—> Try not to breathe: The air quality was miserable here this morning, 198 as I write this. It was even worse just east-southeast of here. The air is yellow and shrouded. Not only can we not see the sun, I can only barely make out the other side of the lake half a mile away. There isn't a breath of wind. They're saying the air quality will clear by 1:00 p.m. tomorrow, but they've said something similar several times over the past few days, and that target keeps moving. And yet, a fair wind has to blow sooner or later. So we'll see. Meanwhile, I'm hunkered down in the house, where I plan to stay—I'm only going to let the dog go outside as much as necessary. (For those of you not up on the situation, we are being inundated with smoke from massive out-of-control Canadian wildfires.)
So far this morning I've seen one jogger and one cyclist go by. I think it's fair to say they are either uninformed or bloody-minded, in the British sense of the latter term. The way the British use it, "bloody-minded" means "stubbornly contrary; deliberately difficult; refusing to be dissuaded even when to do so would be sensible."
—> PGA perfidy: My late brother had a hostile next-door neighbor who was inventive in coming up with ways to be unfriendly. One day they came home and found a line of stakes in the lawn. It turned out the neighbor was planning to build a fence. The trouble was that the stakes were two feet over the line into my brother's property. My brother and/or his wife talked to the neighbor and somebody removed the stakes. A few days later the stakes reappeared, even further into my brother's property. His wife angrily pulled them up and threw them back in the neighbor's yard. To solve this impasse, my brother hired a surveyor to mark the legal lot line, and contracted to have his own fence built where it was legally allowed. Did my brother win or lose, though? My thought was that he had paid for the fence his neighbor wanted.
Imagine how the PGA golfers must feel who resisted the urge to sell out to the Saudis. The ones who did decamp for the big payoffs presumably get to keep their money, but they're back in the PGA anyway, as if nothing happened. The ones who made a principled stand and stayed loyal to the PGA lose out. But here's the real rub: imagine if the Saudi Public Investment Fund had approached the PGA proposing to pay a bunch of money and take over half of it. The PGA would probably have told them to take a long walk off a short pier. And yet, with the recent merger that "solves" so many disputes and problems, that's exactly what the Saudis have accomplished. Like my brother's nefarious neighbor. Dirty deed, done. "Sportswashing" indeed.
—> To mark the occasion: I've decided I should try to review the Pentax Monochrome.
—> Who's to say what's normal? A reader with the handle of Lith, who comments infrequently but often rather brilliantly (although most of his longer comments date from 2010 to 2013), said the other day: "43mm is the only True Normal!"
To which I reply, sort of. Forty-three point twenty-seven millimeters (43.27mm) is the diagonal of a rectangle that is precisely 24x36mm. But there are a few problems with that. First of all, not all film gates are precisely 24x36mm and neither are the effective pixel area of all FF sensors. Then we come to the real problem: the idea that the focal length of a "normal" lens should equal the diagonal of the format is only a very rough rule of thumb in the first place—it's not a hard and fast rule by any stretch. And there's no principle behind it. It was merely adopted as a sort of weak partial solution to the fact that formats are so different in shape that any calculation based on the long dimension of the rectangle alone would be distorted. Mainly that was true when comparing the square of many rollfilm cameras to the long rectangle of 35mm, which was thought overlong by some (a problem which mighty Nikon sought to cure in its infancy, briefly making its Nikon One cameras with a film gate that was nominally 24x32mm, although some actually measured 24x31mm. This effort failed because it "broke" the standardization that was already in place at the time). It was how the normal lens for a TLR camera became 80mm—because that's the diagonal of the nominal 6x6cm format, which is actually 56x56mm.
Anyway, the upshot is that making the focal length of the normal lens equal the diagonal of the format is false precision. There's no reason why it has to be that way and no reason why pictures would look better if it does. It's similar to the idea of measuring a person's weight to a tenth of an ounce—your weight fluctuates throughout the day, as you know if you weigh yourself in the morning and the evening.
Upshot: Normal for you is what you say it is. Whatever feels comfortable and natural for you, that's the True Normal.
UPDATE: The air has cleared greatly this evening, to visual appearances, and the AQI is going down, down, down. Zero to 50 is the Good range. Today I've watched it go from 198, to 165, to 151, and now it's 115: "Unhealthy for Sensitive Groups." So I guess the westerly wind has come to our rescue—115 is still not great, though, so I'm staying inside for now, and we'll see what tomorrow brings.
Mike
P.S. I tried to take a picture of it with my color camera—the iPhone—but the darn thing kept correcting the color and hyping up the contrast and clarity, which diminished the accuracy of the picture. Whatever happened to the ideal of a camera as a recording device?
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:
RubyT: "We had that hazy yellow air in the fall of 2020 when the smoke from the East Troublesome fire joined that of the Cameron Peak fire. My digital cameras/phone sought to correct the color. My Instax recorded it accurately. It was not smart enough to argue against yellow air."
Christer Almqvist: "The true focal length for me is 41.6 mm which I round to 40mm. Incidentally, among my five lenses the Sony 40mm ƒ/2.5 is my standard lens. How did I get to 41.61 mm? Well, in Europe, where I live, common printing papers come in the A series sizes where the longest side is equal to the shortest side times the square root of 2. Printing and web site presentation becomes easier and more coherent if all pictures are in that proportion. So the first thing I do when when working on my RAW images is to crop to 24x34mm. If you crop the sensor image to 24x34mm, then the diagonal is 41.6 mm. Voilà.
"By the way, you complained about your iPhone correcting color in way you do not want it to. My complaint about the iPhone is that it cannot do square roots."
James: "26mm-e is the new normal. How? That is what phones have for their main camera. Visually, people are used to it, because so many photos they see are at that focal length."
The smoke from the forest fires in central Quebec passed over us here in Ottawa before heading south to you. Sorry, nothing I could do about that.
Your brother and his wife may have gotten off easy. I saw an item about a guy who put a gun in someone's face because they had partially pulled onto his driveway while making a u-turn. He thought it was a neighbour of his, an odd excuse. This was in Florida, so he's pleading "stand your ground" now because he felt threatened.
Posted by: Robert Roaldi | Wednesday, 07 June 2023 at 07:59 PM
Regarding the "normal" lens. I can recall how I got that "Wow!" Jolt in my brain when I had a traditional wet darkroom. I was taking my twin lens RollieFlex out which had the 75mm Planar lens and shooting from a tripod to get the highest quality. I also threw my Nikon F2 with the 43-86mm zoom over my shoulder just to have a more spontaneous capability in case I wanted a snapshot.
I was working both the roll film and 35mm film making contact sheets when I saw that the 43mm and the 75mm both gave me the same side-to-side coverage when I shot from the same spot with both cameras. Both lenses were the diagonal of the format and thus normal. Of course the Rollei had more height because of the square versus rectangular capture, but the side-to-side coverage was exactly the same.
If you do try out the Pentax, try to borrow a 28mm lens, even if you need to go back to an older manual focus Pentax lens from the LX days. Then you'll be very close to your ideal 40-ish mm.
Posted by: Albert Smith | Wednesday, 07 June 2023 at 08:10 PM
No mention of your new job as mayor of denver..?
Posted by: Yonatan Katznelson | Wednesday, 07 June 2023 at 08:11 PM
"To mark the occasion: I've decided I should try to review the Pentax Monochrome."
Hurrah!
Posted by: Bob Keefer | Wednesday, 07 June 2023 at 08:28 PM
I've had mixed results trying to photograph the wildfire smoke here in the Pacific Northwest, when we had a lot of it a couple years ago. With a decent camera shooting RAW you can depict the effect, but it still helps if a viewer knows what to look for -- "oh, you mean how it's kinda hazy...." I just watched a video put up by Casey Neistat of the scene in NYC and it shows the pallor pretty well.
Posted by: Matt Kallio | Wednesday, 07 June 2023 at 08:34 PM
If you or anyone reading this is interested in the smoke forecast you can visit this page:
https://rapidrefresh.noaa.gov/hrrr/HRRRsmoke/
The HRRR is the High Resolution Rapid Refresh weather forecast model. It runs every hour (i.e., Rapid Refresh) and they have a version that forecasts smoke.
Select the "Vertically Integrated Smoke" row and click on the check mark for Loop.
Be safe and minimize your outdoor exposure until this event is over.
Posted by: DavidB | Wednesday, 07 June 2023 at 09:43 PM
Would have liked to have seen what the DP2's magnificent foveon sensor would have made of that surreal sight...alas.
Posted by: TC | Wednesday, 07 June 2023 at 10:49 PM
About 4 years ago, our area of Southcentral Alaska hit the low to mid 90s F (about 34-35 C ) for nearly two weeks, shattering the all-time record going back nearly 150 years by a remarkable 8 degree F.
As a result, we experienced yet another massive wild fire that yet again unfortunately made the front page of the NY Times. It burned a lot of national wildlife refuge recreational land but luckily did not burn down the nearby communities.
Good thing that the climate's not warming or we'd really be in trouble.
I shot a DNG photo of a boat on Skilak Lake trying to pull out just ahead of the advancing fire front and the bright, uniformly orange sky and water color is accurate. ( I'd include the image except that there's no URL foe it.)
Posted by: Joseph L. Kashi | Thursday, 08 June 2023 at 12:46 AM
Your postscript made me laugh out loud. I so appreciate your observations, I guess because I'm of like mind. From Apple's point of view, the 'corrected' image IS an accurate version of reality; their device is designed to record "Your best life" or something like that, the purpose of their snaps being for sharing on the envy-machine that is Social Media, hence the forced augmentation.
(I don't mean to make this about Apple. I've used Macs since 1986 and loved doing so. On the other hand, I am critical of them. I think history will judge Apple harshly for how their products since the iPhone have enabled our collective surrender to networks that have evolved faster than our ability to control them.
Just this week, I look at the new Apple Vision Pro and tremble. I want the "Minority Report" interface it promises, but fear it's really just moving us one step closer to the "Matrix." Maybe GPT4 has already taken over Apple and the Vision Pro is the result! Just kidding. :-)
Sorry for the tangent.)
Posted by: Jeff Hohner | Thursday, 08 June 2023 at 01:18 AM
If one doesn't like the way that a Beyer sensor handles black and white photography, there are some fine film cameras in all formats that do... Indeed, every good quality film camera ever made!
Among some of the newer ones are, Intrepid, Chroma and Stenopeika, and I am sure there are some that I have missed, or that are in "development" as I write.
Posted by: Stephen Jenner | Thursday, 08 June 2023 at 02:14 AM
I'm still struggling with image quality and now Mike Johnston comes up with air quality. Come on, air is air! Americans are always inventing new ways to worry: perhaps they have too much time on their hands. Just take a big breath!
[Ahhhh...this is a very strange comment! I assume you're joking but I don't get it.... --Mike]
Posted by: ugo bessi | Thursday, 08 June 2023 at 02:17 AM
Lancaster Co. Pa received the worst of the smoke at about 4pm. Lucky for me I smoke so I was breathing through a filter. https://newatlas.com/remarkable-people/brian-shul-death/ Brian Shul died. Blackbird pilot, photographer.
Posted by: John C Longenecker | Thursday, 08 June 2023 at 03:04 AM
If you use the Halide camera app on your phone, you can choose manual white balance, and its processing is a bit more subtle than the standard Camera app’s.
It also lets you shoot Raw, although I find it’s rarely worth the bother.
Posted by: Andy F | Thursday, 08 June 2023 at 04:19 AM
It is strange to use diagonal as different format (you even mentioned 6x6 which is square). I think we should use our eye as the standard.
That is what say one eye cover is the standard normal.
In fact what a normal lens should be the one which if you look into the camera and open both of your eyes said in a rangefinder, the lens should make no distinction between your left and right eye. That should be the standard. Obviously for those does not have this luxury, we have to use similar standard e.g. digital back 4332 might use the "standard lens" of X1D/X2D and see how left and right eyes goes etc. The problem of this approach is that only a few have 1:1 ratio. My non-Leica rangefinder got one.
Posted by: Dennis Ng | Thursday, 08 June 2023 at 05:20 AM
Here in Australia, we unfortunately know what you’re talking about regarding the smoke. Our summer of 2019/2020 was particularly horrible. Unbreathable orange murk instead of air, for days and days. We’ve had a couple of years off, if you can call COVID times a break. I think we’re back to burning next year, oh joy.
One of the many 3rd party iPhone apps with WB controls should capture a little of the horror.
Posted by: Andrew Cox | Thursday, 08 June 2023 at 07:04 AM
Hi, Mike - Pentax makes two 21mm Limited lenses - an f3.2 and f2.4 - about 32mm-e - so at least in the general 35mm-e vicinity. Would love to see you review one of those on the Monochrome!
Posted by: John Squillace | Thursday, 08 June 2023 at 08:01 AM
Yesterday was National Clean Air Day in Canada. I'm not kidding. There was much cause for celebration because our "clean air" managed to smoke those damn Yankees!
Posted by: Grant | Thursday, 08 June 2023 at 08:32 AM
Ah, the old chestnut of the 'standard' lens. It has been written many times that it corresponds to the angle of view of the eye. Complete poppycock of course. The angle of vision extends to about 100 horizontal degrees each side but gets progressively blurry outside of the sharp centre, which is only about 2 degrees. The brain computes the image as we move our eyes around and its extent varies according to the situation. so there is no such thing as a 'normal' lens.
Take care Mike.
Posted by: Bob Johnston | Thursday, 08 June 2023 at 09:14 AM
I had the same difficulty trying to take an iPhone photo of the haze here in New Jersey. There used to be an app called "645 Pro" that put a bunch of DSLR-like controls on the iPhone's screen to give one control over things like white balance and ISO. Also had nice film simulations.
Well, after I typed the above, I went looking once again for a replacement and was pleasantly surprised to find more than one, nicely surveyed in this PetaPixel article: https://petapixel.com/best-iphone-camera-apps/
I decided to try the free Adobe Lightroom app and viola! my phone once again has a manual shooting mode (LR calls it "Professional"). I'd always presumed that LR was just for post-processing and didn't know it had any capture mode. I miss 645Pro's big buttons, but on the other hand it's nice to have a larger view.
Of course, the yellow haze is gone now (not that I'm complaining about clean air to breathe), but I'll keep LR (or one of the other shooting apps) on the phone.
Posted by: robert e | Thursday, 08 June 2023 at 09:46 AM
I think the notion of the diagonal (43mm) being "normal" is that at that focal length there is minimal compression. Whereas 35mm will be a touch wide and 50mm a touch tele in regards to compression.
I could be wrong though, of course.
Posted by: SteveW | Thursday, 08 June 2023 at 10:52 AM
>> No mention of your new job as mayor of denver..?
Go on, tell us more.
Posted by: DB | Thursday, 08 June 2023 at 11:22 AM
Mike,
That’s great you’re going to test the Pentax K3M.
You might want to give your B&H contact a call right away. I understand the next units will ship later this month. But obviously I don’t know if their allocation has been sold already.
Regarding lenses, my suggestion would be to see if B&H can loan you the HD FA21 and HD FA31. Their equivalent focal lengths become 31.5 and 46.5. Both lenses produce images with great detail, nice contrast and pleasant OOF transitions.
Looking forward to your review. And if you need a lovely old Takumar to try, let me know:)
Posted by: Ned Bunnell | Thursday, 08 June 2023 at 11:26 AM
Really looking forward to the Pentax review. If I were rich I would buy it and a few lenses, maybe the 35 macro, the 31 limited, and the 77 limited.
If a mirrorless company like Panasonic or Nikon came out with a Monochrome camera I would definitely buy one, rich or not.
Posted by: John Krumm | Thursday, 08 June 2023 at 12:53 PM
325 here last night.
You’re gonna want that Pentax…
Posted by: John | Thursday, 08 June 2023 at 01:26 PM
Because I have, out of pure silliness, a whole bag of relatively recent Pentax glass, I've been watching for the monochrome. Adorama says its arrival is expected by "12/23."
Posted by: John Camp | Thursday, 08 June 2023 at 01:33 PM
Hi Mike,
Re: “Normal lens”. Not an expert, but I knew some folks...
In the 1980s, Johannes Bockemuehl, son of the founder of JOBO (also named Johannes Bockemuehl - and JOBO being the first two letters of the founder’s name), moved his family temporarily, to Ann Arbor, Michigan to personally manage importing and distribution of the JOBO line in the U.S. market (the feeling was the the U.S distributor at the time put too little effort into the JOBO product line). Bockmeuehl had personal connections in Ann Arbor, and thought it also a good place to bring his immediate family for a couple of years of orientation to American culture. In yet another case of it’s who you know, I was a partner in a small visual design firm who ended up creating their advertising and marketing materials for the North American market. This was also about the time JOBO launched their line of CP rotary processors.
My contact with Johannes was limited, but the story he related was that, in fact, the Leica originated for on-site exposure and processing tests for the nascent motion-picture industry (as I recall, he related that Oskar Barnack and the senior Bockemuehl were acquaintances). Standard operating procedure to set exposure and processing times (remember, early 1910s) was for a length of 35mm film to be shot for each scene and lighting change, and developed using the same bulk processing equipment and darkroom requirement of an entire reel of film. Barnack’s miniature device (to become the Leica camera) could be hand-held, moved quickly to any view of the scene, efficiently exposing a limited number of frames on a short length of film. Bockmeuehl developed the spiral film carrier and development tank which could then be used in the field, with only a dark cloth needed to move the film from the camera to the processing tank. Results were available in mere minutes, on-site. A huge time/cost saving! The story usually ended with the observation that in Germany “JOBO-ing” your film meant small tank development. The above is a family story of the Bockmeuehl’s, subject to the normal caveats of family stories (and retold by me, no less : -).
Wait, we all know that motion picture film of the era ran vertically through a gate approximately 18x24mm. Why Barnack chose the 24x36mm format is not known to me, but hold that thought.
Now, the connection to what is a “normal lens” runs through another personal connection. In the early 1970s I had the good fortune to study photography under Phil Davis at the University of Michigan. He was asked the question about why “50mm?” for a standard lens on 35mm film. He understood the roots of 35mm film used for still photography, which began in the movie industry. His explanation was that, as best as he understood, Barnack thought the horizontal format for film transport was simply more convenient for handling, and he adopted whatever focal length lens for 24x36mm that approximated the same angle of view as the 18x24mm gate in a movie camera. Barnack was just making an exposure meter after all, to satisfy a movie director and cinematographer, based on the equipment they were using. Movie cameras then (and in general) tended to use longer focal lengths than still cameras “as normal”, to emulate the narrower field the human eye can keep in focus in a moving scene. Davis was quick to point out that it didn’t really matter; 50mm seemed pretty useful, but you (students) used whatever lens gave you the field of view your vision required, and that you could afford to purchase. Meaning, you students should just get on with whatever lens your camera came with.
So, it seems the 50mm standard arose, like many conventions, chiefly as a convenient solution to something rather practical using the bits and pieces inventors tend to have at hand, rather than as a quest to satisfy an aesthetic ideal.
Aside. On the last day of classes, having presented our portfolios for review, Phil Davis admonished us (this is pretty much verbatim). “Now you’ve learned some basics of photography. You may think of your work as art, buy don’t go bothering all your friends and family with your pictures, which they may find rather tedious.” What would he think of us today.
Posted by: John Merlin Williams | Thursday, 08 June 2023 at 02:03 PM
MJ: "Then we come to the real problem: the idea that the focal length of a "normal" lens should equal the diagonal of the format is only a very rough rule of thumb in the first place—it's not a hard and fast rule by any stretch."
Quite so. I recall much discussion of this in the British magazine 'SLR Camera' in the late 1970s; back then it was edited by Cliff Purvey. Several letters disparaged "the 50mm lens (* mythically solely) used by Henri Cartier Bresson." and stated they used the 35mm lens in preference. Then others wrote in to disparage the 35mm lens, and stated they used a 28mm as a standard lens. Then others wrote to the magazine and a bidding war erupted: who could use the widest lens as a 'standard lens' on 135 format.
In old age, I find that the 50mm I could happily use as a 'standard lens' when younger is a bit long and I no longer have the reactions to use it, especially for 'street' photography. I favour a 35mm now for film or a 20mm on m4/3rds for digital.
* It is a commonly repeated myth that the legendary H. C-B used only a 50mm lens as there is visual evidence that he used other focal lengths as well.
Posted by: Olybacker | Thursday, 08 June 2023 at 02:37 PM
"I tried to take a picture of it with my color camera—the iPhone—but the darn thing kept correcting the color and hyping up the contrast and clarity, which diminished the accuracy of the picture. Whatever happened to the ideal of a camera as a recording device?"
I believe the iPhone camera is not a "recording device", in the sense you mean it, nor intended to be. If you use the Halide App, you can choose WB other than Auto.
Here's what it looked like, Chez Moose, Daylight WB, 9/9/2020:
Front

Back

BTW: I replaced the cheap filters in our furnace with Nordic Pure MERV 12 Pleated AC Furnace Air Filters, left the fan on all the time, and AQI stayed good indoors.
Posted by: Moose | Thursday, 08 June 2023 at 02:44 PM
The true normal is whatever the Pentax FA Limited 43mm lens says it is.
Posted by: Robin Parmar | Thursday, 08 June 2023 at 05:13 PM
"By the way, you complained about your iPhone correcting color in way you do not want it to. My complaint about the iPhone is that it cannot do square roots."
Just turn your iPhone calculator to landscape, and enjoy having a scientific calculator.
Posted by: Basil Steinle | Friday, 09 June 2023 at 07:29 PM
A normal lens gives you a normal perspective, not a normal angle of view. In the scenery you see through the lens the subjects in the foreground and the background should have the same relation in size as what our eyes see, even though our field of view is much, much wider than the one of that lens. (This is not hard science, but what I experience with my own eyes. Don’t know about yours).
Posted by: s.wolters | Friday, 09 June 2023 at 11:59 PM
Maybe we'd better use natural perspective instead of normal...
Posted by: s.wolters | Saturday, 10 June 2023 at 12:13 AM
I was not quite serious when I wrote my comment about 40mm being the "normal lens" (a lens that allegedly sees the way the eye sees) with its focal length being more or less equal to the diagonal of the film or sensor gate.
This story about "film/sensor diagonal equal to focal length" just can't be true as it gives a different coverage (horizontally and vertically) if you use a rectangular or a square film gate.
(And thanks to Basil Steinle for his hint about the iPhone calculator.)
Posted by: Christer Almqvist | Saturday, 10 June 2023 at 06:07 AM
Years ago I was taught that what makes a lens “normal” is that its angle of view matches the angle of of a print or display at a given viewing distance. A 50mm lens and 35mm film frame roughly match the the angle of view of a 5x7 or 8x10 print held at a normal hand-held viewing distance. The rule of thumb simply captures that relationship. A large print of a scene captured with an extreme wide angle lens will look normal when viewed from a typical three to five foot viewing distance, an effect employed very effectively by Clude Butcher.
Posted by: Craig Stocks | Sunday, 11 June 2023 at 09:30 AM