The Online Photographer

Final Thoughts on Process vs. Project

I wanted to give my take on Process vs. Project before we move on.

Preamble
However, my opinion here is based on observation; I'm speaking with my "thinking of others" hat on rather than merely speaking for myself. I started teaching photography in 1984 as a fourth-year student intern, and the only time I've been away from the field was a short stint as Senior Editor of Model Railroader magazine. Even there I helped judge the magazine's annual photo contest and interacted with the publishing company's photography staff. I don't know a lot of famous photographers and I've never worked directly in the camera industry or for an advertising agency, but I've engaged directly and indirectly with students, hobbyists, and photography enthusiasts for almost all of my working life.

Projects help
First of all, I agree with Darlene Almeda, who noted that photographing randomly and in a desultory way is setting herself up for failure. She's right that being aimless and unfocused, no puns intended, generally leads to dissatisfaction, or, perhaps, less satisfaction than might otherwise be available.

My observation has been that photography is more rewarding when you have some sort of defined project you're pursuing. For one thing, it divides the time that you're concentrating completely on photography from non-photographing time, and that helps. For another, it helps greatly in minimizing distraction—does it fit the project or not? If it doesn't, leave it till later.

This might appear to be a contradiction, but I don't think it is: when you find yourself engaged in a project that's either not working or not getting your juices flowing, it's okay to shut it down and think up something else to do. Is it a contradiction to a.) decide to finish every book you start, yet b.) bail on a book a third of the way through when it's just not holding your interest? I don't think it is, actually. You mean to finish every book; your intention is to finish. And mostly you do. But in select cases where you realize you're wasting your time, you don't hesitate to cut your losses. You're decisive in both cases. Same with photography projects.

I also don't think it's a contradiction to design projects that are highly process-oriented. Examples might be two projects that everybody knows about, or should: Scott Shuman's Sartorialist blog (there are also several books), for which he shoots "found fashion" (you might say), giving up all control of clothes, makeup and hairstyle—things most fashion photographers control tightly—to the individuals he finds on the street, who have, obviously, dressed themselves. The second is Brandon Stanton's Humans of New York project. It's a portrait project, but it's not primarily visual; he's finding people whose stories he can briefly tell, almost as if he is introducing his readers to a cross-section of the population. Another example of a process-oriented project might be those who trawl Google Street View for happenstance compositions that strike them as mimicking deliberative art.

Mechanical Goals
Finally, I think projects can be defined in such a way that they primarily help you to work. I think of these as "mechanical goals." For instance, my rule for this Spring is going to be to leave the house with the camera and stop to take the first picture within the first twelve minutes. This is intended to help me get over the tendency I have to drive around forever without taking a picture because I don't see something that is "worth stopping for." I find that when I just get started, I do better. (My rule with my heart-health exercising is that I have to go to the Community Center, change into my gym shoes [trainers, in Brit-speak], and sit or stand on one of the cardio machines. That's all. If I do that, I have done the minimum needed to help establish the habit, even if I'm in such a rush that I have to then leave right away, something that hasn't actually happened yet.) A good example of a mechanical goal is to ask strangers on the street for permission to make a portrait of them until you rack up X number of refusals. This helps you approach people; and it makes a refusal into a success as opposed to a failure. I think you see the point.

Energy
Please hear me here: you own your own photography. It's always been my position that anyone can do anything they want to as long as they're not hurting someone else. I'm not telling you what to do, and you're are under no obligation to agree with my ideas about this. This is just what I think after years of watching people engaging in photographing, that's all. So don't feel you're being attacked or have reason to defend yourself. You aren't, and don't. My words are suggestions only. Take what you need and leave the rest.

Having said that, I'll add one last thing: if you dislike projects, the reason might be that you're not thinking of the concept flexibly enough. Maybe you just haven't found the right one from the options available to you (because not everything is available to everyone). When I taught, I noticed that students, at least—and maybe I could expand that and say "people"—tend to have rigid and literal ideas of what a project must be. There is nothing it must be. The proof is in the pudding: if it liberates you and make you free, and charges your work with energy, and enables further creativity, then it's most likely a well-chosen project. If it limits and frustrates you and feels like toil or drudgery, then go back to the drawing board. That's the last point: look for the energy the project idea gives you. That's the test. If a project has energy, creates energy, and energizes you to work, that's how you know you're on to something. If the opposite happens, you know what that means too.

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:

JH (partial comment): " To offer a clarification on the 'process or project' person, one should understand it's not a value judgement. The world needs both kinds and either way can be personally satisfying. A project person like me can thoroughly enjoy a process. For example, I used to create large custom calendars for friends' presents every holiday season. One year the photos were of cross sections of fruit from our farm, backlit by an old slide viewer. The process of creating those photos was extremely satisfying—trying ways to section fruit and vegetables to get the best visual effects, working with exposure to bring out the best detail, then working with all the images to get a consistent version for the calendar. I loved the calendar but the process of making it was equally satisfying."

Rich Beaubien: "You may remember this fellow. If not, enjoy....

"For two-plus years (December 2004 to June 2007), Travis Ruse, via a blog named Express Train, produced some fine photography work in what you call 'Mechanical Goals' (I call it Practice). I loved his exercise to get a photo in the 90-minute subway trip going back and forth to work each day. I have it bookmarked and go back to browse every once in a while. There's no book, nothing, just this archive. Last I heard he was working as a photo editor, or some such appellation, at Inc. magazine. There are many gems."

Nigel Voak: "This a subject very dear to me. When I finished working for our local theatre, my photography became aimless and I lost a lot of interest in photography after a while. When I did theatrical photography, I had a brief, and the subject was clear to me. I knew beforehand exactly what I was going to photograph. It shows in the pictures.

"When I returned to photography as a pastime, I found the answer was to set myself a project that would end up in a Blurb book. Obviously I chose subjects I am really interested in, or which solves some photographic problem. A project can have tight or flexible subject boundaries. My projects sometimes change direction mid-project, and sub-projects are spun off.

"Some example of my projects are:

• The Gonzagas: A mostly architectural exploration of a particular area around Mantua, ruled by the Gonzaga. I wanted to convey the sleepy atmosphere of this area.
• Crostolo: I tried to force myself to find interesting angles and pictures along a squalid little urban river that runs through my town. This was all about seeing.
• Romanesque: This sprawling never-ending project is an exploration and documentation of Romanesque architecture in Northern Italy. This is all about the use of shift lenses and my fascination with the architecture and art of this period.

Photo by Nigel Voak

"Most of my projects need a lot of planning and research, and as a consequence my photography is more focused. You can see some e-book links on my blog."

 

Timing! The Fuji X-T5 and Other Roads Not Taken

Of course there are many things camera "timing" could refer to. I'm talking here about the way your life syncs up with the availability of certain products—a new camera comes along just when you need that very thing, say.

...Or the opposite, which is more often what happens with me.

I remember deciding to "devote" myself (scare quotes definitely needed there, as I am nothing if not fickle where gear is concerned) to the original (2009) Panasonic 20mm pancake lens; the one I had was sweet. More to the point, I liked it, and Mikie hates everything. But I waited and waited for the E-M1 to come out—we knew a "flagship" Olympus was coming, we just didn't know when—and finally I couldn't wait any longer, and skipped to Sony. Shortly thereafter, the E-M1 arrived. Too late. Oh well.

First love
Many years before that, when I was adding to my Contax kit (my first-ever system camera; I went through art school with a Contax), I really wanted a Zeiss 35mm PC shift lens. (Some very professional-looking tabletop pictures here.) I saved up for it, and when I finally decided to buy the thing, the supply suddenly dried up. I looked into it—I was writing for photography magazines by that time—and learned that Yashica ordered batches of lenses from Zeiss, which then made runs of them to order as it suited their schedule. And their whim, apparently. Yashica eventually got so weary of Zeiss being sluggish filling its orders that it started to build the lenses in Japan, reassuring customers that this was done under German "supervision." As if the Germans had to teach the Japanese about quality control! Not. Fanboys of course were very snobby and strident about their preference for "real" German lenses, scorning the "Made in Japan"-labeled ones, but the truth was the opposite—the Japanese facility and all the equipment in it were all-new, so the Japanese-built versions were actually a little better and more consistent than the German-built ones. (This was told to me by a C/Y tech-rep after he had moved to a different company.)

But I digress. Anyway, I was assured that pretty soon the Japanese would order another run of the 35mm PC Shift lens from Zeiss and it would be available again. I waited and waited and waited and waited and waited. Finally I joined a professional studio where all the other photographers used Nikons, and if I wanted to be able to share my equipment and borrow theirs, I had to shoot Nikon too, so I said goodbye to my beloved Contax. Honestly, to this day, I have never had quite the same feeling for any other camera marque that I had for Contax. I recall it as fondly as I recall lost youth.

That was right about the time that the new batch of 35mm PC Distagons hit the small-print ads in the back of Modern Photography, which I'm sure all of you of a certain age will remember. Of course the new ones took a huge jump upward in price—the pricing for the old run having been worked out many years earlier. That allowed me to adopt the frustrated fox's sour-grapes attitude.

And did I ever buy the Nikkor 35mm shift lens? I did not. It's not that I ever stopped wanting one, just that there was always something ahead of it on the want-list.

The unrequited Fuji
I could give more examples, but you get the point, and I'm sure many of you have experienced the same thing or something similar. It's that sometimes the stars don't align, and a different fork in the road is taken.

Well, that's what has happened to me with Fuji. I was turned off by the specs of the then-new X-T4, for purely arbitrary reasons. I just don't care for flippy screens. There's nothing wrong with them; some people prefer them, and some people are agnostic and can go either way. I just happen to have a preference for the aligned kind of screen, that's all. No biggie, and there's nothing sacrosanct about my opinion. Purely personal taste. At the same time, a kind reader gave me his X-H1 when he switched to Leica, and I didn't bond with it for whatever reason.

You know what I would have wanted, instead of the X-T4? Exactly? A slimmed-down X-T[x], closer to the size of the original X-T1; with a brand new, higher-res sensor; a reversion to Fuji's earlier, and perfect (by my lights) viewing screen design; more "photography focused," to snitch the words of DPReview's Richard Butler; and IBIS, which is another feature I've appreciated since I first experienced it in the now-ancient Konica-Minolta 7D.

Which is exactly what the X-T5 is. It's like Fuji was working straight off my personal wish-list.

Silver is the same price as black, which I think is a first

Of course, by then, I had moved along to the Sony A6600 (mine is for sale now, by the way, nearly new, in the box, separate from or along with the wonderfully contrasty Sigma Contemporary 30mm, if you would like that. Email me). And then to the Sigma fp-M. Just went down a different path is all. I never could have imagined that the X-T4 was not a firm and permanent change of direction, or that the X-T5 would pick up where the X-T3 left off. Well, I could have imagined it, actually, it's just that I never would have thought it would happen for real.

It's really only an accident that you haven't been reading all sorts of happy blithering about an X-T5 in these pages since it came out last November. I still love Fuji; still love the lens line; and still think Fuji in general, and specifically the X-T5, is the number one all-'round recommendation for general-purpose enthusiasts, despite its increasingly niche status. A perfectly balanced package of Goldilocks compromises.

It is probably the only time, ever, that a camera company actually did just exactly what I would have wanted it to. Yet I don't own one, and won't. Strange how things work out, that's all I can say.

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:

Bob Johnston: "I just traded in my X-T3 for the T5. I had to sell some lenses too but boy am I happy with the camera. Fuji seem to have fixed all the annoying little quitks. For example, if you enabled the self timer and switched the camera off, you had to enable it again when you switched back on. That's fixed. The bigger battery is a huge plus point. I could go on."

Miguel Tejada-Flores: "Uhhh...Mike, you left out one of the key reasons why I caved, sold my X-T3, and sprang for an X-T5: the brilliant Fuji colour engineers who came up with the new internal JPEG film simulation, which bears the heavy-handed name 'Nostalgic Negative.' That sim, plus the Classic Neg sim introduced in the previous generation of X-Trans sensors, is probably worth the price of admission. Fuji marketing claims that it was inspired by something they are calling The American New Color look of the 1970s, inspired by the work of luminaries like Stephen Shore among others.

"And...guess what? In this case, it's not mere marketing hype but a rather marvelous piece of color engineering by the (mostly nameless) color-obsessed Fuji geniuses who spend years toiling away and come up with (for my money) masterpieces like the aforementioned new JPEG film sims. IBIS is nice too, but compared to the other seismic improvements, I think it's merely icing on the metaphorical photographic cake. Based on my (limited) understanding of—and appreciation of—your photographic tastes and personal work—I think you would love it. Or should I say, you will love it. (Minor note: for those shooting strictly JPEGs, the file size is much smaller than 40 MP, actually much closer to the smaller files of the X-T3 and the X-Pro3.)"

Ben: "When I graduated college in 2000 I was thinking about a Contax SLR system. But I found a nice Leica M3 and a couple of lenses. Got hooked on rangefinders, and even though I've wandered into Nikon and Micro 4/3, I keep coming back to Leica, and despite the exorbitant cost I love every minute of it… "

Ricardo: "Hi Mike. The X-T5 is indeed fantastic. Had one for about three weeks but passed on for an X-E4. I simply must have a smaller. But it’s indeed great. "

Curt Gerston: "I had the X-T3 and, like you didn’t like the direction the X-T4 went (too big, blah to the flippy screen…) so I was happy enough to shoot the X-T3 until it died. Unlike you, though, when the X-T5 came out I was beholden to no other new camera and was able to go get one. It’s perfection. I love it. I don’t shoot video, I don’t need what the X-H2 offers…it’s great. Bravo Fuji."

Richard Tugwell: "I was an early XT-1 user, and upgraded to an XT-3 when the XT-4 came out and seemed unnecessarily bulky. I was quite happy with the XT-1 but wanted to match sensor sizes with my X-Pro2. That was a couple of years ago now and I can't honestly say I'm interested in anything new. I'm more interested these days in spending time with my photo archive. (Most of which emanated from gear whose specs people would laugh about these days.)"

Sroyon: "Re 'It's like Fuji was working straight off my personal wish-list,' as you put it, was the feeling I got about the Fuji X-E4 when it was released in early 2021. And yet I resisted the temptation, because I have a serviceable Nikon D5200 (ten years old, but still works). Then in September 2022, some Japanese stores marked the X-E4 as discontinued. It was also out of stock in all the physical and online stores here in Singapore. I had a sinking feeling that I had left it too late. Luckily, I was able to purchase one of the few remaining bodies from an online store in Hong Kong—and at the normal price. I'm so glad I did, because the camera is even better (for me) than what I had imagined. And this week, FujiRumors reported that it's also marked discontinued at B&H Photo and various other stores. As someone who is resistant (perhaps irrationally so) to buying gear, the lesson for me is that perfect cameras—perfect for me, that is—materialize very rarely. When they do, budget permitting, it's best not to dilly-dally."

Gary Nylander: "Mike, I hope you find the camera or lens that you want. I kinda stumbled upon one of my favorite lenses that I like to use, the Nikkor 35mm PC. A few years ago I was not aware of either of these 35mm PC shift lenses. Coincidentally, the article you linked on Casual Photophile by Yuan Oliver Jin was the very article that inspired me to buy the Nikkor 35mm PC about three years ago after reading about it. Then I bought a second lens from a famous photography blogger so I could have a backup. I didn't buy the lens for its architectural characteristics but so I could compose differently in my mind and then take two separate (or sometimes 3) pictures and stitch them together to create unique compositions. I really enjoy using the lens, it's very clever in design. I only wish that there was a 50mm and an 85mm lens like this."

mynameiseli: "The reason I never had a Canon T70 and FD lenses is because by the time I had saved up the dough (private in the Army at the time), the Base Post Exchange had dropped them. For the new-fangled EOS 650. With the EF 50mm and EF 35–70mm. I was not an avid photographer; I didn't have the resources to be. I still have it, and the lenses. So, when Canon introduced the new-fangled R series, and they ran a good sale on the R near Christmas 2019, I bought it. And I went ahead and bit on the R so that I could say that I have the 'first' EOS and the 'first' EOS R. My photographs look so much better now.  :-) "

Open Mike: More On Money (OT)

In Friday's post, "How Is TOP Doing?", I talked, in the Featured Comments, a little about the relative nature of money. Money is a subject I know little about. Still, I was surprised by Dave Millier's comment. It doesn't jibe with what I know of housing prices in the UK; I remember that when I bought my house, my British friends were flabbergasted by how much house I was able to buy in Wisconsin for $260k. One sent me some links to properties available for the same price in her area (Brighton), and the comparisons were risible. Let's just say the equivalent in pounds didn't buy much. So if British people are earning so little, how are they buying houses to live in?

Furthermore, the "standard" I chose for a good salary (my last corporate salary, $55k in 2000), was in no way high-end for the U.S. It was approximately the median family income for the Chicago suburb where I lived (Forest Park, Illinois), and that suburb was not as prosperous as several of the others around it (Oak Park, River Forest).

I do recall that I was proud when I first earned $60k for a year, because that's what my father earned at his high- but not top-level corporate job when I first learned what he earned. (At the time, he worked for Congoleum Corp. and was charged with returning the Bath Iron Works, a shipyard in Maine, to profitability.) Little problem with that: he was earning that salary in about 1970, as near as I can place it. Adjusted for inflation, that was about $240,000 when I earned the same nominal dollar amount. Today it's a whopping $477,500! So I never matched him, not by a long shot. I guess I knew that at the time.

My father dropped out of Harvard Business School after his first year because he couldn't pay for the second year. He then joined his two brothers in founding a company. When they sold the company—the closest estimate I can come up with for that would be about 1961, when Dad was 32—his stock was worth more than $1 million. Adjusted, that's about $10 million today. So when he went back to finish Harvard Business School in 1963 he was a minor celebrity among his classmates—someone who had already done what they aspired to do. Yet we were far from the richest family at the prep school I attended. We considered ourselves "upper middle class," and lived well but not ostentatiously.

He did like to travel, and I'm sure we spent a lot of money on trips. I got to travel a whole lot as a kid. By the time I was 20 I had been to Ireland, England, Scotland, Italy, the Bahamas on a cabin cruiser with a crew, a dude ranch in Wyoming, the Florida Keys, Switzerland, Austria, and Monaco—and France, my father's favorite destination, many times. On one of those trips we crossed the Atlantic on a then-new ocean liner, the S.S. France. My brothers have ventured farther afield, to places like Istanbul and Singapore, but I've only been to North America and Europe. That early travel sort of scratched that itch for me—I haven't done much traveling as an adult. I would love to take a guided tour of Europe again before I shuffle off to Buffalo, but I'm not organized enough to plan such an undertaking on my own, even if I could afford it, and I guess it wouldn't be much fun to do by myself.

The S.S. France, the longest and fastest ocean liner ever built when she was launched in 1956, pictured in 1962, the year before my family sailed on her to France when I was six. The prow is now preserved at the Paris Yacht Marina at Port de Grenelle in Paris.

The old ship, much modified, awaiting scrapping at the Alang ship-breaking yard in India in 2007. The prow is ceremoniously cut off to mark the commencement of of the dismantling.

Going back further, my grandfather once told me that in 1950, he was earning $350,000 a year in stock dividends alone. That's nearly $4.5 million today. And they were unabashedly rich, with two large houses and a number of servants, and a beautiful 29-foot sloop my great-grandfather bought from General Lew Wallace, who wrote Ben-Hur. (I sometimes characterize their lifestyle as "Downton Abbey at 1/8th scale.") I have lots of relatives who are in a different social class than I am.

I'm unclear about the difference between "mean" and "median," but, "according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the median weekly income (including overtime, commission and tips) for full-time workers (excluding those who are self-employed) in America was $1,041 as of the second quarter of 2022. If that rate persists for the entire year, that would equal $54,132 a year. The mean American income in 2020, according to Statista, was $71,456" (quote from firstrepublic.com). That's below my benchmark of 2000, of course, but it does indicate that my benchmark isn't crazy high. In any case, I'm not earning as much as my benchmark any more.

However, I'm still good to go to keep TOP hoppin' for "the foreseeable," thanks to all of you. Next up, my final thoughts about "process vs. project." And I'm going to get back on topic for a while! I have my strength and balance class on Monday and Friday mornings now, and didn't have time to write a real post this morning. I set the alarm early, but still don't have time to get my work done and get out of the house by 10.

As ever, more anon.

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:

Lee R: "'Mean' and 'average' are the same.

"Median is as follows: if you line up everything low-to-high, the median is the exact middle. This is especially helpful to know when talking about average/median incomes. Let's say we have 11 households. The first earns $1 per year, the second $2, so on until the 10th person makes $10 per year. The 11th person makes $1 million per year. The median income of that group is the household in the exact middle: the household earning $6. There are 5 earning less, 5 earning more. The mean (average), however, is the sum of all the households ($1,000,055) divided by the number of households (11). The mean income for this group is $90,914 and some change. But if you ask 10 out of 11 of the group, that number isn't representative of their income. These are ridiculous numbers, but they illustrate why mean household income and median household income differ: a small number of extremely high-earning households (say the top 1% of earners) will increase the average disproportionately. My takeaway is when you're looking at incomes it helps to know both averages and medians, but the median is probably more representative of what the 'middle' looks like."

Mike replies: A great explanation. Thanks.

Richard Parkin: "How do people in UK afford houses? They can’t currently. I’m no expert on this but it happens I know the three-bedroom flat I bought new in 1970 cost £6,250 to build (land, profit, everything by a large very company). According to the Bank of England inflation calculator, that would be about £80k today; but I’ve just checked and see a neighbouring identical flat sold for £300k a year ago. This is in a not very fashionable area of south London."

Steve Rosenblum (partial comment): " In the medical field, these sorts of numbers [mean and median —Ed.] have caused a lot of pain. People who have a cancer, or other serious diagnosis are frequently quoted a 'median five year survival' and that's the number they hear and hold on to in terms of how long they will live. However, what it really means is that of 100 people with that diagnosis at that stage, 50 people won't live that long, but 50 people will live longer—sometimes way longer. It's usually a bell-shaped curve and there are people who define the far edges of that curve on both sides. When patients used to tell me that they had read online that they only had two years to live, I would review all this with them and tell them there was no reason to assume that they wouldn't be in the group that defined the better end of the curve and that we would hope for that. I had patients that I thought wouldn't live three months still coming to see me 20 years later, and other patients I thought were doing well drop dead the following week. After that I gave up on the illusion that I could accurately prognosticate. Every person is, after all, an 'n of 1.'"

Steve C (partial comment): "I'm in Australia and also remember being shocked at how cheap housing is (was?) in the 'States. Prices here are particularly inflated because home ownership is as much about wealth generation as it is about housing, maybe more so, which drives money into homes, which in turn drives the price (and around it goes). Obviously, there's a lot more to the economy and to general well-being than property prices, though. In relative terms we pay little for health care and education, fresh food is cheap, cities are accessible, the average worker gets four to five weeks of paid leave a year, and permanent employees have a degree of job security (no-fault dismissal of permanent employees is illegal up to around the $160k wage mark)."

Dan Khong: "You have left us with many questions and one of them would be, 'What happened to the family wealth acquired by your grandfather?'"

Mike replies: You'll have to wait for my memoir to come out, if it ever does.

John Camp: "I can give you one example of median and mean that really startled me—I think I saw it in the Wall Street Journal. The numbers I give are not exact, because I can't find the article, but they're close. The average (mean) American has a net worth of $750,000. The median American has a net worth of $170,000. If you lined up up all Americans from richest to poorest, the middle guy, the median, would be worth ~$170,000 (that's including his or her house.) If you counted all Americans and added up their wealth, then divided by the number of Americans, you'd get the $750,000 number (the average.) That's because the richest Americans have so much money that it wildly skews the average (the mean.)

"The third commonly used statistical descriptor, the mode, would be the most frequent amount that Americans are worth, but that wasn't mentioned in the article. But the discrepancy between the mean and the median sort of skizzes me out."

Mike Plews: "Now into my third year of retirement I can say I have at least one life lesson worth passing on to your younger readers. It is this. Managing money is a lot like sex. Most of us think we are a lot better at it than we really are."

David Dyer-Bennet: "I have fond memories of my two crossings on the S.S. France, 1966 and '67. Even in tourist class it was fancy, butter from a different part of France every meal and things like that. The food was excellent. Huh; there ought to be pictures somewhere. I have pictures from a lot of other places on that year-long trip (my father, a math professor, took a sabbatical year and spent it in Zurich). Glad I didn't rush to explain mean vs. median! That's been quite well covered."

The Jeff Keller Article

I managed to track down Jeff Keller, who told me that the article I remembered is actually on DPReview, where he worked for almost nine years, beginning right after he closed the Digital Camera Resource Page—which, by the way, was the very first camera megasite, and lasted an impressive 15 years. (TOP is 17 years, 3 months, and 26 days old). Which made me slap my forehead and say, "of course." Not only did I read it when it first appeared, but I wrote about it once before, too. The brain cells where that information was once stored are apparently among the ones now missing.

It's called "Throwback Thursday: the ups and downs of running DCResource."

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:

'Where Do You Go for This?'

Guest post by Luke Smith

I was the one at imaging-resource.com who did the stultifying work of making the gajillion look-alike images, which allowed comparison of the capabilities of cameras. We even had a "comparometer." I remember being excited by the amazing output of 12 megapixels. Wow!

DPReview continued this work for a while after I-R effectively shut down. Now, who's left? I seldom got anything useful at all from the forums, but how can we know when there are actual improvements in image quality from the latest cameras?

Mike, TOP readers, where do you go for this?

On the other hand, maybe we can finally get "good enough" results from most cameras, as long as we stick with 24x36mm or bigger sensors, and at least 50 MP.

As an engineer, I hate to think improvements will just stop, even though I can't afford prints bigger than a few feet across.

Luke

Original contents copyright 2023 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

John: "Those tests mattered quite a bit before digital became reliably good enough. Now pixel-peeping is a hobby unto itself."

Jeff: "Where do I go for information? I rent or demo the gear from a dealer and make my own pics ands prints using my own style and workflow. There is little reason to change gear these days based on IQ, especially given my smallish print sizes and superb editing software options. More often, decisions come down to viewing experience, handling, controls and ergonomics, etc., none of which can be determined by comments from others. That simple, since the '70s."

Thomas Tveit Rosenlund: "Those kind of tests are not really important any more. In the same class of camera the differences are marginal at best. You really should have double the pixel count/quality to see any meaningful differences on large prints. It is sometimes fun to look at the difference from a 100-MP sensor compared to your current camera, but it's not too important for the actual purchase decision anymore. DxOmark do have the best database comparing sensor image quality when DPReview shuts down."

Mark Sampson: "So much for that slogan from the early days of the internet, 'information wants to be free.' I never believed that; knowledge always comes at a cost."

How Is TOP Doing? (Blog Note)

Kye Wood asked yesterday, in a comment to the spoof post: "I would like to turn this on its head. In all seriousness, I'm asking how much would it take for you to sell control and ownership of this blog, while remaining on staff? Seriously. Might you indulge me?"

The marker I used for many years to measure myself against was my last corporate salary, which was $55k in the year 2000. I figured out how much that was per day, and celebrated when TOP earned that much for just one day. Eventually I achieved it for a whole week, then across an entire month, then a whole year. Eventually I was making double that. I will say that it's awfully nice to earn enough money, and do it on your own bootstrappery. That's been a good life lesson of TOP, and I'm grateful I had that experience. I do wish I had planned better, though, and saved more when times were good. But you have to live sometime.

However, the blog is worth nothing. Because it's just me. My cousin Liz—who, last I knew, works for Intuit—owned a successful bakery in Lexington, Kentucky, for a number of years, and despite being a thriving business she could not sell it, for one simple reason. She wanted to sell so she didn't have to get up at two o'clock in the morning six days a week to bake the day's product any more—it was ruining her social life, and she was approaching 40 and wanted a family. But without her as the baker, the business wasn't one. Same here.

I started the blog in 2005; in 2009, I was able to leave my last outside job (columnist for the British Black & White Photography magazine) behind, and make my entire living from TOP. My two NewYorker.com articles last summer were the first outside jobs I've taken since 2009, and I'll have to be doing more outside work again in the future.

The unadorned reality is that TOP is in the process of failing, following the same larger trends that forced Olympus to sell its camera division and DPReview to shut down, etc., etc. My audience today is one-third of what it was at its peak. Jeff Keller owned a digicam website years ago called Digital Camera Resource. If my memory is correct, at some point he published a very honest post, which I wish I still had, charting the bell curve of his site's fortunes. He was forthright about the fact that it was on the downward slope, and that the handwriting was therefore on the wall, and that he had to start looking for his next job. I remember thinking at the time, whew, sure glad that isn't me. Well, now it is. The amount I earned from my various affiliations  in all of 2022 was less than what I used to earn (sometimes) in one month! The reality is that now, I need help to keep TOP going.

...But, amazingly, I'm getting it. Patreon donations and a small cadre of voluntary contributors have moved the "Point of Failure" much further down on the down-slope of the bell curve. So I've survived the Pandemic, when otherwise I would not have. Even so, I'm making less than my old baseline now. I start taking Social Security this August, which will help.

Times are getting harder for a lot of people, not just me. I'm very grateful, and feel very complimented, that many Patreon supporters who need to tighten their own belts haven't simply cut me off, but, rather, have only reduced their contributions instead. That's incredibly nice of them, and I take it as a big compliment. However, many people have reduced their contributions, and from a high of 835 Patreon patrons, right now I have 707. So the trend is playing out there as well.

The axe—er, tax—lady
Wednesday was Taxageddon, the day I don all black and force myself to trudge down Dickensian alleyways, past the haunts of thieves, cutpurses, mountebanks and beggars, and wend my way to the lair of the tax preparer. She is cheerful and interesting but formidable and ruthless. She takes a double-bladed axe to my bank account and whacks away at it until a torrent of money that used to be mine comes gushing out and into the waiting maw of the Gub'mint. I paid 29.5% of my income in taxes last year. Here's a number that pertains: a whopping 57% of my income last year came from Patreon and direct support from kindly readers. Even so, it's less than that Y2K salary. Were it not for Patreon supporters and that small cadre of well-wishers who contribute cash from time to time, TOP would already not exist, and I would be off by a roadside somewhere, shivering in the whispering cold and selling pencils from a tin cup.

Perhaps I overdramatize.  :-)

So the answer to your question: $55k in 2000 is a cool $98k now, adjusted for inflation. How much capital would yield that much income? Knowing nothing about finance, I don't know what that number might be. But I doubt there's much point in doing the research.

I am mulling over other moves (several posts in recent weeks have concerned my ponderings about what kind of writer I hope to be when I grow up, as you might have noticed), and hope I can come to clarity before my hand is forced. My main goal is to continue to be a writer, somehow, merely because that's what I like to do. Other options are to teach or tutor, among other things, and I'm looking into it. I'm taking a (10-hour!) test this week to become a literacy volunteer, to get a little experience tutoring. Whatever my next move turns out to be, it comes down to a favorite old joke, which might be funnier if it weren't so true: "my retirement plan is to keep working."

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:

darlene: "The check is in the mail. I hope everyone who can help Mike will. Let's keep the ink for his pen flowing and Butters' dish full. I appreciate Mike's writings greatly and always look forward to this site's classy, witty, and enlightening comments."

Simon: "I can't even dream of earning £55k. That is rather more than 2.5 times my current salary and nearly 4x what I was earning in IT back in 2000. I'm pretty sure that it's more than the CEO of our small company will be paid too, though he does get a car and other perks. Despite a very modest lifestyle, the UK cost of living hike is starting to bite.  :-/  "

Mike replies: Yes, of course money is always relative, and I've generally been very fortunate with TOP, in many ways. Do note however that a pound in 2000 was exchanged at $1.52 on yearly average, so my chosen baseline was ~£36,200 in 2000. Of course, that is £63,700 now, adjusted for inflation according to the Bank of England.

The relative nature of money has always fascinated me. The site has readers who range from multimillionaires to retirees (pensioners) who have to think carefully about buying a new lens. One interesting thing I experienced was moving from an area in a big city where my salary was 3/5ths of the average household income, to a small rural town where I earned 1.5X the average. I went from being slightly poor-ish to mildly but distinctly prosperous, on the exact same paycheck. Learned a lesson there.

A friend of mine was a member of the retinue of a Saudi Prince years ago, for a period that lasted about three months, and he related this story: the Prince's father, the King, paid all of the Prince's expenses, down to food for him and his retinue. In addition to that, the Price had an American Express card for incidental personal expenses. My friend said that everyone in his retinue knew that the Prince would be a foul mood during the last few days of every month. The reason was that his father had tried to put a limit on his spending, and had capped his American Express card at the equivalent of US$1 million per month. And near the end of every month the Prince would suffer the indignity of having his card refused.

It would put anyone in a bad mood, right?  ;-)

Ed Hawco: "Is this the Jeff Keller article you’re referring to Mike? One key difference between his blog and yours is that his was very specifically focused on camera reviews, whereas yours is more about photography in general (and life in general). The former can easily be usurped by an Amazon-like big gun (as was Keller’s) but the latter has more resilience and is harder to squash. Keeping it fed is still a challenge, of course."

Dan: "Video killed the radio star and it's doing the same for written content. YouTube, TikTok etc. are the mediums with growth potential. Are you ready for your closeup?"

Mike replies: I'm ready, Mr. DeMille.

The Online Photographer Is Selling Out

I'm devastated sorry happy delighted to announce that The Online Photographer is being sold. Internet mogul Spliff Wayzos and tech boffin Melon (pronounced MEE-lon) Husk engaged in a titanic bidding war for the highly prized property, and, once the clouds of gunsmoke in the air wafted away on the spring breeze, Mr. Wayzos emerged the winner with a towering $53,461.15 bid, for which Mr. Husk had no answer.

It's too much to resist. As much as I would like to remain independent, and as resolutely as I would claim to cling to principle, I find that any stiffness in my spine is turned into jelly by the dancing visions of such a large sum of lucre. I mean, people, I could buy a whole new Prius with that much dosh, that is if I were able to pull the trigger on a depreciating asset. Hence, the owner-manager of this site, corrupted by money into a state of spinelessness, has cynically thrown it all away.

Personally, of course, I will be basking in it. Once the check comes in, I will be $30,000 closer to my retirement goal of paying off my mortgage (only $110,000 to go! Which should take only 18 years, and my current life expectancy is 18 years!) and tooling around town like a princeling in a new-to-me used Nissan with only 117,000 miles on it. As for the site, Mr. Wayzos, or Spliff as I am now privileged to call him, has promised he will not micromanage too much. Privately he has pledged to step back and stay out of the way, ceding editorial control mainly to the site's existing editors—a group that consists of...just me. For those continuing services, I am to be paid a rock-steady $16.20 an hour, day-in, day-out, a generous $2 over NY State minimum wage and coincidentally just about exactly the cost of an 8-pack of paper towels or a lunch at Casa Mezcal, the new Mexican restaurant in town. The new owner has promised to keep the site going "through the summer." After that he will shut down the site, probably because by then he will realize that 17% of the site's income consists of affiliate income from his own companies (we'll hope he doesn't read this). Plus the drain of that $16.20 ticking past every hour whether the head writer is actually writing or off doing errands, or reading Liar's Club while pedaling a stationary bike at the Community Center, or out taking flat lifeless pictures with his pointlessly converted camera (you can convert color files to B&W, you know), or chopping veggies for soup, or throwing the dog's beloved discus and standing there like a tree stump while Butters wanders around with the discus in his mouth sniffing things.

Actually he won't need a reason to shut the shebang down. He's the king of the jungle*; it's just business.

You will not notice any change, all the way through to the very end of the summer. Just the arrival of summer will seem like it takes forever, and the end of summer is way beyond that, so you've nothing to worry about for now.

Signed,

—The Previous Owner and Once and Future All-Purpose Editorial Slave of TOP

*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.)

Featured Comments from:

Keith Cartmell: "I think your high tech blog scheduler published this a week early."

Mike replies: I'd answer that, but I only work till 5:00 now.

Frank Gorga: "I'm so delighted happy sorry devastated for you!"

Chris Kern: "Yeah, well, enjoy it while you can. In this economy, that 'rock-steady $16.20 an hour' no doubt will be a drain on profitability. The new management will have to let the old editorial staff go before too long, and use a chatbot to produce the content."

Mike replies: How do you know I'm not a chatbot?

John Krumm: "If you will take $53,500 I'll buy it from you, then lease it back to you. You can become the peasant blog farmer, and I'll take a percentage of all Patreon earnings. As Lord of the blog manor, I will have the right to approve or deny any marriage, and I can also hold yearly country fairs on the property. You will have to move into the barn. One post a week will have to praise me in some form."

Mike replies: You drive a hard bargain. But you are brilliant, of great understanding, wise in the ways of humankind, clever at puzzles, and better-looking than average. There, that checks the box for Week One.

Sherwood McLernon: "I think you're Lion."

Mike replies: Only when I'm not standing up.

Arg: "Shouldn’t this have been written and published in 2007?  ;-)  "

Mike replies: Wait, are you telling me it's not 2007?

xf mj: "I think what I most love about this post is, other than the fact that it’s not factually true (but it speaks a 'truth'), we can all just continue to huddle in this little corner of Typepad, on its little square block of the internet, await more posts, and occasionally respond in kind, as best we are able. Sure, some other parts are being dynamited maybe, and some new gilded impenetrable skyscrapers are probably being financed and constructed. I myself am comfortable here away from the fray. We can take and make pictures, and talk about doing it, and sometimes debate the process. Across the street, at least for me, is the site on bikes and touring where I sometimes window shop, and where some seasoned frame builders will chance by as well. And just down the street I’ve heard that some people are dancing on and on about architecture."

DPReview Falls Victim to Amazon's Belt Tightening

Amazon's plan to reduce its workforce by 18,000 jobs apparently has to include the staff of 13 at Digital Photography Review.com, known by one and all as DPReview.

Phil Askey started DPReview in 1998 and sold it to Amazon for a rumored $20 million* in 2007. Since then, it has continued acting as an independent review site, attempting to transition to YouTube with the hiring of the team of Chris Nichols and Jordan Drake from The Camera Store five years ago (they have since jumped to PetaPixel). DPReview announced today that it will suspend operations on April 10th and take down all of the site's content at some unspecified date in the future.

Strange fact
It brings to mind a strange fact that has been little noted. I've long marked the end of the era of the "digital transition" as the date of the demolition of Building 9 at Kodak Park in Rochester in 2007, the first of the spectacular demolitions that provide a visual analogue for Kodak's swift and brutal decline. But, assuming that that is a good inflection point, then it was only five years between the end of the transition period and the peak of the digital camera market, which occurred in 2012. Since then it has been a story of accelerating decline, as development slows, the ILC market becomes saturated, the former mass market makes do with smartphones, one company after another fails or fades, and the remaining ones follow the strategy of offering mavens "more for more." And as mavens buy less, less often.

It's really not DPReview's fault. The peak is past; the business is going downhill; the popularity of dedicated cameras is fading.

Wanton disregard
I'm especially sad to see all the information on the site destroyed. One of the best things Phil Askey did was to make a conscious effort to document the entire era in photographic history. By excising all of that from the record, it might be that as much information will be destroyed at a stroke as was lost when Julius Caesar burned the great Library at Alexandria in 48 B.C.** It's a shame and, frankly, a disgrace. The Internet is simply not a good repository for culture, information, and stored knowledge.

Mike

*A reader who shall remain unnamed heard this back then and thinks the information is reliable, but I can't confirm it, so to me it's a rumor. The terms of the deal were not disclosed to the public.

**Seneca the Younger quoted Livy as saying that 40,000 scrolls were destroyed. Depending on how much information could be stored on a scroll—I don't know—it's plausible that DPReview's many thousands of pages could rival the amount of information in 40,000 scrolls.

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:

Steve Rosenblum: "It is ridiculous that they are going to delete all content on the site. It would cost Amazon the rounding error on their per minute profits to maintain that information on AWS [Amazon Web Services, an on-demand cloud business with $62B in revenue —Ed.]. I suspect they are planning to sell the information to some other entity, as it is valuable, but I don't know. I'm sorry to see this, I have followed them since they started and found their content to be very helpful."

Dillan: "Fun fact: Chris Nichols sold me my EF 50mm ƒ/1.4 when he worked for The Camera Store here in Calgary. Right out of the box, it just wouldn't focus on my 5D, so I brought it back the following Monday. He exchanged it for another one, no questions asked. I had the whole sad tale prepared, but I didn't need to tell it. It's a small thing, but I never forgot it. That was a lot of money for me at the time. It's still my favourite lens, and I am still a devoted Camera Store customer."

David Brown: "Re 'The Internet is simply not a good repository for culture, information, and stored knowledge.' Hear, hear! Paper can burn, true enough; but digital storage can so easily be unplugged even with the best of intentions."

Nicholas Hartmann: "Whaat?! Amazon, of all companies, can’t set aside a matchbox-worth of storage for DPReview’s archive? No more camera purchases from Amazon for this dinosaur…."

PaulW: "Your comparison of losing DPReview to the loss of the library of Alexandria is spot on. I'm still in a bit of shock over this. It's hard for me to fathom that such a valuable resource and so much valuable historical information will be lost to a business decision."

William Cook: "Sorry to see the site go. Way back when, I enjoyed reading the new camera reviews. Those reviews were not the usual regurgitation of camera maker’s press releases or spec sheets; they were honest hands-on reviews. In those days I was keen to keep up with the fast-moving market and technology, not so much any more. And that’s probably the personal micro reason for the macro problem. Still, sad to see them go."

Tom Burke: "This does feel like the end of an era. Like many others there have been times when I have availed myself of DPReview’s pages extensively—and then long times when I haven’t. The former were generally when I was considering a purchase. I would then use the (relevant) forums a lot in the period immediately after I’d made the purchase, and found them helpful.

"Scrolls: a comment in a book called The Book, by Keith Houston suggests that that book (smallish hardback, 426 pages including text, notes and index), might hold as much as seven times more information than a scroll occupying the same volume of shelf space. The Book is about the development of books, and the media on which they have been written or printed. Strongly recommended, for its informational value, and also because the hardback, at least, is a beautifully produced object. Not fancy, but elegant and purposeful. If you want to know about papyrus, scrolls, the development of writing, and way too much about vellum, this is the one for you."

Mike replies: I used to have a wonderful mini-library of books about books. Alas, lost and scattered due to moves, volumes left behind here and there, and other vagaries of time.

Tommy Williams: "It looks like the Archive Team at the Internet Archive is taking some extraordinary steps to save as much of the DPReview content as they can which goes well beyond their normal scraping and storing, so maybe—this time—we won't lose such an important piece of history."

Greg: "Here's a link to Dave Etchells praising his 'competition': Quote: 'It’s hard to state the sense of loss I feel, trying to come to grips with DPR’s closure. It leaves a gap in my world, as over-dramatic as that sounds. It’s true though. I think most people imagined us as competitors, and we were to an extent, but it was a very friendly competition. The photo business is an unusually congenial and friendly one to begin with, and I counted many on the DPR team as good personal friends.'"

Andrew Kochanowski: "I don't want to be a contrarian, But twenty years ago a site like that had some value to compare objective information between equipment that was rapidly changing. Whether it was a new Nikon or Canon or a new system, it was useful to be able to access the objective information about it and a bit of subjective feel-in-the hand, maybe make some decisions on what to buy.

"Now and for the past 10 or more years? Not so much. Ever since its Amazon acquisition and especially in the past few years the content was uninspiring. Yes, a compendium of what's new and when was it issued. That's about it. Ah, but the forums. Yes, moderated in the best 1990s tradition, dominated by would-be experts with fragile skins. I thought you got kicked out of there Mike? I sure did, many years ago. Not that I had much to add to the my gear is better than yours threads, so maybe it was for the best."

Mike replies: I did, in the Askey era. Phil apparently had a burr under his saddle about other people acting like they knew something. But, in fairness, the posting that got me booted was actually pretty obnoxious. It wasn't as bad as some other things that didn't get people kicked out, but I could see their side of it.

Peter Croft: "Oh, here we go again. The big fish snap up and swallow the best of the small fry, then close them down. Think Lotus (Microsoft), Word Perfect (MS again), Macromedia (Adobe), Micrografx (Corel) and a dozen, scores of others. We pay big money to own software, only to find it orphaned. Macromedia Authorware used to be a career path in its own right, but Adobe got their hands on it and shut it down! As soon as I learned Amazon had bought DPReview, I thought that this would happen, and it has. I especially liked the sample images shot around London before the 200 lbs. gorilla stepped in and took it away to the USA. And like you, I immediately thought of the huge database of camera and lens data accumulated. Surely that can't be lost? Surely that must be preserved and made available in some way. To trash that would be a crime. What a damn pity. At least it will free up all the time I spend each day reading the site."

A Response to Moose (B&W Tonality, Part CCCLXXVII)

[UPDATE: P.S.—a P.S. before the fact, you might say—I'm actually thankful to Moose, who is a loyal reader and longtime commenter. It's true that I'm "scolding" him a bit here, but it was an opportunity for a teaching moment and it is useful in that way, and for that I'm grateful. I don't have any hard feelings, at all. Also, as many of us are, with my photographer hat on I admit I'm a little more thin-skinned than in my other roles, because the ego is a little more exposed. Plus, if he really objects to this post then I will take it down.  —Mike, with editor hat on.]

Moose replies: "I certainly would not want this post taken down. So many words and links to images...I expect to provide a response, be it mea culpa or disagreement with the brickbats, most likely a combination. Nor have I had time and attention to absorb all the comments. I do relate to the first featured post, from Lothar Adler. The large number of lively comments do seem to indicate that the issue of photo presentation on the web is very much on many people's minds."

-

Moose wrote, yesterday:

When I visit Mike's photos on Flickr, I wonder why they are almost all so flat, lifeless. Most recent two:

Cauliflower

Sun After Rain [both on Moose's own site —Ed.]

(Click on images to see it big.)

I'm no Zone system maven, but I can see immediately that there is no true black and that tonal detail in middle and upper range are compressed.

Are we being treated like John Szarkowski, to unfinished work? Does web presentation not merit being finished? Let's face it, most people will see most photographs on their screens, not as a print. How do I want my work to be seen?

-

There are three main reasons why this is unfair:

First, please don't mess with my work without my permission, especially if your purpose is to insult me. You didn't ask if that was all right. It's true that I've done "print critiques" here on the blog, but I explicitly ask people to send prints for critique, so they have implicitly granted their permission. If I want to comment on a person's work and change it to what I think looks better, I almost always ask them first (exceptions—I can think of one—were noted at the time). On principle, I almost never use negative examples; I don't hold up peoples' actual work for negative commentary without asking them if it's all right, even though I have the right under Fair Use to do so.

Second, for me, without question, the online JPEGs are not the work. I harped on this repeatedly in the early days of TOP, and don't do so as much any more; one reason for that is that now, sometimes the online JPEGs are the art—that is, that's how the creators of the images want and expect them to be seen. The other reason is that I can't keep repeating truths ad nauseam without becoming a bore. So if Moose bought prints of those images and wants to critique the prints, then I'll listen to his opinion, to an extent. Opinions about online JPEGs don't mean so much to me. The JPEG is just a representation, like a reproduction. We have explored over many years the difference between looking at little online JPEGs and comparing it to original work.

Thirdly, and more importantly: as I also keep saying, also at the risk of becoming a bore, you have to take mature artists at their word. That is, they mean their art to look a certain way, and that's their business, not yours. It's completely your right to decide whether you like it or not, whether you respond to it or not, and to express your response. However, in my opinion, you're making a mistake if you simply measure accomplished photographers according to the same yardstick you use to judge your own work, i.e., judge them by how well they conform to your taste in your own technique.

A few examples: Geoff Wittig and I went to the George Eastman Museum a few years ago to see the Alvin Langdon Coburn exhibit. Coburn's tastes were set in the high period of Pictorialism, and virtually all of his pictures are soft-focus, some extremely so, and have an extremely depressed tonal range—he essentially uses the bottom half of the Zone System range of numbered tones. It's meaningless to walk around such an exhibit and say, again and again, "there are no true whites in this picture!" and "his lens isn't sharp!"

Why? Because it's just a given of the work. He got the work to look the way he wanted it to look. The only way to truly see it is to look at it as if that were true. He's the one who gets to express his own intention, not me and not you.

In contrast, pun intended, some of today's B&W artists love the Structure and Clarity sliders and present work with extremely exaggerated local contrast along with hyper-sharpness. It's a look that was also favored by certain film photographers, for instance Charles Phillips, who made very large prints, designed to be viewed under very bright light, from 8x10 negatives using physical unsharp masks (that is, you really can't see Charles's pictures in little online JPEGs—Nick Hartmann, who saw Charles's presentation of his prints with me in my loft in Chicago, can attest to that). It's an artistic decision: unless you consider the art photographer to be a beginner or a student who simply doesn't know what he or she is doing yet, you need to assume that their work looks the way they want it to look, and judge it on that basis.

I could come up with a lot more examples, but just one more pair: take a look at some JPEGs of the work of Rodger Kingston. Now take a look at some JPEGs of the work of Bruce Haley. Both are accomplished, longtime photographers (and both are at least occasional TOP readers). Rodger likes color to be brilliant, rich, and saturated; this is becoming perhaps less distinctive now as popular taste moves more and more in that direction, but at some point in the not-so-distant past it was even more radical than it is now. Bruce, on the other hand, in his Home Fires I and II books, chooses very muted colors, so much so (in the books—the JPEGs at that link seem to me to present his colors a little bit boosted) that some of them are almost halfway to black-and-white. If you thought either person were a beginner or a student, you might criticize their choices to them. But they are not. The technique of their work looks the way it does because that's the way their work looks right to them, that's the way they want it to look, and that's what they intend. They're different photographers. They see differently. Take it or leave it.

This is not to say that friends can't influence each other: Carl Weese and I got together once in Washington, D.C.—he was shooting a kids soccer game on assignment, among other things—and we compared work. I vigorously defended the low contrast of my prints and he defended the high contrast of his prints just as vigorously...and then, months later, we discovered that we both had quietly modified our printing styles somewhat after our encounter: he had started using a little less contrast in his prints and I had started adding a little more contrast to mine. Unbeknownst to us at the time, each of us had successfully convinced the other to bend a little.

I can't personally say that I am 100% happy with the way my B&W work from the Sigma fp-M looks online yet. I'm still learning. I've pointed out failures (this shot) and asked for readers' help on others. But I am after a certain look because I like that look. I have my tastes, and what they are is up to me.

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:

Lothar Adler: "When I read Moose's comment, I never for a second had the thought that he meant to offend you. I read his post solely from the perspective that he wanted to initiate a discussion about the relatively new problem of tonal design and impression of photographs in the age of constantly variable presentation by means of different media. Since nowadays in new photographic productions it is often no longer taken for granted that a material print must always be the relevant standard for tonal value design. Much more so, as different media behave very differently in terms of tonal value. It may be that the commenter Moose did not follow the usual sequence of permissions, but I was still surprised at how strict your response was in the first part. After all, we are among ourselves...and especially in your very cultured blog, we can assume that we are basically well-intentioned."

MikeR: "This post amused me, for the following reason: Some time ago my wife and I visited a museum (may have been the Art Institute of Chicago?) that had a small room dedicated to Stieglitz's 'Equivalents' series. I went from print to print, then back again. As we left that room, I commented to my wife, 'Stiegletz sucks.' Thinking about it later on, I did reconsider, along the lines of, 'Well, he liked it.'"

Mike replies: This comment made me wonder: are all photographers in all times insecure—even Stieglitz? It's at least possible....  :-)

Clay: "For what it's worth, I like your originals far better than the versions that Moose 'fixed.' That said, if they were my images, I would edit them very differently from either. [Carl said the same thing —MJ] It's like that tagline I heard in a commercial the other day: 'I said what I said.' It applies to photographs too. I think it always best to assume that an image that has been posted looks the way it is meant to look."

SteveW: "Thank you Mike and Moose. I think this one is essential reading, and I appreciate this very much. I struggle with what 'look' I'm striving for, and can go insane with post-processing to the degree I don't even want to take photographs. After reading today's blog I feel that there is a sense of liberation in being at peace with whatever look a person may favor. Don't ask me why I never considered this, lol. I'm an old dawg hobbyist, and it is blogs like today's that really make me appreciate TOP."

cecilia: "I hear your frustration, but I think Moose was completely fair. What is public is judged independent of intent. Full stop. This is hard reality. Sadly, when you anticipate judgement, or worse, cancellation, you can fall into extreme self editing. But I think you normally strike a great balance."

George Davis: "Wow! My favorite post in quite some time. While I agree that Moose should have sought permission before posting those comments and edits, I confess that I am glad that he did, for I see the Mike that drew me to TOP years ago. I wouldn't mind seeing a post where you begin to define your 'looks' and your tastes, not just what you like in your own work, but in others. Anyway, excellent post."

Terry Burnes: "We have a large Galen Rowell photograph in our living room, which my wife gave me as a present. I find it a near-perfect representation of the Eastern Sierra, where we live. It's hard for me to imagine someone not liking it. But when my photography buddy, the only friend with whom I share this interest, walked in and saw it, he immediately told me why he didn't like Rowell's work (overwrought, colors too intense, etc. etc., though this one isn't really that way). Yes, he's entitled to his opinion, but it seemed insensitive to me, to more or less insult a gift from my wife to me, an object which we both obviously like enough to buy and put on our wall in the most prominent position in the house. I think he just should have accepted it for what it is, and our choice to buy and display it. I think Rowell got what he wanted in that print. And so did we."

Mani Sitaraman: "I'm on team Mike on this, rather than team Moose (if there are, indeed, two teams in this matter.) I went to Moose's site, and when I moved the cursor over the pictures, everything suddenly seemed better, much closer to what I would want a black-and-white print to look like. I just assumed it was a quirk of the browser, and then I saw Moose's caption, which told me that the lower contrast version—Mike's original—would appear when the cursor was directly on the image. So much better. I dislike Moose's higher contrast versions, with (for example) the shoreline trees of Keuka Lake blocked up and near jet-black. I'm reminded of what I once read, which perhaps was written by Mike himself, in his online print days. Back in the heyday of the monochrome image, Henri Cartier-Bresson would always hound his printers at Picto, the renowned lab in Paris, to lessen the contrast in prints, to 'bring out the greys.' That's the aesthetic I prefer—silver tones in silver prints are just so pleasing. The aesthetic choice definitely carries over to digital, even as the technology of digital monochrome images pushes back against it and doesn't cooperate."

Sean: "The restraint you show in your photography is admirable and of a kind that is all too rare now. It takes time to make pictures look so effortless. I think those who like to turn things up to eleven do it rapidly and are flat-out wrong most of the time, and that's OK—when it's their pictures."

robert e: "I see the appeal of Moose's versions for hit-and-run viewing, but those are not images I would want to spend any time with. I would get a headache from trying—it's as if every element and detail is clamoring for attention, and there's little sense of harmony or balance across the image as a whole. It's like looking around Times Square or listening to 'exciting' audio speakers. Such experiences may be striking, scintillating, and immediately gratifying—enjoyable in their way—but over even a modest span of time they're exhausting and unfulfilling.

"I tried to think of a forests/trees analogy, or perhaps sweetness in food, but in the context of recent discussion here, what if the act of looking at pictures also falls under the 'process vs. project' dichotomy? There's the 'grok it and move on' school of looking and the 'sit with it and let it work on you' school of looking, and all the shadings and combinations between. Watch museum and gallery patrons for an illustration.

"I think the harsh reality underlying Moose's comment (and perhaps it was his intent merely to provoke this discussion) is that most web users habitually approach images with the 'project' mentality. Well, assuming this is true, and that one gives a damn, how much of the aesthetic of a given work are we supposed to compromise to 'hook' such a gaze, and then once we have it, how do we convert that to the process type of looking that that work is intended to reward? That to me is the fascinating issue here—I believe analogous to the problem of how to depict 3D art using 2D images, but more complicated because there isn't an obvious category mismatch. All I'm sure of is that there isn't a one-size-fits-all solution."

I'm Team Process... (More on Process vs. Project)

That was a very rewarding discussion yesterday about "process vs. project," and I'd like to thank JH again, as well as Nick Hartmann and everyone else who commented, whether featured or not. As you can probably tell, I've been trying to figure out what kind of writer I want to be for the rest of my life.

Very interesting that our friend* Kirk Tuck said, "I have to be the most project driven person I know." Kirk is just the nicest and most considerate guy, and I think I'm pretty friendly too, and when he and I talk on the phone the conversations are very warm and tend to go on for quite a while. Yet there is an undeniable tension in our attitudes to each other when we're discussing ideas in writing. I think we may have just hit on the reason, because I can echo what he said, but in the opposite direction: I have to be the most process-driven person I know. JH said, in a private email, "It’s not binary but a continuum, however most people are not in the middle." I'm way over on the process side. I don't even like "closure" at all: to put it bluntly, I dislike finishing anything. I like things to stay open-ended, because that way they're still alive; change is still possible, they can still evolve, you can still think about them some more, still be creative, still catch and fix your errors, and so on. It's only very reluctantly, and with disappointment and misgivings, that I will come to a hard stop and concede that something is done.

It's possible that the reason I liked being a magazine editor so much is that it counteracted my process-driven tendencies. Each issue was a project. There was a series of defined hard deadlines for every issue (I still dream sometimes of missing them), and there were people to help get each deadline met. Then, when the issue was printed, it was done: there was no more possibility for change. I could let go of it because I had to. If all of it had been up to me, on the other hand, every issue probably would have been late and half of them wouldn't have gotten done at all!

It's not that I can't work. I've told this story before, but when I was a freshman at Dartmouth had the honor of attending a meet-and-greet with Saul Bellow, who had just won the Nobel Prize in Literature. I waited in line after the breakfast to ask him a specific question, but I didn't get my chance, because the guy in front of me asked the exact question I wanted to ask: what's the best way to become a writer? Mr. Bellow didn't hesistate: "Write three million words." The guy who asked the question argued with that, but Mr. Bellow gave his reasons and didn't budge on the concept. The requirement was practice, and lots of it.

I was disappointed, because of course I was eighteen and wanted to be famous yesterday, but I headed right back to my dorm room, counted the words on a typed page (about 400), did some calculations, and determined that if wrote two typed pages a day, I'd be at three million words in slightly over ten years. I got right to work. Writing became a daily habit, and has stayed that way.

But then there was another problem. What the heck was I going to do with all that writing? I certainly didn't want to be responsible for it—keep it, catalogue it, store it. (Three million words with 400 words on a page is 7,500 pieces of paper, for one thing.) So I started writing letters. That way, I figured, each day's work was done and out the door in a day or three, and I didn't have to worry about it any further. It allowed me to get on to the next one.

I also wrote a lot of short stories, having the vague idea that that was how writers got started, and I might have made the switch to another kind of writing at a certain point. My girlfriend in art school wanted to get married soon and have six children, which greatly worried me. At that time in my life, I couldn't even support myself, much less myself and seven other people. (Ah, feckless youth—it never occurred to me that I could stay with her and not necessarily go along with her plan.) I knew enough about writers at that time to know how they work: John Camp described it in his comment two days ago. I had already met Larry McMurtry, and Larry's method was to write five new pages a day and revise the previous fifteen, meaning that he went over everything three times after composing it. I figured at the time that if I married Gina, I could pick a type of book, keep writing my two pages a day and revising six, and just keep letting them add up into books until the books started doing well. That was the wild card, though—I had no idea if, and when, they would ever start earning money. It got me no further toward a solution to my immediate problem. I honestly had no faith in my ability to earn a living at that point, and instead of courageously devoting myself to the one I loved and shoving off into the unknown seas of a great adventure, I broke up with her—a despicable, defeatist, cowardly thing to do, because I really did love her. (Although very bright, she's dyslexic, so there's little chance she'll ever read this.) Something I still deeply regret, all these years later. (Everything bad that happens to me in my romantic life I ascribe to karma, repayment for my perfidy. I'll either forgive myself someday, or else someday I'll die.)

I'm pretty comfortable with the idea that I've easily averaged 800 words a day, lifetime, even if it's a thousand words one day and six hundred the next, or whatever. (This post is about 1,500 words.) If I do the arithmetic for the 47 years between the day I met Saul Bellow and today, that's about 14 million words in my lifetime, give or a couple of million. Even if we put it at 500 words a day, which I think is too conservative, that's still 9,500,000 words since I was 14. So I surpassed Saul's Dictum a long time ago. Put in my 10,000 hours, in Gladwell-speak.

But you've probably detected already that "writing letters" is something I'm still doing, more or less.

Because that's another thing I learned too late: only practice exactly what it is you want to do, because that exact thing is what your practice will train you to do. Practice by writing letters, and you won't get good at writing novels; you'll get good at writing letters. Blogging is perfect for me because it's just an eternal flow of process. There is no project.

Even my photography is all process. I once got an introduction to John Szarkowski at the Museum of Modern Art, and instead of taking a finished portfolio to show him (I had several), I opted to maximize the opportunity by taking a bunch of bits and pieces of things I was still working on, along with some interesting failures. Very much the wrong move, highly transgressive in light of expected behavior and protocol when an artist is granted an audience with a top curator. But I was much more interested in trying to engage him in a discussion about process than I was in showing off finished work and trying, like everybody else, to entice him to buy something for the Museum's collection. That didn't seem nearly as much fun. Big mistake, but the impulse was a reflection of who I am and the way I think.

You know, what should happen is this: Kirk and I should write a book together. Call it Game Theory for Photographers, the art of the medium from the divergent perspectives of a highly project-oriented professional and a highly process-oriented teacher-type. I'd be the one to slow it down and chew on all the gristle and edit and rewrite until it's all shiny, and Kirk would be the one to slap it into shape (an outline? What's an outline?) and keep it moving forward and and to drive us up to and over the finish line. (While I wail noooooo!) The only thing is, pace Charlie Ewers' comment on Saturday, it would not be good if Kirk and I ended up killing each other!

Mike

*Just as an aside, according to The Gotti Wars by John Gleeson, in the old Cosa Nostra, introducing a guy as "my friend" meant he was just a schmoe, but if he was introduced as "our friend" it signaled that he was a made man and couldn't be messed with.

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:

kirk: "It's wonderful that good friends can disagree so much and yet really enjoy the process of it all. I'm too reactive by far but I can't tell you how much I appreciate MJ's patience with me. It's comforting. And the fact that he's produced wonderful writing for me to savor (and sometimes disagree with) over coffee each morning makes me happy day by day (bird by bird?). Thanks to JH's comment I now get it. There is no right or wrong on the subject of writing. I need to stop believing that there is. Maybe that's the secret to enjoying both process and closure. Thanks Mike!"

Andreas Weber: "I'm leaning far to the process side as well (and a mechanical engineer with quite a lot of projects under my belt...). I may have found the ideal hobby in growing bonsai—they're never finished (unless you manage to kill one)."

Aaron: "You and Kirk would not end up killing each other. Rather, he would accomplish killing you because you would never get past chewing on how and whether to actually do it. Process can get you killed.  :-)  "

John Krumm: "Wonderful and slightly heartbreaking story. I almost succeeded in breaking up with my future wife when we were 21, telling her I wanted to end it after a summer romance. I returned to college 100 miles away, thinking I might get back together with a former girlfriend (shameful, I know). Fortunately, the former girlfriend had transferred, and intense loneliness, a phone call, and a bus ticket intervened, and we are still happily together. I chalk it up to dumb luck more than anything else. Sometimes the process works."

Project People and Process People

Reader JH wrote this as a comment yesterday. Thanks to him for permission to make it into its own post. —Ed.

Guest post by JH

According to a fellow I worked with back in the early '70s at a high tech company, there are two types of people that work at companies, project people and process people. Project people want to complete whatever they are doing and move on to the next project. Process people enjoy doing the work and often hate to see a project finished. Project people work toward meeting a goal. These types of people work in all fields, but those who become engineers or accountants tend to be more process people. For accountants, it's easy to understand. I've employed many engineers and often had to pry projects out of their hands to get a product to market.

It's like that with writing books. A project person will define the book well enough that they work to the goal of creating a finished work, starting with a table of contents and writing it in sections that allow putting together a finished work. Doing even a short book takes many hours, thousands in some cases if research is needed, so it's easy to see how a process person gets entangled in the work and has trouble finishing the project.

I'm a project person and doing books for me is easy. I've written 10 textbooks and one business/humor book over the last 25 years. Almost all came together from assembling short articles or web pages I had already written, with perhaps 10% requiring research, so they are more editing that writing. I had plenty to pull from; over that same time frame I have written over 1,000 technical web pages (created after I found what a mess trying to publish on Wikipedia was), more than 300 monthly newsletters, and over 400 technical articles. A few product catalogs and instruction manuals too.

What I learned early on was that I was not a fiction writer. I have a folder of ideas for science fiction stories or books, but I never liked what I wrote—too much like my technical writing.

My business book was droll humor about the tech industry—a put-down of tech—but it was too early, and no publisher would touch it. Self published, I think I gave away more copies than were sold. Maybe it's time to add a chapter about Silicon Valley Bank and reissue it.

The idea has been brought up that you, Mike, could do what I do, gather articles into books. The missing element is market—who or what is the market? Is it self-help for photographers? Critique of selected photographs? Ideas, anyone?

For books, the Internet has changed how people get information and it has become harder to get sufficient revenue from books to make them worth the effort. In my case I have an organization sponsor and a captive audience; the textbooks are tied to training and certification and generate good revenue for the organization.

I'm generally reluctant to offer advice, but I would say keep doing what you do now. Be honest with yourself about what you do well and focus on it. Trying to be what you ain't ain't no fun!

—JH

So, speaking primarily of working at photography, would you say you're a process person or a project person? Is that a useful conceptual framing for understanding how you work? —Mike the Ed.

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:

Nicholas Hartmann: "A favorite quote from I don’t remember where or whom: 'There comes a time in every project when you must shoot the engineers and go into production.' I also found during my service in volunteer association leadership that the best way to get a project done was to give it to a freelancer, whose ingrained way of making a living is to complete a job, send the invoice, and go on to the next job. The best way to kill a project, conversely, was to give it to an academic, whose survival reflex is to string out projects as long as possible and study every aspect of a problem in order get more funding, add to his/her bibliography, and achieve higher staus in the cutthroat university hierarchy. (A Texan friend of mine once defined your 'project' mentality as 'git 'er done' [past tense: 'got 'er did'].)"

Adam Isler: "My own experience in business of the last 40 or so years, the last 20 in software, is that the process/project orientation is a useful distinction to draw, given, however, that we recognise it as representing a spectrum rather than a purely binary distinction. Most people will probably orient more to one pole than the other but few will do so absolutely."

Kirk (partial comment): "JH's comment, and defining of the way people work, is brilliant. Project versus process. I wrote five 40,000+ word books and did all the illustrations for them in the space of three years for Amherst Media. None of the books took me more than four months from receipt of contract to completion. I have to be the most project driven person I know because I did all of the books while maintaining a full time schedule within my commercial photography business. And I rarely missed a daily swim practice. Nicholas's realization that the best way to get a project done is to hand it to a freelancer is so true. We live to get stuff done successfully and then move on quickly. No question. Time is money."

Charlie Ewers: "The division into project and process folks certainly rings true in my experience. I'm very much a project person, although I'm an academic, but my co-author (also an academic) on a recent book is so much a process person that we almost came to blows before we got the final version to the publisher. There was always one more thing he wanted to work into a chapter, one more photo he wanted me to get, one more edit on material that had already been edited to death. We got it done and we're both proud of it, but it's truly a wonder that we're still friends."

Unexpected Epiphany (Followup)

I apologize for yesterday's post—it was a complaint, and thus annoying to some, and it was too personal—I try to make these posts personable but not personal, always trying to remain aware of how others will relate to them. You have to understand, though: on most days I sit down in the morning with no idea what I'm going to write about, and two or three hours later hit the "Publish" button. (Then, if I like the piece, I'll tinker and toil over little changes throughout the day.) Yesterday I hadn't even mulled it over the evening before, which I sometimes do, because I had planned to republish that "Self and Other" piece about Diane Arbus, not realizing that I'd already done so a few years ago. As my father used to say about his attempts to learn to cook French omelettes the old-fashioned way, "sometimes you get an omelette, sometimes you get a mess of eggs." Yesterday it was the latter, that's all.

However, it did result in a rather surprising epiphany! Last night I abruptly decided that I should stop trying to write books—give up, leave the idea behind.

In my life I have written school papers, essays, letters, a dribble of poetry, short stories, many magazine articles (like 250 all told), forum posts, and blog posts (more than 10,000). All of it short-form writing. That's what I do. That's who I am. As David Vestal often used to say and write: "So, okay."

The longest ever
In the midst of the release of the Harry Potter books, I sent a 50-page draft of the beginning of a novel for adolescents to Scholastic, the publisher of those books in the U.S. I got a rejection slip with a handwritten note on it that said, "This almost made it for us—please keep us apprised of your future projects." I have been wracking my brain, but I believe that that was the longest thing I've ever written that anybody else ever read (assuming they read the whole thing, which I guess is not something I know). On the other end, I took a class at Reed for which we were supposed to write one-page papers. It was maddening—the professor used to pepper the margins of my papers with compliments and praise, and then give me B's and C's. Some sort of didactic strategy, I suppose. It made me contumacious. But I do recall one of his scribbled reactions: "How do you manage to say so much in ONE PAGE?!?" [sic.]

Anyway, I have reached a decision. It's the opposite of what I counseled yesterday—and I will have more to say about persistence vs. quitting in photography tomorrow (or rather Sunday, as I reserve Saturdays to not do housework). No more effort wasted on books, no more daydreams of being an author, no more thinking diverted from short-form pieces. To quote my very early childhood idol, Popeye, I yam what I yam.

And now, I am very late for my exercise class.

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:

robert e: "My takeaway from all this is that the essential skill is, in the words of Kenny Rogers, '...to know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em / Know when to walk away and know when to run.' Perhaps the next lines are also instructive: 'You never count your money when you're sittin' at the table / There'll be time enough for countin' when the dealing's done.' I've tried to read A La Recherche du Temps Perdu at least four times. I suppose that time is lost forever."

T. Edwards: "For what it's worth, I liked yesterday's post and didn't even really notice the 'complaint' portion until I went back and re-read. I loved the Malcolm piece to which you linked and that's what I remembered."

Dave (partial comment): " I hope that this decision, this revelation to give up the long-format, would be a level of freedom for you, a breath of fresh air, if you will...I, for one, applaud your decision to give up and carry on without that burden.... Bravo."

Ben: "I think that learning how to finish things is really important. I'll share a little story....

"My daughter, previously featured on TOP [top picture —Ed.], received an iPad for her ninth birthday, in early 2020. Round about April of that year there were a few things happening in the world, so she decided to start writing a book. She had started several before, but never finished them, so I told her I'd read it when she was done. So every day she sat under a blanket and tapped away with two fingers on glass. Sometime in late June or early July she shared the document with me, all 40,000 words of it. And then she revised it; I went over it with her; she revised it again; her mother proofread it, etc....until late 2021, when I realized that she could just keep revising it every six months, and every six months she'd be a little more sophisticated, have a little better vocabulary, and that this process could go on forever.

"She and I discussed; she decided to commit to her final revision, and we self-published it through print-on-demand. She spent a lot of time on it, and I really feel that finishing a long-term project, and then letting it go, is a skill that I didn't learn until much later in life...and then only in certain things. Not sure if it's all right to post a link to it, but if that's OK, Mike, here it is. She's now revising the sequel, and I'm just a proud dad  :-)  . It's different, I think, to create and then let go of a large, bounded project, than it is to build one over time out of smaller pieces. It's harder to let go of the former, to finally call it finished. But the latter is no less real, no less valuable, and something like this blog, the consistency of creation over time, is a real accomplishment. Something like what William Matthews wrote about Mingus, 'as the work of the body becomes a body of work.' (Apologies if I'm not recalling the quote correctly)."

Another Mike: "Mike, your parents and my parents must have gone to the same parenting school. The very sad fact is that no one gets out of a situation like that without serious damage. When the people who are supposed to love you the best are the ones who are sabotaging you and ripping your very sense of self to absolute shreds, it sets up your life to be an endless struggle. People who have had good supportive and loving parents have no idea and seem very glib about what we go through. Just do this, or just be that, they say. Sure, for you maybe. People brimming with solid self confidence who have known success and satisfaction their whole lives cannot relate to other realities so easily. Just know, you're not alone. There are a lot of us out here, and we see you, we get you, and we appreciate the struggle you so openly write about. Thank you for being honest. Mike."

Ed Hawco: "For what it’s worth, letting sh*t go is how The Buddha found enlightenment."

John Camp: "I don’t know why I’m writing this, since Kirk Tuck answered you well enough. Maybe because it’s snowing and I don’t want to take the dogs out.

"You (Mike) get up most days and write a column for this blog. That’s how a novel gets done. You have a time when you write, and that’s what you do. Doesn’t have to be too long. A couple of hours a day will do it. If you write 500–1,000 words a day, you’ll have a bestseller length novel (100,000–110,000 words) in half a year, more or less.

"If I sat in a chair and looked at the back of a Stephen King novel and thought 'My God, I have to write a *&#* brick like that,' I’d never get it done. So I don’t do that. Stephen King doesn’t either. So, I write 500–1,000 words a day, just like you do. And that’s what King does and Kirk does, too—and that’s why Kirk has a penthouse at the top of the Tuck Tower in Austin. You don’t have to be inspired, you don’t have to think deep thoughts, you don’t have to be overly bright, you don’t necessarily know what you’re going to write that day. You just have to work.

"Probably the best inspiration for me was negative: my folks were nice people, but didn’t have money, so if I needed some, as a teenager, I pretty much had to get myself. I started by doing fieldwork during the Iowa summers, detasseling corn and bailing hay, and the inspiration was simple: 'I don’t want to do this sh*t anymore.' I sold men’s clothes in a department store, and drilled holes in knobs in a radio factory, carried mail, and was an Army draftee, and it was all 'I don’t want to do this sh*t anymore.'

"I worked for newspapers, and it took a while—better than twenty years—and again, it was 'I don’t want to do this sh*t anymore.'

"Is it possible that you’re at that point? If not, then maybe you can continue to do the same ol’ sh*t.

"What kind of befuddles me is that I could take the columns you’ve written since you’ve run this blog, print them all out, get some scissors, cut and paste, and come up with the structure of a pretty good book on photography. The rest would be editing. Basically, carpentry.

"Couple hours a day."

Simon: "Like a significant number of commenters above, I cannot object to Thursday's post (a self-described 'complaint') but welcome it. Some (probably many) of your readers will take more from such a piece than you probably realise. Also, without it there would be no 'epiphany' post the following day. We are all shaped by our experiences, especially those in childhood, and many of us are unaware—at best only partially aware—of just how it has made us into the people we are today. Some things are good, some are not so good. But they are what they are and I think the value is in recognising or acknowledging them as much as we are able. As a parent I try not to make some of the mistakes my well-meaning parents made but I'm conscious that I will surely repeat some of them...and add some more of my own.

"I'm looking forward to seeing more photographs and your accompanying observations. My own ventures with my OM2n and 40mm ƒ/2 are frustratingly infrequent and irregular, but the process is still enjoyable. I am finding I now think more about the sense of place and composition as a result of viewing the recent images created with your Sigma fp."

The Creating Game

Well, rats. I had an old article about Diane Arbus all teed up and ready to go this morning, which would have given me a free morning for writing, but I see that I already republished it—in June of 2019 when I had my partial cornea replacement operation. In fact, I republished all of the old "T.O.P. Ten" articles I wrote back in the 'aughts, under the freshened rubric "Ten Iconic Photographs." Here's the one about Arbus; if you're interested, you can go from there either forward or backward and see the others.

Those articles are getting pretty dusty now. Can't rest on past laurels forever. You're only as good as your latest sh*t, as a friend of mine used to say. Otherwise you're Brooks Koepka, the golfer who was on top of the world in 2018 but hasn't done or won  anything lately. (Sport is brutal that way, by the bye.)

Shoulda, woulda, coulda...what I should have done is write another one of those articles—articles discussing specific individual photographs, I mean—every so often, and just kept plugging away. I had a strategy; I had a start. Those ten articles were the start. If I had started in 2006 and written just one more of those articles every two months or so, by now I'd have 112 of them in the can and I could have tried to market it as a book. I can't remember if I ever meant to do that. The idea still seems gauzy and vague to me, somehow. I'm never clear in my head.

John Camp is a reader of this blog. He's better known as John Sandford, the writer of 54 bestselling thrillers (like the number of my Mennonite friend Alvin's grandchildren, the number keeps growing. Alvin has about as many grandchildren as John has novels. I can't believe either one could name them all!). Here's a nice bio of John. I asked John years ago how to get a book published, and in the same email proceeded to provide my own answer, in the form of several long, tortured, idea-laden paragraphs about concepts and psychology and strategies and so forth. His reply was crisp and quick. I can't find it, so I can't quote it, but essentially he said: Nope. Just finish it. My observation has been that when writers finish things, good things happen. I replied that it can't be that simple and he said it is that simple. I'm paraphrasing.

How many books have I finished since then? None. How many books have I started in my life? The number must be in the low tens of thousands by now (I exaggerate, though not by much, *rimshot*). How many of them did I finish? None. Is it my aim to die with the most started-but-unfinished books of anybody? It appears so. I am in the running to win the prize for that. Well, except that I have lost most of those beginnings. Me and writing books is like that pop definition of crazy: doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result.

[UPDATE Thursday evening: I'm just being funny, or trying to. I'm not actually all upset over this. Don't worry. I'm a writer of short pieces. I know that. I'm not trying to bring anybody down.... —Mike]

Did you know that Janet Malcolm, a sometimes photography critic who died in 2021 and who has a new posthumous book out called Still Pictures: On Photography and Memory, once wrote an article called "Forty-One False Starts"? It's about the artist David Salle, and consists of 41 attempts to begin an article about David Salle. The really funny thing about it, of course, and the thing that twists up my brain like a rag you're trying to get water out of, is that she finished it, and it was published, and it became famous even.

The older I get and the further I go, the more value I give to two things which historically I have not had: energy, and the ability to follow through. That is, to finish. I would probably place those two virtues at no. 2 and no. 3 on the list of attributes you need for success in the arts, and maybe in everything. I wonder how many parents start out with the intention of teaching their children the habit of "finishing everything they start"? Is it just a habit, one that should be started early? Or a gift, provided more by character than by training? My parents were forever telling me that I couldn't do things. If I tried something—anything—my mother would explain to me that what I was trying to do was too hard for me, and that the people who did that thing (whatever it was) were serious people who worked very hard, the implication being that I was not a serious person and would not work hard. Was she trying to protect me from disappointment? I never did figure out what was behind her impulse to throw cold water on everything. When my father found out I wanted to be a writer, he actually made an appointment with me to discuss the matter. We sat down alone together on the veranda of a rented house in Georgetown, D.C., at a scheduled time. He framed it that we were going to "debate" the issue, with me taking the "pro" side and him taking the "con" side, each arguing vigorously for our assigned positions. He prepared; I did not. It ended up being a spirited two-hour harangue, mostly one-sided, covering every conceivable reason why a.) a writer was a silly, foolish, disreputable, impractical thing to want to be, and b.) all the reasons why I, in particular, could not be one if I tried. I'm not kidding; that actually happened. He was a very persuasive man, my father. According to him, he convinced the Harvard Business School to accept him into the Masters in Business Administration program even though he had a 1.9 GPA from a little-known Midwestern liberal arts college; he claimed his was the lowest GPA of any student the Business School had ever accepted, although I would question how he knew such a thing. Later, he talked his way into becoming a Director of NASA* even though he was (again, according to him) the first NASA Director ever who was not a scientist. He ended up "our little talk" very pleased with himself, convinced that he had run roughshod all over the campfire I was trying to kindle and stomped out every spark and ember. When I read in a biography of Picasso that Picasso's father gave up painting on his son's sixteenth birthday, giving him his paints and proclaiming that, "from now on, Pablo is the painter in the family" (I hope I'm remembering that correctly), I could only marvel at it. Thus the no. 1 thing you need for success: self-belief, wherever and however you get it. (Funniest cartoon I have seen recently: a group of art students clustered around a computer. One says—I'm paraphrasing again: "AI started out strong, but then it got self-aware and now all it does is question itself and procrastinate.")

I'd like you to consider this for yourself, but I'd also like to recommend that you advise any younger photographers to adopt this habit, consciously and deliberately: resolve to finish anything you start. Right out of the gate, the mere idea of finishing confers a huge benefit: it forces you to set the terms of your own success. You can't very well finish anything if you don't know what "finishing" means. So there's that: to finish, you have to first define what it's going to mean to be finished. That provides a whole lot of clarity right there.

There's an even bigger advantage, however: namely, that you're also forced to understand what "it" is. What exactly is the project? Look through the work again. What part of it is most vigorous, most alive? What piques your ambition or satisfies your eye? If you've worked enough so that you have a start, then the answer is in there. The project doesn't have to have a "public" definition, rendered in artspeak all gleaming and pretty. It's between you and you, so the way you understand it can be crude and coarse if you want: I want to make black-and-white digital pictures of heavily lined faces. I want to work with models. I want to photograph exquisitely arranged collections of random found objects. Whatever it is. To finish something, you naturally have to first be clear about what that something is.

Once you understand what it is you're doing and how it's going to come to an end, you can throw yourself into the work and work steadily toward the goal. Those are two things you cannot do if you are just gadding about amusing yourself any old which way. And when that goal is met, you are free, free move on, with a clear head, and a clear heart, and a feeling of accomplishment, to something else, something new.

And that is how to put one foot in front of the other, I think, in this creating game.

Mike

*The head guy is called the Administrator; there are, or were, six Directors under the Administrator. My father was Director of Space Applications in Jerry Ford's Administration, and was (again, according to him) the highest-level Ford appointee allowed to stay on into the Carter Administration. That is, until he pissed off Carter's Chief of Staff. But that's another story.

Original contents copyright 2023 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

David Dyer-Bennet: "Modern rich people say 'fail faster.' That's kind of the opposite of 'finish everything you start'; they're saying be ready to abandon your baggage and move on when it's time to stop burning good money after bad. I strongly suspect different people need different mottoes to live by, because they have different characteristic failure modes. Certainly the importance of hard work is either ignored, or approached very badly, by parents throughout my lifetime (not my own particularly, I hasten to add; not actually sure where I acquired my semi-decent ability to persevere, but I had it by 8th grade at least). Inarguably, successful people, especially in the arts, are people who have finished a lot of things. I strongly suspect (and I've been in conversations with a lot of successful writers in particular) that nearly all of them have chosen not to finish some things and are good with that choice decades later."

JOHN B GILLOOLY: "As is often the case, and curiously so, this post comes at the exact moment in my life when it intersects perfectly. That has happened to me with many of your posts—to the point where I sometimes actually think you've been following my recent activities!!"

Mike replies: I promise I am not stalking you!  :-)

James: "Have you ever read Proust's A La Recherche du Temps Perdu? A great deal of the plot (to the extent there is one) is driven by Marcel's desire to be a writer, and his parents' desire to protect him from that career path. Marcel succeeds, it turns out."

Mike replies: No, I haven't read that, but I did write a satire once claiming that researchers had proven once and for all that no one, not even one person, has ever read Proust....

kirk: "Mike, I'm serious here (for a change) but for the life of me I don't understand how you can give out advice about finishing stuff if by your own admission it's your own personal kryptonite. If it's something you have no clue about how to do. You have some conjecture but no proof of your suggestions.

"Getting stuff done all seems so straightforward. You don't need a plan or a strategy or a spreadsheet, etc. One just needs to decide they'd like to do something and then sit down every day and do it. At some point it's done. No excuses. As the universe's most famous Jedi Knight (Yoda) once said, 'Do, or do not. There is no try.' The intention to finish should be assumed."

Mike replies: But Kirk, you are blessed with energy, follow-through, and self-belief....

John Krumm: "You finish stuff every day, even if you also don't. I have to counsel my wife on this. People prone to depression tend to not take stock of their successes, or to assign them very little value, while failures are put up on a stage and given a trophy. Your blog is a big success that many, many writers would be envious of. To actually pay bills by writing about photography on the internet, without endless posts about gear, but instead full of insights into all sorts of subjects, that's something to be proud of. Dads can be awful. Mine was a master manipulator. At one point he assigned us chores, and instead of paying us an allowance, he paid us in 'dad time' coupons we could use for fun stuff with him. We didn't want to ever spend it, so it was worthless."

Severian: "At one level, I agree. Perseverance and finishing is a powerful habit and mindset. However, for the opposite perspective, Steven Levitt (of Freakonomics fame) and Annie Duke (author of Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts and Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away and also famous as a poker player) make strong arguments that most people don't quit soon enough or often enough on all kinds of things. Check out their discussion on Steven's 'People I Mostly Admire' podcast, episode #93. Years ago, I used to feel bad when I didn't finish reading a book or a magazine article. I don't suffer from that delusion any longer, and I wish I had learned to 'quit' a lot sooner."

Albert Smith: "Sometimes finishing can be overwhelming simply based on the 'end item' being so far from the initial move to get there. So rather than being so obsessed with that end item, break up the project into doable steps, and then do each of those steps. You will get multiple dopamine releases and will eventually finish what you started. Could you imagine how hard it would have been to fulfill Kennedy's goal of landing a man on the moon within the decade if they didn't do the incremental steps of Mercury, Gemini and the development of the lunar module as stand alone goals? They were all moving to the final task, but were doable in their specific focus. If the task of 'get to the moon within the decade' was tried as a single event, they'd still be at a drawing board wondering how they could finish."

darlene: "Making a habit of setting and managing realistic expectations works too. I am not a writer per se, but I have had to write a lot during my professional educator career. And in the beginning, it felt a bit mechanical to me, but not so much any more after years of doing it. When I write, just as in photography, I know what I want to say; if I do not, I wait until I do. That is where expectations come into play. Aimlessly pointing a camera would waste my time and energy, as luck has never been on my side. I see that as setting myself up for disappointment. I alone have to care for myself, physically and mentally. I take full responsibility for my place in life, regardless of what my parents did, and they were both neglectful parents. But I forgave them the moment their selfishness overtook the right thing to do because you forgive others for yourself. Not everyone gets that, but that is my story, and it works for me. I made my living with a camera, so I had to be motivated and know what I wanted to say with it. My energy is limitless when motivated, whether in writing, photography, or any other creative endeavor. And I love to be in that energy cycle. It's a high like no other and can have a mind of its own, which can be fascinating as to where it has sometimes led me. It starts with realistic expectations, which is the gift I gave myself a long time ago. One step at a time, and before I know it, I am over the finish line."

Seven Strange Facts About Diane Arbus

—>She grew up—echoing the upbringing of Siddhartha Gautama, who became The Buddha—in very privileged, wealthy circumstances, largely protected from the outside world and from the suffering and "otherness" of the poor and unfortunate.

—>She had a sexual affair with her older brother, the poet Howard Nemerov, that lasted from childhood up to her death.

—>Although photography is a male-dominated field generally, there have always been women among the greatest of its practitioners. Arbus's two most significant teachers were women—Berenice Abbott, the rescuer of Eugene Atget and a major photographer in her own right, and Lisette Model, who is her most identifiable influence and who encouraged her to quit commercial work and devote herself to her art, which Diane eventually did abruptly and decisively.

—>She craved fame, and in her lifetime felt she never achieved or was rewarded for it. Not a little ironically, she immediately became world famous following her death and has been among the most famous photographers in the medium's history ever since.

—>An unusually talented and original painter, she excited great interest in her talent for painting while still very young, but was unhappy with her ability to realize her vision and definitively turned her back on painting while still in her teens. (Bill Jay: "True, there are photographers who are failed artists, but so are most artists.") Today, only a single one of her paintings—a surreal conceptual portrait of Allan Arbus, whom she met at 14 and married at 18—survives. The painting is owned by Ellen and Richard Sandor, who would be worth a post by themselves.

—>A small inscribed and signed print of "Identical Twins, Roselle, NJ" given by Arbus as a courtesy to the family of Colleen and Cathleen Wade, who were seven at the time she took their portrait, is referred to by the twins' father as "their 401k," because the print, with its sterling provenance, is now worth some undefined but doubtless huge sum of money. The little boy in Central Park with the toy hand grenade was not so lucky.

—>Arbus planned her suicide and seemed to desire it as if it were a kind of fulfillment. Even when she was young, she apparently felt that there was some sort of mysterious spiritual culmination in death. It brings to mind a quote attributed to Carl Jung: "Don't rush to help those who haven't asked you to, because not everyone who is drowning needs a hand; some want to drown." Her obituary did not appear in the New York Times until 2018, as part of the newspaper's "Overlooked" series.

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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Diane Arbus Centennial

Diane Arbus by Allan Arbus

Today is the 100th anniversary of the birth of Diane Arbus, one of the most popular art photographers in history.

Her 1972 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art is to this day the most popular such exhibition ever at that museum. Her monograph is one of the medium's all-time best sellers. Since it appeared in 1972 it has never been out of print.

(The picture above was taken in 1949 as a film test by her husband Allan Arbus, who later played the part of Dr. Sidney Freedman on the 1970s television show "M*A*S*H.")

There are many books about her, including biographies by Patricia Bosworth (1984) and Arthur Lubow (2016).

Diane Arbus (by the way, the name is pronounced "dee-ANN") died by suicide on July 26, 1971, at the age of 48.

Mike
(Thanks to Anton Wilhelm Stolzing)

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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Kenneth Tanaka: "Diane Arbus's work leaves few on the fence; you're either strangely attracted to it or you find it repulsive and exploitative. And that, plus a rich and brief personal history, is precisely what's helped to keep her work in the public eye for so long. Arbus's 1972 retrospective show at MoMA was indeed extremely popular. (Although I think that Steichen's 'Family of Man' might have been the most popular show, at least worldwide, with over 9 million visitors. [Diane's was the most popular single-artist retrospective.—Ed.]) But many of those who I know attended recall it as more of an attraction to the bizarre rather than to the art, per se. Last fall (2022) David Zwirner and Jeffrey Fraenkel, two of the most influential art/photo dealers in the world and representatives of Arbus's works, staged a re-creation of Arbus's 1972 MoMA retrospective. Quite a rare recreation of a photo show."

More Questions and Answers

[Continued from the previous post.... This is complete now, or as complete as it's going to get. Thanks to everyone for all the questions!   —Mike]

Kye Wood: "WOW! What an engaged and thought provoking comments section—especially featured comments. Mike, you clearly have some very high-IQ creative people following your blog."

Mike replies: Kye's comment isn't a question, but man, do I agree. It's what keeps me coming back.

Beau Camel: "This might sound like a silly question, but it has been nagging at me for the many years in which I have been interested in photography: what makes a photograph 'good'? What is it about certain photographs that people who see them will say, 'that's really interesting' or 'that's really good.' Are there certain characteristics a photograph must have to meet that standard? Surprise? Beauty (whatever that is)? Singularity? Timing, either for the subject or for the viewing? Appealing composition? A combination of things? I don't think it's necessarily 'in the eye of the beholder' because there seems to be a consensus around examples generally deemed 'good' or 'great.'"

Mike replies: Pretty early on in my career I wrote a long article on just this topic, one I put a lot of thought, time, and effort into, but I'm really not sure how I would go about finding it now. I think I would find that my views have changed or evolved on the topic now. Still, it would be a good place to start. I'll make an effort to see if I can find it and post it here.

Doug Anderson: "When we travel we usually stay at a Hampton Inn, a part of the Hilton chain. A consistent element of the decorating scheme is black-and-white photographs, and they fascinate me. They are of a variety of subjects and in a variety of sizes but all of them are square format. And they were all clearly taken with that format in mind. I can not mentally crop any of them without spoiling the composition.

"Over the years my own photography has switched back and forth between 1:1 square format and 3:2 full frame 35mm format. And this is reflected in the assortment of my photographs hanging on our walls. I like the photographs individually but I have never liked the appearance of the mixed format groups. Do you think this is just a personal problem, or is there a more general issue with mixing the formats of photographs in groups (or books for that matter)?"

Rob Griffin: "What are your thoughts about print proportions? Do you feel photographic prints need to stick to standard aspect ratios such as 4x5, 2x3, 5x7, 1x1, or even 16x9? Do you have any feelings, good or bad, about square photographs?"

Mike replies: The three topics that seem to have emerged as loci of interest in this "thread" are format/proportion (i.e., aspect ratio), street photography, and museum/gallery shows and other ways of looking at original photography. I'll try to keep these in mind.

For me personally, I think either consistency or "consistent dissonance" in aspect ratio are important, because it's not something you want to call attention to in displaying work—it can be a distraction, like a written piece with a lot of distracting typos or magazine design that tries too hard to be edgy. Part of creativity is calling attention to what deserves attention and not distracting people with what doesn't.

With my Sigma fp-Monochrome, I have it set to 4:3, but of course it still records 3:2, and I find that there are a few shots that just work better at 3:2. Here's a shot that I shoehorned into 4:3 when the subject really demands a little more air (especially on the left); here's a shot that just worked better at 3:2 and so I presented it that way.

This is one of several reasons why I used to like to print 35mm to the blackline—because it made all the work consistent across multiple pictures (and it forced me to compose in-camera rather than after the fact, which improves your seeing). But this is the kind of nuts-and-bolts problem that you work on in art school.

As for square photographs, I think they're a little harder to compose consistently, because the aspect ratio is inherently less dynamic. But some people are good at it (Fay Godwin and Mary Ellen Mark come to mind), and no, I don't have anything against square pictures. In my past life as an editor I presented pictures that were square and presented as diamond-shaped, that is, as if tipped up to balance on one corner, and Sam Wang's circular pictures which I thought were beautiful. Linda Connor did some Asian landscapes that mimicked antique scrolls in being long, skinny verticals, and they worked nicely. Any format can work if the artist is good enough at making it work.

Not THAT Ross Cameron: "Q for Mike. To raise something that was touched on a while back, are you using colour, ND or polariser filters with your B&W digital photography? And why, regardless? Thanks in advance.

Mike replies: I'm using a dark yellow filter outdoors with the Sigma fp-Monochrome. I'm not sure it makes much difference—certainly not as much as filters make with B&W film—but I'm striving for a certain tonal range and I think it helps me to get there, at least a little bit. I haven't noticed much difference at all in artificial light, and I can use the extra sensitivity in low light, so I sometimes remove the filter shooting indoors or in low light. I presume and hope that clarity on this issue will be one of the things that will shake out as I do more work with my camera and get more familiar with its workflow.

Jeff: "Speaking of Leicas, do you still plan to assess the M Monochrom that was loaned?"

Mike replies: The owner is being remarkably patient with me, which I appreciate on top of his generosity. I've been a little scared of trying it because I fear demoralizing myself if it turns out to have an edge over the Sigma fp-M. But yes, I will get around to trying it and writing about it when spring springs up.

Terry Burnes: "I do think Kirk's questions about galleries (and perhaps museums) is a good one. I feel I've learned a lot by viewing the work of others. Where can I go to see reliably good photography? Or where can I get information about where it is on display? I've figured out a few spots. We go to Tucson every year and always visit the Center for Creative Photography at the U of A. And also the Etherton Gallery. When in Yosemite, always the Ansel Adams Gallery. The Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego. Perhaps an occasional feature of TOP could be you and readers letting everyone who visits TOP know about worthwhile gallery and museum exhibitions of photography. For instance, there is an Ansel Adams exhibit coming up at the DeYoung Museum in San Francisco, April into July, that seems to take a somewhat different approach."

Mike replies: This has been a recurrent idea over many years, but it's far beyond my resources. I don't even get to all the shows at the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, the major museum closest to me. If I won the lottery, however, I'd immediately do two very quirky things with the money: 1. build and staff a vast greenhouse so I could eat super-fresh fruits and veggies year-round, and 2. travel around the country and perhaps the world going to museum shows (art and photography both). One of my mother's friends did that with opera—her golden-years boyfriend is also passionate about opera, and the two of them travel the world going to operas.

So, the answer for your question is: as soon as I win the lottery, TOP will provide a comprehensive list of photography venues around the world, information about all the shows on offer at those places, and exhibition reviews, some of which will be written by me. So as soon as that happens....

Kenneth Tanaka replies to Terry (partial comment): "One of the best sources of very current news of photography exhibitions, collections, and curation moves is Photograph Magazine. It features an informative newsletter emailed weekly with lots of doin’s."

Terry replies: "Thank you so much to Kenneth Tanaka for the tip about Photograph Magazine. Just what I was looking for. I'll be checking this in advance of travel to see what photography exhibitions we might take in along the way. And it is clear that in the areas of the West we visit most, S.F., L.A., Tucson and New Mexico have lots of opportunities to see photography. I was just in and missed a lot!"

Robert Roaldi: "Why are photos of ordinary objects or places in our environment more interesting in photographs than in real life?"

Mike replies: That's a very deep question. The very short answer is that I think it releases an impression of the object into the "free world" of timelessness as discussed by Vladimir Nabokov in Speak, Memory.

Jon Erickson: "As a writer and a photographer, are there similarities in how you compose a written work and how you compose a picture?"

Mike replies: The thought has never occurred to me and I think not, although I have always liked words coupled with pictures—anything from John Szarkowski's mini-essays in Looking at Photographs to the captions I like to write to go with pictures on Flickr.

Mike Peters: "Hi Mike, I'd love to hear your thoughts on the difference between taking photographs of a variety of subjects, and creating a body of work over one's lifetime that hangs together both visually and thematically by making photographs with intention. Also, the idea of photographs being original in this time of photography ubiquity seems like an idea whose time has past. It seems to me that making photographs that are authentic to who one knows themself to be is much more important these days. And of course, over a lifetime, that knowledge will evolve and change. What are your thoughts on these subjects, or are they completely intertwined?"

Mike replies: Well, it would take an awful lot to truly unpack all that. I could argue that my three years of college-level art school only partially answered those questions (and of course didn't take into account possible recent changes).

Bearing in mind that I don't know much about how photography is taught in art schools now—assuming there is any general commonality at all between them—I'd suggest that it might be most productive to think in terms of the traditional "body of work." As I understand it, a body of work might be anything from a brief albeit possibly intense project to a lifetime spent doing work that is virtually all thematically, technically, and/or visually related. An example of the first might be a photojournalist on a specific assignment overseas, to a fashion photographer reinventing herself by working out a distinctive style, to a hobbyist working on a Blurb book about the vanishing post-and-beam barns of Pennsylvania; examples of the latter might be the work of Edward Weston, say, or Michael Kenna. Thinking in terms of bodies of work can give us the benefits of both discipline and direction on the one hand, and freedom on the other.

As for whether the idea of originality is no longer meaningful, I don't think that will ever truly be the case. It might be that photography itself will not follow, in the future, the conceptual patterns that we developed for it in its first hundred and sixty years, but in any expressive medium, people will find ways to express themselves.  

David Aiken: "I noticed that there were a lot of comments which mentioned street photography so I did a count. Twenty-four comments so far and five mentions of street photography. Those responses asked questions about your thoughts on street photography, whether YouTuber street photographers using film Leica M's with 28mm lenses were foretelling the end of street photography, and composition.

"Your only comment, to Pete Komar, was brief but hinted at some interesting thoughts on what makes a good street photography and why the genre is so easy to work in and so difficult to do well. How about a longer, considered post about street photography including on its beginnings and ongoing artistic development, what makes a good street photography, and where you think it may be heading. Personally I think street photography is alive and well. I think the best work being done today is just as good as the best work done at any time during the history of street photography and I think there's more of it being done than at any earlier time.

"If as you and Alex Webb both say, street photography is 99.9% failure, a view I have no reason to doubt, then given that a lot more street photographs are being taken today than at any other time in the history of street photography there are definitely going to be more great street photographs being taken but we have to work our way through a lot more poor results to find those great results. The standard only seems to be higher in prior decades because it's easier to come across the great photos from those periods than it is to come across the bulk of the poorer ones, time does a great job of culling what we can see. It just hadn't had a chance to press the Delete button for 99.9 % of the photos being taken today but it will eventually get there."

Mike replies: Several people have suggested longer, more thoughtful posts about some of the issues and questions raised over the past few days, and I'm going to keep that in mind.

Bear: "Why don’t you do 'Ask Mike' as a regular feature?"

Mike replies: I could, I guess. Here are a few reasons why not: 1.) it's difficult. Many of the questions aren't simple, they're foundational. They require a lot of thought even just to construct answers that are responsive and not simply dismissive or trivial. 2.) I don't think I know all the answers. 3.) the format doesn't really allow each individual question or topic to "breathe"; it doesn't allow for a focused discussion either by me or by commenters. This thread has been entertaining and interesting (for me anyway), but we didn't really go into depth on anything.

But we will do it again sometime. Thanks again to all!

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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Ask Mike

Got any photography questions? You'll be helping me out.

I can only answer the ones that I know off the top of my head. As I said to a reader once who had an insistent question, if one of us has to go do research, I don't see why it shouldn't be you.

I'm not the one to ask about technical niceties, because my interest, and hence my knowledge, is limited*. (The older I get, the less I think technique matters in photographs. You need what you need, and as long as you're not a professional doing work on assignment, you won't need much. Henri Cartier-Bresson said it took him three days to master his first Leica, and when Peter Turnley made the switch from film to digital he hired an expert to teach him, and they worked intensively for three days, and that was that—done, back to work.) But I'm pretty good with content, process, method, artmaking issues, motivation, direction, aesthetics, accomplishment, and so forth—mostly from the creator side, not from the perspective of the appraising art critic looking on from outside. I've always been on the side of photographers. I guess if you read here much at all you'll be broadly familiar with my strengths and weaknesses**.

I'm asking because I've got an empty tank this morning when it comes to ideas of photography-related things to write about. If you can think of a question you'll be helping me!

Mike

*And getting more so all the time. When he was in his retirement, I asked Rudolph Kingslake to write about optics and lenses for the photo magazine I edited. He had studied under the great Conrady at Imperial College London and was the former Head of the Optical Design Department at Eastman Kodak, the founder of the Institute of Applied Optics at the University of Rochester, and the author of six books on optics and lenses. His response was, "I don't know anything any more." I couldn't understand that then, but now I'm beginning to get it.

**Speaking of weaknesses, Robert Roaldi's joke: "A retired guy decided to get a part-time job for some extra cash. At the interview with the much younger manager, the interviewer asked the old guy what he considered to be his greatest weakness. The old fella said 'My honesty.' Young manager says, 'That's interesting, I never thought honesty could be a weakness.' Old guy said, 'I don't give a damn what you think.'"

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:

PaulW: "Would you ever consider writing a book on B&W photograhy? I love B&W photography, monochromatic really, but I've never become good at it. I've always felt like I stumble through the process haphazardly, and any success I have leans toward luck more than knowledge or skill. I'm competent with photographic technologies, lighting, composition, and I can even make a good color photo, but B&W really trips me up. With your years of experience I can't imagine you not having some great pearls of wisdom to pass on to others. You've done this in many of your posts here on TOP, but I'd love to see all that great knowledge put into one place."

Mike replies: Film or digital? Or both?

Actually the photography book I'd like to write would be called "Classic 35mm Photography" (or that could be the subtitle), and there would be two parts: one volume of history, how-to, and the technical underpinnings, and the second volume a selection of 60 or 80 pictures (maybe two or three of them mine) with commentary. Now would be a good moment for it, what with the renaissance of interest in old film cameras.

The trouble with books is that they require intensely front-loaded effort. Imagine promising to work for a new employer for a whole year, or two, at which time he will decided if, and how much, he will pay you. And your chances are maybe one in four that you will achieve minimum wage for the effort expended. You can see the problem. A body's gotta eat. People with more energy or more resources can take the risk; as a recovering chronic depressive (it's much better now than in the past, however), my energy has generally been rather on the low side.

William Giokas: "What would be a good travel camera? I could take my Leica and a 35mm lens to keep things simple. But, I would probably miss a zoom lens."

Mike replies: I once asked Ansel Adams what kind of camera he used, and he replied, "the biggest one I can carry!" Which was his standard answer. So the answer to your question comes down to, what's the biggest one you will carry?

My suggestion therefore has three tiers:

Small: IF (big if, get it?) you are only going to look at the pictures on your phone, tablet, or laptop, or post them on social media, a good late-model smartphone. The limitation of course is quality when zoomed in, and quality and maximum print size when printed.

Medium: Your choice of a good small, light Micro 4/3 body with one of the two Panasonic 12–60mm lenses on it. The smaller one is very good; the Leica-branded one is faster and a little better, but heavier. My feeling is that you don't want to be changing lenses on your carry-around camera when photographing is not your #1 priority, and having that extra reach out to 120mm-equivalent will be a crucial benefit of carrying a zoom.

Big: IF you want to make prints, ever, a Fuji X-T5 and you decide on the lens(es). Our friend Dennis Mook posted his thoughts about that paragon of camera brilliance (still my top pick as the most recommendable camera across all brands and models) at The Wandering Lensman. Alternately, for maximum capability and versatility in the smallest package, the OM System OM-1 with the 12–100mm lens as your only lens (a "nested" 20mm pancake is nice to have to make the camera lighter and smaller when you need that, say, when you're going out to dinner or traveling through airports).

Peter Komar: "Part question, mostly requesting your opinion on, so-called street photography and mostly film shooters. My view and opinion is that most of what I see on YouTube is that it’s all mostly very amateurish. Yes there are/were some real artists, the Turnley brothers, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Vivian Maier. My gosh I wish the current street photographers would just buy their books or view the body of great images the above three produced (in the case of the Turnley brothers they are still going strong). Well, I guess this turned into a rant but I would like to hear your opinion on our current situation where anybody shooting film has a YouTube channel and label themselves as a street photographer. Yes there are some good ones out there but mostly the rest are just boring."

Mike replies: Street photography is one of the easiest genres to work in and one of the most difficult to do well. So you just need to remember that most people doing it will just not have much actual aptitude for it, or won't have the time or dedication to do enough of it to yield consistently good results (it's very low yield per hour put in and number of shots taken), or won't have the discrimination and taste to know which of their own pictures are really great and which are average, or mediocre, or that just show them "playing the same old games" (we all have our tricks that we play, some of which become notorious as clichés among the self-appointed critics on the Internet). And there's close to zero market for it, so it's sort of like poetry in small literary and prestigious general-interest magazines: highly competitive but for no real reason.

It's an area in which gatekeepers and shared group experience would be very helpful. And those two things are sorely lacking, if not missing altogether, on the wilds of the Internet. So I'd be inclined to seek out websites dedicated to street photography, or cooperatives, or individual artists who post new work on websites or Instagram.

If the old rule is that 95% of everything is crap, then 99.9% of street photography is crap, but the remaining .1% is still a hell of a big heap of work and it's all out there. You just have to work to find it.

robert e: "How do you figure out what to charge for one of your prints? (Or, for that matter, a digital image?) You may have covered this before, in which case a link would be appreciated, assuming that finding the link doesn't fall under 'research.' ;-) "

Mike replies: Wish I knew. I think before you charge for prints you make a commitment to be the kind of photographer who sells prints. Just charging for a random print now and then is bound to be awkward.

When I was at the Corcoran, we were ostensibly being trained to be art photographers, i.e., doing self-directed creative/expressive work, having shows of framed prints occasionally in which prints were for sale, trying to get into juried shows and the like, trying to get gallery representation, getting published. Very distinct from professional photography, photojournalism, or hobby photography. If you want to know what an art photographer does, just go to the website of a successful one and look at his/her c.v., and you'll see the activities they target.

At that time, we were told that $350 (and this was in the mid-'80s) was acceptable for a student print, but once we graduated we should aim for $750 or so, $650 at minimum. But $650 in 1985 when I graduated from the Corcoran is $1,800 now, and I don't think I've ever gotten that much for one of my prints from that day to this. Of course, I never really played the game, so that probably makes sense.

A few things I think I do know: 1.) the less you charge, the more buyers will complain and push back; 2.) if you charge a lot, your print quality and presentation better be impeccable; and 3.) becoming a salable art photographer takes every bit as much marketing skill, savvy, and effort as being a working professional competing for jobs. Just a different kind is all.

Mike Plews: "How do I get a digital inkjet print that is as beautiful as the ones I used to get from Portriga Rapid back in the day? I can get nice prints from my printer but not that nice. Something is just missing."

Mike replies: Forget digital! How do you get a B&W film negative print on fiber-base gelatin silver paper today that's as beautiful as the ones we used to get from the old Portriga Rapid?!

Bob Keefer: "As a fellow chronic depressive, I'd be interested in your strategies for staying engaged with a photographic project—or with photography generally. I'm not looking for ways to deal with depression; over the years I've learned to keep it under control, mostly, with diet and exercise and the seasonal use of a happy light in the morning. I'm interested in what to do when your photography is in demand—you can get your work shown in a gallery or publication—and yet you're struggling for that next idea, wanting to find something that doesn't feel endlessly repetitive and that isn't boring to create. Travel helps, as does the occasional new lens, but you can sink a lot of money in that kind of diversion without getting much in return. Any ideas for curing photographic ennui?"

Mike replies: Just work. And you work by playing. Go out and do. Do something stupid or silly. Follow your id. Let the work come to you. But get out there with the camera in your hands.

Mark L. Power told me once that when his students complained, he used to sympathize, help them analyze, hold their hands, commiserate, soothe, etc. But finally he realized that they only complained when they weren't working. Go out and look, and look some more. Get the camera in your hands and start messing with it. If nothing works today, just shrug and try something else tomorrow. Shoot till you get one that turns you on and see if you can figure out a way to string another one to that one. Or set some silly goal that takes you places—nineteen pictures of feet in 19 days; ten good pictures that include clock faces; walk up and ask a stranger if you can make a portrait of them until you get 50 rejections. Find the highest point you can get to in five towns and keep going back till something happens. Anything can work. Work is what it takes. Just go work.

Aakin: "What are your thoughts on shooting in JPEG?"

Mike replies: Well, Bruce Fraser's Camera Raw was one of the turning points of photography in digital for me, and I've shot in raw ever since, but the times are very different now. In-camera conversions are excellent now, cameras no longer have problems with white balance, and high-resolution sensors have much better dynamic range. JPEGs from good cameras today are much more correctable in post, too. Raw can be better for some styles of photography, and can offer more flexibility, especially if you've mastered a sophisticated editor like Photoshop or Capture One. But JPEGs look great now, can be simpler to work with, and can streamline your workflow. I'd say go for it, and if it works for you, don't give it another thought.

The thing that will tell you if you need to do something differently are the pictures themselves. If you're getting what you want, then don't change. If you're coming away dissatisfied too often, then do something differently. There are no rote rules.

Kirk: "If you had ample funds, ample time and access to any gear you wanted where in the United States would you like to go explore? What kind of project would you make of it? How would you produce it? Where and how would you show it to an audience? Do you see the possibility for a resurgence of bricks and mortar photogrpahic galleries? If you had to choose between being out photographing your passion or spending the time in the office printing the results of past passions which would you choose? How would you choose? Given we only have so much time in front of us would you consider the idea of legacy (printing, arranging, showing) or rather, embrace the fun of the process of shooting? Which is more important to an artist, having a good and ample social media presence or chasing after publication in a book which might reach several thousand people? Is the black and white print still the gold standard in an age in which people can reach thousands and thousands of viewers using good social media platforms and the skills needed to attract audiences? Do we do ourselves a disservice as artists in constantly mining the past as opposed to embracing the future of our photographic craft? Another travel and value question: What are the 10 best places in the USA to see great photography in gallery environments? Can you speak to their individual attributes? What do you think the impact of images made solely through 'text to image' Artificial Intelligence will have on the market for collectible photography and/or commercial photography? How can we of a certain generation keep up with progress/changes in the art of photography (styles, content, craft) without defaulting to just mining the legends from a time when barriers to entry made defining 'stars' easier? What do you think of the current styles of street photography? It seems so many younger practitioners are copying each other by using film Leica M cameras and 28mm lenses. Snapping semi-candid opportunities and displaying online in the same styles. Is this the death knell of street photography? What would you like to see more of in this genre? Less of? Do photographers retire? Do artists retire? Why is there a resurgence of film based photography right now? Are there cultural trends that would explain this? Why are Americans so 'home centric' in their photographic interests? Should we be more open to international trends and styles instead of endlessly worshipping American documentary and landscape photography from the far past? How often do you get to New York City, Boston, Miami, San Francisco or Santa Fe to visit galleries? Of those galleries you visit which are your favorites? Recommendations for new shows of new photographic works? Given that publishers are disinterested in funding new books by artists, preferring to have artist help with both funding and marketing of books amid the skyrocketing prices for production do you see a time when photo books by any other than proven money makers like Annie Leibovitz just die out and photo books cease to become a venue for up and coming photographers? How will that affect future photo artists? Why do you disregard Leicas with such prejudice? So many of the cameras are so good and can still be had used for affordable prices. I'm curious to know what puts you off besides the 'idea' of price. Have you visited the Humanities Research Center at UT Austin? The Gernsheim Collection of Photograph, the recent acquisition of Elliott Erwitt's work and the Magnum Collection on loan from Michael Dell would seem to make it a top destination for critics, collectors and pundits on the subject. Do you have plans for a visit? Do you need a place to stay?  :-)  "

Mike replies: Wow. I can't top that, Kirk. My general answer, quoting David Vestal's mentor Ralph Steiner, is: "In Spite of Everything, Yes!" (It was the title of one of his books of photographs.)

(P.S. I am not prejudiced against Leicas. I've owned or shot extensively with a number of them over the years. More than I've owned Canons, Minoltas, Hasselblads, or several other brands.)

Open Mike: The Last of the Old Americans

Here's an exercise to try: don't complain at all for a whole week. I learned this from a man who never complained, Loyle Egger. He was a WWII veteran whose father, Fred, served in the armed forces for every minute of both WWI and WWII—not just of the US involvement, but the entire time hostilities were going on, anywhere.

If you complained, Loyle would let you go on for a while and then say, "aw, too bad!" As if to say, stop whining. I always figured it was probably something he heard a lot from Fred.

It's not that Loyle was perfect. He was cheerful, but with an edge—he'd argue with you, and he could be critical, and sometimes he would needle you until you wanted to strangle him. But he almost never complained.

One time he showed up for pool with a big bandage on his forearm. When we asked what happened, he said he was taking a drink to one of his guests, and while he was stepping over the sleeping dog, the dog decided to get up. "And I had to take the fall on my left arm because I was holding the drink in my right. So I hurt my arm. But I didn't spill a drop!"

I said, "Loyle, you're 89. At what age does it start to be prudent to walk around the dog?" He just shrugged and made a dismissive noise. Later, our friend Jerry said to me, "He's never going to walk around the dog. He just thinks he can do everything like he always did. That's the attitude that got him to 89 in the first place."

Sleeping in the garage
Here's my favorite Loyle story. Before he moved to his daughter's house in his dotage, he had some ten acres, give or take, parts of which were grassland, wetland, or woods. A key point to the story is that he had very few near neighbors—and they weren't very near. A large chunk of the land was lawn, and until fairly recently he still mowed his own grass himself with his John Deere. Anyway, one day, after finishing, he backed the John Deere into the garage as usual, but, as he was getting off, he fell backwards. He ended up lying awkwardly on his back on the concrete, jammed between the wall and the mower, with his legs awkwardly tangled up in the tractor. He tried to extricate himself but couldn't. So he lay there for a while. "I thought, well, I can't get up. So, what can I do?" he told me.

He decided the answer was...to scream. So he started screaming for help at the top of his lungs. Within just a few minutes he realized he wasn't going to be able to keep that up for very long, so he revised the plan. He would scream for help every fifteen minutes, in two stages. Scream for a minute or two, pause, then repeat. The idea was that people would hear him the first time, and then, while they were listening more intently, they'd zero in on the second round.

So he kept this up for three or four cycles. At that point there happened to be some workers across the road retrieving a load of yard waste for pretty much the only neighboring house within earshot. They weren't regular workers, weren't normally there, and were only there that day for a short time. But the plan worked: they heard Loyle screaming for help, went in the direction of the noise to investigate, heard the second set of screams, and eventually located Loyle and helped him out of his predicament.

"So everything worked out fine!" Loyle said cheerfully.

"Well, not really!" I retorted.

"What do you mean?"

"What would you have done if those people hadn't just happened to be there at that moment?"

"I guess I would have spent the night in the garage," he admitted. "But I would have been all right. My daughter Marsha calls me in the middle of every morning to check if I'm all right. If she didn't get an answer, she would have come over. Marsha would have found me. I wasn't in any danger."

"But Loyle, you would have had to spend the whole night on your back on the garage floor! It's Fall. It gets cold at night. What about dinner? What if you had to pee?"

"Oh, I would have been all right," he said, then added, in a quiet, rather annoyed tone, "I hope would have slept at least part of the night." You're 89, and you occasionally sleep on your back in the garage trapped behind the lawnmower. No big deal.

A good ending
I have a snapshot of Loyle in extreme old age that I might show you someday. But here's the picture I have of Loyle in my mind. A group of us used to play pool at the Moose Club. One day several years ago, before COVID, it was raining when we were leaving the Moose. I had parked on the far side of the parking lot, and for some reason was just sitting there in the car—maybe I was looking at my phone, or just thinking, I don't know. Anyway, I watched Loyle and his good friend Norm Wilson come out of the Moose. They were both lean but frail—Norm is a retired Xerox executive, as far as I know, a few years Loyle's senior (he's 98 now, despite the fact that he gets pneumonia every winter), and they're both widowers. Both could still get around pretty well at that point, although they might not have beaten the tortoise to the finish line. Well, Loyle was walking Norm to his car, shielding him with his umbrella. Loyle had his hand protectively on Norm's shoulder, and they were walking side by side, two old friends. I don't think they knew I was there. They walked into and out of the perfect composition—the right angle, the right distance, wonderful expressions, the protective gesture, the umbrella, the gray day, one guy protecting the other from the rain. I didn't have my camera with me. But I can see the picture in my mind's eye still. I could reconstruct it pretty precisely with stand-ins. I figure the two of them will be the last of the WWII generation that I know, anyway.

Loyle died last October, and he had a good death. The two of us and our friend Dan played pool just ten days before he died, at the bowling alley, with him ratcheting around the table using his walker, and at lunch he re-told a few of his favorite WWII stories that we had heard many times before. He died after an illness of just a few days, during which he was able to call some old friends, including Norm, to tell them he would never be seeing them again.

In my observation—I saw him every week for the last five years of his life, more or less—Loyle had about a three-year decline, soldiered through his extreme dotage stoically (with much help from Marsha and his granddaughter Becky and other family members, I'm sure), and expired at the end of a very short hospital stay. We should all be so lucky.

And here's the coda to the above: when I told the story of the fall behind the John Deere to his daughter Marsha, on a phone call just this past week, she had never heard it before! He never even told her. It would have been too much like complaining, I suppose. That was Loyle.

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:

Tom Duffy: "The story reminds me of my sainted mother, God rest her soul. At 87 we insisted she use a medical alert pendant. She'd been resistant because of the monthly fee, despite money not being a concern.

"A week later I got a call, in the middle of the night, from the servicing company, saying the pendant had been activated. I drove to her apartment and opened the door for the police who had also been notified. We found my mother lying in the bathtub unable to extricate herself. After we got her back to bed I told her I was glad she had got the pendant. She insisted she didn't need it. 'Mom, you were stuck in the bathtub and couldn't get out.' 'I was perfectly prepared to spend the night in the tub!'

"I guess living through the Depression and World War II gives you some perspective."

darlene: "Your words weave worlds of wonderment, Mike. I feel like I got to know Loyle through your memories and storytelling."

Moose: "'Never explain, never complain!' I explain all too often, I suspect. I very seldom complain. I can't claim the apparent perfection of your late friend, but I'm pretty darn good. One benefit is that, when one eschews complaining, it seems that the number of things worth complaint diminish, rather dramatically."

Richard Nugent: "I am reminded of a story about my mother-in-law, Mary, who immigrated to the US from Ireland as a teenager. A widow in her mid-eighties living alone, she was very self sufficient, if a bit frail. During a visit I suggested that she might want to put a smoke detector in her home. She demurred, objecting that if it went off in the middle of the night it would “scare the b’jesus out of me.” Will our generation ever be as endearing?"

Hurry Hurry

Don't read anything further: go here, and check it out.

Our friend Paula is releasing some more of the many rare treasures from Lodima's storerooms in Pennsylvania. Once these are gone they are gone gone, so don't wait till tomorrow.

Just a hot tip from your friendly neighborhood photobook fan!

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:

Craig: "I bought that whole series back around the time the 14th and final volume was added. Wonderful books! I actually ordered the first 13 (the 14th hadn't been announced yet) along with the Brett Weston books, and Michael Smith actually called me on the phone to ask if I wanted to add the 14th volume. I said yes. I wish he were still with us."

'This Is Genius' (The Motorized Self-Leveling Tripod Has Arrived)

I'm a member of "Generation Jones," born 1954–65. If "the world we expect is the one we're born into," then lots has changed. They say that older people aren't entirely comfortable with new technology, and that might also be what's going on here. But then, a lot of new technology seems gratuitous to me, like we're doing things just because we can.

here's a new product that I could almost not be less interested in: Theta, the self-leveling tripod from Benro. You attach a battery to it, and it levels itself. This is supposed to...what, save time? Will it really make life easier if I now have to manage the charging of batteries for the tripod? That seems like a much worse headache than simply loosening a collar and dropping a leg. I have enough trouble managing the batteries for the camera, not to mention the other multitude of things I have to manage batteries for. I have a battery-charging station in my house! The last thing I need is to transform another sturdy mechanical device that I can control into something that has to "work" and can break. My oldest tripod, that I got when I was 22 (that's been a while), is still out in the garage, considerably the worse for wear, but it still works fine.

On the other hand, my now-ancient rule as a reviewer was: never judge until you try it for yourself. And I haven't tried this for myself. So I'll reserve the right to change my mind, as well as the right to be shown I'm wrong. 

Generally, though, I don't like it when technology tries to serve me like a servant, to make my life more luxurious or pampered—spoil me by doing things for me that I can do perfectly well by myself. I don't need the rearview mirror to dim automatically—I'm actually capable of flipping the little switch to dim it when I want it dimmed. I don't need a "Tire Pressure Management System" (one of the persistent trouble spots on my otherwise pretty reliable car)—a pressure gauge and the air hose at the gas station is a system I never even thought about for many decades. As for cameras, I want cameras to stop doing for me things I previously did perfectly well for myself. Only Leica and Apple seem to try to simplify things without oversimplifying them. I use Apple products and Leica is too rich for my blood, but they're two companies with the right approach. When the spokesman says, "Theta is not only a tripod, but is also a smart console. Theta has three electronic ports which can connect to dedicated modules to expand its functionality." Save me, please.

It doesn't matter if I give a negative reaction. Theta has reached ten times its original $50,000 goal on Kickstarter with 43 days remaining, which means that a lot of people have put their money behind their interest. So clearly my opinion won't affect the project.

By the way—this is an aside—I don't think older people are resistant to new technology. I'm just as capable of getting excited about something that's cutting-edge as anyone else. When my stepfather tried to step away from his longtime position on the Harvard Graduate Admissions Committee, he was told he was still needed because the older committee members were the ones who were willing to take a flier on unconventional candidates, like the 20-year street cop who only had a BA when most of the candidates had a Masters. He told me the younger professors were the ones who tended to be hidebound and rule-bound and constrained to go "by the book," who were more apt to disqualify candidates for missing resumé points. Rather, I think it's just that we've seen it all before—the constant churn of marketing and the ebb and flow of popularity and neomania, the prestige of the new. People to whom it's fresher think it's more momentous than it is. Whereas I've learned such things are not all that important because "this too shall pass." But I was a big fan of carbon fiber from the first and bought a CF tripod as soon as I could swing it.

This has nothing to do with the Theta, of course. Maybe it will take the world by storm and we'll all soon be using self-leveling tripods. If that happens, I'll follow the old rule and try one.

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:

David Smith: "As I've posted before elsewhere, if I brought another tripod, my wife would kill me with it. This just makes the thing more lethal."

DavidB: "I keep a small level in my camera bag. Simple and effective. I have this model in bright yellow."

David Drake: "O please! People love gadgets. I remember talking with an appliance repair guy when our fridge was on the fritz, and he said to keep our older more basic model as long as we could. The more modern appliances have more electronics which are usually unnecessary. The fancy electronic parts typically cause the problems. What happens when the electronics go wonky and the tripod starts flinging around like a crazed robot? That would be funny to see, unless it was my camera!"

robert e: "Too bad the thing isn't designed to keep my own head on the level. Theta seems squarely aimed (if there's a pun there, it's unintentional) at the solo vlogger—perhaps traveling without a production assistant, and with few camera and tripod skills of their own. Not being a vlogger and having invested way too much time learning a hodgepodge of photo and video skills, I don't feel I'm in a position to judge such a product. But, wow, that tripod seems almost as complicated as a modern DSLR. Maybe they'll get along like birds of a feather."

Jh: "Re 'But then, a lot of new technology seems gratuitous to me, like we're doing things just because we can,' I would modify that slightly: 'But then, a lot of new technology seems gratuitous to me, like we're doing some things just because we can.' As an old person (just turned 77) who has been in technology for a lifetime, and still is actually, I agree that there are plenty of gratuitous uses of technology—but also a lot of very useful ones. You may not like all the new auto tech (tire pressure monitoring systems today are seamless and very useful, early ones were horrible to reset) but modern cars emit less than 0.1% as much pollution as cars from 50 years ago and get twice the mileage. And require tuneups at ~100K miles instead of ~20K. On the downside, the instruction manuals are typically 500+ pages, compared to less than 100 pages then.

"Modern cameras take great photos, cost zip per photo and don't pollute the water like photo chemicals, but can also be overly complex to use if you don't set them up right (or just like to play with all the features.) As someone who has employed plenty of hardware and software engineers, my opinion is that many of the options in products today are simply there because they were easy to add if marketing asked about it—'Well, somebody might want that feature'—not because of demand. Companies tend to focus on their competitors, not their customers, and that leads to having another feature or better spec irrespective of its relevance. Some modern tech is so thoroughly hyped that it's hard to dig out the truth. Electric vehicles are a perfect example. Someone explain to me how a 5,888 pound Mercedes EV costing $125,000 is good for the environment."

Nigel Voak: "I do a lot of architectural photography and this at first glance seems like a wonderful innovation, as getting the camera level with my geared head is always a bit a painstaking task. But on second thoughts it looks like just another bit of electronic gear that might not be precise if the electronic level goes out of tolerance, or a useless innovation, if the tolerance is not too precise. It also relies on the sensor in the camera being perfectly aligned with the base of the camera/ vertical grip. Just too many tolerances, in my opinion. I think I will stick to my 30-year-old Manfrotto tripod, with the junior geared head used with the in camera level. Getting the shot set up is part of the fun."

Bob Rosinsky: "I laughed so hard that I spit out my coffee while reading your commentary on the Theta."

Mike replies: I'm glad. I think I'm at that stage where half my readers think I'm funny, and the other half just think I'm being crotchety.

Terry Letton: "On the other hand, I have a friend who pretty much always produces wonky horizons. Even his paintings have them. I can see a good case for supergluing his camera to one of these tripods."