The Online Photographer

Tip from a Reader: Calculate!

Miss the scientific calculators of old? My brother paid $300 for one in the early '70s, and was the coolest kid in school, at least until the same calculator was discounted to $150 (Seinfeld "Newman" voice: Gordon Moore!). Wish the iPhone had that? Here's a tip from a TOP reader: open up the simple calculator on the iPhone. Now turn the phone sideways to landscape orientation. There ya go.

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:

Mark L: "Hi, Works on my Samsung S21 too, I never knew that! Thank you for that."

Gary Merken: "My oldest brother went off to college in 1973. My parents bought him a calculator. It could add, subtract, multiply, divide, do square roots, and compute percentages. That's it. Cost? $215 (about $1,500 in 2023 dollars). A few years later I saw that exact same model in a remainder bin at Caldor, a now-defunct regional discount department-store chain. The discounted price was $15."

George Andros: "How about the slide ruler? I have shown my slide ruler from my 1953 college freshman physics class to dozens of people under 30 and they have no idea of what it is, what it does, or its vintage. It made beginning calculus visually intuitive. Gone, along with cursive handwriting."

Alan Whiting: "I tutor high school science and math, and college prep. Some students use their phone calculators; we discourage that, because phones are so distracting otherwise. The currently accepted graphing calculators, like the TI-84, have an amazing range of features; no one person uses even a fraction of them (something you've commented on for cameras). The user's manual for the TI-83 (I have it on my iPhone) is 827 pages long. All that sophistication doesn't prevent students coming up with wrong answers. I wrote an essay for them entitled 'Your Calculator is Lying to You (and vice versa)' that none of them read."

Open Mike: Peak Track (OT)

The essay I promised you about how photography is not ending is underway, but it needs percolation time. Can't rush some things.

Meanwhile, I thought I would mention how much I've been enjoying the recent World Championships in Budapest. One of the best athletics meets I've ever seen, right up there with Beijing 2008. The USA did spectacularly well, and it seems like there are many young talents in a large number of disciplines, from many countries, all peaking at the same time. Some absolutely wonderful performances and some great stories.

The only dark spot is the absence this year of Sydney Superstar, out with a knee injury, whose Bolt moment you can see here, at the 2022 Championships. "Absolute greatness," as the announcer says.

A few of the many highlights from the 2023 World Championships in Budapest, Hungary:

• Sha'Carri Richardson, who races with the longest fingernails ever recorded in track, has suffered some of the wayward setbacks of an unbridled youth, including her heartbreaking disqualification from the pandemic-delayed 2021 Olympics in Tokyo after testing positive for marijuana, which she had resorted to after the death of her mother. But if you've ever seen a young kid happier about an unexpected triumph than she was at these Championships, I don't know when it could have been. Her mouth was shaped like an "O" for minutes afterward. (By the way, the clip shows a really dire video editing mistake—they cut away from Sha'Carri at the exact moment she sees confirmation that she's won the race.)
• Noah Lyles, Noah Lyles, Noah Lyles. On top of the world. And the USA wins its fourth 100 World title in a row. Rising star Erriyon Knighton grabber silver, on the podium with Letsile Tebogo from Botswana. (Watch for the names Knighton and Tebogo in the future.) Noah Lyles also caused a huge viral explosion with his comments about the NBA. See also his golds in the 200 and the 4x100.
• After her catastrophic fall just meters from the finish line in the 4x100 Mixed, Dutch standout Femke Bol redeemed herself anchoring the 4x100 and in the 400 hurdles.
• Katie Moon and Nina Kennedy agree to share the gold medal in the pole vault. I love this. I used to play Risk with a bunch of people including my friend Jim Schley at Shoestring Farm, where I lived after dropping out of Dartmouth, and, in one game, when Jim and I had the last armies standing, he looked up and said, with a chuckle: "why can't we just live in peace?"

That's not all, but I gotta go. I have to get back to it. I'm hard at work on the post I promised you on Monday, and it will be up soon. It's called "The Antidote."

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 Drake: "Looking forward to your post Mike. We all have to keep positive and inspired! The antidote is your blog! That’s the best thing about the web is being a part of online communities, whether they are for photographers, marimba dancers or knitters, Being part of a community or communities and sharing our experiences is so important. Sure, I would love to be able to make a living off my work; but just creating something and being able to share with others - that’s the essence of a creative life."

Dan Montgomery: "Track meets always make me cry. Whether it's a middle-school meet or the World Championships, there is always a moment (or many) in which an athlete decides that he or she may not be out of the race after all, chooses to plumb the depths of their own conditioning and tolerance for suffering and pushes themselves toward the finish line through pain that is both off the scale and entirely voluntary. Gets me every time. And you have the surprises whose joy at a win (or a medal or just making the final) tells you something about what it takes to get there. And then you have the people who just lay down the law.

"By the way, it seems to me that the World Championships, which only started in the 1980s, are always great (not that I have seen them all, of course), in part because only the best of the best qualify, in part because the crowds are better informed, in part because the track meet is the whole point, not a subset of a bigger global athletic-cultural-commercial-political spectacle. But yes, too bad Sydney couldn't make it. And, I don't know, did you see Flo-Jo's nails back in the day?"

Is Photography...Ending?

Okay, clickbait title. At least I hope it is. I try.

But take it as a serious question. Of course "photography" has to mean photography as we once knew it, because virtually everyone in the First World is equipped with a camera as matter of routine nowadays. According to Pew Research and others, almost 90% of Americans now own a smartphone. Another 7–8% own cellphones. (I presume they're counting only adults.) Everyone takes and shares pictures now. Photography certainly isn't ending in that sense; it's taken off like a rocket.

That doesn't mean that photography "as we knew it" can't get functionally obliterated by the ubiquity of smartphones, although that's probably a conversation for a different day. The vast torrent of new pictures—above a billion daily just in the US, by most estimates—has many implications, including a.) that no one person can be familiar with more than a minuscule fraction of all the photographs being made, meaning that no one, not even a professional curator, has a reasonable understanding of the directions and accomplishments of photography as a whole any more; and b.) photographing is fast becoming nothing special or distinctive simply because everyone does it, about like everyone eats, breathes, and poops. It's a part of daily existence and fast becoming nothing at all special. Photographers used to be respected, because, through hard-won skill and knowledge and practice, they could do things ordinary people couldn't. But the status of having specialized knowledge and skill has been evaporating for years now. Paralleling that decline is a decline in the in the need to hire a photographer for a wide array of once-common needs. In the late '80s I was charging $670 for a portrait sitting plus $80 per print. Now, I literally can't give away portrait sittings for free half the time. People take their own portraits now.

Then there's the camera industry. For decades it was a truism that "the mass market" supported the makers of the high-end equipment that art photographers, professionals, and photojournalists wanted. And it did, once upon a time. No longer. Apple, Samsung, Huawei, Lenovo, Xiaomi, Oppo, ZTE, Vivo, LG and Alcatel own the mass market now, and none of them are doing anything to support lower-end consumer ILCs (interchangeable lens cameras), much less helping Nikon produce Z camera lenses or subsidizing Fuji's interchangeable-lens medium-format cameras. Camera companies have been disappearing for years now and there are for all practical purposes only five of them left: according to Statista, Canon, Sony, Nikon, Fuji and Panasonic account for 94% of ILCs sold today, all the other surviving brands sharing the meager remaining six percent. And shipments of digital still cameras declined from 121 million units in 2010 to just eight million in 2021, a decrease of 93%. And nearly all of those eight million are hybrid cameras, video having become a significant driver of both interest and sales to today's buyers, as well as a locus of technological development and innovation for the manufacturers.

Hard-won culture
As far as some of the other features of the old culture of photography, built up so painstakingly from the beginnings through the advent of affordable digital cameras, I don't have facts and figures at my fingertips. These include museum and gallery shows and sales, books, and printmaking, and the art market.

The practice of "art photographers" (usual disclaimer: I use the term as a description, not a claim) building up a CV based around shows, sales to museums and private collections, teaching and lectures, awards and honors, and published articles about the photographer or the work used to be common enough that the nuts-and-bolts of it was part of a class about the business of photography that I took as a senior in art school. So do photographers still strive to advance their work by dropping off portfolios of prints at galleries and museums for review? I'd have to talk to gallerists and museum curators to get a handle on whether this is more or less common than it was forty years ago, but I have my suspicions.

Peer-to-peer and peer-to-public sharing of deliberate bodies of work through books seems less necessary now than it was when photography was on the rise as an art form. I've seen no sign that interest in photobooks has diminished; it's quite possible more are being published now than ever before. But I do get the sense that books are more often considered artworks in themselves, with many of the creators maybe falling into the category of "artist" rather than "photographer" and the individual photographs in them perhaps becoming less primary, and I would guess that printing runs are getting smaller and smaller. I'd have to talk to photobook publishers to take the temperature of this aspect of the culture of photography.

Prints. The vast majority of photographers three-quarters of a century ago shot B&W negative film, meaning that pictures required the making of a physical print just to be viewable. Making a print was required in order to share the picture with others. Prints were what we shown and shared. Now, if a photograph existed only as a paper print, it would virtually be a way of hiding it from view. My most popular picture on Flickr (itself not considered a very prominent site, not like Instagram) has just over 77,000 views. Even if I were honored with a full show of custom exhibition prints at a prominent museum—say, the George Eastman Museum, which is local to me—do you think 7,000 people would see it? I doubt that very much. (Again, I'd have to ask the staff at the museum what they believe the average attendance to be.) And how many enthusiast photographers still make their own fine prints, or have fine prints made? As insufficient as it is to view a picture as an online JPEG rather than as a fine print made by a master printmaker, the percentage of photographers who have good prints made is likely in steep decline, I believe. Again, I haven't done the actual research.

A consideration of the art market—which for all practical purposes requires objects to function—wouldn't be out of place here either, but I don't have time.

That sinister elephant
And then there's the elephant in the room: the recent phenomenon of AI. Digital eroded the essence of photography, because it was so much more easily faked and doctored; but there was at least the potential for it to continue to be a record of the lens image, with its understandable connection to the world of appearances, if the operator was honest and worked in a culture which encouraged honesty, such as traditional, edited photojournalism. But AI is the danger inherent in digital suddenly exploding to a nightmare level, and it could be a disaster for any number of areas of photographic culture that were previously still struggling to survive. Just a week ago, in the post about audio speakers, I showed an example of a real-world advertising pastiche that was based on AI. That's something that a professional photographer would have had to shoot, and be paid for, in times gone by. No more. Before the pandemic I asked a professional I know how he was doing, and he told me he cleared $80k the year before. "That's not so bad," was my comment, to which he said, "Yes, it is, because I used to clear $240k a year." That's about to get worse. Thank goodness it's still easy to recognize AI when you look for it; I hope against hope its flaws are inherent in it and it never gets any better, although that seems very unlikely.

And if digital quietly eroded public support in the veracity of photography, its ability to serve as a witness, AI, if it gets a lot better, will obliterate it.

In sum: the art, craft, and business of photography as we once knew it is in considerable decline, in terms of status and stature, practice, reward, it's place in society, and in its conceptual underpinnings. Things look grim.

Don't despair
I have to break this off, because the insistent needs of the blog format mean I simply have to get something up before breakfast—there hasn't been a new post since Saturday, and there must be. And, um, it's almost 1:00 p.m. and I'm hungry. So I don't have time to finish this now. As I always say, this stuff doesn't write itself, and I watch myself getting slower as I get older. But don't despair just yet—and don't condemn this post for being one-sided until you read the other side. There's good news, too. I'll show you the sunny side of all this, and explain why it's not really a disaster, sometime within the next week.

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:

Tex Andrews: "Re 'So do photographers still strive to advance their work by dropping off portfolios of prints at galleries and museums for review? I'd have to talk to gallerists and museum curators to get a handle on whether this is more or less common than it was forty years ago, but I have my suspicions.' Got news for you (I work at the Hirshhorn, and my wife at the Baltimore Museum of Art; I'm in the Exhibits Department, she was a registrar and now a curator—a rare bird!): Not only is this not true for art photographers, it's not true for any artists anymore. It's harder now to get your work in front of 'the people that matter' than it has ever been."

Paul Martini: "'The ease with which we can make a superficial image often leads to creative disaster.' —Ansel Adams."

Doug Anderson: "I look forward to reading the good news! My take on the situation is pretty much what you have described so far."

JOHN B GILLOOLY: "The beginning of this post echoes the sentiment I have had this month while photographing two PGA events (professional golf) in Chicago, Illinois, and Greensboro, North Carolina. The layers of redundant coverage of everything is a bit disheartening. Almost any significant moment that you photograph is also being photographed and recorded by multiple others with varying skill and equipment levels. The premium in terms of media distribution is certainly speed. I am almost never shooting for media purposes so I am not part of that, but it still has greatly eroded any sense of capturing something 'special.' That represents the erosion of the personal fulfillment side of this equation.

"On the other hand, my business as a commercial photographer is thriving. Demand is steady and even growing and rates are also steady and/or rising. So I felt the need to buffer my frustration and discontent with the reminder that I am a commercial photographer doing this work for a living. I can, and must, be an artist on my own time."

Paul: "The ever-changing world. Which side of the proverbial fence? It really does not matter as we all have to adapt. This argument could be made about most everything and likely has been made since the beginning of time and evolution. That said, I still prefer much of the "old days" and my view considers both nostalgia and romanticism."

Rob de Loe: "You offer a realistic assessment. I've come to the same conclusion. There are a lot of people who still enjoy cameras and lenses, who like making photographs, and who appreciate good photography. But the number is dwindling. Eventually those of us remaining will be like the folks who still practice large format film photography. There are some young whippersnappers in that community, but mostly I think we're down to people who have been doing it seriously for a long time and simply enjoy the process.

"A related trend, which I think you recognize in your post, is the huge gulf that has opened up between the above crowd (enjoys cameras and lenses, likes making photographs, appreciates good photography) and 'artists who use photographs.' Talk about Mars and Venus. The artists who use photographs will be fine because it doesn't look like they're too fussed about things that excite photographers. So how is this not depressing? I suppose if you're willing to just make photographs for yourself and your own enjoyment, you'll be fine. Mind you, with all the billions of photographs being made every day, that's all we're doing anyway, so it won't be a big adjustment."

Lee Rust: "The internet and digital devices have upset just about every traditional aspect of modern life. Photography is everywhere all the time these days, but 'famous photographers' seem to be a thing of the past. Now that anybody can instantly broadcast their images or videos worldwide with the flick of a finger, who needs a gallery? 'Going viral' seems to be the new 'getting famous.'"

John Krumm: "Your coming 'sunny side' follow-up immediately made me think of Monty Python's 'The Bright Side of Life.' We are indeed in weird camera and photography times. I think the decline of photography as a hobby is related to the decline of all hobbies, to the very idea of hobbies. You have to hope that in 30 years we won't be limited to phones, an ever declining used camera supply, and sad go-fund-me garage-made cameras cobbled together with security camera parts."

psu: "The answer is no."

Sean: "Not according to Betteridge's Law of headlines, which states: 'Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word 'no.'"

Jim Arthur: "Amateur photography as we knew it is dead because of its cost and complication. A smartphone is easy to use, can be inexpensive, and is incredibly useful. Camera companies are now trying to automate their complex cameras with additional in-camera processors for AI based autofocus and other computational features, but they can’t compete with the convenience of the smartphone. Once we began to network computers, everything changed…everything sped up…and today in 2023 the modern mirrorless camera remains isolated.

"Today, a twenty-year-old with a smart phone in his pocket has no need to buy a still camera, video camera, stereo, calculator, etc., and if a compromise in the quality of these items is needed to gain the incredible convenience of the smartphone, that’s OK because the device will likely be improved next year. Technology and automation won’t be slowing down anytime soon but I expect quality cameras and lenses to remain available for folks like us for as long as they remain viable tools. For example, you can still spend hundreds of dollars on a Starrett dial caliper when cheap digital Bluetooth calipers are also available."

Printing Papers

I'm sorry, but I've been down a few rabbit holes over the last few days, which is awkward when the rabbit hole doesn't involve photography. Speakers and houses. I was all set to write a post about my pet peeves about house design (all 27 of them) when I thought, nah, I can't do that to my poor readers. They come here to read about photography.

Fortunately, the cavalry arrived over the hilltops, bugles blazing, in the form of a large, fat mailing tube in my mailbox. You remember my plan to offer a print of the "Mennonite Boys" picture? Well, the proofs arrived from Bob Rosinsky in Colorado. Bob is a photographer, a TOP reader, a custom printer, and a guy who has seen an inordinate number of UFOs.

And something happened that has never happened before: the prints inside were so good that there was nothing I need changed and nothing I would have done differently had I been doing it myself. That's never happened. Normally, what you do when someone else prints your pictures is that you send them a file, they send you a proof, and then you get to work: you tell them the changes you want, they apply them and send another proof, and then rinse and repeat until done. It can be anything from a small thing or two to a long, drawn-out process of many iterations. It can take weeks. And there's nothing wrong with that. It's just the process, just what it takes. It's normal.

The Maytag repairman
One of the best printmakers I ever had was a guy at a camera store, of all things. The store had an older employee who sat "in the back" at a big computer. He had one of the HP Z-series printers, 36" wide if memory serves or maybe 24", and you would sit there and look over his shoulder in real time while he did the Photoshop preparations, discussing options together, and then he ran the first proof off and you looked at that and went from there. It was great. The store didn't even charge a lot. I thought I'd use him going forward, but about the fourth time I went in to have a print made, the old guy was gone, replaced by a kid who had obviously just been trained. Apparently the old guy just found himself sitting around back there with no customers too much of the time, and he got tired of it. Oh well.

I get the feeling Bob really slaved over these. Plus, he's been seeing my pictures here since 2007, and he has absorbed a sense of how I like my pictures to look. He gave me samples of four different papers: Moab Lasal Exhibition Lustre 300, Hahnemühle Photo Rag Baryta, Moab Lasal Photo Matte, and Epson Hot Press Natural.

We had already decided to offer a small print on 11x14" paper based on the recent print size poll, but it's the large image floated on 17x22" Epson Hot Press Natural that's the real stunner. It's just gorgeous. Bob did a fantastic job—it's not easy to get dark contrast to print right, much less when you have large blobs of bright light that have to have the transitions look right. He corrected the verticals perfectly. He printed the big one to look right in room light—in other words, on a wall. If you flood it with strong light, the darks will look a little weak; but in more subdued normal room light, it comes alive and sings. So we'll offer a small one, but I have to offer the large one as well. It couldn't have turned out better. I'm very proud of it. (And relieved that the print worked—it didn't have to, with that file. There's no disappointment quite like a file you love on the screen that doesn't print.)

With the help of a friend (I don't usually name people until I'm sure I'm going to use their services, in the way I didn't name Bob until now—these folks are professionals, and I want to preserve their anonymity in case we decide not to work together), we're planning a new sale page, and it looks like we're going to be able to have a permanent store. So maybe the small low-cost print will be the offering in the print sale, and the large print will be available on an ongoing basis in the new store. We'll see how all that works out.

Curiously, Bob and I agree that we like the Hahnemühle print the least with this image, which is only worth remarking on because we both expected to like it the best! Some papers just look better with specific images, that's all. You can think all you want and assume all you want, but you've got to see it with your eyes before you can make up your mind.

I have a bit more news on this front, but I'll put it in another post.

Mike

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

Featured Comments from:

The Ugliest House Ever

If you like interior photography, or just interiors, Zillow is an historically unique opportunity to sneak a peek into houses everywhere.

Just wondering...does your aesthetic sense extend to a lot of things in the world? I'm pretty convinced that most human beings don't think or feel about the world in this way. How things look—visual priority, you might call it—a sense of the aesthetic style of the world of appearances—just doesn't enter into their perceptions. I think it was either Grant Wood or Thomas Hart Benton who said that middle Americans were the most aesthetically dead human beings in the history of the world, or words to that effect.

But maybe the habit of looking at the world through an aesthetic filter is itself disreputable, I don't know. It does make you judgemental. It's possible that my reflexive tendency to look at the world through this prism is undesirable or misplaced. It certainly seems unfair to look at people this way, although I still do sometimes (we all do, albeit for different reasons. Scott Schuman certainly does. He's one of a small number of photographers who photographs "found" fashion on the street). I've had to train myself to overlook peoples' outward appearances to better see their humanity underneath. I try to be nice to all kinds of people. As if we are all equal, even though it's human nature to strive to pretend we're not.

And I myself don't dress well, speaking of Scott Schuman. Anyone could easily find fault with my appearance.

Trees and houses
But with some things it seems harmless enough. When I was a kid I actually had a mental list of beautiful trees that I had seen in my peregrinations. That might sound weird to say out loud. But I liked trees and I admired ones that were picturesque. Houses are easy to evaluate in aesthetic terms, because they are "presented" to the world by their outward appearance—realtors call it "curb appeal"—and you're not insulting anyone directly if you judge a house while driving by.

The housing stock in America generally is a complete disaster. It's a contemporary American characteristic that we select people who have an innately good design sense, train them to be architects, and then save money by not hiring them to design our houses. Not one house in a hundred was actually designed by an architect for a particular site or neighborhood. It was plucked from a catalog or concocted by a builder. We generally let builders design our houses—which of course results in houses that are calculated to be a.) salable to lowest-common-denominator tastes, and b.) easy and cheap to build. Or simply designed by someone who doesn't have a lot of aptitude or talent for design. That's how we get monstrosities like the ones found at sites like McMansion Hell. The top example on that site right now looks like a deliberate parody. Truly awful. Alarmingly awful. Dispiritingly so. Honestly, go look at that thing—check out the interior; it seriously wouldn't be any worse if it were drawn for an episode of The Simpsons.

The bigger the house, the harder it is to design well. But even garden-variety houses can be really bad. Just poking around on Zillow, it's unfortunately far easier to find ugly houses than attractive ones. But even acknowledging that I can be judgemental in this regard, and that it might not be fair to look for taste and beauty everywhere, this house took me aback:

This might be the worst one-box house I've ever seen. How can you screw up a plain box so spectacularly? Here's a rear view:

I just love that misbegotten little twist of downspout coming from the lower edge of the "mansard roof." That gutter placement is hilarious.

One of the funny things about this is that the real estate listing for this house features 15 photographs of the exterior, including seven of the front of the house. Like it was something to savor. The interior is actually pretty decent. But I'd be embarrassed to live there.

You can find an endless supply of very odd things about houses on the internet, and they always entertain me. Just a few examples and I'll stop:

Someone really didn't think things through here. I even wonder if maybe this isn't a Photoshop joke.

There's more than one way to skin a cat, as they used to say in New England.

What I like about this one is not so much the odd position of the loo, which is weird enough, but the "design" of those steps. Seriously, contemplate those for a minute. Truly postmodern. Someone really got carried away with that.

Passive Design Solutions
And just as an antidote to all the above, here's an example of a good design: Juniper Mountain is a passive house design from Canada's Passive Design Solutions. This house would be low maintenance and have very low energy costs, and it has enough room without being too large. I don't think it has enough storage space for a three-bedroom house, unless it's a vacation home. It would be luxurious as a house for a couple or a single person with one guest room. And I don't approve of the open kitchen (I like closed kitchen plans), but other than that, it's quite nice in my opinion. 

My advice, if you ever build a house: utilize the services of a good architect who specializes in residential design, even if it's a very simple house, and hire an experienced professional contractor. And don't get fancy.

Bad design, like entropy, never rests.

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:

MarkB: "You just like that passive house design (Juniper Mountain) because they put a pool table on the plan.  ;-)  "

Mike replies: You got me.  :-)

Bridget Dawson: "Oh my gosh...your timing of this is just right for my husband and I. We are laughing hysterically as we read this. We've been looking for a house in Florida, and we ignore 95% of what comes along because they are all so unattractive. No personality. Why does this entire state look like a giant suburb? Florida was charming in the 1970s, but now it's nothing more than the world's largest parking lot! Everywhere! And it's what's going on inside all these cloned houses that really aggravates us. White on white, with white, in white. Another ugly kitchen with ugly spotted granite countertops, ugly colorless stainless steel appliances, refrigerators the size of a walk-in closet, white cabinets to the ceiling that no one can reach...why does everyone want their kitchen to look like everyone else's? And don't even get us started on the lousy photographs...."

David Maxwell: "You are probably not much into Twitter, but an account on there called Zillow Gone Wild is a lot of fun."

Sebastian Broll: "The loo made my...not my day, but at least my pre-breakfast morning. Cheers from a usually badly-dressed person."

Colin: "Another source of both delight and distress is Zillow Gone Wild."

s.wolters: "Belgium has a reputation when it comes to ugly houses. Several photographers had projects about it and even accused each other of plagiarism in court. There are books and even organized tours, but if you want a quick impression about the scale and the looks of it just google images of Ugly Belgian Houses or try this link. Another is this one."

Mike replies: There's a Middle Eastern country—I think it might be Turkey, sorry if I'm wrong—that has a tax loophole for unfinished houses, which has resulted in countless houses being perpetually half-finished. A different but not dissimilar problem. Of course America sometimes has the opposite problem of Belgium's—too many rules rather than too few, not because of government but in private developments with strict rules on the look, size, color, and even landscaping of every house. I looked at a house in such a development where I wasn't allowed to fence my backyard. Land of the Free?!

I almost bought a lot in a development in Wisconsin until I discovered that I could not legally build a house as small as the one I wanted. Nor was I allowed to build a one-story design. They all had to be 2,500 square feet minimum, two stories, and either beige or light gray in color. One renegade had painted his house pale yellow, no doubt raising the ire and the emnity of the condo association.

jeremy t: "Here is a nice essay that discusses why houses in Belgium are often ugly. There is also a great book by Hannes Coudenys with photographs of some fine examples."

[Ed. note: See both ASW's and Henning's comments in the Comments section. Both are a bit too long to feature, but both are good and illuminate different important aspects of the subject.]

Jim H: "Where I live now (Santa Monica—near Los Angeles) is both ground zero for showing how money, wretched excess and custom homes exemplify bad taste, and also a showcase for some of the best residential architects ever—Charles and Ray Eames, John Lautner, Pierre Koenig, Richard Neutra and even Frank Lloyd Wright Jr. About 10 years ago, having house tours of these famous houses was a big thing, so we got to visit many of these houses and buildings by famous architects.

"You can waste a lot of time in my pages on these tours. I recommend the MAK House Tour first which ends with a visit to Julius Schulman's home shortly after his death while it was being cleared out for sale. Schulman was probably the most famous architectural photographer of all time. We met him once at a tour of the FLW Ennis-Brown house (linked to) and heard him talk about all the famous places he photographed.

"All of these pages are more than a decade old. Some of these photos are from earlier digital photos and some film—the 'Oak Park - 1971' pictures are scans from some Tri-X negatives we shot in a visit to the FLW homes in Oak Park where we joined a college class getting a private tour—long before organized tours. Most of the digital was taken with an Olympus Micro 4/3 camera with the 9–18mm zoom—really nice for architecture."

Yonatan Katznelson: "It seems to me that someone took the euphemism 'throne room' a bit too seriously in that last picture."

John Camp: "Because I've had an odd series of jobs and moves, and because I was lucky enough to get into a house when I was young, I've owned 11 houses in an already long life. I have worked with different architects specializing in residential work on two different homes and both made serious errors that were either expensive to fix or unfixable.

"The most annoying and potentially dangerous error over the longterm was a kind of eyebrow shelter over a front stoop that actually drained onto the stoop—this in Minnesota, which has an extended freeze-thaw cycle in both late autumn and early spring. For two months a year, the stoop was an unpredictable skating rink. The error was unfixable without essentially disassembling the house and rebuilding the entire front. On the other hand, it looked kinda nice, if you weren't lying on your back in the driveway with a broken spine.

"My advice to anyone working with an architect—you're probably smarter than he/she is, and you probably know more about your building site. Question everything, and stay on top of everything. Demand current and specific billing. Be especially aware of climate problems (like the freeze-thaw cycle, or flat-roof sections in areas with lots of snow, or large north-facing windows in cold climates.) Do not sign the standard AIA (American Institute of Architects) contract. Hire a lawyer to write the contract with the architect, and if the architect doesn't like that, find another architect. This will save you lots of money. (The 'standard' AIA contract is bullshit; it protects no one but the architect, and sets up a system that positively encourages the architect to spend as much money on the project as is possible.) Do not allow the architect to order anything from Europe. Anything that you can get from Europe is also made or available here. If you insist on Carrara marble...well, that's unfixable.)

"I could go on, but won't, except for one last suggestion: Buy an existing house that you find financially and aesthetically acceptable, and inspect the hell out of it so you know not only what needs to be fixed, but what you might want to change in the future.

"As for the commenter above with the unfinished wet basement, that can be fixed, without too much cost. And you can finish the basement simply and by yourself. Unless you live in a remote area, there are classes that will help you finish it. I've actually done all this—I've even installed a second bathroom on my own, and I'm not renowned as a handyman."

Cameras Named After Their Makers

Ed. note: The previous post is finished and polished up all pretty now, and I added a bunch more to it this morning. Check it out past the break if you'd like. Meanwhile, on another subject....

Dan Boney wrote: "It just occurred to me how often speakers have been named after a creator/person (JBL, KLH, Bose, Carver, Polk, etc…) while cameras have not—the closest being Leitz/Leica and perhaps Polaroid 'Land' camera [named after the Polaroid's inventor, Edwin Land —Ed.], but those are semi-close exceptions. Apparently speaker design is a seemingly much less collaborative effort!"

That's a good thought, but there are exceptions among European cameramakers—Victor Hasselblad was the founder of Hasselblad, for instance [CORRECTION below, in the Featured Comments, by Christer Almqvist —Ed.]. And it doesn't hold true for the makers of small- (and sometimes larger-)volume makers of many field view cameras. I thought of Wisner, Canham, Philips, Gandolfi, and Deardorff right off the bat. Plus there are a lot of older view camera makers that must qualify—there must have been a Burke and a James behind Burke & James, for instance, and ditto for Conley. There was a guy in the UK who made a view camera from a sturdy type of plastic whose name is eluding me at present.

Can anyone think of other camera brands, from now, or not long ago, or in history, that are named after their creator or another person or persons?

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:

Christer Almqvist: "I don't think Victor Hasselblad was the founder of the company. It was founded in 1841 and the son of the founder started messing around with photography. Obviously with success because in 1888 he became the distributor for Eastman in Sweden. Victor developed a camera for the Swedish Air Force during WWII and in 1948 the first version of the later F 1600 came on the market. Designed, by the way, by the man who designed the first SAAB cars, Sixten Sason."

James Weekes: "Always ignored, the toy cameras named after Diana and Holga Rabinowitz."

Mike replies: Ha ha! He's pulling our legs, folks. According to Wikipedia, the Diana was marketed as a novelty by the Great Wall Plastics Factory in Kowloon, Hong Kong, in the 1960s, and the Holga, designed by Lee Ting-mo and based on the Diana, was originally intended to help poor Chinese families make family portraits.

Dan: "You have forgotten the most successful of them all, Sony. Founded by Italian shoemaker Enrico Vincenzo Sony DeLinguini. He had always wanted a better way to collect pictures of his clients feet (for strictly prurient reasons)."

Mike replies: Dan, meet James. James, Dan.

Four Fabulous Retro Speakers (Music Notes)

Okay, just one more off-topic post about vintage speakers, and then I promise we'll move on. I've been spending more and more time photographing lately, and I couldn't be happier about it, but there's a reason you tend to hear very little from working photographers...they're working. My work is writing, and photographing distracts me from that.

Back to speakers. Lately I've been exploring/enjoying the beautiful Complete Gerry Mulligan Meets Ben Webster Sessions (1960), which is marvelous "cool jazz," and also marvelous to listen to on a desktop system, because Gerry is on the left channel and Ben on the right, making it even easier to distinguish what each is contributing to the conversation. It's not hard anyway, because Gerry plays baritone and Ben plays tenor, and they have such different "voices." The music is also great to listen to because it showcases the superb sonic qualities of a small group recorded faithfully and without frills—even just listening to the YouTube versions, which is what the link above goes to. American jazz from the period 1955–1960 is my favorite of all music, even topping 1960–1980 and 1990s rock. Take a listen to the first cut, "In a Mellow Tone," even if jazz is not your bag and you don't want to explore further. "Who's Got Rhythm?" also makes a nice sample. Here's the record itself.

Continue to my discussion about the gear if you're interested.

Don't Shoot Film? It's Okay. You Can Relax.

So just a little gentle admonishment. I have lots of readers, and y'all do different things and have different histories. Some of you even photograph flowers and cats, or use Rodinal!

I kid.

All right, all right
Some of my readers shoot film. A few of them, like me, liked darkroom work—we found it a positive pleasure for its own sake. Even if we aren't graced with darkrooms in our current circumstances. This is okay.

Some shoot with view cameras. Because they like the process. I already told you the story of how I got suckered into writing an "anti-view-camera" article once, at, let me see, the original Camera & Darkroom magazine, for Ana Jones who was the editor then. It was proposed to me as one half of a "pro/con" pair of articles, and Ron Wisner of Wisner Classic Manufacturing Co., a builder of bespoke view cameras of high Edwardian style, was supposed to write the counterpart "pro" article. But Ron never came through on his promises, so Ana went ahead and published my "con" article by itself. As a stand-alone article, it made me out to be a hater! It alienated many view camera photographers, understandably, making them think that I was unsympathetic to their beloved niche. Actually, though, I kinda love large format. I certainly have an appreciation for view camera work (what, I'm going to hate Weston and Watkins and all the others?!), and I absolutely have no quarrel with people who choose to center their hobby or their art on large format! Then or now. So using view cameras is okay too.

But if you don't shoot film any more, look...it's okay...you don't have to respond to every film article by saying "I hated/loved film/darkroom but I shoot digital now and it gives me so much more control and it's cheaper and...." It's okay. We know. We all shoot digital now. I adore my handheld digital 4x5 view camera (by the way, "Paddleboarder on the Outlet" now has 9,884 views and 228 Favorites) and I actually adore my iPhone camera too. Digital won. So there's no need to treat every mention of film like it's a call to battle. Maybe it used to be. But not now. The war is over.

So...
If you come across an article on film or darkroom here, and you aren't interested, maybe you could just treat it like it's not for you. It's for somebody else. It's for the people who still like and/or work in film or in the darkroom. If you're not one of those, that's okay; everyone understands. You don't need to rise to the defense of digital.

I'm saying all this with a smile and a chuckle, not at all angrily or stridently, so don't get that wrong. I do like it when we can find something new that everyone wants to talk about for a day or two; but a lot of topics are minority topics. Aren't there a few other topics I cover occasionally that have zero interest for you personally? I know some readers won't read about sports, or hate the WFPB posts, or pool, jazz, Miatas, or vintage stereo speakers. So just treat the film/darkroom posts like one of those. With each of those things, there's some percentage of readers, some small subset of the set of everyone, who enjoy them. How about you, don't you also enjoy one or two of the off-topic subjects? Why lowriders bounce? Romance at the movies? Lee Sandlin? So you can understand that the film/darkrooms posts please somebody, somewhere.

A.V. Shirk in his darkroom, 1974. I had an enlarger like that
once. (I found this picture on Wikimedia Commons.)

So anyway, don't stress. I want to write about film photography sometimes. I don't want it to be off limits. I want to write about vintage eBay film cameras. I want to write about large format. Occasionally, not frequently. I even want to write about ye olde darkroom that apparently horrified so many people (in 1979, the peak of the darkroom hobby, the then-leading magazine estimated that there were 250,000 small private darkrooms in the USA. Soon after, there were not one but two US darkroom newsstand magazines). I don't want to have to field a bunch of comments about how glad you are that film is gone or how superior digital is every time the old ways crop up. If you don't want to read about that stuff, I get it. I understand you might not have any interest any more. But relax. If you don't care, somebody else might! Find a little sympathy in your heart for them.

A blog is like the weather in Scotland. If you don't like it, wait a while, and it will change.

Cheers!

Mike

P.S. Although I get on my high horse every now and then, and sometimes lecture about things, I seldom lecture at people. So if this made you feel lectured at, I apologize!

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:

Funniest Thing I've Seen All Week (OT)

Have to pass along my current favorite video, from TC Live:

I've watched this about five times and it makes me laugh out loud each time. First there's how Andy Roddick (a past U.S. Open champion and former World No. 1) looks when the program cuts to him for the first time, with his head in his hands, which cracks me up, and I agree with what the host says after Andy says "this is the dumbest segment we've ever done on the show." But I love Andrea Petrovic's explanation of why amateurs can't beat her ("First of all, I was a professional tennis player. I'm competitive. I'm not going to give you a point for free"), and when she says "come at me" I burst out laughing every time. Wonderful little video. (Here's that book, by the way.)

I do think we who watch on screens just lose sight of how far above us professional athletes really are. They're not a little better. They're way better. Next time you watch an American football game, notice some of the acrobatics the players do as part of a play—leaping over a tackler or stretching for a ball on a dead run and falling forward in a somersault—and try to imagine yourself doing the same thing, with no pressure, with all the time in the world, without a full suit of pads and a helmet on, and without an opposing player trying to kill you at the same time. Some of it boggles the mind. And NBA basketball, just fuggedaboutit, those guys can move faster than I can think and they think much faster than they move....

I personally think that the great thing about sports is that we've all hit a shot or performed some feat as well as a pro. Golf, tennis, pool, basketball, football (either kind), whatever it is, we've done it once or a few times. I hit a hole-in-one on a par-3 course once. Once. While practicing alone. I've hit shots on the pool table as good as pro pool players do. And that gives us a sense of kinship with them, direct knowledge of the feeling of what it's like. It's why we can identify as we watch. But they can do that kind of shot all the time, and we can do it once in a while, and that's an immense difference. In pool, if you miss one shot per rack, you're going to lose every single match to a pro, and not by a small margin. A pro can sometimes lose a match by missing one shot in the entire match. Whereas only one miss per rack will put you in the elite in APA pool league...on much smaller tables with much bigger pockets. And that's just the tip of that iceberg. Enough from 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:

What Film + Developer + Paper Would I Use Today?

Thinking about this a little...

I think if I were to do B&W film today, here is what I might use, or start off trying:

A. Ilford HP5+ film

B. Kodak T-Max Developer

C. Ilford Warmtone RC 8x10" glossy paper

D. An ~8x10" flatbed scanner. Do they still make those? Ah, I see they do.

'Kay, first, disclaimer: the above is just based on thinking, and photographic craft needs to be a program of action. I'd need to run experiments before I could really say. I know what results I want, and results are where the pudding meets the road*, and it's possible I might not be happy with this FDP (film-developer-paper) combination. Actual tests using actual eyeballs always needed. So don't hold me to this.

The choices above each deserve a little drill-down, because they probably sound surprising given my known history on this. So, a little explanation:

A. I've always liked Ilford papers (I'll get to the "RC" part under section C.), and HP5+ has a pretty straight-line curve in the highlights which matches up with most of the company's papers pretty nicely. I printed Tri-X 400/D-76 1+1 negatives on Warmtone and I liked it, but then, I like lots of highlight detail; the highlights end up pretty low-contrast. So maybe that's not for everybody. Note: with variable-contrast papers, the dark tones from ~Zone V down are what mostly change with filtration under, or in, the enlarger; highlight contrast from ~Zone VI upwards is pretty much fixed by the FDP combination you choose. So you choose your FDP based on the look you want in the lighter tones, then target your development time for a good middle value in the shadows so that your enlarger multigrade filters give you flexibility in overall contrast when printing.

B. D-76 is the best developer ever made, certainly for 35mm, and I don't know why people get so averse to using the best. Everyone wants something special and distinctive and different, and I guess if you've got great chops you can make anything work.

However, let me just mention very briefly a few things I used to go through with D-76:

It's a powder. You have to mix it with water to make a stock solution, and it doesn't go into solution easily; it takes a while. I had a stirring rod with a flat tip on the end that I could use to crush the stubborn granules that didn't want to dissolve. Developer-mixing night was an every-now-and then after-dinner chore that took up the shank of an evening. Next, the stock solution, which has to be decanted into smaller brown glass bottles so it doesn't oxidize, changes activity as it ages. Fresh stock solution is too active, and so is stock solution that's too old. So I didn't use fresh-mixed stock solution for the first four days after mixing. However, after about 90–180 days (remember I have a bad memory for numbers, so run your own tests!), the developer stops being stable and starts to gradually become more active again. Truly old D-76 is ferocious—you'll think you souped your film in Dektol.

Of course I remember the negatives I lost in learning this lesson, and where I was the day I took those pictures...and the time and effort it took for me to figure out what had gone wrong....

Being abundantly careful, I only used stock solution that was between 4 and 45 days old. I always used up a gallon before 45 days, so I didn't run tests past that.

There are other niceties about using D-76 that I could describe if we had all day. And if it mattered to anybody.

So: T-Max Developer is easy to use. Path of least resistance, etc. It's a liquid that can be mixed directly, has a long shelf-life and a long period of stability. It's got great shadow detail, which seems like it couldn't hurt with HP5+. Again, I'd have to see how it works—I've never developed one single roll of HP5+ in T-max developer in my life so far—but it seems like it would be less of a headache**. I'd try it first and go from there. Maybe I wouldn't settle on it, maybe I would. Eyeballs decide in the end.

C. In the early days of resin-coated (RC) papers there was a lot of to-do over whether RC papers would last. They got a second-class-citizen reputation from the get-go that has always clung to them. Early RC papers as they aged suffered from metalizing, sometimes called bronzing, and tiny cracks all over the surface, called crazing. Alarmed "influencers" (they weren't called that then) issued stern warnings against committing precious images to RC. RC was for newbies, ignoramuses, and students (who are both). I never used RC for final prints all through my film years and all through my career as a custom darkroom printer. RC was for workprints, prints for repro, and proofs. And for students. Plus, galleries and museums preferred to buy prints on fiber-base [sic—never "fiber-based"] paper, so that settled that.

However, and it's a big "HOWEVER," Ilford solved those early problems; solved them thoroughly; and, many decades since I tried the new RC papers for the first time, my old fiber-base prints that were so carefully made and washed and dried look just a tad dingy, and thirty+-year-old Ilford RC workprints look exactly as bright and fresh as the day I made them. This being enough real-world aging testing for me, I would settle on the Ilford RC paper of choice if I were doing it today. RC papers are so much easier to deal with.

D. I wouldn't scan negatives. I would scan prints to get a JPEG to put online so I could share the pictures with my friends and the rest of the world. Why? Because the characteristic curve (AKA H&D curve, for Hurter and Driffield—Kodak called it CI, for contrast index) of film is meant to be counteracted by the curve of photo paper. That's why scanned B&W negatives look so unbearable if the operator doesn't know what he or she is doing—they're just getting one curve, the film curve, not the other curve that the film curve was designed to work against. When were negatives ever going to be used without paper, in the old days? Never. You had to print to see the picture. Real photographers who have mastered neg scanning do nice work, and I don't quarrel with experts over their expertise. But most people who scan negatives (intrepid as they are) haven't the faintest friggin' clue how all this works. One curve without the other is like a day without sunshine, yang with no yin, cracker with no cheese, etc. Watch out, here it comes: in my view, there's not much in the way of a good reason to use B&W film unless you're going to make enlarger prints on paper. Yes, that might be an unfair statement toward some good workers. But it's my opinion for myself. Ergo, that's what I'd do.

And that's why I'd settle on 8x10 prints. Because they fit the scanner linked above. And here's a very salient vector on the whole 8x10 choice: you might say that 8x10 prints aren't adequate as wall pieces, because they're too small and big = cool, and you're right, but that doesn't matter, because the targeted final, finished presentation of the pictures, for me and my practice, would be photobooks, hypothetically. And 8x10 is fine for book reproduction. The fact that I have never had a photobook published is immaterial, as I am an idealist and live mainly on that plane.

All this would be an interesting exercise. It's speculative, but I got asked what I would do if I were starting out today, and there ya have it. I've said this three times, but all that I've described above would simply my starting point. If I were using film today, which I am not. If I had room for a darkroom and no money worries, I'd do all the experiments for y'all just to write about 'em. But that ain't happening. (I do have all the equipment in the basement, thanks to MM [thanks MM], so hope doesn't die until I do. But don't hold your breath.)

I'll tell you, though, I should write a book called "Classic 35mm Photography," and stuff it full of everything I know. I know a lot, and a lot of the stuff I don't know, I know where to find. I sure could save today's younger/newer film hobbyists and enthusiasts a lot of trouble and bother and bumbling around in the dark...um, literally. With classic B&W film photography, knowledge is power, and there's a lot to know. But 15 or 20 years ago (could be closer to 25) I worked very hard on a book proposal for exactly that, even going so far as making a cover mockup, and the proposal was so nice I thought it couldn't fail to get a bite—I did my very best on it, and my very best, although I do it rarely, is very good—but even the little photographic publishers weren't interested. Rejection, rejection, rejection. You know what they say: Oh well.

Mike

[Ed. note: This post ought to have an illustration and I will work on that.]

*It's what separates the boys from the chickens before they hatch.

**And why didn't I use T-Max in the old days? Because it was marketed in the beginning as being specifically for the T-Max films, and it wasn't as good with the T-Max films as D-76 was...or (ahem, tugs collar) Rodinal, which I used for T-Max 100 for quite a while. In fact, the sharpest film prints I ever got, period (I did that exercise qua exercise) were rollfilm T-Max 100 negatives shot with studio strobes (better than a tripod) developed in Rodinal.

John Camp: "A brilliant demonstration of why I like digital (including prints) so much."

Dan Khong: "I am using: 1. Fomapan 400 film, 2. D-23 or HC-110 developer (whatever is left), 3. Ilford paper (like Mike's choice)."

Car Maintenance (OT)

Curiosity costs.

I know nothing about car maintenance, so it's always interesting to get opinions from experts. Small-shop mechanics are more independent-minded even than carpenters. Some small but significant fraction of auto mechanics can be autocratic, pardon the pun.

So I needed new brakes. Around here we get "Summer Syndrome" pretty badly. Quick! Make a whole year's profit in three or four months! Most services and trades have their schedules jammed in these months. (Some of them get pretty haughty, too—I made a $5 mistake on a check to the landscaping service, and the guy has apparently fired me as a client over it.) My car is an Acura built by Honda Manufacturing of Indiana in Greensburg. The first mechanic I tried, a Honda and Toyota specialist, was recommended by a local guy who races at Watkins Glen and whose father was a high-level racing mechanic. That shop was scheduling six weeks out. A little too long to wait. So I found a shop in town that could take me within a week. They wanted $400 for the front end rather than the $300 the other guy wanted, but they were available.

The new brakes chirped and made grinding noises for a while, which is normal. But they kept making noises for weeks. So I simply kept the appointment with the first guy, the master mechanic who specializes in Honda. I asked him if he would pull the wheels and check the first guy's work. He obliged.

The report: they used budget Napa parts and didn't clean the hubs before installing the brakes. The Honda specialist pulled them off and fixed what he could. During the process, he got my car down off the lift and took it out to the road twice to test it. And charged me only $52 for all that.

Not Mike's car. Photo by Living in Monrovia.

The upshot? I spent more for the brakes to begin with, then had to have the repair repaired...and ended up with worse parts. Good work, Mike. My sister-in-law is a ninja with a dollar—she buys stuff twice as nice for half as much. Me, I spend half again as much for something not quite as good. That's my level. Oh well, at least the brakes are working properly now. No more funny noises.

Do you ever do that? I've done it a number of times in my life—get the car fixed, then take it to a different mechanic just to see if the first one did what he said he did. Usually purely because I'm curious. It can end up costing extra, but it's always interesting. You know a guy is good when the second guy has nothing but praise for the work.

With film cameras, I used to like to find the best repair person for each brand of used camera I tried. Sherry Krauter worked on my Leicas, Mark Hama for Yashica, John Hermanson for Olympus, and so forth. Not that I ever had very much done.

This winter, I'm going to take the car into that specialist for a thorough inspection. I just want to know what he thinks of the shape it's in. That'll be interesting, 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:

Albert Smith: "There was a time when a backyard mechanic could do a lot on most cars. Today, you can barely identify what's under the hood. So you are at the mercy of the honesty or lack of when you take a car in for maintenance. I took my car in for two tires and an oil change a while back. My chair in the waiting area gave me a clear view of my car on the lift. Two tires were changed out and I was called up to the counter. I reminded the person about the oil change which he assured me had been accomplished. I verbally said that I didn't see that happen, to which he said I was wrong. I walked into the garage (against all the signs that said no customers allowed), pulled the dipstick out which was covered in the sludge of old oil. They charged me for the tires and informed me that I was not welcome back. I wonder how many people were not able to observe what was not done to their cars."

SteveW: "You're probably lucky to have found a specialist mechanic who is also honest. I gave up on private mechanics years ago after too many bad experiences, some similar to what you described, and many others worse. I will only maintain my car at the auto dealer."

Joel Becker: "I did the same thing last year, but with dentists. I hadn't been to the dentist since 2019 because—you know why—and I clearly had some cavities that needed filling. But my dentist of 20 years was now quite far away, and I finally bit the bullet and located a highly-recommended dentist near me. Well, after the visit, the sheer amount of work the dentist proposed was daunting. Don't get me wrong! My mouth is prone to cavities, and it was quite possible I needed every recommended filling! But you hear stories about dentists on the make, so I wanted to be sure. I booked an appointment with my previous dentist, being very up front about what I was up to and that I would pay out of pocket. They were very understanding, and fully supportive of my transition to a nearby practitioner. Turns out the new dentist was on the money. My old dentist confirmed every cavity and wished me good luck in the repairs. I'm now 3/4 of the way done with repairs, and I haven't had to lose a night of sleep whether I was being taken for a ride."

Steve Jacobs: "Concerning dentists...I don't know a good way to find one. I'm a retired doctor, and I do know how to find a good physician. Don't ask your friends, since they have no idea if their doctor is competent. Don't ask another doctor...they will recommend their golfing buddies, referral sources, etc. Ask a nurse. They know."

Chris H: "There are a few strategies for having a reliable, well maintained vehicle: a) be very rich b) be interested in, and capable of most of your own maintenance (more easily accomplished if you also gravitate to older generation cars) c) be incredibly lucky I kid, but only somewhat. While I am a car maintenance enthusiast, I completely understand why someone else might not be. The best overall approach (imo) is to not pay too much on vehicles - as little as reasonably possible, as long as that's palatable for your lifestyle. Over time, you pay somewhere - either you overpay at a dealer, roll the dice with an independent, or invest your money in tools and time in gaining the knowledge and executing the repairs and maintenance yourself (this is not insubstantial). Being a bit frugal, and having a bit of knowledge in order to divine whether you're being taken by a shop, is probably a reasonable approach for most."

James C Chinn: "I have learned that the quality of after market parts has drasticcally declined over the years. Even though they may have a long familar brand name, chances are good the parts are manufactured over seas and barely meet the minimum acceptable standards. I do quite a bit of my own maintance on my "08 Lexus such as brakes and use only the genuine Toyota parts. Much more expensive but they work and last several times longer then the other option."

'Global Nomad' by Tom Haig

Tom Haig today

As a youngster growing up in a Milwaukee, Wisconsin, suburb, Tom Haig ran wild with the neighborhood's kids. By seventh grade, the thirst for adventure and fearlessness he learned from them led him to springboard diving. "When I was older and experienced, I would feel, deep in my soul, that I was a diver."

After graduating from the University of Illinois, Tom flew to Luxembourg on his first international trip. Despite being broke, hungry, and far from a flight home, he and his brother Dan headed to Venice, Italy. "Without any warning, the greatest and most powerful epiphany of our lives unfolded. We looked back at the paths we'd chosen to get to this starving moment, and concluded that not only had we made the right choice to stretch things to the limit, we were committed to continue to make those same kinds of decisions the rest of our lives." And so began The Bridge to Venice Rule.

Living by that pact, Tom started work as a performance diver in Missouri. Several times a day, he climbed to a small platform, lit himself on fire, and dove seventy miles per hour into a shallow lake. Soon he was traveling all over the world, including to the 1989 Acapulco Cliff Diving Contest. In France he fell in love with cycling and carried a new passion back to Portland, Oregon, until one Sunday morning in September 1996. He crashed headfirst into a truck and found himself living a very different life from a wheelchair. His recovery—mentally, physically, and emotionally—was excruciating. "I'd been in car accidents, fallen from water towers, and landed flat on my back from 70-foot multiple somersaulting dives. No crying. I used to swear, jump up and down, and tell jokes. Anything but cry. I was going to have to learn how to cry again, or I wasn't going to survive. Then again, I wasn't sure if I wanted to survive."

In Global Nomad, Tom shares his early free-wheeling life with its exciting cities and colorful personalities, and his extraordinary post-accident return to The Bridge to Venice Rule—racing in marathons, traveling solo in some of the world's poorest countries, meeting the Dalai Lama, jamming with jazz great Oscar Klein, holding disability seminars, and starting the International Rehabilitation Forum with his physician brother Andy. In the process, he bares the unvarnished aftermath and heartbreaking vulnerabilities that follow permanent paralysis, and inspires us all to take risks and live remarkable, generous lives.

=  #  =  #  =  #  =

That's the Amazon book description for Tom Haig's new book Global Nomad. Tom has appeared on TOP before—in this post from 2007. I don't know Tom well—he's part of an extended family I've been close to all my life, and he might not remember me, I don't know. But I have heard stories about his life intermittently for years, and all I can say is that if anyone should write an autobiography it's Tom! A true daredevil, who has several different kinds of courage.

I've ordered mine and will post an update after I read it.

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 Raboin: "Wow. My two favorite blogs profiled the same person. Check out this article about Tom on Bike Portland."

Mike replies: They did a much better job than I did...let's send everyone there!

The Trouble With Rodinal

Everything comes and goes. You stick around long enough, you'll see a lot of things come around again. I've been around for long enough to have seen not one but two brand-new/revelatory/breakthrough English translations of The Brothers Karamazov (among Dostoevsky's novels, the last and greatest, and Susan Sontag's favorite book). The latest is by Michael R. Katz. This supplants the previous new revelatory breakthrough translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. Twenty or thirty years from now there will be a new must-have translation, unless we are all cooked by then*.

So now Rodinal is popular once again among B&W film users. Sad. It's a poor-ish pictorial film developer, in my 'umble opinion, especially for small formats: not always terrible, but not very good. The reason is that it depresses the mid-tones with most films, and accentuates grain. If handled well, some pictures look okay. With average skills or below, most pictures will be overlaid with a fog of depression and despair; tones will look grimy and dirty; sunlight shining on the World will seem like it gave up before it got here; pictures convey a grim mood and feeling. Spirits will be oppressed and reality made to look airless and hopeless.

Other than that it's okay.

It's also okay if that's the view of the world one is trying to convey, like a cynical Holden Caulfield with a camera. Maybe Rodinal is the developer for disaffected teens.

Magic bullet, dept.
Oh, but what about acutance? It's a high acutance developer. When someone says that to you, ask them to define acutance. Put them on the spot; don't allow them to go look it up. And what makes them think it is high acutance? Oh, they heard it is. Yes, I heard it. We all heard it. We heard it over and over, so it must be. Acutance is something good, we think, and it is something Rodinal provides. We think.

Piffle and balderdash. D-76 1+1 has just as much acutance, without the emphasized grain. And if you really want to see what acutance is, with your eyeballs, try D-76 1+3. This will extend the development times considerably, but we got your acutance for you right here.

Rodinal was formulated in 1891. The great innovation was not only that it could be supplied as a liquid, but as a liquid concentrate. Maybe it was high acutance by the standards of 1891.

Edna Leighton Tyler (1879–1970), Betsey, 1922. The
kind of tones that Rodinal was made for, and best at.
Okay, I'm being half tongue in cheek.

The other bad developer everyone uses is HC-110 dilution B. Because Ansel Adams used it. Here's the thing to remember about that: he was Ansel Adams. And, um, you're not. (And he used it with sheet film, which, while it was "Tri-X," was TXT in his day, not TXP or TX.)

Here's what normally happens with HC-110B (or used to):

1. Newbie, green, wet-behind-ears photo-infant hears about how great it is, Ansel used it, etc.
2. Uses it with 35mm, seeking specialness. (Magic bullets being what you think you should be after when you're green.)
3. Turns out that it's rather balky and hard to control, because it's too active and requires short development times which increases timing errors and agitation irregularities, and...
4. ...Pictures don't look all that good. Certainly not like Ansel Adams prints.
5. Continues to use it, all the while thinking and asserting that it is special, albeit with, shall we say, subsiding enthusiasm.
6. Eventually, quietly gives up and finds a better developer. And in so doing becomes less of a newbie, less green, and less wet-behind-the-ears, having gone through one of the standard trials by fire we all go through.

Nine people were in my graduating class in the Photo Department at the Corcoran School of Art in 1985, but 15 people were in the class in our sophomore year, the first year students picked a specialty. One, whom I will not name even though I remember, was a young guy with very little photography experience. He had some resources, though, which a lot of us did not have. He had two brand-new Nikon F3T bodies, the F3 being the top professional Nikon at that time and the "T" meaning the top and bottom plate were made of titanium so it could cost extra. His lens was the 55mm Micro-Nikkor, because that was the sharpest lens Nikon made according to what he read. He only shot Panatomic-X film (or maybe it was Technical Pan? It's been a minute), because it had less grain than any other film. And of course he used Rodinal, see above re: acutance. Maybe HC-110B. Pretty sure it was Rodinal. The photo paper he used was whatever had the blackest blacks.

Of course his prints looked awful because he didn't know how to expose and develop, which is more important than what equipment and materials you use. Highlights were hopelessly blocked and he tried to print down through them so a lot of the dark tones were forced into pure Dmax. He was mystified by these failures, and our teachers were no help because they didn't really teach technique unless you bugged them to. (In case you're wondering, they taught judgement, artistic meaning and effect, working methods, and ideas, among other things. Just not a lot of nuts and bolts.) I offered to help him with his technique, but he didn't see the reason to change film, developer, or paper...wasn't he already using the best of everything?

He didn't last long. I think he left before the end of the year, although I might be wrong.

And of course you can make Rodinal look good, with the right film and paper. But—this was Phil Davis's thing—photographic technique gets a lot easier when you use materials and methods that fall naturally into the way you wanted your pictures to look in the first place. Most people who use Rodinal end up fighting it, and then wondering why the craft of photography seems to be so hard.

Mike

P.S. Take this article with a grain of tolerance...er, salt. I kinda got going. No offense to anybody. Opinions are those of the author, etc.

*I say this, but I'm going to get the Michael R. Katz translation. Because I am a sucker for the idea that a newer translation is a better one. This is not rational, but there you go.

Related post: How to make digital B&W look better.

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:

Olybacker: "If I recall correctly, Technical Pan film requires a purpose-made Kodak developer. Theoretically, so do the Kodak T-Max films although a Kodak Company representative told me at a Trade Show in the UK, 'You will get better results with T-Max using D-76. We have done or own lab tests to prove it, but don't tell anybody.' In my view the current Kodak T-Max 100 and 400 ISO films are the best B&W films going. Please don't tell Ilford I wrote that!"

Mike replies: That's true. I was a pre-release beta-tester for the T-Max films (I was told I was the first person outside of Kodak to get any—one roll of each!), and if memory serves I believe D-76 was the developer used throughout the films' testing phase. I also ended up preferring D-76 for P3200 too.

Marten Collins: "Oh Mike I must partially disagree with you over Rodinal though I have no experience using it pictorially if that means landscapes. I used it shooting portraits and families in a studio with APX25 and diluted 1:50 for many years or at least till Agfa on their way down stopped making APX25. I reduced agitation and rated the film at ISO 12 and was presented with quite 'heavy' negs which gave me wonderful grain free images and cool whites together with the ability to dig details out of the blacks if I wanted or needed to. Oh yes I was beyond my teenage years when I started to use Rodinal and it was, for portraits, my favourite dev+film coupling; in fact I wrote an article about my usage for the late lamented Darkroom User magazine edited by Ed Buziak."

Mike replies: I wrote many articles for Darkroom User, albeit under a pseudonym—the publisher of the magazine I worked for didn't want my byline appearing in other magazines. You chose wisely—APX25 was one film that Rodinal worked well with.

Dave: "Another great 'nuts and bolts' post.

"In the book Pentax & Single-lens-reflex photography, by Robert Fuhring, he mentioned that one magazine editor would tolerate new photographers' pet processes for a while. Eventually, the new photographers would fall in line and let the lab process with D-76 and whatever paper they used. The results with D-76 were better than the 'special processes' the new photographers championed. (I really like how Mr. Fuhring wrote his various versions of that title. Easy to read and not too technical sounding, with several stories included to show the importance of the point he was covering. Just the information you needed to understand the camera and to help take better photos. Even those new-fangled electronic flashes were covered.)

"Less grain than any other film? It had to be Tech Pan. Of course, that was 'graphic arts' film and had to be coerced into good pictorial photography results with a different developer. Lord help you if you didn't have the exposure and dynamic range under control!"

Mike replies: Yes, in direct comparisons D-76 (Ilford's version is called ID-11 and is in some ways superior in terms of handling) usually won out over everything else. It had many different looks depending on how you used it. In the '90s there was a great cult around pyro developers, thanks to Gordon Hutchings and his Book of Pyro and its many admirers. Phil Davis, of Beyond the Zone System and the de-facto technical editor of Photo Techniques, did a series of demonstrations that proved D-76 could be made to look exactly identical to pyro...but he refused to let me publish his results! He knew it would be a pointless hornet's nest of disputation and he just didn't want to get into it. 

Ed Hawco: "No need to apologize for the tone, Mike. Personally, I like it when you tell it plainly as you see it, and it even makes me giggle a bit."

Mike replies: Of course people can use whatever they want to, and the good workers will do good work. I partly just thought there should be a little counterbalancing somewhere on the Web to all the gushy blabber about Rodinal.

Andrew L: "You just try telling me that Fomapan 100 (or Arista Ultra 100) looks bad with Rodinal. Just try. Also, Acros II. Good day, sir. I SAID good day!"

Mike replies: Ahhhh...it looks great with those films? (Edges toward exit)

Blessed by Marilyn Monroe's Ass

I tried to find a biography of Cartier-Bresson (no proper one exists), and came across Pierre Assouline's Henri Cartier-Bresson: A Biography, which sounds more like a compendium of reminiscences from interviews (although I haven't read it), thence to a short article by Peter Conrad from 2005 reviewing the Assouline book in The Guardian. There I found this:

Cartier-Bresson refused to venerate photographs, because they are thefts from life, mortified moments that kill the vitality they adore.

That's a whole lot packed into one sentence, isn't it? First that photographs are a way of adoring vitality (of life, of the world, I assume?), second that they are "thefts," which seems strange because you don't take anything when you take a photograph, third that they are "mortified moments" (he conjures Nabokov's musings on the fact that a butterfly collector kills his butterflies, or at least they did during the great 19th-century taxonomical project, when specimen collecting was thought to be central to naturalism), and finally it implies that some unnamed cohort (other photographers? curators and critics? The audience for art photographs? We aren't told) "venerates" photographs. And of course that our hero has rejected this stance of veneration. I count nine extraordinary assertions in that little sentence, which is beautiful to boot.

The funniest thing in the Peter Conrad article is this, which I've never heard before:

During the war he buried his Leica in a field in the Vosges, and left it there for three years while he continued to take photographs in his head, developing and displaying them in his memory.

After he exhumed the camera, he touchingly sought to reward it by arranging for it to be caressed by Marilyn Monroe's bum. He was at work on the set of The Misfits; Marilyn arrived late for a meal, and moved towards the empty chair on which Cartier-Bresson had rested his lucky Leica. 'Would you give it your blessing?' he asked. She obliged, and with a wicked smirk pretended to sit on it, just brushing it with her behind.

That does sound like something he might do. And yes, he did, fairly often it seems, claim to take pictures in his head that he remembered. I do that too, and probably you do as well. One little problem, though: if both those things happened, they'd be two entirely separate events. The Misfits didn't come out until 1961, long after the war, and it's highly unlikely H.C.-B. was still photographing with the same camera he buried in that field. He started using the M3 as soon as it came out in 1953. But it makes a nice story.

Isn't it odd that there has never been a scholarly biography of Cartier-Bresson? You'd think there would be by now, especially since so many vivid stories and entertaining anecdotes are connected with him. I wonder if any of you have read Pierre Assouline's book. It's not available as an e-book, unfortunately.

 

Mike

P.S. How was that for a clickbait title? I always feel like a fraud when I try to do that. It doesn't come naturally to me.

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:

Rob Brodman: "I thought it was cute and accurate according to the article and not just click bait. You're the real deal Mike. Don't fret it."

More Visitors Than Ever!

According to my Typepad Dashboard, yesterday TOP got 150,860 visitors.

Unfortunately, that has to be a glitch. That's more than double my all-time record for daily visitors, and it's nearly thirty times the average traffic for the past week. Furthermore, it's not reflected in the number of comments, Affiliate looks, or Referrers. I've asked Typepad to correct the error and remove the result from my recent stats.

Sigh. I would love to have that many viewers. Unfortunately, to accomplish that, I'd have to be making videos, writing only about products, and relentlessly structuring my my content as clickbait—not only in the title, but in the body of the content.

And if I did that, you probably wouldn't be here.

Still, it would be nice. Here's to illusions!

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:

What's Valid and What's Not, and Why?

Sam G. wrote: "For me, the more interesting idea is whether camping at a spot for hours on end removes the genuine serendipity. If you want a person to stand in a very specific spot in order to complete your composition, is it that much different to wait of hundreds of passers by to randomly walk through rather than just ask them to stand in the right spot? In both cases, you are imposing your vision on the scene rather than letting the scene present itself to you."

He was talking about Jeremy Paige, whose work I like (what little I've seen of it, in the video)—I didn't know of him before this. He comes off as the real deal. I'd like to see more of his work.

The issue of what's valid and what's not in getting a picture is interesting, although perhaps overblown in most cases. Of course it's a thorny thicket. It has has to do with psychology, status, and assumptions and expectations. It also seems to have a lot to do with Internet culture, which has a marked petty-and-vindictive streak. People can get criticized severely for almost anything, because...well, because they can, I guess.

What's okay and who says so? People can slammed for all sorts of alleged transgressions. A photographer once shot a project in the dark, using IR film and an opaque red filter. She put a bunch of nearly-nude friends in a room and shot away, discovering later what she had gotten. Were those not "her" photographs because she couldn't see through the viewfinder what she was shooting at the time the shutter fired? What about a guy who shot from the hip for weeks and then edited severely? I know of a very good photographer who shot that way for years, although I can't remember his name. Is it okay that Robert Frank exhaustively "worked" some of his pictures for The Americans to come up with a picture that looked like it was one quick and thoughtless snapshot? Robert Doisneau got Internet-shamed at the end of his life when people found out something that had long been known, which is that he wandered around Paris for several hours with the couple in Le Baiser de l’Hôtel de Ville, taking many pictures of them in different locations. A friend who knew him said he was very troubled by the harshness of the accusations, which he shouldn't have been, because the accusations were thoughtless, not to say mindless. How about setting up a camera with a motion detector to trip the shutter remotely when something happens in front of it? How about suspending a camera around a cat's neck and setting it to fire at intervals for a cat's eye view of the world?

All these things, which are all real examples by the way, have outraged somebody somewhere. Why? Who gave them the right to set the rules?

Jeremy Paige rediscovered Cartier-Bresson's method, which in many cases was to find a scene and plan and wait. I use that method sometimes, as with the paddleboarder shot. That doesn't mean the shot is staged. I didn't know a paddleboarder would come along. The thought hadn't crossed my mind until she came into view. (I was waiting for a canoe, which never came.) I didn't tell her to stand, or how to dress, or instruct her where to look.

Anyway, if staged pictures are somehow tainted, then pretty much all fashion photographs and all still lives are tainted. If posing is bad, then most portraits in history can't be good.

Is it inauthentic to take many shots of a scene to see what will work best? How about when a large-format photographer consults charts to find out when the sun will be in the right position, or finds a vantage point so she can exclude something intrusive? Is that dishonest? We were just talking about the San Francisco de Asis Mission Church in Ranchos de Taos, which John Camp photographed showing the parking lot and commercial buildings that surround it. Are all the photographs and paintings that omit those things somehow lying?

Lying is at the core of the real issues here, of course. We're mainly affronted or offended when we think someone was trying to pull the wool over our eyes. Pretending something is one thing when it's another thing. Le Baiser de l’Hôtel de Ville looks like it was a snapshot, therefore people are critical when they find out it's not. Of course, not very many viewers have a very subtle knowledge of what's involved in making pictures, so the first thing that begs to be examined is their assumptions, not the pictures.

We all set our own rules. The real responsibility is to be considerate of viewers by acknowledging what is really going on.

And speaking of the paddleboarder shot, I'm interested in making a combination shot of that scene, one that includes both the geese and the paddleboarder. That was suggested by Ritchie Thomson in the comments. But of course, if I did, I would say, "this is combination photograph. The geese and the paddleboarder actually passed this spot about ten minutes apart." I suppose I should look up the time stamp on the two images and give the interval in exact minutes and seconds! Because you can never be too careful.

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:

Benjamin Marks: "Outrage is tiresome, and useless if we are talking about making art. The Internet has fooled us into thinking outrage is useful, or that it matters. It doesn't. It is just a tribal marker, and folks must be pretty lonely and lost these days if they take such satisfaction in banding together in this cheap copy of community.

"Here's my two cents. As long as no one is getting hurt in the making, all bets are off when art is being created. Plan, stage, pay, tech-up, tech-down, stalk, hide, buy gear, paint your belly with blue woad and howl. With the above proviso, all that matters is what the viewer of the art feels. There isn't a 'sin' listed in your post, Mike, that would keep me from being moved by a beautiful image."

Alan Wieder: "This is a very thoughtful post. Your examples are great and my thinking is that critics should make pictures of their own authenticity rather than condemning what other photographers do."

Kristine Hinrichs: "Your inspiration was that couple in a canoe. Even if they were paddling, it’s likely a much 'lazier' scene than the paddleboard which (to me) exudes a different physicality."

Niels: "I love the light and detail/texture of the photo on Flickr."

Sam G. [the OP —Ed.]: "To be clear, I wasn't passing judgement on the validity of a photograph. A staged photograph is not any better or worse than a serendipitous photograph as long as, as you said, the photographer is honest about what they are doing. I like Jeremy's work. It is incredible! I just thought it was interesting how some of his photographs seemed to push the limits of what it means to be serendipitous.

"An attempt at an analogy...if you pick a number at random from the phone book, and happen to call your old friend from high school that you haven't talked to in years, that's serendipity. But if you continuously call random numbers from the phone book until you ring your old friend, that's brute force."

Followup: Falcon LS3/5a CHEAP (OT)

Mark Kinsman wrote:

Coincidentally, I revived my HiFi interest when Covid hit and have been enjoying it ever since. As part of that two-channel system, I purchased a pair of the Falcon Acoustics LS3/5a Silver Badge Edition (BBC Licensed). Falcon was started by Malcom Jones, who, while working at KEF, designed the drivers that were used in the original BBC LS3/5a. The Falcon drivers are exactly as Malcom designed back at KEF. Very highly recommended. When I got back into this hobby, I purchased the Sound Artist Chinese homage version of the LS3/5a—surprisingly good for much less money. While not exactly an LS3/5a, they are more alike than not, with a great midrange. They are part of a bedroom system. While I now have three sets of speakers I rotate listening to, the Falcon Acoustic LS3/5a’s are magical and my forever speakers. The others may go, but these are here to stay.

Someone made a cryptic comment about Steve Huff, which made me go check if Steve had ever written about the LS3/5a speakers. (I seldom read other photo bloggers. Whenever someone tells me that another blogger has written a response to something I said, for instance, I don't go read it. Other people's opinions of me are none of my business.) Anyway, he wrote about them on July 11th, 2020 (down near the end of the article). This is a brief selection from what he had to say (I usually change the formatting and punctuation of quotations to accord to TOP's style sheet, but Steve's are distinctive and I have left them alone):

These tiny speakers are gorgeous in build, and have a unique sound that takes you back a ways but at the same time they do things I have not heard many modern day speakers do. They also lack in bass, so they are really only good for a small room and near field listening. In this kind of environment these are magic as once you start listening you do not even realize you are missing out on anything, as the speaker is just so natural and sweet and expansive in sound with a sweet fullness that makes you think what you are hearing is complete. [...] Everything is just…beautiful…with the right music. They really bring some recordings to life in a way I have never heard before. These made me realize what a true holographic soundstage should sound like. [...] …Vocals on these are magic. One of the best midrange performances I have heard, regardless of cost. [...] I warn you, they are addicting.

Hot tip
I'm afraid I triggered my own obsessiveness again with that post the other day (note to self: never write about hi-fi ever again). If you want to try the little Falcon LS3/5a speakers, a little tip: unused factory seconds (the box might be the only thing that's hurt) of the Falcon version of the LS3/3a are currently on closeout with MoFi badging for only $1,650. That's well below the price of most of the other UK-made variants. For easier-on-your-wallet experimentation, try the Chinese knockoffs Mark mentioned*.

These speakers have been out of my price range my whole life, one way or another, even though I've owned or had a pair about five times for brief periods of up to a couple of months (one time I bought a pair on credit and had them repossessed, the only time in my life such a thing ever happened). Same story now. Some things never change. Please buy those bargain Falcon/MoFi LS3/5a speakers all up, please, so they won't torture me any more!**

Mike

*But remember: small room, careful setup, small acoustic ensembles or vocalists. There's a useful PDF about room setup at the Nordost site, but you have to give them your contact details to unlock it. Oh, and you need an amp with some grunt.

**I wasted my life. I'm not kidding. I should have done something that simply earned money effectively, and then pursued my interests as hobbies on the side. Too soon alt, too late schmardt.

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:

Jeff: "Some of the best advice I got early on in my business career, which was unrelated to photography, came from a photo dealer from whom I was buying prints for my eventual collection. A camera store owner, near retirement, had approached me about buying his business. And I envied the photo dealer’s life, at least as I naively imagined it at the time. Anyway, she emphatically told me to stick with my business career, make a lot of money, and indulge my other interests (including, at the time, hi-fi) as hobbies. Glad I listened."

Short Story

Professional photographers run into all kinds of issues trying to do their work. Friend of mine was shooting a job for the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) at a location in Langley, Virginia, next to another Federal agency thought to be headquartered there. Tried to do the job using a drone...but sharpshooters from "the other agency" shot the drone out of the sky. "True story," he says. So he went back to the drawing board. Had to hire a bucket truck, AKA a cherry picker, to take the picture for the FHWA.

Mike
(Thanks to JT)

P.S. As of 1:00 ET Wednesday I'm all caught up on comments.

FOLLOWUP 4:30 Wednesday: I wrote to CIA Public Affairs:

Dear CIA,
I write a website for photographers that receives ~6,000-8,000 views per post. Recently I repeated a story that alleged that an unauthorized drone being operated near CIA headquarters was "shot down." Many of my readers objected to this in one way or another.

So my questions are, 1.) does CIA control unauthorized drones being operated in its airspace, and 2.) does it have a way of doing so without endangering the public?

Kind regards, and thank you for your service.

The website says they read every inquiry sent to them. I'll let you know if I get a response.

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:

What Comes A-Floating Down the River

At the northern end of the eastern arm of our lake there begins a long stream (how long? A search didn't turn up that information), with dams and waterfalls and the remnants of 19th-century mills, called the Keuka Lake Outlet, through which Keuka Lake drains into the larger and lower Seneca Lake. The Keuka Lake Trail runs alongside. Various stretches of the Outlet are used by recreational boaters and fishermen. At the local Arts Fair a couple of months ago, I saw a picture here—a couple in a canoe paddling lazily past this spot. I saw the picture without seeing it, because I was off to the side and a couple of hundred feet away when the couple in the canoe came by. They passed by, and I couldn't get into place in time.

(View an enlargeable version of this shot here.)

Since then, I've been back to this spot twice more to to see what I might get. I worked out the vantage point I wanted for the background and put a piece of wood on the ground so I could return to it easily, set the camera the way I wanted it, and retired to a bench in the shade to wait. It's very near the public landing, so lots of watercraft stopped short of me because the people were headed back to pull the boats out of the water.

On this occasion I patiently photographed this same scene with all sorts of craft passing—multiple kayakers, a sleek speedboat, a strange one-person fishing-boat contraption with an electric trolling motor, this young paddleboarder...and a flock of geese. Strangely, everyone passing (even the geese) looked at me, except the people in the speedboat. None of them even glanced over. I waved to most of them, and spoke to a few. The geese were amazingly cooperative, arraying themselves in a single line, perfectly spaced. The thought crossed my mind that they looked too perfect, and people would think I had cloned and Photoshopped them into place!

Are they bitin' today?
Theme song for this picture: J.J. Cale's "The Old Man and Me," a song I've always loved. I used to call it the theme song of my life. The lyrics describe a situation that is lyrical, pastoral, touching, profound and profoundly ridiculous all at the same time:

The old man he catches
The fish in the morning—
He rides the river every day.
I sit on the bank and
Holler when he passes
'Hey, old man, are they bitin' today?'

I wake up in the morning,
Thinking 'bout my troubles
I go down to the water
And they pass away.
And when the old man comes
A-floating down the river
'Hey, old man, are they bitin' today?'

Now here we got a thing
That keeps on rolling.
It ain't heavy, don't take it that way.
The old man and me,
We got a good thing going—
He catches fish, and I sit all day.
He catches fish, and I sit all day.

I could write a whole post on that song.

Muddle
But which one is "the" picture? They all work, and yet none of them were exactly what I had in mind. You have to avoid being bloody-minded ("stubbornly contrary or obstructive: cantankerous") when photographing. I am willing to be patient when hunting a photograph, but I've noticed over the years that when I get too attached to the idea of the picture I think I want, often nothing good comes of that. On the other hand, I'm good at accepting serendipity when it happens, and it happens often. Sometimes I will go to a place to photograph a specific thing I saw, and try hard to get that shot, only to have to accept the fact, later, while editing, that the shot I went after just isn't much. On the other hand, when I'm out taking one shot, sometimes I happen on another scene, and that one is the good one. Photographing is like fishing—you equip yourself, position yourself, encourage good luck as much as you can, but you're still not entirely in control of what you're going to get. You have to stay open-minded pretty much every step of the way. Especially, you always have to be open to the fact that maybe what you thought would be a good picture, isn't.

So is the paddleboarder "the" picture? ...The one I should be open to? I like it. At the same time, my instincts are a bit muddled—I'm not quite certain it all comes together. Maybe this is it, or maybe there's not a picture at this spot. (The geese came close for me too!)

Time will tell
The answer, for me, almost always comes as time passes. When pictures are new, there's a residue of false enthusiasm that clings to them. But after some time goes by, usually the good ones come forward more—that is, I like them better—and the poorer ones fall away—they offer me less and less. That's when I realize that I've "forced" something that doesn't quite work.

So I'll let some time pass, and see how I like the paddleboarder. But whatever happens, I think I'm going to return to this spot at least one more time this summer, to see what happens by.

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:

Aaron: "I'd love to see the geese version. I think your understandable concern about it appearing too perfect is reflective of our cultural moment. Serendipity happens. But, because it's technically possible to create a fiction that is indistinguishable from an authentic spontaneously serendipitous moment it becomes harder for all of us to trust and appreciate an image of such a moment. And because visually we've been trained with certain expectations of perfection we now have an unending stream of simulacra of serendipity. It's hard to distinguish photography from graphic arts (and nothing against graphic arts, by the way). I don't think there's an antidote to this except to find photographers who we trust to give us those moments within certain conventions of image manipulation without violating the authentic moment, perhaps image manipulation that calls appropriate attention to the moment without fictionalizing it. That's clearly an art and not a science and people will understandably disagree about what counts as appropriate manipulation."

Mike replies: First, here's the variant with geese:

Second, to your main point, very pithily (is that a word?) stated, I've long thought the same thing. People don't tend to like that argument, but the fact that photography is not as much a pure record as it used to be has dampened my enjoyment of photographs somewhat. I remember when I learned to be wary of photographs with telltales of manipulation (including excessively perfect "spontaneous serendipity"!), and also when I realized that I was becoming more reflexively wary about the truth-value of all photographs.

Kevin Crosado: "A magazine editor I used to do prepress for back in the noughties would have had me Photoshop out the paddle-boarder because they distracted from the photograph of the building...."

John Camp: "People shooting digital often shoot multiple takes of a single evolving scene. Did you, by chance, get a shot of the paddleboarder entering the scene? Or did you wait until she was in your pre-selected shot, and then take it?"

Mike replies: I only took two of her, which is too few. I generally don't take enough variants, and often, back in front of the computer, wish I had more to choose from. I suppose I'm still too attached to the old idea (or habit) of anticipating just the right moment and hitting the shutter at exactly the right moment. In this case I have one of her entering the frame, and then the one at the top of this post. I didn't take one of her in the middle of the scene because I realized she wouldn't contrast well unless she was in front of the darkest background. I took 36 shots of this scene altogether, with various watercraft, which is, by coincidence or not, just about exactly what I would have given this subject shooting 35mm film.

I have another shot that I haven't yet posted on Flickr that has a man walking through the scene. He's quite far away from the camera, and I couldn't see his expression as I was shooting. I took five variants of that one—and there's only one in which he's not looking at my camera!

The Ideal Portrait Client

Following up from this post, about the recent portrait I did for Kerry Graff, a doctor in Canandaigua, New York, here's the picture she chose from the five proofs I gave her:

It's for professional purposes, for a public-facing website of medical professionals. (My choice, not that that matters, is in the original post. She thought that one was too formal.)

Kerry turned out to be an ideal portrait client. For these reasons:

—> She chose the picture she wanted right away. I mean it took her five minutes. Man, when I think of all the portraits I did when the client took days, weeks, or in some extreme cases even months to make a decision.... What that meant is that I had to remind them multiple times and keep the job open (and wait to be paid) for what seemed would be an indefinite period. I would always think of that Lovin' Spoonful song:

...Did you ever have to make up your mind?
Pick up on one and leave the other one behind
It's not often easy, and not often kind
Did you ever have to make up your mind?

...Did you ever have to finally decide?
Say yes to one and let the other one ride
There's so many changes, and tears you must hide
Did you ever have to finally decide?

Back in the olden days, when I did portraits for pay, I finally ended up charging just $20 in advance under the pretense of "reserving" the sitting. I found that even with that small amount, FOMO would motivate them to carry through, make their selection, and get their portrait; otherwise they forfeited the twenty bucks. (Not for nothing do higher-level photographers, like higher-level lawyers, prefer not to deal directly with the public!)

—>She chose one. Just one. Not two, and not four.... Every portrait photographer knows the problem when the client says "I like them all! They're all good! Can I have this one, and this one, and this one, and this one?" Of course, that's not a problem if they're paying for prints. But when I'm doing the job for expenses or for free, that's not what I agreed to do.

—>She never even mentioned the other shots (I mean apart from the five proofs I presented her with) and never asked to see any. She just trusted my choice of the proofs. This is fairly atypical. The last portrait I did before this one—also done for free—I explained very clearly to the client that I would provide six or eight proofs, and I ended up providing ten or twelve (I don't exactly recall). Well, he hectored me to see "all the shots," saying things like "I know you took a lot more than that. Why aren't you letting me see them?" I thought, what do I need to do, put it in writing and make it a contract? He started acting like I hadn't delivered what I had promised, like I was being negligent. It got a little unpleasant, to be honest. But if I take 150 shots, you don't get to see all 150. I've always been like that, even when I was a teenager.

—>Finally—and this is probably the part I like best—Kerry actually preferred the unretouched version. Look, Ma, no Photoshop. Again, It's more common for clients to nitpick the Photoshopping—"can't you get rid of this wrinkle?" (Or, can't you make me look like I did when I was in my twenties only better-looking?) Photoshop is a great boon, I'll give you that. I started using it in 1994 with Photoshop v.3. I can think of a dozen trouble jobs pre-1994 that I could have solved with it in a jiffy.

OoC on the left, retouched version on the right

Whenever I work on a portrait in Photoshop I think of Edward Weston slaving over the retouching of his portraits for his clients, when he made his living doing portraits, as recounted in The Daybooks*. Of course he was doing it with a graphite pencil on the emulsion side of 4x5 to 8x10 negatives, but "same difference" as we used to say when we were kids.

Shut up
I'm sure all of this makes me sound like a terrible whiner, like I never did anything but bitch and moan about my clients. Far from it. I did have a few troublesome clients, who I tend to remember well, and if I'm honest I had a couple of jobs that I myself was guilty of flubbing, and I'm not too proud to tell those stories as well. In far and away the majority of cases, however, I liked spending time with portrait clients and I miss the work. (Nobody pays for portraits any more, in my experience. My son's girlfriend Kate sent me a portrait of their baby recently that a professional thirty years ago would have worked hard to get and would have been justifiably proud of. She has an artistic eye, a smartphone, a parent's love and regard, and access.) I didn't advertise who my clients were, back in the day—privacy concerns, you know—but they included a U.S. Supreme Court Justice, a U.S. Senator, a prominent black activist I guarantee you've heard of, several television personalities, and a variety of socialites and local luminaries. And of course I treated those people like anybody else. By far the majority of my subjects were fun to work with, and most everyone was pleased with their portraits.

But I'm an idealist, and, in an ideal world, all my clients would have been more like Kerry in those four ways listed above. Smiley emoji!

Mike

*Which every aspiring art photographer in my youth read, and which are now out of print. Ah well, culture moves on.

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:

Simon Grosset: "These are all the reasons I give hi-res files to wedding couples, so they can make prints themselves (I do recommend an online printer too.) Similarly, I will deliver a proof of a wedding album without asking which pictures they want in it. They’re allowed to make one set of changes before they start getting charged extra for my time."

Albert Smith: "Re 'Nobody pays for portraits any more, in my experience... has...a smartphone, and access...': I think about this a lot. When we were learning about perspective, lens-induced distortion, and creative use of selective focus back in the day, and acquiring some classic focal length in the 85mm to 135mm range to be flattering to the subject, we also learned how not to render a subject, such as a headshot made close-in with a 28mm lens. Today, 10-plus years into the smartphone generation, I'd guess many 20-somethings have never seen a photo of themselves made with basic photo 101 techniques that we all used in the before times. When I see many of the 'selfies' posted by people that think they are terrific, all I can see is the things that we were trying to avoid back when people studied this stuff. It would be fun (and easy) to impress a vain subject with the most simple portrait technique when all they have ever seen of themselves is an arm's-length wide-angle shot with large nose and small ears. Of course, we wouldn't get that chance."

Mike replies: I don't know what the "effective" focal length of the above portrait would be...shot with a 56mm, which is an 85mm-equivalent, and then considerably cropped (to Kerry's instructions—she cropped it on her phone the way she wanted it and then sent it back to me). It's probably equivalent to something in the 120mm to 135mm range.

s.wolters replies to Albert Smith: "A few weeks ago I made a portrait of the seventeen-year-old daughter of a friend with my Panasonic 42,5mm ƒ/1.7 lens. An 85mm-equivalent. She said she didn't like it because she looked so weird! The wide-angle distortion seems already the standard now for the young generation.

"What doesn't help either is that the portrait mode on an iPhone is also a 26mm-equivalent. Portrait here means only means that it gets a blurry background."