing. Ten years ago, in 2013, the standard mainstream AdAm camera was probably an APS-C DSLR—wouldn't you say? Even though full-frame mirrorless cameras were just beginning their run at that time (the Sony A7 and A7r both came out that year). Ten years before that, 2003, was when the APS-C DSLR dominance was just starting; that was the year the Canon EOS Rebel, the first truly affordable DSLR, and the EOS 10D both came out. Remember the Nikon D100 of 2002, just one year before 2003? Like the 10D it had a six-megapixel sensor, which, half a dozen years earlier, had been touted as the holy grail, the point at which digital would come to equal film in quality. The name D100 recalled Nikon's last standard mainstream AdAm film camera, the F100, which was bought in great numbers by AdAms right before they realized they wanted to switch to digital—pristine and little-used F100s went begging for many years on eBay. But despite the intense interest in products like the Digital Rebel and the D100—like nothing at all generates today—I would venture to say that the standard mainstream AdAm camera in 2003 was still a full-featured digicam. Or, at least, we were at the end of the predominance of those camera types. We don't always get sales figures on cameras and camera types, or at least they're not easy to compile, so we don't really know for sure.
In 1993, when the digital transition was still really just a glimmer on the horizon, the standard mainstream camera was no doubt what came to be called a "black blob" (molded polycarbonate) 35mm film camera. We were at the end of the point-and-shoot era then. 1993 also saw the brief flourishing of the "premium point-and-shoot" like the lovely (but not terribly practical) little Nikon 35Ti of that year. That was probably as far into point-and-shoots as most AdAms ventured: most of us shot with SLRs. Ten years before that, in 1983, we were transitioning to polycarbonate from metal SLRs, most of which were featuring more and more electronics by then (1976 was the year of the landmark Canon AE-1, which had a polycarbonate top plate cleverly disguised as metal. Since the metal top plate was the most expensive part to manufacture on consumer 35mm cameras, this gave Canon a crucial pricing advantage, and polycarbonate was on its way. Most buyers were unaware of the change, though, which was kept hidden from view for the time being).
I don't know how far you want me to go back. The year 1973 was at or near the apex of the "MMM" (metal, manual, mechanical), interchangeable lens, bayonet-mount 35mm SLR. (The twin peaks of the MMM type were the Nikon F2 [1971] and Leica M4 [1966] in my humble opinion.) However, the electronics revolution in cameras was just beginning in 1973: you can literally see the shift in one glance by looking at the Nikon F2 Photomic that came out that year. Going back yet another ten and twenty years, 1963 was seeing the ascent of the SLR. The year 1953 saw the introduction of the Leica M3, which was fitting, as the 1950s was the decade of the brief flourishing of rangefinders.
[UPDATE: Note that all this is distinct from the history of the consumer camera, the Brownie / Instamatic / point-and-shoot et al. The smartphone camera is the inheritor of that tradition. Although most enthusiasts shoot with smartphone cameras like everyone else, I actually can't think of a single dedicated photography hobbyist who shoots with only a smartphone camera and doesn't own or use anything else. —Mike the Ed.]
Big shift But back to the standard mainstream camera of today: as you know, the "big shift" happened in 2018, when all the "bigs" followed Sony's 2013 lead—Sony had FFM virtually to itself for five whole years—and decided that full-frame was the safest refuge from the withering onslaught of the smartphone camera. I saw somewhere recently that at least one of the big cameramakers believes that 50% of ILC or "serious" camera sales will soon be FFM.
This is too bad, if you ask me. The 4/3 format is the smartest format for digital photography. It has all the advantages. But it's already being shorted on sensor development, so it won't keep up with its potential. And it's not differentiated far enough from the smartphone cameras for marketing purposes. Shrug.
Of course there's nothing wrong with a 24-MP FFM camera. They're certainly right-sized, and although they miss the magic of their high-res siblings and the "medium" format sensor cameras, their image quality is excellent and everything that most of us will ever want—or want to pay for. Because they are mostly mid-line cameras (the Leica SL2-S is the exception), they're relatively straightforward and not gummed up with insane amounts of complex features. Not that there's anything wrong with you if that's what you like.
There are a few high-end pro models that meet the spec, like the Panasonic S1H, Canon R3, and Sony A9 II. There are also a few with resolutions near 24 MP spec—as close as makes no difference—for example, the budget 26-MP Canon RP ($999), which is also a great entry camera into the Canon R lineup, and a few quirky designs that are mainly made for video like my Sigma ƒp. But for the most part, the genus consists of cameras as mainstream as the Honda Accord used to be in the world of automobiles: the newly announced Panasonic S5 II and S1, Nikon Z5 (Nikon's counterpart to the RP, even though it's a little more expensive) and Z6 II, the Canon R6 II, and the Sony A7 III and A7C, the latter being sole rangefinder-style camera in this group.
If you were starting over again or advising someone who was, and you were going to recommend a FFM 24-MP camera or buy one for yourself, which one would you pick? I'd probably recommend the Nikon Z6 II first, simply because you can get a full Thom Hogan book about it. Although the Panasonic pictured at the top natively takes Leica L-mount lenses like all the new Sigma Contemporary lenses, and that would be a plus for me.
Another question, of course, is: what will the standard, mainstream camera for AdAms look like ten years from now? But that's another post.
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.)
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Jeff: "Wouldn't the mainstream camera these days be an iPhone since that's how 99% or so of photographs are taken?"
Mike replies: That would be the equivalent of the consumer camera...the box Brownie, the Instamatic, the point-and-shoot and so forth. And that's a different thing than what I'm talking about in this post. Throughout photography's 18 decades there's usually been a pretty clear distinction between cameras for the casual user or consumer, the ordinary member of the public, and cameras for those who have a serious interest in it, the kind of people I'm talking about in the post and calling "AdAms." There are times when the two got pretty close to each other—probably most of all in the MMM SLR era, when pro cameras were just nicer versions of cameras for parents and students. But even though we all have smartphones and I use mine fairly often, and even though I know several people who have done serious projects with smartphones, when I think about it I can't come up with a single photographer I know who shoots with only a smartphone. I've added an update to the post to reflect this.
Albert Smith: "I have a cupboard full of Fujifilm cameras because Nikon was late to the mirrorless game. I was tired of carrying my FF DSLR and the petite size of the Fujis attracted me. It was then that the advantage of mirrorless became so apparent. With six bodies and over a dozen lenses, changing systems would be too severe a financial hit. But I always play the 'If I lost everything tomorrow, what would I buy?' game. I would go with a Nikon Z6 variant and a 35mm lens. And yes, I have no desire to ever go beyond 24mp."
Dan Boney: "I resisted the FF calling until the manufacturers made it so obvious that their entire direction was going that way—a Nikon Z50 would have served me fine, but when there's a $400 discount on a Z5 that makes it only $200 more, and for that you get some extra pixels (24 MP vs. 20 MP), lower light advantage, shallower DoF, IBIS, and a larger/higher resolution viewfinder, it's too much of a no-brainer. Didn't help the Z50 in that Nikon has only released three dedicated APS-C lenses, either...."
Ben M.: "This is pretty easy for me, as I just made the switch to full-frame about six months ago and had to go through the whole analysis then.
"For my money the best 24-megapixel FFM out there right now is...the Sony A7 IV. Yes, I know it’s really 33 megapixels, which is more than I (and probably you) actually need. And yes, I know it’s more expensive than some of the competition, and certainly than the A7 III. But to the A7 III, which seems its best competition, the A7 IV adds two critical advances: improved autofocus—it really feels like magic—and, maybe even more important, Sony’s updated menu system. Either is worth the extra cash for a camera you’re going to live with for several years. Both together make it a no-brainer.
"Why Sony, you ask? Simple: the lenses. My extremely scientific sampling just now (a quick B&H search, filtering for 'lens only' for each mount) reveals the following currently-available autofocus lenses for the FFM players: Canon, in the rear, has 36; Nikon is in third with 44; L-mount sits at 53; and Sony takes top honors with 133. That’s right—there are an equal number of AF lenses available for E-mount as there are for all three of the other systems combined. And the lenses range from no-holds-barred, cost-no-object Sony GM glass all the way down to ultra-budget offerings from Samyang/Rokinon.
"For myself, going with Sony meant I could scoop up a second hand set of Tamron’s excellent, compact ƒ/2.8 zooms, running all the way from 17mm to 180mm, all matched and with standardized filter threads, for less than the cost of Canon’s RF 24–70mm ƒ/2.8 L alone. And I’ve added to that a lovely Sigma i-series 35mm ƒ/2 for when I want to keep it simple.
"For an advanced amateur, emphasis on the latter, the choices and price points available in E-mount are just too good to pass up. Well, for me anyway."
Geoff Wittig: "It still kinda boggles the mind how much Canon has missed the boat here, after coming to near domination with its DSLRs. Despite colossal corporate resources and (no doubt) a lot of smart engineers, they continue to stumble badly. And it isn't just their lateness to the mirrorless party! Their first effort, the EOS-R, was an embarrassing kludge, marrying the previous generation sensor to a bizarre very non-Canon-like interface with that useless slider pad. The RP was at least cheap-ish, but still sported a weird interface.
"They have continued to whiff (IMHO) on almost every release since. I have been hoping they'd address landscape and wildlife folks like me...but no. More than four years on, they still make nothing I want to buy. [Ed. note: Geoff is a Canon shooter.] The R5 was hugely disappointing to me, between its video emphasis, its overheating issues, and resolution barely matching the now seven-year-old 5DSR. Okay, it's a pretty good wedding camera, but so are plenty of competitors. It almost feels like Canon are trying to drive their market into the waiting arms of Sony."
John Camp: "My problem with Micro 4/3 is that I think my two GX8's are about shot. They've been rattling around in cameras bags for something like six years now, and nothing better has come along in Micro 4/3. If Panasonic would come out with a GX10 24-MP sensor, that would be it, for me. I'd buy a couple and use them until I'm dead.
"I still shoot them, but now I find myself with a Z6 and Z7II, shooting quite a lot these last couple of months, and they are better cameras than the GX8s. More evolved. Better in dim light, which I like. Also bigger and heavier. The S glass is exceptional. I currently have a 24–120mm zoom on the Z7, and I really think it's better than any Nikon lenses, including primes, that I had on my F3's, F4's, and F5's. I mentioned on Kirk Tuck's blog a few days ago that I was sitting in my living room fooling around with the Z7. I was across the room, maybe fifteen feet away, from a couch. The light was dim, and to my eyes, the couch was sort of an unvariagated gray. I shot a photo and when I looked at it on the camera's back screen, I could not only see the individual weaves in the fabric, I could see individual stitches. And that is good enough for anything.
"Still, I find myself going out with the GX8's. If they were updated with the stuff we now have in FF cameras (mostly better sensors—resolution isn't everything) I'm not sure we'd ever need any improvements. They'd be good enough forever."
This is cool. Dale Irby, a gym teacher in Dallas, accidentally wore the same clothes for his picture in the school yearbook two years in a row. He was embarrassed, but his wife liked it—so he kept wearing the same clothes for 38 years after that.
Watch the section of the video on "Curiosity Box," a feature of a YouTube channel called Vsauce. (It starts at about the seven minute mark and lasts for less than three minutes.) The phenomenon, which he dubs "retrospective aging," goes like this: people keep wearing the styles that were popular when they were young; later generations eventually come to associate those styles with old people; so when we look at old pictures of young people wearing those styles, we think they look older than the age they were. But all they're doing is continuing to wear the styles that were associated with youth when they themselves were young.
It's an effect I remember well from when I was young, because people who were young in the '40s and '50s looked so different from young people in the '70s when I grew up. And a lot of those guys were still wearing those same styles in the '70s, which pegged them as part of their earlier generations. I know one guy here in Upstate New York who still rocks a greaser haircut with a ducktail! That look has pretty much died out now. On the other hand, those guys looked silly when they adopted '70s styles. There were few looks more cringeworthy in the mid-to-late '70s than a 40- or 50-year-old guy with disco chains, super-wide lapels, long sideburns, and coiffed, blow-dried hair. (No offense if that describes mid-to-late '70s you.) 1970s styles were silly, and they didn't survive long.
A photograph of my father. In my opinion his glasses, hairstyle, and expression make him look older, but he was 17 in this picture, in 1946.
The photograph later in the video segment—the hipster from the future—is interesting too. I thought the whole video was interesting, actually, but as to whether you want to watch it you can of course suit yourself, no pun intended.
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.)
—> From The Virginian-Pilot: "Longtime Virginian-Pilot freelance photographer dies after fall from parking garage." No foul play is suspected in the death of freelance photographer of Jason Hirschfeld, 48. His editor at the paper said, "He had a loud laugh and he definitely had a big personality. He just exuded positivity and enthusiasm."
—> From The New York Times: "The Risks That Define New York Times Magazine Photography: In her own words, Kathy Ryan, the director of photography for The New York Times Magazine, unpacks some of the biggest challenges of the last year."
—> From PetaPixel: "Nikon is Doing Everything Right." Jaron Schneider didn't think Nikon would recover from its financial woes. Now, he argues it has come back from the brink the old-fashioned way: with superior products.
—> From Visual Science Lab: Kirk Tuck is "Reporting in from the Central Texas Ice Storm. Nasty out there." It doesn't stop him from exercising, even though it closes the pool. At the end he gets down to the real peril: "Sadly, when the weather gets really bad my resistance to shopping for photo gear goes down. I've found several items online that are battering my will to resist." You can go find out what those are; I need to not look.
—> From DPReview: Richard Butler thinks Sony's new A7R V excels at still photography in his in-depth review.
—> From lensculture: In The Editorial Portrait, Lucy Conticello, Director of Photography at M, the weekend magazine of the French newspaper Le Monde, is interviewed by Sophie Wright and shares some of her insights. This republication of a 2019 article is part of a recent slew of articles on lensculture about photographic portraiture.
—> From LensRentals: "How Front Element Scratches Affect Your Images." Spoiler: they don't, much. But these guys are among the few who can show you. If you want to test the general principle yourself, without scratching your lens, tear off a bit of a Post-It about the size of a small pea and stick it to the front of your lens. Compare the result to a frame shot without it. Interesting, no?
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:
Speed: "From PetaPixel: 'Nikon is Doing Everything Right.' But...Nikon's biggest competitors in the camera business, Canon and Sony, are very much in the amateur/commercial/professional video business...and Nikon is not. Big moves in our lifetime: Film to Digital to DSLR; DSLR to Mirrorless; Still to Video. It looks like Nikon won't be making that last move."
Tam: "There is nothing wrong with what one of my blogfathers referred to as an 'All Linky, No Thinky' piece. All blogs are, at heart, a LOG of things we’ve found on the WEB…A WEB LOG, if you will. ;-) "
Andrew Bearman: "Love these curated links; thanks!"
Mike Ferron: "The little city I live in borders Austin, Texas, to the northeast. It looks like a powerful hurricane came through with amount of tree limbs that came down. The last night of the storm was the worst. You could hear one crash after another all night long as the big limbs fell. Crazy. The local weather said it was the worst ice storm in 60 years. Two and a half days of rain with the temps just below freezing."
I'm sorry for the lack of focus around here lately—I'm doing the best I can. I've got a lot of stuff on my plate. It's a little overwhelming actually. Ever feel like you're behind on everything? That's how I feel. I've got a to-do list that's longer than my arm.
I'll just observe that making several lifestyle changes all at once is not the best way. I know people don't like specific (individualized) advice, but just a small tidbit of generalized advice: if you know you need to make changes in your life, get to it. Just begin. Don't wait till you have to do everything at once.
I'm suddenly on blood thinners, and using a CPAP at night, and trying to get back on my old diet after a year and a half and stop eating sugar, and starting exercising at the gym I just joined. And it's a lot all at once.
And the thing I'm most ashamed of? There's one more. I almost don't even want to mention it. I'm supposed to start wearing "support hose."
It's not that big a deal. They're just tight knee socks. I don't know why I'm so put off by a pair of socks, but I am. Evidently all the sludge in your body kind of moves down with gravity and collects in your feet and legs, and you're trying to give your heart a little boost in getting it going back upwards again. I find the term itself cringeworthy. Hose? Yeah, I know, hosiery. But gentlemen wore "hose" when they also wore knickers (or were they breeches?), and it's been a while since showing a little calf was sexy. The equivalent was showing a little ankle if you were a female. "Support hose" is the single most ancient-old-person-ish thing I can think of. White hair; false teeth; walkers; hearing aids, yeah yeah, but hey, white hair on a person can look good, and if you can't walk or hear, fine, you buck up and do what you have to and soldier on. None of those things seems quite as pathetic as "support hose."
OK, adult diapers maybe. I don't need those. Yet.
Maybe there should be a contest to think up a better name than "support hose." Maybe that particular bit of attire just has a bad PR agent. They ought to be called "vitality socks" or "heart-health socks" or something. There has to be a better name that would soften the insult a bit. Isn't indignity enough of a problem already?
I'll get over it. The socks are kinda comfortable if I'm honest. Gotta do what you gotta do.
Inspiration to others Speaking of bucking up, I have to tell this story again. When I lived in my second house in Waukesha, I had a next-door neighbor named Walter who was 80 and suffered from Parkinson's disease. I was walk-jogging two miles every day at the time. So one day I was standing at the picture window in my living room, looking at the late fall weather. I was 57 or 58 then. It was a blustery, nasty sort of day, cold and kinda wet, and there were random snowflakes in the air. So I was thinking, maybe I shouldn't go out walking today—the weather's too bad.
As if on cue, who hoves into sight but Walter. He's dressed in a "warmup suit" that looks like he bought it in the 1970s: zip-up jacket with a big collar and white stripes down the legs. And he's out for his walk—using his walker! He's hunched over the walker and laboriously following it up the street. Needless to say, I sucked it up and did my two miles. If an 80-year-old who has Parkinson's and needs a walker can get out in the weather, it was pretty obvious there was nothing stopping me. From then on, every time I was tempted to dish up an excuse for myself, the mental image of 80-year-old Walter and his warmup suit and walker popped into my head. Before I moved away I thanked him for being an inspiration, too. I still think of his example from time to time.
My idea with the gym is to go over at 2:00 every afternoon. That's going to take more than just motivation—it's going to require a little planning. Yesterday I had to go to the cardiologist at 2:00 (neither of us knew what the appointment was for—I guess they just want to guard against surprises). Today I have a haircut at 2:00. My barber is kinda hard to schedule, too—she works out of her house and she has a life. I guess I'll head over to the gym after I get my few remaining hairs cut.
By the way, the cardiologist gave the green light to exercise, as long as I take it very easy at first. I did ask.
But I wasn't looking for an excuse to get out of it.
I don't think.
Mike
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Featured Comments from:
ASW: "Hey Mike. In the running world, 'compression' socks and sleeves are quite popular. There are companies (e.g., Compressport, 2XU) that sell full lines of compression gear. So, just consider yourself one step down the path to better fitness."
Pritam Singh: "Try 'sarvangasana,' among other asanas, from Iyengar yoga to keep away from support hose. I guarantee it's more dignified."
Dan D: "Are you talking medical grade compression socks? If just mild compression socks there are many choices that look and feel great. I was in the sock business for many years and started wearing mild compression socks on flights to the west coast (four hour flights from Chicago). My feet felt great when we landed. Many runners wear compression socks too. Sockwell merino wool were my favorite."
Mitch W: "Compression socks. Triathletes use them. I cycle a lot, and after suffering a heretofore unexplained/unprovoked blood clot, I noticed my IronMan friends all wore them. Plenty of configurations in terms of size, strength of compression, wild colors. I detest this phrase but they have been a 'game changer' for typical photo days in the field consisting of one to 14 hours on assignment, too. Far better performance than those, uh, likely-drugstore 'hose.'"
John Camp: "The wife of a friend of mine flew to Italy and back a month ago. She was told to wear compression socks (also called support hose, but 'compression socks' sounds more medical and less elderly.) She didn't. She got back with some leg pain, discovered she has a blood clot in her leg, and is now doing semi-weekly doctor visits to deal with it."
V.I. Voltz: "Due to crummy veins and an injury that made things worse, I’ve worn compression socks since I was about 30 (I am now 48). I wear Supcare Extreme with Drirelease socks every day. My nine-year-old son calls them ‘sport socks.’ About every month we talk about why I need them, and what he needs to look out for to keep his circulation healthy. It’s not that big a deal."
Mike replies: Dr. Greger recommends arugula and citrus fruit for vascular health. Beets and watermelon are also good. I've stumbled on a heady elixir: one large seedless orange, peeled; half a small seedless watermelon; and a racquetball-sized cooked and peeled beet, all tossed in the blender. I keep the ingredients in the fridge so it'll be cold when prepared. Delicious—the flavors balance, and none "win"—and brightly colorful too. I put some chopped arugula into my daily salad, and sprinkle a handful on my nightly bowl of soup after the soup is hot; the arugula wilts and gives soups a slight but pleasant peppery accent.
Joeb: "Compression sox. Nothing wrong with them. Real athletes wear them, people who hike, run, work out. Even people with heart/circulation issues wear them. They come in all colors, patterns, and compression strength. They are not the white, hospital style that 'old' people wear. Not any more. Soldier on!"
Kristine Hinrichs: "There is another name for support hose—compression socks. They are very popular with long distance runners, particularly ultramarathoners. If you have a running or outdoors store nearby they would have them—or try REI online. They come in lots of colors, including your basic black socks. They are also a lot more durable and comfortable. I wore them back when I ran marathons and ultras and all my friends did, too."
