The Online Photographer

Free Money (OT)

This is a followup to the OT Ford Mach-E EV post, and I beg your pardon. I really shouldn't write about this this morning. But I can't help myself...I need to vent.

Here's the short version. As you've probably heard, the government, at both the State and Federal level, wants to sweeten the deal for people buying EVs. So they offer consumer incentives in the form of rebates and tax credits. (As of this year, the Federal tax credit can be applied to the price of an EV immediately at the point of sale, by the dealer, so it's easy now.) In my State the incentives max out at $7,500 Federal and $2,000 State. There are a few conditions, mainly to benefit American car companies and lessen our dependency on China.

So the government wants to give me $9,500 to help me buy a Ford EV. Nice of them, huh? And guess how much the Mach-E qualifies for?

...In most cases, $500. I didn't skip a zero there—five hundred dollars. The other nine grand? Ford doesn't mind if you and I miss out on that.

G O O D   L O R D. Talk about shooting themselves in the foot! Ford pours resources and engineering into building an all-new, from-the-ground-up EV, and then they don't even ensure that their customers can avail themselves of the free money the government is giving away. What?!? Really? That has got to be one of the most self-defeating business blunders ever. If you were designing a car from scratch, and the government had designed a program specifically to help you succeed, wouldn't it be "Job One" to absolutely ensure that your car qualifies for the monetary incentives your customers will be eligible for?

Of course, it's a little more complicated than that. The government did change the rules midstream in January '23—the Mach-E qualified for half the Federal incentive before that—and the lowest model configuration of the car does qualify for the whole two grand from the State. It's all the higher models that only qualify for $500. Furthermore, a used EV that costs less than $25k qualifies for $4,000 in Federal tax credits, regardless of where it was made and what kind of batteries it has. (But there are no State rebates for used EVs.) A few of the early cars have already dipped into that range, and more will follow as time passes. And, Ford was planning to build its own LFP battery plant in Michigan, which would have solved the problem—but apparently it has put those plans on the shelf because of short-term consumer hesitancy.

Ah, what a clusterf--k.

Anyway, in 2022, when the Mach-E qualified for half the Federal sweetener and was still newish, it outsold the gasoline Mustang—in fact, in April '22, Ford suspended orders, citing excessive demand. In 2023, U.S. sales (now with zero Federal rebate) only rose slightly, from roughly 39,000 to around 41,000. But how are you going to apportion the blame for that? Some of it has to be due to the denial of the subsidies. Why would you buy Car B if it meant leaving $9,500 on the table, vs. Car A which allows you to have that money? There was also a very costly recall of early cars that might have dampened Ford management's enthusiasm for the whole project. That's partly what you get for starting at the top end, rather than the low. Maybe Ford should have built a cheap EV at the same time. (Reminds me of Kyocera's star-crossed attempt to build a deluxe 6-MP Contax DSLR, the full-frame N Digital,  before the timing was right. It wasn't "the" camera that killed Contax—there were several factors—but it was the biggest.) Still, the Mach-E is currently either No. 3 or No. 4 on the list of the best-selling EVs. The first two places are held by Teslas, which qualify for all of the available government incentives.

No such thing as range anxiety
Meanwhile, two little morsels I stumbled across in my research (you know me—it's been all EVs all the time for the past several days). They give opposite perspectives on the the issue of range anxiety. The first from a guy who's making a road trip from L.A. to Phoenix and the second from a guy who charges a daily driver, a Tesla, at home.

1: A wonderful rant by Matt Farah of The Smoking Tire about "infrastructure anxiety." Start watching at about 12:00 and go to about 14:30. This is worth hearing. (Note that the sound is not properly sync'd.)

2: From a comment by a Tesla owner who goes by the name @MH-Tesla:

"Oh, and it's full every day I wake up, like having a gas pump at your home. So the one and only thing a gas car is superior at is long road trips.

"I thought the charging was going to be the thing I disliked the most. Turns out it's the best part of an electric car. Unless you do that road trip, you don't even think about range. It doesn't enter your thinking. You just use your car without a thought to 'do I have enough gas / range.' You always have enough every day so you quickly get used to not thinking about it. It's awesome."

"Like having a gas pump at home." We don't hear enough about that. In my area, you can get free electricity in the middle of the night if you are using it to charge an EV, and you can sign up to get all your electricity from local solar fields whether you have an EV or not.

Anyway, the Mach-E gets shunted to the long list of expensive cars I like but can't afford, and to say I am disappointed is an understatement. (I've really caught the jones for that car.) Well, those grapes were probably sour anyway. But supposedly the Chevy Bolt is being redesigned and re-engineered for a 2025 or 2026 return, and will reportedly be at the cheaper end of the price range for EVs. We'll have to wait and see if that will be true—and whether the GM managers have enough sense and direction to give their customers a crack at that free money.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2024 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:

Stephen S.: "I used to live in a condo near downtown Toronto, Canada, and they announced a plan for electric car charging in the underground parking: residents would have to pay up to $30,000 to get a charger at their parking spot, and the building could only support half of the parking spots having chargers, so everyone was encouraged to secure their spot for the future, or risk losing out forever. It sure made it look like the future was that EV ownership only for those who owned a house, and that half of the condo residents would have to give up driving entirely if internal-combustion vehicles were ever outlawed. This was not at all encouraging."

Tom Stermitz: "Yes, pay attention to the rebates, whether Federal, State, dealer or manufacturer. The Hyundai/Kia group doesn't qualify for the Federal rebate because the batteries are not U.S.-made, but the manufacturer matches the $7,500. Thanks to the supply-demand-inventory distortion of the moment, I got $17,500 off my Kia EV6.

"Secondly, pay attention to lease vs. purchase cost over the life of the deal. Leased EVs get the Federal rebate regardless of battery origin—assuming the dealer passes that on to you. This is such a good deal, that over half of the EVs sold right now are leased.

"Thirdly, pay attention to your local off-peak electric costs. My 7.5 cents means that I pay $2 per 100 miles. My electric bill went up $20/month, but my fuel cost went down $200/month.... I commute about 1,200–1,500 miles per month....

"Fourth, don't forget the little things like purchase sales tax, yearly registration and monthly insurance. These cars are tech-heavy, and a broken rear-view mirror or bumper probably includes broken cameras or sensors."

John Camp: "One of the odder and yet more intriguing speculations about why 'we're alone' in the Universe—that is, we've never found a sign of life outside the solar system—is that advanced civilizations hit a 'great filter' that destroys them, and maybe their worlds. That always seemed unlikely to me, as surely some advanced civilizations would avoid the filter. But perhaps there are several filters to avoid, and we're approaching one. One of the more ignored thoughts about global warming is that there is an enormous (truly enormous) store of methane in the northern tundra of Canada and Russia. When that begins to melt, the amount of warming gases entering the atmosphere will increase exponentially. We can probably handle 130 degrees in Scottsdale and Austin with air conditioning. Can we handle 200 degrees in Minneapolis?

"Also, to the people who argue that energy generation is energy generation, and that going to EV cars is simply moving pollution from one place to another...no it isn't. The difference is, power plants are single-point sources. There is available (if expensive) tech that will sequester CO2. But how do you do that from millions of tiny point-sources, like cars. And the answer is, you can't. If we really want to control CO2 emissions, we need EV cars and nuclear, wind and solar."

Mike replies: Wind is already 10% of utility-scale electricity generation in the U.S., and the total of renewable sources is 21%, which exceeds the percentage for nuclear (source). Worldwide, the situation is better, with more than a quarter of power generation being from renewables according to the United Nations (source). One nice thing about renewables is that you can scale those down to point-sources (as you call them)—I have a number of friends who run their homes on solar, and one who runs his house on solar and has enough power left over to fuel his Nissan Leaf.

Cars are also an excellent solution to the problem of how to store solar energy! Millions of little mobile batteries can do what large-scale storage ideas can't.

Bodies of Work

Frans Hals, Catharina Both van der Eem, bride of Paulus Beresteyn, 1629

Tom Burke writes, on Saturday: "[On the subject of] single-subject pictures, in this case Wegman’s Weimaraners: I’ve found something similar in other artists and photographers. Jane Bown was lauded as a great portrait photographer—she did portraits two or three times a month for The Observer newspaper—and seen individually they were great. But I once looked through a collection of maybe 100 of them, and I came away with the feeling that they were essentially the same portrait, just with different subjects. Similarly, albeit on an altogether different level, Frans Hals' portraits: all individually utterly brilliant, but not really meant to be seen in an exhibition of 50 or more. I was ready to look at pictures of something very different well before the end of the exhibition."

Jane Bown, Francis Bacon

John Camp adds: "Your analysis of Wegman made me think of Hendrick Kerstens and the photos he takes of his daughter in the faux old-masters style. As you say, it's a schtick, and often quite amusing as well as quite striking. I particularly like the one with the toilet paper rolls."

Hendrik Kerstens, Paper Roll, 2008

Tom and John's observations make an interesting point that I had never thought of before writing the post about my Rockwell Museum visit with Geoff. I was taught in art school that individual images are stronger when they're part of what was termed a "body of work," a term which itself could mean either a whole ouvre, meaning all of an artist's work over her lifetime, or a project, meaning an intentional multi-work grouping of more limited scope—say, for instance, all of the pictures in one book. So all of Ralph Gibson's pictures are a body of work, but his color pictures in the book L'Histoire de France are also a body of work. But of course the opposite can hold true as well, as Tom puts it so well—that some artists repeat variations on a theme, and a single work seen in isolation is more powerful that many such pictures grouped together. John's suggestion of Hendrick Kerstens (who I wrote about here) as a case in point is bang on.

Curiously, I mentioned N.C. Wyeth in that post. Wyeth (I don't even know what his friends called him!) illustrated 112 books, each of which was a de facto body of work; I mean, you can't group a painting of Robin Hood with a bunch of paintings of pirates. But he himself differentiated illustration from art and was of the opinion that there was a gulf between the two. He could conceive, sketch, and execute a large illustration painting in as little as three hours, Wikipedia tells us. But from 1914 onward, according to the same source, he chafed at the compromises forced on him by book illustration, and longed to do more artistic single "easel paintings" that could stand alone.

I've long recognized that the convention of thinking and working in "bodies of work" often falls flat because of repetition and the lack of organic variety. (That is, you can do it poorly, no surprise.) An example I recall is a book called "sunflowers" or something like that. All the pictures were (black-and-white!) shots of, you got it, sunflowers. I had had enough after three of them, and yet there were dozens and dozens more...and nothing else. Just sunflowers. Bad shots thrown in with the good. Certainly the hope of the whole being more than the sum of the parts didn't hold up in that case.  

On another occasion I saw a show in D.C., at the Corcoran, of portraits. The subjects were mainly of D.C. movers and shakers at the time. It got a lot of attention because the mover-and-shaker class was very interested in who got included and who didn't. But the portraits themselves were as dull as rain—same background, same lighting, same "Sunday clothes," same poses. They could have been production-line advertising shots of office furniture for all the visual interest they had.

Courtesy of Harp Gallery

I know, somebody will say they like this as a photograph. Sure you do, but how about if it was with 89 other pictures of slightly different wooden desk chairs on the same background, printed 30 inches wide and shown on the walls of a museum?

It's probably a crucial point for working artists or those who have ambitions to be. To know which way your work functions best and how it's really meant to be seen: in groups, or singly in isolation? There's nothing at all wrong with photographing Weimaraners all your life and making a trademark of it—but it's possible that every great collection of late-20th and early 21st century American photography needs no more than one Wegman!

Mike

Original contents copyright 2024 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:

Open Mike: Ford Mach-E Oh My

Mach-E's in a row at Friendly Ford in Geneva, New York

Yesterday, as I was going about my errands, I decided to start familiarizing myself with the automotive New World Order. I stopped at a Ford dealer and asked if I could test-drive a Mach-E.

I was skeptical. I've always been skeptical; as a matter of social responsibility, I've been thinking that my next car should be an EV, but I've always known I wouldn't like EVs because I love manual transmissions. I like cars to be responsive and controllable. I like naturally aspirated engines for the same reason. I want the car to do what I tell it to. I like to drive; I don't want to be driven.

The Mach-E, about which I know little, was designated a "Mustang," but that confuses the issue. It's actually Ford's first car designed and built from the ground up as an electric vehicle (EV). In form it's a crossover, which are smallish, vaguely racy-looking SUVs. It has nothing to do with Mustangs, and in fact the naming alone is one of the things a lot of people reflexively dislike about the car. It's available in various trims, which include one or two electric motors—rear only, which corresponds to rear wheel drive, or front and rear, which corresponds to all-wheel drive—and either a standard or an extended-range battery. Actually, the variations are highly confusing; I couldn't sort them out when I tried.

I should point out that even though I've been a car nut since long before I took my driver's test at age sixteen and one day, and have driven lots and lots of cars over the years, I've never driven an EV before, and in fact the Mach-E was only the third SUV I've ever driven. SUVs leave me cold. I like cars, the more go-karty the better, the fewer seats the better. I owned a 2012 Toyota RAV-4 for two years (the model with the covered spare tire on the tailgate), and last year my neighbor and friend Ilene bought a hybrid Toyota RAV-4 Prime and she let me drive it to the dog park one day. That's it. So not only am I not familiar with EVs, I'm not even familiar with SUVs. Just so you know where I'm coming from. Not an expert.

The dealership, the showroom of which is elegantly designed and exceptionally clean and quiet, is called Friendly Ford. An antique Ford Model A from the 1930s was prominently displayed. Because I love vintage cars, this meant my visit was rewarded right from the get-go. I was pleased. There was no standing around waiting to be noticed—something for which the local Toyota dealership, for one, is notorious. A slight, skinny young man named Donovan came up and greeted me before I'd even been there two minutes. He turned out to be one of the dealership's two EV specialists. So far, so good. So here's a weird thing: Donovan turned out to be the friendliest car salesman I've ever met. A friendly salesman at Friendly Ford? The dealership was actually living up to its name. What, had I entered some kind of weird warp in the cynical/deceptive space-time marketing hype continuum?

He also turned out to be knowledgeable. At the end of the test drive he asked, "Do you have any more questions for me?" And I thought, young man, I have done nothing but pepper you with questions for three-quarters of an hour now, and you have answered every. single. one. Could not stump the kid.

Donovan Deredita, who informs me that
he himself can fit in the Mach-E's frunk!

Despite everything going well during the preamble stages, when it came to the actual car I did not have high expectations. The Mach-E seems not to have taken the EV market by storm, and the EV market itself is believed to be in something of a doldrums.

The car I drove

First impression: one of the most comfortable cars I ever sat in. A few simple adjustments and the driving position was perfect. Surely these newfangled e-leck-trickal thingamabobs have to be hard to drive, then? Nope. Press the brake and push a button. Nothing happened except the screens came alive—one giant one replacing the center stack, and one modest one in the usual position. PRNDL is a nifty little dial that falls under the right hand.  Pleasing. (I learned later that this is typical of many newer Fords.) I liked the door-opening buttons and latches too, inside and out, but I understand they're not to everyone's liking. A flick of the dial into "R" and off we go.

We set out on a 20-minute test drive. Within minutes, I had my verdict. I will cut to the chase: I absolutely loved the Mach-E. Absolutely loved it. Quiet, smooth, with a suspension that lets you feel the road, a gentle no-fuss glide when you want that but with gobs of power on tap that will push you back in the seat should you need it (and we were not in the most powerful version of the car). Everything super-responsive and highly controllable. The way I like it. If I owned one, I would get the car out just to go for drives. It's that nice. Beautiful. I loved it.

Ford Mach-E spotted in the wild

Two things in particular stood out. You know how I'm fussy about camera viewfinders? Well, I'm just as particular about the steering in cars. I drove an Audi S5 once and liked it except for the steering, which was numb. Yet I don't like twitchy steering either. Some cars have too gradual a ratio, others can't track when you point them straight—the only reason I don't go on and on about this (you know, like a bore) is that I don't know all the engineering terminology to describe what I can feel. Suffice it to say that the secret of cars is that the steering is what establishes any car's character more than anything else. I read that in a car magazine once but I believe it to be true.

I loved the Mach-E's steering. It's spot-on. Effortless. Lovely.

The other thing I adored is single-pedal mode. I suppose this will be old hat to those of you who own EVs. For those who don't, single-pedal mode is that the car will accelerate when you press the accelerator and go into regenerative braking progressively on lift-off. (Yes, the brake lights turn on when you're slowing down, per the encyclopaedic Donovan.) You can brake all the way to a stop. Now, in my old Miata, I liked braking with the shifter. I once drove all the way across the town where I used to live and only touched the brake pedal once, using downshifting to slow down and timing the approach to stop signs and lights. So, naturally, I really liked single-pedal mode. I would be in single-pedal mode all the time if I owned one of these. Of course the brake is right there if you need it.

Crazy
This is probably going to sound almost unhinged, but I'm going to say it: even on such short acquaintance, I think the Mach-E is my No. 1 favorite of all the cars I have ever driven in my entire life. If I were in the market for a new car now (and assuming it were in my price range), I would read a bunch of user reviews to be alerted to hidden problems and weaknesses, such as the Mach-E's relatively slow charging, which is not something that would bother me much. (And something they'll be fixing next year.) However, I honestly believe I would not go around test-driving the competition. The Ford Mustang Mach-E feels that "right" to me. I'd want this. This exact car.

By the way, if you've heard that there's been a slowdown in EV sales, in my opinion there are four reasons for that. First and mainly, infrastructure. Charging stations are being put in at an increasing rate, but it's all been pretty haphazard and spotty. That makes people nervous.  Second, price. Same reason why all new car sales are being restrained; lots of people can't afford them. Third, there are a lot more EVs flooding the market than there were when the Mach-E arrived. A large number of them have gone on sale in the past two years. That makes for a smaller slice of a still-small pie for every seller. Lastly, Tesla is the market leader in EVs, and...Elon Musk. 'Nuff said.

Still, it's obvious that EVs are the future. The infrastructure situation will improve; since the Mach-E came on the scene in 2021, the number of charging ports nationally has doubled, to around 180,000; and that number is expected to increase to 500,000 by 2030.

At the very least, though, I am now officially over my skepticism, reluctance, aversion, whatever you want to call it, to electric vehicles. Despite the sunset of my beloved stick-shift gasoline cars, I will now be eagerly looking forward to owning an EV when the time comes.

Not a review
This is not a review; it's just a fun little What-I-Did-On-My-Day-Off report. I know the majority of those reading this might not be interested, for any of a variety of reasons, and I can't recommend the Ford Mach-E anyway. I only drove it for 20 minutes and I still really don't know that much about it. But there's one thing I can recommend, for any of you to whom the idea appeals: a test drive! Try one. And let me know what you think.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2024 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

darlene: "I am looking forward to reading the comments on this article!"

Curt Gerston: "We have a recently purchased a Hyundai Kona EV. Love it so much. Electric cars are so fun to drive, and with our own charger in the driveway, easy to own and use."

AN: "I bought a Mach-E in late June, and have since put over 6,000 miles on it. I spend a lot of time driving (long commute), so switching to a brand new EV was actually a cost-saving measure over the long run. The Mach-E wasn't really on my radar initially, but once I started shopping seriously, I zeroed in on this car really fast. I'm surprised at how much it feels like this car has improved my quality of life; I never got that sense with a new car before. I'm not really a car guy, just a person who drives a lot and needs something practical and functional, but it is also legitimately enjoyable to drive."

Yoshi Carroll: "After several years of EV-only driving I got into an ICE car and it felt broken. Too loud, too much vibration, laggy gas pedal. It took a while to get used to it again."

Mike replies: You know, I felt that. One of the interesting things about test drives is that your own car feels slightly strange to you for a few miles when you get back in it.

robert e (partial comment): "I've never driven an EV, but I hear this kind of thing a lot—once people drive one, they really, really like them."

Benjamin Marks: "Just as a data point: We are around the same latitude as Penn Yan. We have solar panels and an EV, which is my wife's commuter car. It is a Chevy Bolt and she loves the thing, although neither of us is a 'car person' the way you are, Mike. As a point of comparison, my brother-in-law has a hybrid RAV4, which has a certain number of miles of range and then switches to a gas engine. The key difference is that my sister and he don't have solar.

"My sister/BIL use their car on Long Island, which has pretty expensive electricity (something like 23 cents per kWh of energy). The result is that their car costs about the same per mile to run electrically as it does on gas. My BIL is a math-head and figured out that the cost difference is about a penny a mile with the advantage going to the EV. He doesn't have the added benefit of no oil changes or sparkplugs or coolant, because of the gas-side motor in the RAV4. So: all of the maintenance costs of fossil fuels, and none of the savings of electric because of local electricity costs.

"In contrast, we pay around 19 cents for a kWh of energy in Vermont, and also offset our bill by covering most of our e-costs with generation. So our cost per mile is around 3.4 cents to drive, compared with around 25 cents for my Subaru.

"Keep in mind that you lose around 25% of your overall range at these latitudes to winter's ravages during that season (the batteries draw current to keep themselves warm enough for the chemistry to function in the cold).

"All that said, I agree that the advantages to eCars (low maintenance costs: tires, bearings, washer fluid) will gradually tip the scales in favor of that technology, particularly for any entity operating a fleet of the things.

"Lots of transition issues: For instance, gas taxes fund road maintenance here in Vermont, and, until this year, e-vehicles have gotten a 'free ride' (ouch). Also, the roll out of e-vehicles will have regressive effects, with those least able to bear the cost of gas price increases representing a shrinking customer base for that product. So, lots of concerns to address.

"Every time my wife drives by a gas station in her EV, I am glad I am not in that business. Buggy whips, for certain."

J D Ramsey: "While I haven't driven the Mach E, I've heard great things about it. Having a Tesla Y for almost two years (despite Elon), I can say that your observations about how much fun it is to drive are spot on. The inadequate charging infrastructure and cost (though there are reasonably priced EVs, and, with the federal subsidy for those who qualify, the cost can be quite reasonable—like in the 30-something thousand range) are factors, although the infrastructure issue is quickly improving and its one of the Tesla advantages given the volume of their 'superchargers.'

"I drove mine back and forth from New Jersey to Florida and the Tesla mapping makes sure you find a charger when you need it. In most instances the total time to charge was 20–25 minutes and the chargers were where there was a mall or a food place and a bathroom. Being similar to each other in age, those stops were mostly welcome.

"Like your initial reaction, many guys (cameras and cars being dominated by guys) claim they will miss the ICE and 'control.' In fact, while the roar—in a few vehicles—of the engine will be gone, the control of the vehicle will still be there and, depending on the vehicle, the acceleration will be like no other.

"In the not too distant future it's where we are going, whether kicking and screaming or enjoying the new experience."

Mike replies: Young Donovan turned on fake engine noise in the Mach-E, and I immediately asked him to turn it off again. So it has that, in case one misses it.

Chris Koerner: "My wife and I had the fortune to borrow a Mach-E from the local deal for a weekend a few years ago. We were smitten and have been saving up for one. Soon!"

Charlie Dunton: "Mike, I couldn’t agree more. I bought the Mach-E in April, 2023. The new car honeymoon has never lasted more than a month for me and I’ve owned a lot of cars in my 55 years of driving. The honeymoon is as strong as ever with the Mach-E and frankly, I don’t see it ending. I have never owned a car I love this much.

"And one-pedal driving, boy do I miss it when I drive our Chrysler Pacifica (it’s for driving our two Weimaraners around—really enjoyed your Wegman column). What do I like? Responsiveness, both steering and especially power. When you ask for it, it delivers immediately; no transmission lag, no down shifting, just GO!

"As for charging, I’ve put 17,000 miles on it and only used a public charger three times. We have a 240-volt charger in the garage and it will charge from 10% to 100% overnight, giving up to 300 miles of range. Ford rocked the EV world when they partnered with Tesla to support Tesla’s charging adapter. Overnight, the entire industry switched to supporting Tesla’s adapter. Our adapter is supposed to be here next month but I believe the 2024’s come with the Tesla charging port. And there isn’t a charging network that comes close to Tesla’s for being available and actually working. Yes, Mach-E’s are a bit pricey, but there have been a couple of price cuts in the last year. We had the privilege of buying at the top of the market, but having it those extra months was worth it. Take the plunge, you won’t regret it."

Mindee: "I have a Mach-E and it is absolutely hands-down by far my most favorite vehicle I have ever owned in my 47 years on this planet. Hubby has the Tesla Model 3 and will be upgrading to the Performance in a few days when it gets delivered. His may be faster, but at least mine doesn't look like a catfish (our little joke). If anything ever happens to mine, I'll upgrade from the Premium to the GT Performance Edition or the Rally."

robert e: "As best I can tell, there's plenty of lithium in the world, and some of the world's largest and richest deposits are in the American west. In fact, there's a lithium 'gold rush' going on here, thanks to both recent price bubbles and generous funding from Biden's Inflation Reduction Act. There are pilot programs running of cleaner and more sustainable extraction methods. Battery makers continue to reduce the amount of lithium needed in batteries and to eliminate it altogether. Recycling can already recover almost all of the lithium in a battery, along with other minerals, and that'll get better and cheaper to do. When in doubt, follow the money.

"'Whataboutism' is especially annoying because, on top of the genre's usual mix of FUD, facts and contextless framing, it tends to be woefully out of date. It's also everywhere. I don't blame well-meaning individuals for repeating what they hear from trusted sources, but I wish they'd be more critical, and try to recognize when reader or source are out of their depth. Our news media is a shell of its former self and social media has few filters and no vetting (this blog, as we know, is a glowing exception)."

Mike replies: I dunno about that last! Just one guy doing his best, along with a whole bunch of well-above-average readers.

A Day with the Wegman Dogs

The Rockwell Museum in Corning. The architectural style
is the colorfully named "Richardsonian Romanesque."

Geoff Wittig and I went to the Rockwell on Thursday to see the William Wegman show. The Rockwell Museum, located in Corning, New York, in the former Corning City Hall dating from 1893, is based on the collection of paintings and other works amassed by department store owner Robert Rockwell, who collected from 1959 to 1974, concentrating on figurative paintings of the American West. (The definition of "figurative art" is not entirely intuitive. The terms are usefully parsed in the first three paragraphs here.) As Geoff put it, Rockwell "had a good eye," and he was able to buy many of his holdings when the artists he collected were much more accessible (i.e., cheaper) than they are today. He acquired many significant works, most famously Albert Bierstadt's "Mount Whitney." (Check this article out if you've ever thought framing one of your photographs was a pain in the butt. It's about the epic reframing of "Mount Whitney." Really, check it out. [And here's a video, thanks to Jim in the comments. —Ed.])

I lapped up a whole bunch of Scribner's Illustrated Classics when I was in grade school and middle school, and got very engaged with N.C. Wyeth, so I particularly like visiting the Museum's Wyeths. N.C.'s colors are slightly garish, as the paintings were made to pop off the page when reduced in size to fit in the books. Regarding Bierstadt, I've known his work since high school. It always struck me as a bit funny that, confronted with the glory, majesty and drama that is the American Western landscape, he felt compelled to exaggerate. His paintings represent reality with a 20% dose of fantasy.

William Wegman is OK
I've been aware of William Wegman all my adult life—I heard him speak when I was in art school. He's got a great gig, and whaddaya know, is still workin' it. I see his schtick as something like the exercise of a trademark. The interest present in his photographs is mainly in his creativity in continually conceptualizing new and different settings for photographs of his worried-looking Weimaraner dogs. Seeing so many dazzling large prints together, it finally occurred to me that what the prints might be best suited for is display singly in personal collections, because his "trademark" is so distinct that any visitor with a cursory familiarity with modern photography would recognize any of the photos as a Wegman right away. Hang one of these in your foyer, or the gallery leading to your lavish NYC apartment, and it's instantly recognizable, flattering your visitor with his or her own knowledge. You'd make any art-sensitive visitor happier.

Seen together, though, they strike me as, "Wiemaraners iterated," perhaps with an end-tag of, "...but why?" He is indeed creative (still) in finding new settings and surroundings for the dogs, but then, in the best of them, you start wondering whether the dog or dogs themselves are actually...necessary. And I'm a dog person. In his much earlier work—with Man Ray, his original dog, who might be described as a patient ham—there was a lot of humor, some of it referential to art history and artistic tropes; more recently, the pictures are elegant, clean, and mainly about color. My favorite was a rather atypical B&W shot of a dog draped in a transparent polka-dog raincoat; the dog is barely visible at first but the mind fills in its form as soon as you detect its face. Or, rather, you construct his face after you see his eyes, and then his body from his face. I can't find a reproduction of that one online. I tend to like pictures like that, with subjects obscured or overtly in need of the mind to do part of the seeing.

I enjoyed the show, but can't say I loved it; the bon mot that came to mind to sum up W.W. is an old Mitch Hedberg joke: you either love him, or you hate him...or, you think he's OK.

I'll tell you one picture I'd love to take, though—a documentary shot of William Wegman out walking his dog(s). Because, after all, they're, well, dogs. And you know what? If I had a beautiful modernist house, I would honestly covet a Wegman to hang in the entryway. Seriously. It would be friendly, quirky, beautiful, and cool, and would probably appeal to just about everybody who walked through the front door.

Cat person
Geoff is a cat person. One of the great things about seeing Geoff, apart from the opportunity to spend some time in the company of someone much smarter than I am, is hearing about painting, which has elbowed photography aside as his top artistic interest. He still does some landscape photography. (How he finds time to do everything he does is close to unfathomable; he's very busy with his practice as a small-town doctor and with medical administrative work, and he does photography and painting, and he's the family cook.) He schooled me about the turn-of-the-20th-century movement known as Tonalism, which he considers central to his taste. He had a lot of things to say about many of the artists and gave me a miniature window into a world I don't know very much about. Enough to whet my appetite to know more.

One interesting thing he told me about is a saying among contemporary figurative painters: "Paint two days a week and you stay the same, three days and you get better." Interesting: it highlights the fact that painting is a manual skill after all. A craft you need to practice in order to stay sharp. I was reminded of pool, which I don't practice enough. There are thresholds there, too, where you either stay the same or get better. Although I hit balls every day, I don't do enough to stay "in stroke" as pool players put it. As with golfers, the good players practice a lot.

Even photographers have to stay in shape that way. Bill Jay once invited Josef Koudelka to his country cabin, and was surprised to find Koudelka out snapping pictures around the place before breakfast, taking pictures of woodpiles and trees and a pond and so forth. When Bill commented that he didn't think the subject matter was typical for Josef, Josef said he was keeping in practice, staying sharp. He probably got that habit from his older friend and fellow Magnum photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, who famously shot two rolls before breakfast every morning to "keep his hand in." For a month or two, two years ago, I tried to get a decent photograph every day, and my sense of that kind of "sharpness"—of being in shape, in stroke, in flow—went way up. I'd love to be able to photograph like that. There's really nothing stopping me except energy...and self-belief, and time, and the cost of gas, and...oh, never mind!

We also got to see some Edward Curtis photogravures. Geoff was on a schedule, so we had to make a shortened circuit of all the paintings to have time for lunch. But that only means there is more to cover next time.

I hope to visit Geoff in his own environs someday. I would love to see some of his photographic prints and his paintings, and he reportedly has a large photobook collection (for an unknown value of "large"), and he tells me the walls 'n' halls of his medical practice are a mini-gallery of his landscape photographs. Should make for a fun day trip. If we get 'round to it, I'll keep you posted.

[Ed note: More illustrations to come.]

Mike

Original contents copyright 2024 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Tom Burke: "I’d never heard of Tonalism before, but the reference (on the linked Amazon page) to it 'dethroning the Hudson River school' had me interested. A few years ago I saw an exhibition in London of Thomas Cole’s pictures, including all five of the 'Course of Empire' pictures, and I thought they were stunning. (I’ve also seen the John Martin 'Great Day of His Wrath' trilogy, and I think the comparison between that and the Cole five-picture work is interesting.)

"But onto single-subject pictures; in this case Wegman’s Weimaraners. I’ve found something similar in other artists and photographers. Jane Bown was lauded as a great portrait photographer—she did portraits two or three times a month for The Observer newspaper—and seen individually they were great. But I once looked through a collection of maybe 100 of them, and I came away with the feeling that they were essentially the same portrait, just with different subjects. Similarly, albeit on an altogether different level, Frans Hals’ portraits: all individually utterly brilliant, but not really meant to be seen in an exhibition of 50 or more. I was ready to look at pictures of something very different well before the end of the exhibition."

John Camp: "Your analysis of Wegman made me think of Hendrick Kerstens and the photos he takes of his daughter, in the faux old-masters style. As you say, it's a schtick, and often quite amusing as well as quite striking. I particularly like the one with the toilet paper rolls."

Open Mike: The Era of Cluster B

Plans: I heard a great thing the other night. It came out of conference-approved literature for Al-Anon. The quote is, "It's OK to plan, but you can't plan the outcome." That hit home for me. My tendency is to envision what the result needs to be in order to align with my desires...I plan outcomes. And repeatedly get stymied, frustrated, or disappointed because of it, because that's not the way the world works. You can plan, but you still have to be alive to the possibility of unexpected outcomes. Things happen the way they happen. The world is unruly. Fate is unruly. You can believe you can know the way things are going to unfold, but no one can actually know the future or the course of events. In fact, I think I need to look into the ancient Greek concept of fate a little more than I have.

Red-assed: In a 12-step program you work on yourself. You do it to make yourself better-adjusted and happier. I'm fortunate in that I was driven into a 12-step program by absolute necessity; by age 33 I was a hopeless substance addict and had nowhere else to turn. Lucky thing, as it turned out. My first day as an ex-drug and alcohol user was Sept. 10th, 1990—coming up on my 34th anniversary clean and sober. And still getting a lot out of my 12-step program. More and more all the time, actually.

Lately, I've been thinking a lot about a particular character defect of mine: rebellion. You might call it stubbornness, or pigheadedness. A friend calls another friend "red-assed"—an old expression meaning (in my view, anyway—published definitions vary) to be like like a child who has to be spanked repeatedly because he won't learn his lesson. He stubbornly persists in his bad behavior. "Stubbornly persisting in bad behavior" certainly characterizes long stretches in the lives of alcoholics, among other things.

Or, it can mean being gritty and grimly determined: Casey Pycior, in a baseball article called "On Being Red Assed," writes:

Red Assers[:]

• Never draw undue attention to themselves, i.e., they let their play do the talking;
• Run out every ball out as if it is their last;
• Go hard into second base on every double play;
• Refrain from outward displays of emotion, like smiling (Red Assers often look like angry, miserable bastards while playing);
• Are, unquestionably, indisputably, tough (if you want to get them off the field, you better bring a stretcher).

Ty Cobb was red-assed, by that definition. A very unappealing personality, as baseball fans know.

Anyway, you know what "rebellion" means. I've rebelled all my life. In fact, once I got the hang of looking at my failures, troubles, and resentments from the perspective of my part in it, it begins to appear that everything bad that has happened in my adult life was partly or largely my own fault. You might think that's pessimistic, but not really, because it allows for the possibility of a better course going forward.

Cluster B: I heard something about narcissists the other day (go to this link and scroll down to Cluster B personality disorders > Narcissistic personality disorders. This is the best page I've found about personality disorders, the mental sicknesses that are the most persistently mysterious to the common citizen. It took the rest of my family literally years to come around to understanding that my father was a narcissist/borderline. It seems plain to us now, but it was unfathomable for a long, long time. (Looking at the rest of my family of origin apart from my father, I'm the only one who doesn't or didn't have an advanced degree in either medicine or psychology. We all needed to figure it out.)

In fact you might as well read the bullet points for all of the Cluster B disorders—we're in an era of Cluster B right now, at least in the U.S. Anyway, what I heard was, narcissists never say "I'm sorry," and they'll never just thank someone. That is, they never thank anyone casually, for something small and personal. They might "thank" people, but only when they're being grandiose, as in, say, thanking the Academy for an Oscar, or thanking a crowd for an ovation: thank you for acknowledging how great I am / how right I was / how wonderful my accomplishment is. They'll never thank another person privately for being considerate, or doing something nice, or for being good, or just for being their nice selves. Ever since I heard this I've been trying to look for opportunities to promptly admit it when I am wrong, or to thank someone for some small kindness—to watch for and appreciate when others demonstrate patience, kindliness, tolerance, and love.

Just: I'm trying to excise the word "just," meaning merely or only, from my writing. I think it's become a tic. A tic is a mannerism or a bad habit. "I think" isn't far behind—I write that all the time as an attempt to qualify statements, as if to say, humbly, this is only my opinion. "I think it's become a tic" rather than "It's become a tic."

Bag the game: I've had a great week and a half. I've been neglecting my writing (as you might have noticed! Nothing new here yesterday), but I've done a lot of photographing. I wish I could describe the feeling this gives me, but I feel sure that words are going to fail me. I just really love the process of going hunting with the camera. I get on the trail of whatever might fit the angle of view of the lens and the look of the sensor, and here's the miraculous thing: sometimes you bag the game. You never know when the next good picture is going to show up, but they always do. The way I feel about it can be inadequately described in one word: gratitude. I love looking, I love the look of the world, and I love that strange transmogrifying alchemy of extracting a picture out of the world. It's...exciting, somehow. It gratifies me on a superficial level but also at a much deeper level. It's the result of something I'm doing, but also of something outside of me.

I don't get to photograph all that much, but when I take some time to do it, I remember all over again why I like it so much.

Today I've got plans—a friend and I are going to a photography exhibit and making a day of it. I'll tell you all about it tomorrow.

Hope you get a chance to go hunting soon!

Mike

Original contents copyright 2024 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 l: "This is likely deeply presumptuous, but—you seem happier. There's an undercurrent of joy in your writing when things are clicking for you, photographically, so don't apologize for writing a bit less when you are engaging with the very thing we all come here for. You've built a community of commentators that's unique; if you stop caring, they fall off. The web was meant to be a place where friends can meet and share ideas, and this site is one of the great bastions of that ideal. Go shoot! And thank you."

Ned Bunnell: "Mike, Really glad to hear you’re out photographing more these days. And although you’re not using film, I thought you’d enjoy this article The Japan Times published earlier this month about the current film scene in Japan."

Howard Sandler: "Old Yiddish expression: 'Der Mensch Tracht, Un Gott Lach' (Man plans, and God laughs)."

Stan B.: "Yes, when I think of all the things that have given me such pleasure in life, and have waned throughout the subsequent years (e.g. sports, music, etc.), photography is the one that still holds much of its initial magic, wonder and reward. I don't get to enjoy photo galleries or even photobooks as much as before, although I still find joy in it when I can—most of all, I'm finally enjoying making photographs on a more consistent basis. And I'm grateful for (all of) it...."

David Miller: "Regarding 'just,' I couldn't agree more. It denigrates the point you are making. If the point is so insignificant, why are you wasting your time and mine with it? On the other hand, I find 'I think' is often very useful, requesting that my audience take it as an opinion worth considering, but not as a bold statement of unarguable fact. Humility, which is not the same as a lack of self-confidence, can be very valuable."

Mike replies: Well said. I think (!) you just (!!) evaluate each instance of any "tic" on a case-by-case basis. If you know your tics, you watch out for them, and get rid of them when they're extraneous, but keep them if they're doing real work in the sentence. In natural writing and speaking we use "just" all the time, but that doesn't excuse peppering the page with it where it's not needed.

I agree with you that "I think" often does do useful work. Ironically, it often signifies that you're reacting to something in the moment—that is, saying something that just occurred to you. In other words, what it often means is, "I haven't really thought this through, but here's a thought...."

iPhone Photo

Downtown Penn Yan Gull, iPhone 13 Pro Max

Every now and then I get a nice one with the phone. It's not for lack of snapping—I take pictures with the iPhone every day, some of them practical notes, most of them pointless. This is the most recent one I actually like—taken two nights ago when I stepped out of a restaurant on Main Street. It had been raining all day, and would rain again a while later. In the meantime the skies were clearing dramatically and clouds and the light were gorgeous. I was just going to take a little memento of the sky—I do that a lot—when I noticed this fellow flying in circles above the street. He probably had his sights set on some discarded morsel and was waiting for his chance to swoop down and nab it. So I framed the clouds between the two rows of buildings lining Main Street and then took an exposure every time he (or she) flew into the frame. Fortunately—chance is always in play—I got this. Large, it conveys the light, I think. Beautiful evening.

Clouds—check; bird—check. You might have noticed, if you've looked through my B&W pictures, how often I'm taking pictures of clouds and/or birds. (Although it's kinda quixotic to go around taking pictures of birds with a 45mm-e normal lens.) Water, swimmers, and the shore used to be my favorite subject, but even when I was young I figured that sometime later in life I'd start paying more attention to clouds. When I was 27 I used to picture myself ending up as a white-haired octogenarian living on a cliff on the north shore of Lake Superior with an 8x10 camera set up on the widow's walk, taking pictures of the ever-changing skies. In the manner of André Kertész, late in life, confined to his apartment, taking SX-70 Polaroids out of his window. (The book, called From My Window, is long out of print. It's not the book of his to buy first anyway.)

I think my attraction to birds started because my friend-of-longest-duration*, Jim Schley, announced several years ago that he had become a bird watcher. This isn't surprising, as he and his wife live on the back side of a ridge in a solar, semi-communal land co-op in Vermont; they must get a lot of bird life. While I'm not a bird watcher per se and not a good learner about them (my head is already too full, and the filing system is breaking down), I've started to pay a lot more attention to them.

Something else
I'm terminally ambivalent about the iPhone. I saw this coming many years ago, in the dawn of digital—I figured that a.) digital would eventually put us at the mercy of whatever the manufacturers decided to give us, and that b.) one day some lowest-common-denominator solution would become sufficient for the vast mass market and we'd run the risk of being trapped there with them. It's not as bad as all that yet, but it has halfway happened so far—the stormclouds are certainly on the horizon. Smartphones dominate camera sales by far. And although we still have larger-sensor interchangeable-lens cameras (ILCs) plentifully at hand, that market is already contracting and the players in that space are beginning to drop away. Consider that sales of dedicated cameras in camera-mad Japan have fallen from 11.11 million units annually in 2008 to 910,000 units today, and household penetration of ILCs in Japan has fallen below 50% for the first time in 19 years**.

We should probably enjoy the heck out of the biggest, baddest, highest-resolution cameras and most over-the-top interchangeable lenses we possibly can, while we still can! Our best hope is encapsulated in the fact that you can still buy vinyl records, you can still buy film—and you can still ride horseback and buy fountain pens and mechanical watches and ICE two-seaters with stick shifts. And books on paper. What usually happens when a market falls out of the mainstream is that it becomes a much smaller niche (pronounced neesh as most of my readers would know), but those niches continue to thrive. So the likely outcome of the smartphone takeover is that big cameras, big lenses, and big inkjet printers will continue to exist in a smaller way for a shrunken but still passionate group of aficionados. Fingers crossed.

I love taking pictures with the smartphone. And you could argue that smartphone pictures have gotten as good as the tiny-sensor digicams of 15 and 20 years ago. (Actually in some ways they're better, in some ways worse.) They're good, and, for most people, good enough. But whenever I happen to get a good picture with the phone, I almost always wish I had been shooting with something else, something better still. 

Mike

*We started saying that in our fifties to avoid the term "oldest friend."

**From an annual survey of 5,000 Japanese households of two or more adults taken by the Japanese Cabinet Office, via Nikkei, via Scottish pro John Aldred at DIY Photography.

Original contents copyright 2024 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:

Color Filters on Converted Monochrome Sensors

Tiffen No. 15 Deep Yellow and Hoya YA3 Orange filters

As regular readers know, a couple of years ago I bought a rather offbeat camera—a full-frame Sigma FP outfit with the 45mm lens and the chimney viewfinder that attaches sideways to the viewing screen. I had it converted to monochrome (i.e., black and white only) by having the color filter array (CFA) stripped from the sensor. The work was done by Daniel Morrison of Monochrome Imaging Services at a cost of $1,200. The cost of the conversion was covered for me by a generous reader.

I seriously adore my camera. To repeat something Lee Friedlander once said, sometimes I get it out just because I want to play with it. Easily among my top three favorite digital cameras since I bought the first of many 21 years ago now.

If you're not interested in my particular technique, I understand. But perhaps (at the risk of sounding stuffy, or worse), you might find it instructive to observe my dedication to my technique. The point for most photographers is not to learn and master every technique, it's to develop and master their own. What that is will depend on you, the depth of your dedication, and your own visual concerns. (And on whatever floats your boat, whatever scratches your itch, whatever gives you what you yearn to be given.) Most successful art photographers, historically speaking, are not jacks-of-all-trades who flit from one set of technical parameters to another like DDD (David Douglas Duncan) did, or like many professionals for hire must do; most develop a mature technique and then stick to it for most or all of their work, at least during the peak years of their output. Sometimes perhaps with one or two sideways jumps throughout the course of their lives...but sometimes not. They search until they find something that works for them and that nourishes their enthusiasm, and then they stick to it. But I digress.

Back when panchromatic films were "less panchromatic," color filters were meant to correct the spectral response of the film. Early plates were orthochromatic, meaning, sensitive to blue and green but not red light. Because earlier panchromatic films tended to be weaker in response to the red end of the spectrum, and yellow filters subdued the response to blue and green light, at one time there were yellow filters in many different strengths to allow photographers to tailor their tones exactly to their films as well as their tastes. Eventually these choices boiled down to three: light yellow, medium yellow, and deep yellow. With thick-emulsion B&W films such as classic Kodak Tri-X 400 [1954–2007] and Plus-X [1954–2011, R.I.P.], as well as Super-XX [1940–54] and Verichrome Pan [1956–71]* before them, a medium yellow filter, known as a K2 and also known as a Wratten No. 8, was just the thing to correct the spectral response of the films. I kept K2 filters on all my cameras at all times in my early years. Well, except when I was shooting color film!

You might think that color filters would have the same effect on monochrome sensors they do on film, but that hasn't been my experience. A K2 filter has so little effect on my converted Sigma that I basically can't see it except in direct A-B comparisons. So I tried a deep yellow filter. The only ones readily available are from Tiffen, though, and I don't care for Tiffen filters because they're laminated. They make them by sandwiching a piece of gel between two thin layers of glass. They perform well; I just like the idea of filters made of single pieces of dyed optical glass, that's all.

The Tiffen Deep Yellow 15 (Wratten No. 15) works pretty well, but the effect is still a bit mild.

Finally I "went nuclear" and bought a Hoya YA3 Orange filter. Extremist! Hoya is the top Japanese filter brand; they make Nikon filters and probably do other OEM for all I know, as well as selling under their own name. The Wratten number of the orange filter is 21, and it cuts out two stops of light, vs. one stop for a No. 8 and about one and a third to one and a half stops for a No. 15. Hoya has long been my go-to filter brand.

That was the ticket. It's a stronger filter than I would have used on B&W film, But it has an effect on the stripped sensor that's just a little more pronounced than the effect of a K2 filter on Plus-X. It makes Caucasian skin look great; I'm interested to experiment to see whether it's ideal for other skin tones, but haven't done so yet. Note that the EVF image still looks neutral on a converted camera—the camera can't record color—but if you happen to have a converted DSLR, you will see the heavy overall orange cast. I photographed for many years with SLRs with yellow filters on the lenses, and after while a camera viewfinder didn't look right to me if it wasn't yellow.

The loss of two stops of light isn't a problem in most situations, as monochrome sensors are remarkably consistent across different ISO settings. Jacking up the ISO a bit doesn't seem to have much effect. Of course filters are removable, too.

If you use a monochrome camera such as the wonderful Pentax K-3 III Monochrome, or the Leicas such as the slightly pricey M11 Monochrom or the Q2 Monochrom (a camera that has a devoted owner base like the Leicas of yore), you might want to try a 2-stop orange filter and see if you like what it does.

Taken with a Hoya YA3 orange
filter. Larger version here.

Here are some of the effects of the orange filter to look for:

• Blue skies will darken, although not excessively;
• Contrast is modestly enhanced;
• Assuming proper exposure, more detail will be available in clouds;
• Grass and foliage has a darker tone;
• Open shade will darken;
• There might be a modest reduction in atmospheric haze;
• Caucasian skin looks lighter and smoother;
• Blemishes and blotchiness on Caucasian skin are minimized;
• Freckles and red hair will lighten (sometimes too much, so watch it); and
• Overall tonal balance looks richer and somewhat more vivid.

Of course not every effect will be observable in every picture, as it's strongly subject-dependent.

A good learning exercise with a monochrome camera would be to purchase a Hoya YA2 2-stop orange filer and also a G(XO) green filter and shoot a bunch of things with both filters and compare the results. Things to try: blue skies and clouds; Caucasian skin; Black skin; older peoples' faces, or faces of teenagers with blemishes; redheaded people with freckles; vases of flowers of many colors including red; grass lawns; subjects in open shade; scenes with lots of lush green foliage.

Of course, monochrome converted cameras aren't necessary for black and white. "Color camera" image files converted to B&W in post also look very good. They're useful for learning, too, as you can add and remove "virtual filters" in your editing/processing software with abandon, and get a pretty good handle on the effects of virtual color filters. That's a perfectly workable solution if it works for you. It depends on your "mental workflow" among other things. I personally much prefer a dedicated monochrome camera that doesn't see color—it makes for a much stronger commitment to B&W, and a clearer mindset as you're out and about with the camera. But it is possible that the preferences of reasonable persons might differ**.

Daniel at MIS can convert most cameras that use Sony sensors. Contact him to see if he does conversions on the camera of your choice.

Mike

*And Verichrome before that, which was a legacy of Kodak's purchase of the British firm Wratten & Wainwright in 1912—also the source of the name "Wratten" for filter numbers. Verichrome was introduced around 1907–8, and re-introduced by Kodak on a safety base in rollfilm sizes in 1931.

**I get tired of "YMMV."

Original contents copyright 2024 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: "I carry yellow and orange filters for my Leica M(9) Monochrom and M10 Monochrom (the former now sits mostly unused), much as I did when shooting B&W film. I don’t like unnaturally darkened skies (preferring, for instance, Ansel’s decades-earlier renderings of ‘Moonrise’), and never owned red filters. Most times with the M10M, I shoot without any color filtration. (One individual on the Leica Forum prefers a green filter for general use, and for skin tones; to each his/her own.) Conversions with color digital offer far more convenience and flexibility, but I find that one must refrain from using a heavy hand with color channel adjustments. However, the B&W 'mindset' (avoiding color distractions) from using a monochromatic sensor (like B&W film) is worth the trade-off for me."

More Selected Comments on 'New Work'

I've had a fun photographic week, posting some previously unseen older work and doing some new shooting. The standout was probably "Paint Spill," which was chosen for Flickr's "Explore" feature and is nearing 10,000 views (by Flickr's count) as I write this. Read the write-up, too; it was an interesting situation with an evergreen lesson for all of us.

In response to the "New Work" post this past week, we got a lot of great comments. Many of them were outstanding. As a sampling, here's a selection of responses I didn't post fast enough when they were offered:

Michael W Plant: "Hi Mike, I have just spent some time looking though your Flickr account and I have to say you are slowly getting there a body of work that reflects the place and time you live in. Can I suggest you spend more time out with your camera, so you can progress with your image making more quickly. I know what it means to sit on work for way to long and not make enough of it, then time goes and you still have not made enough images. Time is not your friend in this regard so please get to making more images."

Mike replies: It's tough. I have too much to do already and too frequently feel very weary and lacking in energy. And there are times recently when I've gone out shooting and have come back with...nothing. And it costs a lot, mainly in gasoline (petrol) as well as time. But I do enjoy photographing, and I wish I could do more of it.

Sean: "It’s hard to explain the feelings some of your pictures of your life in the Finger Lakes evoke in me. The closest I can come to is the feeling I get when faced with some indifferent beauty that tells me I came before you, continues out of your gaze, and will long outlast you. ‘Still points’ might be a good description. I don't mean to liken you to Robert Adams, but I recall him having to seek company when faced with certain scenes. Have you ever felt that way?

"Re colour management, I remember researching light booths and 18% grey wall paint for my monitor/print room. Half the time, my nose was stuck in Andrew Rodney’s book Color Management for Photographers and the other half was spent chatting in forums about colour spaces. 'Best viewed on a colour-calibrated monitor' was often said more in hope than expectation. And when somebody criticised the dynamic range of a shot, the standard response was: 'It was edited on a calibrated [x] using an [x] calibrator, you tyro.' Those silly back-and-forths seem quaint by today's internet standards."

Moose: "Re 'Prints are susceptible to looking different under different lighting, as well as different types of lighting. Museum lighting was traditionally strong and bright, and now is often the opposite.' Oh yes! A recent-ish show of St Ansel's prints in San Francisco was so dimly lit that his (archival) prints, printed for the then-usual lighting, were deeply murky. People were going in close and squinting. A woman standing next to me commented to her companion how the person on the side just didn't fit. I pulled out my pocket flashlight and lit the print. "Oh, that looks right now!" Awful. A wildly different set of prints would be needed.

"Re 'So take a look at that one when you get home.' That one looks fine, but some of the others are too dark for me. Then again, we know our tastes differ."

Mike replies: Another neat trick besides the flashlight demo is, when faced with a dark print, look at an area of it through the cardboard tube from a roll of paper toweling. You'll be amazed. It has the same effect as the flashlight, more or less.

Dan Khong: "I like your composition of the herd of cattle resting under the shade of the trees."

Jeff: "A viewing booth really helps when printing, provided it corresponds to display lighting conditions. I also like using ImagePrint software, as it provides custom profiles not just for virtually all papers, but for different lighting conditions. It also operates in full time soft proof mode. Another underrated viewing variable, besides lighting, is the type of glass used to frame a print. Without top quality glass (I bought Museum glass in bulk from a commercial supplier to drastically reduce cost), subtle tones can be lost, much like dry-down effects when wet printing. I, too, love Roy DeCarava: A Retrospective. But nothing compares to seeing the actual prints, which I had the pleasure to view at MoMA in 1996. Shame that so many people don’t experience well executed B&W fine prints, let alone do their own printing. I think I would give up photographing if screen viewing were the sole output."

Jack Luke: "I was a photography department technician at an art school for a very happy nine-month post-graduate placement. Among my other jobs, I managed nesting [do you mean testing? I don't get "nesting" —Ed.] and charging for prints on our big Epson printers. I fondly remember working on a series of prints with a young lad who carried around a portable darkroom in a briefcase (!) and wore sunglasses at all times—he really fancied himself as a bit of a Wes Anderson film character. Anyway, I had to tactfully explain that his prints were perhaps a bit blown out because he wore sunglasses while editing them.... I also had to tell the same lad to wear shoes in the darkroom because he kept frightening everyone who couldn't hear him walking. What fun!"

We'll close the comments to this post to avoid confusing me further.  :-) 

Mike

Original contents copyright 2024 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.)

The Direction of Error

I am not caught up on comments. (Been out working.)
The comments on the last two posts were so good I'm considering
feturing a few of them in separate posts. Stay tuned.

I once wrote a post called "Do You Have a Color Cast?" It was about the tendency of many color printmakers (what we use to call "printers," but that word now denotes a machine) to "lean" in one direction of the color wheel when making prints—lean meaning to depart from absolute calibrated neutrality just a tad. Many color printmakers feel a need need to see enough of their favored color cast, and are sensitive to its absence. For example, Ctein leans cyan; I lean red. Viewers might be sensitive to casts of different colors to different degrees, too: for example, most people are sensitive to greenishness, so you have to take care not to lean too far in that direction, but people generally have a high tolerance for yellow. In terms of the old color packs, you might be able to go only two points too green, whereas you could get away with as much as five or even seven points of extra yellow. This is doubtless because humans evolved seeing lots of early- and late-day yellow sunlight, when the angle of the sunlight travels a greater distance through atmosphere and leaches blue out of the light. The human eye likes the look. Many landscapists lean yellow; warmer light seems to have an innate appeal to viewers. As one printmaker I knew used to say, "a little extra yellow never hurts."

Similarly, I think a lot of printmakers and post-processors for screen display have what you might call a characteristic "direction of error." They, or rather we, will have some aspect of the picture or print that we tend to fret or worry about, and thus tend to overdo or "overcook" it as they say. For example, one otherwise very good printmaker I know periodically gets too worried about sharpness. When he's in one of those moods, his prints will be otherwise perfect but perceptibly oversharpened. And, when he's in that mood, his first question to you will be, "do you think it's sharp enough?" So that's his direction of error. A couple of commenters noted that a few of my new pictures look, to them, a little dark. Moose said, "...some of the others are too dark for me. Then again, we know our tastes differ." Maybe, but maybe that's not it, because I'm not sure he's wrong: "too dark" is my direction of error if I'm honest. It's something I have to watch out for. However, one's direction of error is a good thing to know about. Once we know our direction of error, it becomes easier to ask for help from objective third parties. If the question we might want to ask is "is it dark enough?", it probably means we should ask, "is it too dark?"

Mike

P.S. In regard to the color wheel, the "Hue Ranges Map" on this page is useful.

Original contents copyright 2024 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:

V.I. Voltz: "When I printed professionally (darkroom days only) I found several things were useful for preventing drift: a set of reference prints to look at, a reflection densitometer to check that things weren’t going too far one way or another, and relatively frequent breaks from work/looking at work. The problem with the latter is that as much as everyone thinks or wishes that professional printing is like Nathalie Lopparelli at work, essentially the work requires you to go as fast as you can all the time. I miss the prints, but not the work."

Mike replies: I recall how shocked I was when I learned that the local professional lab only allowed its custom printermakers a few test strips and two sheets of photo paper per image! That wasn't for a "standard" B&W print; that was for the special custom version you paid extra for. "Going as fast as you can all the time" indeed. In fact I used to count this as one of big advantages of being an amateur: amateurs might not be as skilled or have as much experience, but they had the huge luxury of being able to spend as much time and effort—and paper—as they wished on each image.

Like you, I also used to keep a folder of reference images handy in the darkroom. The funny thing was, even when I wasn't experiencing any difficulties, if I just leafed through the pictures in the folder before the start of a printing session, just letting my eyes take them in, I would print better and experience lower levels of anxiety and/or frustration during the printing session. I never knew how that worked—it was like some kind of magic—but it worked. Similarly, if I put the cue ball exactly on the spot and try to lag it off both end rails and return it exactly to where it started, and do that ten to twenty times, I will shoot better all during that session. Again, it's magic of a sort.

Alan Whiting: "What we're up against here is the fact that the human eye-brain system is excellent at detecting differences, but terrible at establishing absolute values. If you take a piece of nominally white paper and view it by candlelight, fluorescent light, sunlight, and electric-arc light it will look white to you in all situations. However, if you actually measure its color, it's vastly different in each. You adjust. A similar thing happens with brightness. Probably the best that can be done is not to let things get too out of hand."

JOHN B GILLOOLY: "My feeling on this issue is sort of representative of my philosophy across most things. There is a point of diminishing returns on these efforts. Everyone's eyes are seeing a bit differently and monitors are inconsistent across the board. So it would seem that the exhaustive efforts to make it perfect are futile!

"I've decided with the help of a couple buddies that I am an 80% guy. I'm an 80% healthy eater—I try to eat organic foods when I can and avoid wasted sugar intake. I am an 80% exercise fit person—maybe three or four 45-minute workouts per week. Etc, etc, etc.

"I look at my monitor, compare it to the histogram and what my prints look like. If an image looks good on my monitor and I like the print that results, I let the rest go.

"It seems like the last 20% of perfection are a bunch of rabbit holes. Maybe there is one thing in your life that you can truly chase to 100%. But you should probably be careful in choosing one! It comes at the expense of many other things.

"Yes, I could go from 18% body fat to 10, but it would require incredibly strict eating and 15+ hours per week in the gym. Not interested. I could go from a 4–5 handicap golfer who plays recreationally to maybe a 1, but I would be at the golf course six days per week for hours. Why? I'd rather be roaming a city making photographs, getting lots of steps in, stop for a nice lunch with some dark chocolate for dessert, download and edit on a monitor where the images look good! Then enjoy a nice dinner! No rabbit holes. No obsessing over minute details."

Mike replies: When I was darkroom printing, I followed your 80% rule most of the time, but, just as an exercise to keep my chops up, I would occasionally (like, once every six months to two years) print a bunch of negatives as fast as I could, spending as little time as possible on each, and on other occasions I would spend lots of time and effort trying to print one negative as perfectly as I possibly could, in some cases spending hours one day and then more hours the next. I felt that most darkroom workers tended toward one or the other—speed or care—based on their personal style and general psychology, and I felt I could benefit from learning both ways. Both exercises improved my printing.

And by the way, one of the reasons I chose my car was a review that said it handled very well up to 80% of of its maximum performance but started to fall apart as you pushed it to go above 80% and tried to get closer to 100%. I reasoned that I never pushed a car past 80% but wanted it to handle well up to that point. I still have that car after 10 years and still enjoy it.

George Sinos: "Several years ago I taught a photography class at a local community college. I had the same digital photo file printed by six different companies. In addition, I worked with a local lab to have one print made as 'neutral.' There were never any prints that matched. They all had different color casts and saturation. I asked every class which print was the most 'correct' and which was the most preferred. The choices for most 'correct' were all over the map, but most preferred was almost always the most over saturated version. The 'neutral' version was seldom picked."

Mike replies: I used to run lots of those "focus group" type of tests. I would have loved to do a test like yours, but never did. Still, we need to remember that most people aren't experts and haven't learned how to look. Similar to the way that most people in the general public don't have any aptitude for music but are still choosing which music is "best" by listening to it or buying it. (You probably know at least a few people who just don't even listen to music. They have so little aptitude for it that it's not part of their lives.) To give you an example, I used to put up three prints of the same negative in front of my photography classes. I would ask them to describe the main difference between each one. One was printed with a paper/developer combination that looked warmer and more brown on a more off-white base, one was neutral, and one was pretty heavily selenium-toned, giving it "eggplant" blacks on a colder white paper base. The classes of 12–15 kids would usually be mystified, so I'd tell them the difference was color. That mystified them even further—inevitably, several kids would say something like "what are you even talking about? They're all black-and-white! There's no color version!" Just as inevitably, one or two perceptive kids would "get it" at some point and see it on their own. But, curiously, or so I thought, there were usually a few kids in each class who just couldn't see the color differences even when I and the kids who could see it were telling them what to look for.

It was really very interesting.

Ed Hawco: "For years I had the small problem of each eye seeing color differently. One eye saw it 'correctly' (by my interpretation) while the other had a warm, slightly greenish tint. The difference was only perceptible when I would look at a scene or image by alternating eyes.

"About a year ago I had cataract surgery and it changed everything. The surgery involves replacing your eyes’ lenses with new, artificial ones. Not only do I no longer need glasses for distance (and driving), but I now see color the same way through both eyes, and I see it correctly.

"I was shocked at how cool and blue everything looked at first, thinking it was a defect. The eye doc assured me that what I was seeing now was 'real' color for the first time in years, and that my brain would adapt quickly and would stop seeing it as weird. As I like you tell people, 'before surgery my neighbour had a yellow car; now he has a white one.'

"I was worried that I’d have to re-color balance my photographs and maybe even re-print them, but for some reason that doesn’t seem necessary. My photos seem to have the same colors as they always did; it’s real life that has color shifted. I have no explanation for this other than a.) I suppose this shows I’ve never been very particular about color balance (I’m B&W at heart) and b.) the brain really does amazing and unpredictable things with our vision."

New Work

It's been almost ten months since I uploaded any new work to Flickr, so I've added some new pictures, along with some write-ups. Here's the link to the first new one, and you can page forward from there (left arrow). The first one is relevant to a recent discussion here on TOP.

It's tough to get the tones right. They should be considered approximate. I can make the pictures look the way I want them to look on my computer—usually—but the Flickr algorithm changes things in subtle ways. I find I have to lighten the pictures before posting, and in some cases that throws the tones off somewhat. The one of the churchyard is probably pretty approximate; sunlit white clapboard is tough. In a print you have to get it just right. Edward Hopper is a good model for rendering sunlit white clapboard. Even though he was a painter (who sometimes worked from photographs), you can still study how he did it. He gets the feel right.

You might think that the same issues don't impact* prints, but they do. Prints are susceptible to looking different under different lighting, as well as different types of lighting. "Museum lighting" was traditionally strong and bright, and now is often the opposite; wall lighting in living rooms can range from bright daylight to murky "leftover" incandescent light from shaded lamps. These days, interior lighting is often from LEDs, which may have different characteristics than older B&W printmakers assumed would be normal or usual.

They even make viewing booths and proofing stations with controlled color-calibrated lighting for viewing prints, objects, and things like color samples in a controlled environment. When I was a custom printer I took care to calibrate the intensity of my darkroom viewing light so I wouldn't be misled into making prints too dark or too light. Lighting that's too bright causes you to print dark, and vice versa—I could even see it in gallery shows if a photographer who made their own prints had bad darkroom viewing lighting. You also have to accommodate for eye adjustment. The best darkroom viewing light would be one that ramps up slowly to full brightness (I never had anything like that).

Anyway, I hope these look okay on your monitor. I'll be adding a few more this afternoon perhaps.

Mike

*Yes, I accept "impact" as a verb. It's widely used, and there's not really another word that means quite the same thing with the same, er, impact.

Original contents copyright 2024 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:

Nick: "I love the photos, though I thought they looked substantially too dark when I looked at them on my monitor at work (during a break, of course). Questioning myself (since you've forgotten more about B&W tonality than I'll ever learn), I flipped over to my Flickr Photostream to see if I thought I really was making everything too high-key. Well, I'm sure I've got questionable (or bad) decisions all over the place in how I place tones, but my photos look too dark on this monitor as well! Gonna have to look again on my better-calibrated monitor at home....

Mike replies: Good idea. My pictures do skew a little too dark at times and on some monitors. I like some tone in highlights, and I'm definitely not afraid of photographing in dark scenes, sometimes in near total darkness. Plus, I generally edit at night in minimal room light.

A picture that looks tonally just about right to me on Flicker, on my calibrated monitor, and with daylight illuminating the room through windows (my office has windows on all four walls), is this one:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/156825285@N07/52449968060/in/photostream/

So take a look at that one when you get home. If that looks "right" to you tonally, then we're probably on more or less the same page, as they say.

Martin: "The presentation on Flickr looks good to me. I think 'Oak Tree, Old Number Nine Church' nails the highlight and shadow retention, and the sky has lovely varied tones while still being distinct against the bright sunlit hard surfaces and the shadows in the foliage. Tasteful and thoughtful treatment all around.

"I do agree with John Krumm's observation that 'Tree Down' feels underexposed, even given your preference for richer mids and shadows.

"Can you say anything about what looks like artifacting in the upper 15% of the 'Wheat' photo? I love the detail in the rest of the photograph, but when you get to the upper extremes of the image it looks like stippling or a low bit-depth scan. Is that in the original, or is Flickr's compression making a hash of it?"

Mike replies: I see a little pixelization at the highest magnification on Flickr, but mainly just a little out-of-focus blur (bokeh):

Sorry I couldn't get exactly the same place on the image.

The Best Way to Be a Photographer

The best way to be a photographer might be to not put "photography" first as your main interest.

Better to have an ulterior purpose or outside motivation of some sort—to be interested in something, to have an aptitude that defines you, or be willing to get engaged in things—and use photography as your way in.

The most blatant and obvious example of this principle is: it's better to be interested in photographs than it is to be interested in "photography." Lots of people who are photography amateurs and hobbyists just don't seem to be all that interested in pictures. (Present company excepted of course—all TOP readers are above average.) They care about everything surrounding photographs—the gear, the techniques, the companies, the lore, the history, the communities (er...), the loyalties, the lifestyle, and so on, but pictures might remain sort of an afterthought.

Photographers might ask themselves: Am I interested in photographs? Are you interested enough in photographs that you'd still be just as deeply interested in them if you gave up your own photography altogether? It's possible to be deeply engaged with photography yet not be a photographer. Several great critics and many great curators aren't photographers.

When you're merely interested in photography itself, you can get lost in all sorts of banality. The most common way of getting lost is to shop for gear and never stop shopping. Another way of getting lost is to be a hopeless dilettante in the focus of your attention and your work—you dabble in all sorts of things but create only a jumble, a far-flung hodgepodge of unrelated pictures. A third way is to be too undemanding of your work: you took it, and it's the best thing you got that day, ergo it must be good. A fourth way is to zero in on some narrow aspect of picture-making and get so involved in the details of something—which might include, well, detail, or what we call high resolution—that you don't recognize the real importance or purpose of the thing as a whole..."losing sight of the forest for the trees," as the old expression puts it. I've done that. I've certainly seen others do it.

The question then: Am I lost? If you are, how can you see your work dispassionately enough that you can evaluate where you are and where you want to go with it?

The thing itself
It might be better to have some passion that guides you into your work. It can be something concrete and definable: you love people and take joy in photographing them and their activities, like Eisenstadt; you have a thing for horses or cars or railroads and mostly photograph around those things; you love landscapes; you love sports; you love animals. You might have what are lumped together as "concerns"—documenting something, revealing or promoting something; a cause. I think it's fine, too, to love some aspect of photography that can be brought out in pictures: you love color or B&W or the look of some specific alt process**, or big prints or large-format contact prints; you love control or looseness; you love iconoclastic, offbeat compositions, a certain feeling-tone, or some kind of nostalgia; you want to break or follow certain rules you've defined or recognized. It can be anything. Do you have to know exactly what you're doing? The obvious answers seems to be yes, but maybe, sometimes, not. Some people are after something they can't define in their work and it's left to others to recognize it from the work itself and articulate what it might be.

At the concrete end of this spectrum, you might be interested in one specific subject. Fashion, or residential architecture. People you meet on the street. Roy De Carava, the subject of one of my very favorite books, photographed Blackness.At the abstract end it could also be all sorts of things. It's occurred to me over the years that what I really like is looking. I love to look and to see, and some of that can be photographed and some can't, but I love to see, whether I have a camera with me or not.

The best book I know of that articulates these ideas is Bill Jay and David Hurn's On Being a Photographer. This is available in print and as a download, for very reasonable prices, direct from the publisher. Reasonable people can disagree with me, but I'd say it's not just recommended, it's essential. I need to re-read that. Take notes!

Mike

*John Rewald's History of Impressionism is a good read for anyone interested in visual art.

**A local guy I don't know very well, John Coffer, is obsessed with the 19th century and lives most of his life as if it's 1850, although he does make one concession to modernism, so I hear: he owns three Ford Model T cars. He makes his living selling his artistic tintypes in NYC galleries (one I particularly liked is a tintype of a metal road sign with bullet holes in it, and John then shot holes through the metal substrate of the photograph) and doing tintype workshops. His obsession with tintypes is all of a seamless piece with his antiquarian preoccupations.

Original contents copyright 2024 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 Leica D-Lux 7 and D-Lux 8

Comments are all moderated at 12:18 p.m. Sunday

This isn't a review. Just my chatty impression after trying a D-Lux 7 a few times. (Note the new Category, which you can see in the footer.) I took it to the local Art Fair weekend, where I met this guy. He was selling steampunk clocks made out of all sorts of bits and pieces of all sorts of things, and most of them incorporated old junk-shop cameras. The women I was with, Mary Kay and Chris, were moving on, so I didn't dally to take pictures of his clocks. A pity.

But I like that T-shirt.

Szarkowskian positivity
Negative reviews are too easy. You make a straw man of some product—a "straw man" is when you set something up just to knock it down—and then you can be entertainingly snarky and insulting. Some people get off on that. It makes them feel powerful or something. John Szarkowski, one of my writer-heroes in photography, had a simple policy about that: he didn't write about work he didn't like. He felt it was much harder to be clear about why he did like something than to wax acerbic about stuff he didn't. It's a good policy. Most of my best camera reviews came from getting very enthusiastic about something, learning all about it, and then sharing all that in detail.

That's not going to be the case here.

How this all came about is that my main camera has a 24x36mm B&W-only sensor (I'll be putting up some new work soon), and I started thinking about getting a color camera that's a little better and more versatile than my iPhone, but doesn't require me to carry my Fuji kit along.

A month or two back, Leica had just released the next-gen D-Lux 8, but they weren't shipping yet, so I figured I'd try a D-Lux 7 just to see what I thought of the form factor. Also, Leicaphiles are very hostile when you criticize anything about a current Leica product, whereas you are allowed to point out shortcomings in older versions. Think I'm kidding? It's absolutely a thing. I've watched it for 30 years or more. You can get around it by reviewing the last-generation version of anything.

The last-gen version of the D-Lux, the 7. The current
version is the semi-unobtainable 8.

I enjoyed my week with the D-Lux 7, which was kindly provided for us (for you) by Lensrentals. I like taking pictures, and I can enjoy almost any camera. Even if I don't get out with the big camera very often, I take pictures with the iPhone virtually every day. But the D-Lux 7, which is more or less identical to the now-discontinued Panasonic LX100 II that sold for several hundred dollars less, has one big problem.

It's not a bad camera at all, and I don't mean to dismiss anyone who loves it. It has a 4/3 sensor, and I particularly love the image quality of 4/3 sensors—they have sort of a crispy, sharp look. Although they're maybe a little coarse, without the fine detail or very subtle gradations you get out of larger sensors. (Note that the blog software softens pictures somewhat, so you can't get a real look at how sharp these illustrations are.) It has 17 megapixels, which is plenty. The zoom is effectively a 24–75mm, which is fine. The Leica raw files are nicely correctable—you can bring highlights back down pretty well and open shadows effectively, although, again, this tends to be even better on larger sensors. I might not get excited about the image quality, exactly, but I could live with it.

Friendly young art-fair goers I met at the Blue Heron
Bakery. We had a nice conversation.

The camera is small and light and easy to carry. And it looks nice. It drew attention several times, including from the young people pictured above. They all said they liked photography, and the first question they asked was, "is that a film camera?" I can't remember if I suggested the group portrait of if they did.

I've always tended to like arty people. It's my tribe.

I'm feeling sheepish about this next bit—and it violates yet another reviewing rule of mine, which is never to write about a camera except when you have it in front of you—but I can't remember what I thought about the viewfinder. That's a pretty serious lapse, since I have a long history of caring a lot about viewfinders. I don't recall a bad impression, so I think it's fine. But I don't really know. Can't recall now. (Gets red in face, tugs at collar, clears throat.)

But here's the bottom line, and the reason I lost interest in getting one for myself right away...it's a point-and-shoot. Now, there's nothing wrong with point and shoots, and I don't want to diss anyone who owns or uses one, and I certainly don't disagree with anyone who likes one of these LX100/D-Lux variants. You do you, and power to you. All cameras are good for someone. I'm camera-tolerant.

But, much as I love the idea of point-and-shoots, I've never found one that I've really been satisfied with. And—because I like the idea of them so much—I've used a great many of them over the years. Including some exotics like the Nikon 35Ti and the Contax T2, along with famous mainstream ones that everyone loved like the Olympus XA. I've used many digital ones too. And I've never found one that doesn't have weaknesses that become intrusive over time.

The D-Lux 7 is just...too...slow. Or rather, it's not too slow...but it lacks that wonderful feeling of immediate responsiveness that I love in cameras. The sense that you can raise it quickly to your eye and take a picture as fast as you can. There comes a point when slow AF, slow adjustments (in this case the power zoom—I have never, ever met a power zoom I liked), and shutter lag conspire together and that feeling or razor sharp responsiveness just goes bye-bye. Mind you, a camera doesn't have to be fast by the measurements...but that feeling of responsiveness, of it doing your bidding just as soon as you ask it to...well, that's something that really ratchets up the enjoyment of picturetaking if you ask me. It's worth a lot. It's worth having, and it's worth chasing.

And the one problem of the Leica D-Lux 8, which is the only surviving variant of this whole long line of Panasonic cameras and their Leica counterparts? (Aside from the fact that it's being released in fits and starts in limited quantities?) It's that the value proposition is in the toilet. It's terrible. Leica wants $1,600 for a D-Lux 8. That, in my opinion, is just too darn much for a point-and-shoot—even one with a nice sensor and a nice zoom range and that looks swell. $1,000 was too much for the Panasonic LX100 II. $1,600 for an LX100 II with Leica customizing is lighting a cigar with a $100 bill, just throwing money away.

I'd rather see people put those 16 $100 bills in the pages of a book* and keep adding more from time to time until they'd saved enough for a Q3. Or a used Q2. Or a nice Sony. Or something else.

As for me, I mean to wean myself of the allure of point-and-shoots. I should have learned my lesson eons ago. No more point-and-shoots from here on out, Mike! You know that territory, and you've investigated more than enough to have learned your lesson. No. More. Got it? Good.

That's my camera impression of the D-Lux 7. Note that I don't know about the D-Lux 8, which is probably much better. (Wink.)

Mike
(Thanks again to Lensrentals for the loan of the test camera.)

*I knew a camera dealer back in Chicago who had a tiny hole-in-the-wall shop—I think the street address ended in "1/2"—and that was how he saved for cameras he wanted for himself. He'd just take a hundred dollar bill or a fifty dollar bill from time to time and put it in a book until he had enough there for whatever he was saving for. Why a book? Because a thief would never know what book the cash was in and would never have enough time, or any reason, to look through all the pages of hundreds of books.

So what did I do? To make a start at saving, I took a $50 bill, put it in the pages of a book, forgot all about it, and then, later, donated the book, along with many others, to a local coffeshop/bookstore where a young couple were trying to make a go of a small business of their own. Months later, they called me—they, or someone, had found my $50 bill—and they remembered where the book had come from, and they returned the money to me!

Original contents copyright 2024 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:

Grant: "I’ve been using a Panasonic LX100 since 2018. I have a lot of chatty impressions too, but I will try and keep this brief.

"I agree with a number of your observations. I bought a store demo LX100, with a very low shutter count and a full warranty, for $550 Canadian. The D-Lux 8 is selling for $2,200 Canadian. Ouch! I can buy a large supply of red sticky dots at the dollar store for a lot less.

"The zoom, which can be controlled by both a lever around the shutter button and by the control ring on the lens, takes a bit of getting used to. I’m used to it now.

"The focus is slower than cameras from Canon and Nikon but not unbearably slow. Should you need focusing assistance, it’s available.

"Moving on to where our impressions diverge. Yes it’s a point-and-shoot. So is your phone; get over it. Any camera is a point-and-shoot if you set the dial to P. The beauty of the LX100/D-Lux 7 and 8, is that they can quickly go from P, to A, to S, to M, with a turn of the shutter dial or the aperture ring. That’s a feature that sets this camera apart from all the other point-and-shoot cameras that force you to dig into menus, tap a button, or turn an unmarked dial. Glance down at the top of the camera and all your settings can be read instantly. I find this is a huge bonus when shooting quickly or in low light.

"To help refresh your memory, the viewfinder is good. It has all the shooting information and focusing aids that are on the LCD screen. I usually use the viewfinder before I use the screen.

"I have no complaints about image quality. The lens shines. The results please me. It’s hard to tell the difference between the LX100 files and files from my APS-C cameras. Gallery quality prints are not on my agenda so I don’t know how far the files can be stretched.

"Overall this is a full-featured camera in a small package. I keep the camera, plus the flash and two spare batteries, in a very small shoulder bag. It rides shotgun everywhere I go. When I walk about and don’t want to use the bag, the camera hangs on a wrist strap or slips in a jacket pocket. Yes, I know my phone is with me too, but I can’t get no respect when I pull out a phone, the way I can get respect when I pull out a real camera.

"Dear editor, you may edit this comment for reasons of punctuation, spelling and grammar, but please do not remove the parts where I call you rude names and insult your intelligence for not being hopelessly smitten with this fine camera."

Bernard: "I think that your Leica observation has flipped around. You'll hear and read lots of criticisms of current models, but previous models are revered. The M11 and SL3 are suffering the brunt of criticism right now, while the M10 and SL2 are considered to be their best recent interchangeable-lens models. We'll need to wait for the M12 to come out before the M11 becomes the best digital M. It may have something to do with Leica owners of course. Many of us can only afford (or justify owning) the previous model, so we are only now discovering what those cameras can do."

Mike replies: Thanks for your insight. It's entirely possible I'm behind the times.

Rick in CO: "As a Leica user (M10R & CL) I agree completely with your review. I was hoping that Leica would come out with a new compact camera to replace my CL, which, with the 18–56 zoom lens, is not exactly pocketable. As it is they just re-hashed the old design, although I understand the EVF is a notable upgrade. I can only think there was a leftover supply of parts in China that had to be made use of due to previous contractual arrangements. There is some feedback from 7 users that the 8 has lost a few of the features they previously enjoyed (step-zoom in particular). My CL will have to trundle along as my knockabout/backup camera."

Thom Hogan: "There are probably two primary changes in the D-Lux 8, which I have, from the D-Lux 7/LX100 II, which I used to have. No. 1 is a very improved viewfinder. It's now OLED. No. 2 is a pretty simplified and more direct approach (Leica Q3) to setting things. Do those justify the now substantively higher price? No, but it does make an already competent compact a better experience. Note that not everyone will like the near menuless approach. To enjoy it, you have to embrace what Leica did. Button, tap, maybe another tap, done."

Omer: "My experience with the 7 is somewhat better than what you've described and I am content with it. But it is just a camera so I'll leave it at that. I have it only because it has the famous red dot which has some power over me. The 7 and a 6—yes, 'platinum blondes' both—are enough to satisfy my Leica craving."

Reader View

Do you know about Reader View? I can only speak to the Firefox browser, which I've been using for years. In the address bar, over at the right, there's a small page icon:

Click on it and it turns blue, and all the interruptions and distractions in the page layout are stripped away—all the flashing ads, the inline links to other content, the obnoxious intrusive mini-videos—leaving just the text, relevant illustrations, and links. You can toggle it quickly using command+option+R. You can also customize the look of the resulting page using settings found on the left—text type, size, and spacing. Backgrounds too—some studies have found that the ideal background for reading is not white, but that an off-white cream or light gray background is easier on the eyes. I read that in the era of reading on paper, and it might be even more true now that the background on screens is emitting light. (Along these lines, a medium- or low-intensity light placed behind your monitor, creating backlighting, helps relieve eyestrain too.)

It might not work for every site—I think I've encountered a few that don't work. But not many.

It's good for printing articles, too.

I suppose most people know about this already, but, on the other hand, I find it absolutely essential for reading online, so it doesn't hurt to mention it. Might help someone somewhere.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2024 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:

Chuck Albertson: "A big thumbs-up for that one. I've used Firefox for years, and never knew."

Ed Hawco: "The Safari browser also has Reader View. It’s not just good for removing distractions, it’s great for non-dynamic pages (ahem; like this one) that don’t work well on small screens (phones, tablets). It fills the screen properly with the text so you don’t have to do any awkward pinching and zooming."

Mike replies: You don't actually have to pinch and zoom with TOP. Open the site on a phone and double-tap the text area—it will expand to fit the width. Simply turn the phone sideways to enlarge the text further.

Some Days Are Better Than Others (Blog Note)

Sorry for the dearth of content this week. I know you'd like something new every day.

I had to spend the whole day yesterday doing house- and yardwork, cooking, shopping, bills, that sort of thing—the administrative duties of life. Usually I reserve Saturdays for that stuff, but last Saturday I spent most of the day writing the first draft of the first half of the "Curious Thing About a Book" post.

Long posts take take the vinegar out of me for a day or two afterwards. That one took three whole days to write—it went through the equivalent of several drafts and rearrangements. After I posted it I was temporarily depleted of writing energy.

I consider myself a slow and scant writer. The "Curious" essay is 2,630 words as published. And a fair amount of what I wrote, I cut. Steven King said any writer worth his salt should be able to write 2,000 words a day. I'm good for around 1,000, give or take 300. It doesn't take long to write, but I rewrite obsessively, going over things again and again and again. Much over 1,500 words  takes all day and I have a hangover the next. Then again, Joyce Carol Oates doesn't consider herself a fast writer (per this article) and she's written "sixty-three novels, forty-seven collections of short stories, and numerous plays, librettos, children's novels, and books of poetry." That's according to The New Yorker, so you can bet your bottom dollar it was fact-checked.

I've considered trying to write two longer posts per week, or even one, but I don't think it would work. I'd fall behind sooner or later. I'm not very consistent. All through my youth I used to say, "constancy is my worst thing." It's one hallmark of a depressive. We have lots of energy sometimes and no energy at other times. Samuel Johnson, who today would no doubt be diagnosed as bipolar, would excoriate himself for his long periods of lethargy and then try to make up for it with Herculean exertions when he was in a manic phase. Although I don't suffer anywhere near as badly as he did, I can identify.

"Curious" was the kind of essay that will be tl;dr for many people. Of those who did read it, I'm sure only a minority subset were interested, and probably a minority subset of that minority subset enjoyed it. But one thing I've learned writing a blog for very close to 20 years now: not everything is for everyone. It's great when a post is read and enjoyed by a lot of people, but it's equally good when you touch a small number of people deeply. 

Anticlimactic
I'm largely over my depression, thanks to a long course of antidepressants in the early 2000s, administered by Dr. David Holloway, M.D., Ph.D., and subsequent involvement in my own fellowship community. It's kind of a miracle, actually. Dr. Holloway advocated involvement in community as an important aspect of recovering from depression. And, not coincidentally, I started this blog halfway through treatment. Pace our friend Kirk, David Holloway also uttered the memorable line, "All of my patients who exercise do better than any of my patients who don't." His approach to depression was holistic and multifaceted. I'm lucky. And grateful. I never get as depressed now as I used to get all the time.

Next up, Next week, my impression of the Leica D-Lux 7. Just a warning...it might be anticlimactic.

The clever drunk
Good alcoholic story. It's true, I think—comes from a good source. [CORRECTION: Nope! I am wrong. It might have its origins in truth, but not in any way that can be determined or proven now. It's folklore. A folkjoke? —Ed.] A man is out drinking. On his way home, on a four-lane divided highway, he gets pulled over. He figures he's had it, because he's very drunk. The cop gets him out of the car to do sobriety tests—touch your nose, walk a straight line, that sort of thing.

But just as this gets started, there's an accident across the highway in the two lanes going the other way. Cop points at the guy, says, "stay right there!" and runs over to help. Drivers are pulling over and getting out of their cars to see if they can assist. More police arrive. People on the drunk's side of the highway slow down to look. The other side of the highway is down to one lane; traffic slows down and backs up. Ambulance and paramedics arrive. The drunk waits patiently for ten, fifteen, twenty minutes, watching all this. But he's thinking. And the more he thinks, the more convinced he becomes that the cop never asked for his license and registration when he first pulled him over. Probably intended to get it during the arrest. Which probably would have happened, as he had been drinking heavily. The whole scene is busy and confusing now. There are a lot of people milling around all over the place. He seems to have been completely forgotten in all the commotion. Nobody is paying the slightest attention to him.

So the drunk decides to very casually get back in the car and drive home. Which he does. He drives home, puts the car in the garage, and goes to bed.

The next day, a knock comes at the front door. It's the police. They ask him if he left the scene of an arrest the night before. He feigns surprise and says, "No, officers, it wasn't me. It couldn't have been me. I've been at home all day today and I was right here all day yesterday. Never went out."

"You weren't stopped for suspicion of driving under the influence?"

"No. I didn't have a drop to drink all day yesterday. I was home all day. Wasn't drinking at all."

The cops say okay, but where's your car?

"It's in the garage."

Cops say okay, show us your car. If it's there, we'll leave.

The man confidently leads them through the house to the door to the garage. Opens the door and...

A Curious Thing About a Book

Comments are up to date as of 10:47 Wednesday morning.

...or a photograph, or a painting, or indeed any kind of artwork: not all of what it offers is in it.

Bear with me for a sec if you will. I recently attended a short talk about the 6th and 7th steps of many 12-step programs, which, if you don't know them, go like this:

6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.

7. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.

The talk was about the distinction between the terms "defects of character" and "shortcomings," whether they mean the same thing or something different—and, if they are different, how that should be interpreted. Working from a number of sources, the speaker first reported an involved argument that assigned "shortcoming" the meaning of specific instances of a character defect, and "character defect" as the underlying cause or source of these shortcomings. So, in other words, "I knew the leftover cake in the fridge was yours and that you were saving it, but I ate it anyway" is a shortcoming, and the defect of character behind it would be selfishness and inconsiderateness.

But this isn't the case. Many editors and writers, as a matter of policy or habit, simply choose to use different terms to avoid repetitiveness. It's a rule of house style at many publications. Bill Wilson, the author of the original steps, stated on several occasions that he was just using a different term for the same thing. In hindsight, the two steps might have been better written as:

6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.

7. Humbly asked Him to remove them.

In that light, the "defects of character vs. shortcomings" thing is a red herring, not available for insights—at least not according to the author. But here's the interesting thing: even the author of a book isn't the absolute arbiter of what the book means. It's a curious thing about a book. The reason is simple. The meaning, importance, feeling-tone, significance, connotation, and connection to any work of art is forged in the reader or viewer by a combination of two things: what the author or creator put into the work and intended it to be, and what the reader or viewer brings to it and takes from it. So if the reader decides to interpret "shortcoming" and "defect of character" as something different, and work these two steps accordingly, she or he may do so. You work the steps as best you can and according to your own best understanding and your own needs. It's up to you.

A photograph of a gun
Getting down to photographs, here's a simple example. Imagine an obviously old-fashioned photograph of a man kneeling on the ground holding up a large, long rifle which is prominently featured in the image. The landscape looks like prairie. The picture is historical and seems to date from the era of the American frontier. On the ground nearby is a small structure that looks like an "X."

One viewer looks at the picture and sees a brave frontiersman, and imagines him valiantly fighting marauding hostiles with the rifle or setting off on a hunt for bear or mountain lions. This person hunted with his father and uncles as a boy and has great memories of cold mornings stalking deer, and his family have always been responsible gun owners.

A second is knowledgeable about species extinction and has a special interest in American bison, and he recognizes the gun as a long-range rifled weapon for killing buffalo in a particular way: lying prone on the ground and propping the end of the barrel of the heavy rifle on the small gunrest (for that's what the X-shaped thing is), buffalo hunters could target a group of bison placidly eating grass far in the distance, and kill twelve or fifteen of them one after the other before the scent of death from the first one reached the others and they panicked and fled. The second viewer imagines that this is probably what just happened, and that the hunters will soon go to the kill site with their wagon to skin the dead buffalo and leave the rest of their bodies for predators or to rot in the sun. Past the edge of the picture, he can vividly imagine the pathetic sight of the slaughtered buffalo whose lives were wasted.

The first person sees the photograph in a romantic light, building a comforting and noble story around it. It brings up positive connotations and makes him feel good. The second sees the photo almost as a record or at least a reminder of an atrocity, a small detail in the overall destruction of the great bison herds, and it seems a great shame to him and leaves him feeling unsettled and troubled.

Then we come to the caption or explanation for the picture. It turns out the photo was made to display the gun itself, and talks about who made it, why it is superior to other buffalo guns, and what the gun's special features are. The man is not a buffalo hunter himself, but an employee of the company that made the firearm.

So then what is the true meaning of the picture? Strictly, it might seem that we have to accept that it is exclusively about the firearm and is primarily of interest to those who like guns: enthusiasts, historians, collectors. But the two viewers described bring to it very different ideas. It would also seem that their reactions are wrong because parts of their perceptions might be in error: the first person assumes the gun was used in warfare, which it probably never was nor would have been. The second thinks that the man holding the gun has probably just slain a dozen defenseless buffalo from long distance, which is not the case here, although it is the purpose for which the rifle was made.

What is actually "in" photographs? The difficulty of interpreting even a single photograph fully and exactly is best exemplified for me by Errol Morris's investigations into Roger Fenton's "Valley of the Shadow of Death"—here's a brief video introduction at Vox if you're not familiar with it. The three long original articles in the New York Times, when they were published, provoked long and erudite comments numbering in the thousands when they were published. Here's Part One (you'll have to Google for parts two and three, as the links appear to be broken. Not all the comments are archived). The takeaway is that there are some things that are in a photograph, but even exercising the utmost rigor and an unlimited interest in solving the mystery and establishing the facts in evidence (Morris journeys to the Crimea among other exertions) there are limits to what you can know from what's actually in the picture.

But even once you settle the idea of what you're actually looking at, there are all sorts of other things that influence your reactions and, eventually, opinions. Your history, your experiences, your fears, your ideas of beauty, your sexuality, specific memories, all manner of things—the list is long. And yes, one of those things might be your taste, although "it's all a matter of taste" is always such a gross simplification that it's never useful. Or rather, it can be useful for one thing, namely, dismissing work you don't want to engage with or give consideration to. Many people believe that in written descriptions in books, whether you know the subject firsthand or not will amplify or diminish the capacity of the words to transmit a vivid image. When you read "the hot sunlight on her face," the words conjure a feeling because you have felt hot sunlight on your face. You might respond differently to photographs of mountains and alpine climbing if you have personal experience of mountains and alpine climbing. Or the opposite might hold more sway: you might have romantic ideas about mountains and climbers without knowing much about it; certainly when we read books about 18th-century pirates or 1930s gangsters we're not bringing personal experience to bear. Oddly, some people get very persnickety about mythical clichés that don't have any concordance to a verifiable reality—for example, what the clothing of Santa Claus should look like. That's yet another thing that can influence your reaction to photographs: what if it shows something you have an idea of but shows a reality that conflicts with your conception? Even your own work might influence how you experience similar work by others. A landscapist might have an abiding interest in how other people solve the same problems and what they can show her about how to succeed. Or a street photographer might be jealous of others who do work similar to their own. They might respond with reflexive denigration or scorn that has its origins in anxiety.

These days, another dimension is added to every "photograph"—because we're still calling them that—what is real and what was faked? I don't think it's any accident that recent years have seen numerous examples of famous photographs being cynically recast as probable fakes. Our minds are changing. We used to be trusting; now we are not. For example, no one when I was young seemed to have doubts about the veracity of Robert Capa's "The Falling Soldier," at least that I remember. But lately it's been fashionable to think it was staged and is fake. The picture hasn't changed; it's our attitudes surrounding pictures that have changed. We now think we need to start every experience with wariness, a sort of caginess, asking ourselves, first, whether we are being duped. The more that things are faked, the more likely it is that we'll suspect honest things as being possibly dishonest. I personally believe the picture, because I believe Capa. He said it was what he said it was, and I don't believe he would have lied. Viewing old photographs with new suspicion and mistrust is a sign of the changed attitudes with which we approach the experience of looking at created objects.

Collision
The curious thing about a book or any work of art is that we bring ourselves to it. And the resulting event-specific alchemy is what creates the work of art. It's not necessarily contained in the work itself; nor is it entirely about your understanding and feelings. It's the intersecting of the two.

It's also true that with many works of art, we react to them differently depending when in our lives we encountered them. Think of the movie that really changed your world and blew your mind when you were 17—or that just seemed perfect somehow. While you might continue to like it today—memories, sentimentality and all that (every now and then I re-watch American Graffiti)—would it have the same life-affecting power if you saw it for the first time today? Assuming you're an adult and have been one for a while, how about the best movie you've seen in the past two years? Would it have struck you the same way when you were 17? Books are like that too. It's not just age dependent, of course. It's also stage-of-life dependent. We are most moved by what reflects our concerns, interests and thinking when we experience them. I've seen Barry Lyndon three times. The first time I saw it, right after it came out, I was completely enthralled, almost mesmerized; the second time, only a short time later, I was bored stiff, not to mention alarmed that my experience of the film could shift so drastically in such a short time; and when I watched it again a few years ago, when it was 40 years old already, I had read some good critical exegeses about it and deeply appreciated the movie, and enjoyed it as well. I'll probably watch it a fourth time before I go shuffling off to Buffalo.

Another example from movies: think of a movie in which you achieved the Coleridgian "willing suspension of disbelief"—you got into it, and accepted its world at face value, identified with the characters, went along with the action—versus one for which you were unwilling to suspend disbelief. In that case, you kept yourself apart from it, maintained your critical distance, evaluated the mechanics of acting and direction and plot as you watched—very different experiences, no? The first movie you love, the second you approve of. I think of the scene in Goodfellas where Jimmy Conway (Robert De Niro) is trying to get Karen Hill (Lorraine Bracco) to go into his warehouse a block down the sidewalk to get herself a nice dress. He's trying to see if she's frightened of him or if she still trusts him. I found myself desperately trying to read his body language and expression to detect his motive, and I could feel Karen's barely-under-control terror. Thinking back on it I realize how completely the movie had drawn me into its world.

Is there such a thing as a great or excellent book? Well, of course—if many people have a positive experience with it, if critics find in it lots to talk about, if it was important in its time, if it was influential, if it's particularly beautifully written, if the author is a household name. There could be all sorts of reasons. And cultures need shared experience in order for them to cohere, although those stories are more often movies, now, than books. And sometimes the stories transcend the books themselves, culturally. Most people know the outlines of Gulliver's travels but haven't ever (and will never) read Gulliver's Travels. Especially, a book can be good if one person's good experience with it is reliably (more or less) transferable to another person, such that recommendations work and are appreciated. But it's not entirely in the book—Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy and Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress were once considered great books in Great Britain. Does anyone there read them today? (I tried to read them both, once upon a time, and failed.) Despite having eight billion people on the planet, only ten people per decade read Critique of Pure Reason or Remembrance of Things Past. That's my guesstimate and I'm sticking to it.

The bottom line is that with any work of art, the potential is always there for us to have a personal experience with it that is uniquely meaningful to us. And you don't have to have a deep, meaningful experience with art just because it's famous and venerated. And you can have a deep, meaningful experience with something few other people like and respond to (one of my favorite movies is Adaptation, a movie about a screenwriter so conflicted he had to be played by twins, who were played by one actor. It's not a movie very many of my acquaintances knows about). I once wrote something to the effect that "I reserve the right to react to art as if my encounter with it is a meaningful occasion for me." Works of art aren't static. They don't contain one effect that they impart to everyone equally. They aren't necessarily the same work of art for two different people at the same time. They aren't even the same work of art for the same person at different times; the next deeply meaningful book you read might be one you already read before, when you were younger. You were a different person then.

The search for good art is never over, if we're open minded. It's very much like the search for your next great picture. If you get the knack of making your experiences of art into occasions, you never know what occasion is headed your way next.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2024 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Dave Miller: "Well said, Mike. There are a few precious books on my shelves to which I return every decade, knowing that something new and valuable will await me. Most of those walls in our house which are not obscured by bookshelves are hung with art works. Although I have lived with them for many years, I still discover something fresh and new in the best of them whenever I take the time to contemplate them."

robert e: "Wow. That's a lot to think about. First of all, I loved Adaptation!

"From another perspective: Henri Cartier-Bresson talked about using the camera to question how he fit into the world. If all artists are doing that to some extent, and presenting us with the results of their inquiries, and if they are skilled, then some of those results are going to resonate with those of us asking similar questions (consciously or not) at some personal or even profound level, if not necessarily in the same way.

"Those moments of resonance or recognition may be my favorite thing about art museums. It's not always deep, or consistent, and it's not always there, but when it is it makes the world considerably less confusing or flat or lonely. (Museums because both quantity and quality increase the odds. Yes, 'quality' in that case is largely determined by professional consensus and that's not the only way, but it works well enough for me, to an extent.)

"I've always thought that one of the things that made J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings books great is that so much of the text is devoted to mundanities like food, drink, sleep, hiking, riding or sitting around fires telling stories. It's not wasted space—these celebrations of the quotidian root a fantastical tale of magic and monsters in a reader's everyday experiences; and, interleaved with reminders of how all that is threatened, they bring the story's stakes home, literally.

"Peter Jackson's film adaptations understandably had to take a different tack, relying instead on the immediacy and spectacle of cinema to do that work, but for my money they lost a good deal of the power of the original in the process."

Win G Low: "Since gods do not exist, the start of the article makes the rest a bit hard to swallow!"

Mike replies: At the outset, I asked you to "Bear with me for a sec if you will." But if you won't, then you won't.

Ugo Bessi: "Borges wrote a tale, 'Pierre Menard autor del Quixote,' in which Pierre Menard, after many tries, rewrites the Quixote; Menard's version is identical, word for word, to the original, but its meaning is utterly different, because it's written in another century."

Mike replies: J.L. Borges is the M.C. Escher of literature!

Kodachomeguy: "This disbelief in modern images and the suspicion that AI may have generated them is one reason to use film. If anyone questions your print/scan, show them the negative. It was there on the spot when you took the picture. The actual photons modified the silver/dye in the emulsion. It is a time machine, like tree rings in a 500-year-old log. Film is the real thing."

AN: "I think this idea of the malleability of an artwork’s meaning based on the essential interplay of the author’s literal content and the variable interpretation of the audience is a reason that, for me, works that are particularly driven by an explicit message/argument tend to fail as satisfying art. It’s important when making creative art to leave some space for the audience to make their contribution. I think that’s one of the big challenges: knowing when to guide or direct, to gesture or articulate, to suggest or define. If it’s too amorphous, it won’t be engaging, but if it’s too defined, it prevents the audience from getting swept up."

Mike replies: That's beautifully put, and so true. I remember watching cartoons in the early 1960s(!) in which the "moral of the story" was too obvious, and getting turned off by it even as a six-year-old. And the same thing still happens today.

It seems to me I read a profile of the late Edward Gorey recently in which he talks about not saying too much and leaving space for the viewer's own perceptions and reactions.

How to Deter Burglars, and Hal Webber's Trick to Foil Book Thieves

There are a lot of entertaining videos online about how to deter burglars. One of them makes a surprising claim: that a "Beware of Dog" sign might actually encourage a burglar.

How? Well, it means a dog moves around inside the home when the owners aren't at home, meaning there's no motion-sensor alarm inside.

A new fence around the backyard might also encourage unwanted visitors. It means the homeowner has enough extra money to be able to afford a fence, so they might spend more on easy-to-steal valuables too. Walls around the yard aren't great either, but for a different reason. They limit visibility and give burglars privacy while they work on breaking in. Same with large bushes around the house.

One of the best ways to avoid getting robbed is not to own a lot of valuable things in the first place. "Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal" (Matthew 6:19). There's a lot of once-expensive junk in my house, but I'm too lazy to get rid of it for a good reason: it's a pain. If a thief wants my old Pentax LX, he's going to have more work to do later to get any cash out of it. And he'd have to lug my old a/d/s L1290 speakers up from the basement and out of the house, which won't be easy and is going to take a while.

It helps if you live somewhere safe. Check the crime rates if you're thinking of moving. And observe peoples' habits. When I got here to Keuka Lake, I walked by a workman's pickup truck parked in back of a lake house. The guy was way down by the water, out of the direct line of sight of the truck, and his toolbox on the truckbed was wide open. He certainly wasn't worried about getting his power tools jacked. There are places in Chicago where they would lock the back doors of a van with tools in it just to walk to the front doors of the same van! Some people here (including my ex, a middle aged woman who lived alone) don't even lock their doors at night.

There are a few nifty tricks you can try. Even if you don't have an alarm system, stickers that say you do can be a deterrent. Some friends of mine used to spread fake dead mice on the floors of their lake cabin in the winter and put up signs that said something like "WARNING, DO NOT ENTER, POISON GAS FOR RODENT EXTERMINATION." With a skull and crossbones.

Here's one of my favorites. Put locks on the front and back doors that don't open with the same key. Then put a spare emergency key near the back door that only opens the front door. That way, when you need to use it, observers who see you go in the front won't see you going straight through to the back door to put the key back in its hiding place, and any bad guy who might find the key near the back door will try it and find it doesn't work.

I don't do that myself, and I've locked myself out of every house I've ever lived in. Including this one. I keep better track of my keys now. I'm getting too old to climb in windows.

Keep your guns, if you have any (I don't), under lock and key even inside the house. Most burglars come in the daytime, because you stand a better chance of being away during those hours. But if you return home unexpectedly, it's possible your own gun could be used against you if you leave it lying out. That might hurt you twice, once if you had it pointed at you (or worse) and again when you realized whose fault that was.

Impact windows are a great idea. There are videos online of would-be burglars firing guns at them or whacking away with a sledgehammer and still failing to gain entry.

With this house, I inherited a large steel safe in the basement which must weigh five hundred pounds. I bet I couldn't even hire anybody to get it out of the house. Thieves would have to have several large men and a free weekend. Then they'd have to crack it...all to find nothing in it but a few mementos, some old hard drives, and a bunch of papers that are useless to anyone but me.

As to where I keep a stash of cash in the house? I don't. I couldn't put my hands on a hundred bucks without a trip to the ATM.

Cadillac Hal
One of my favorite theft-prevention stories was one I learned about personally. I was working for the rare book dealer William F. Hale, building bookshelves in his Georgetown pied-à-terre apartment, when Bill's friend and neighbor Larry McMurtry, the novelist who wrote Lonesome Dove, The Last Picture Show, and Terms of Endearment, had a friend and business associate come by. It was Hal Webber, who Larry used as one of the inspirations for the main character in his novel about book scouting, Cadillac Jack. Webber, whom everyone addressed by his last name, was a slick-talking bear of a guy who wore jeans, cowboy boots, and a denim shirt and had black hair down most of the way to his waist. He sported a giant belt buckle and wore copper and turquoise jewelry that he had made himself. Webber was a dealer of rare stamps who got out of the business after the mob got into it; he switched to rare books instead. Larry, apart from being a novelist and scriptwriter, was a major rare book dealer in D.C. at that time. Negotiations took place that morning in Bill Hale's apartment over the course of two hours. Webber had a buyer for some books he knew Larry had. I was allowed to sit in for most of it, but was asked to step out momentarily at one point when things got a bit delicate. A stack of books no higher than you might have on your nightstand and some $30,000 were exchanged. After which, Webber invited us to lunch.

William Hallam (Hal) Webber, book scout, book dealer,
and character extraordinaire, with his niece Heidi.

We headed across the street and paused for a moment by Webber's car, parked by the curb on 31st Street in Georgetown. It was a sorry sight, an ancient, beat-up station wagon with fake-wood sides. The back seats were folded down and the entire back was filled with old banana crates made of heavy, waxed corrugated cardboard. Then we headed down an adjacent alley. Halfway down the alley we came to an old carriage house with heavy wooden double-doors held shut with a chain and padlock. Webber flung the doors open to reveal the massive grill of a gleaming Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud—his in-town ride. Off we went to their favorite Indian restaurant. Since it was my first time in a Rolls, they let me sit in the front seat. I had never been to an Indian restaurant before, either. I was a notoriously picky eater and still as thin as Lincoln. So they ordered for me and made me try everything they ordered. I got into the groove, and enjoyed the food. The conversation was fantastic. All four of us were storytellers, even me.

It turned out the old station wagon was Webber's business vehicle. He made the rounds of dealers, customers, and potential sellers of private libraries in the old car. He drove all over the country in it. The old boxes were all chock full of rare books. He said that although he liked the body of the car to look as old and as grody as possible, the mechanicals were all kept in top trim. One of them told me that at any given time, he had up to a quarter of a million dollars' worth of rare books in those boxes. I reacted with incredulity that he would leave so much treasure parked on the street.

"I don't even lock it," he answered. "If anyone is curious enough to sneak a look, what would they see? A bunch of old books. Any thief worth his salt knows old books aren't worth anything. Nobody will buy them." Larry allowed that a he had a steady stream of sad characters coming to his shop every month or two trying to sell a box or two of obviously stolen books. Usually unsuccessfully.

I never saw Hal Webber again, but I sure heard a lot of Hal Webber stories over the next few years. It was great to know who they were talking about. Bill and Larry were very generous with me. I still have two sets of 18th century books that Larry gave me. Both Edward Gibbon. The Autobiography is three volumes, the first Irish Edition of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is in 12 volumes. Both binder's copies, because I was scheduled to become a bookbinder at the Library of Congress at one time.

Plain sight
I adapted a version of Hal Webber's diversionary station wagon trick  on a much smaller scale when I started to do freelance photography. I allowed my car to get cluttered inside and dirty outside, and kept the cameras in a brown kraft paper grocery bag sitting right up on the passenger seat. Virtually nobody in D.C. at that time would leave anything remotely valuable in plain sight in a car—break-ins for car radios were a common way for addicts to make enough for a day's high. The grocery bag was old, soiled and crumpled. I kept the top rolled down so people looking in wouldn't think there was much of anything in it. It definitely didn't look like it held food.

There was a joke going around in those days. A man in New York City put a sign on his dashboard that said NO RADIO. He returned to his car one day to find the driver's side window smashed. On the sign, turned over and placed on the front seat, were the words JUST CHECKING. I was fortunate. No one ever broke my window to check what was in the old grocery bag.

Here's another fun story about burglars and cameras, if you're in the mood.

And here's another trick to protect your home—a guy in one video mentioned that he sets a Roomba going in the house when he leaves for the day, so if someone comes in it will sound like someone's home. Smart, eh?

There are all kinds of ways to be smart.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2024 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

JH: "On a somewhat similar topic, back in the '70s I often visited with a sales rep for Italy who lived in Milano. It was the era of the Red Brigades. The rep was very wealthy. His father was one the first electrical distributors in Italy and he expanded it to electronics. He had a side business also. In the building he owned in Milano, the first floor had a shop selling antique weapons, mostly guns. Another shop also dealt in modern weapons. He and I often went around the city to visit customers and to go to restaurants. When we walked, his 'sales manager' would accompany us. He was a giant guy, always armed. My guy wore bulletproof vests under his suit coats. When we drove, he had three cars in his garage. A Bentley sedan, a 356 Porsche, and a Mini. We always took the Mini. But it was no ordinary Mini. It was a hopped-up 1275 Cooper S that had been modified with armor and made to look like a crappy, beat-up city Mini."

Terry Letton: "Back when the NO RADIO signs were a thing I was always tempted to go to a junkyard and pick up an old random radio and put it in an empty parking space in Boston’s Back Bay with a sign that said NO BMW."

John Camp: "An old anti-burglar classic: a hand-written note on the door that says, 'Larry, the snake got loose again. Be careful.'

"Back in the days when a lot of wives stayed home with their school-age kids, I was a Miami Herald reporter and I'd occasionally go on ride-alongs with cops. One anti-burglary patrol guy told me the prime time for burglars was shortly after the kids would leave for school, and the wife would go out grocery shopping—usually between 10 a.m. and noon.

"Cops would always check walking couples carrying tennis rackets and bags to make sure they belonged in the neighborhood they were in.

"In one situation in Fort Lauderdale, some cops spotted a guy breaking into a house and dumped their patrol car and chased him on foot. They didn't lock the car, and they didn't take along their handset. Somebody stole their handset, and for the next couple of weeks until the battery ran out, every hour or so somebody would call "Hey, piggy piggy piggy...."

"One favorite target in big cities (St. Paul) where they have free-standing garages off alleys, is guys who'd drive through the alleys looking for open garage doors or doors that could be easily opened. Burglars will steal anything, and open garages always have something.

"I once went on a raid on a house occupied by a couple of young burglars (married with small children). The house was completely stacked with crap that you couldn't believe anybody would want, including a lot of obviously shoplifted stuff. But $5 here, and $5 there, and it adds up. They'd definitely take your Pentax.

"In one case in Miami Beach, the building department required fire extinguishers to be mounted on exterior apartment walls in case of fire. If you didn't have one, it was an automatic fine. In one apartment building, every time the manager put up a fire extinguisher, it would be stolen in a matter of days, and the building inspector would spot it and issue a fine. The things cost $40 or $50 apiece, probably sold for $5 or $10, enough for a rock of crack cocaine. The manager carried a gun, and one day, frustrated by the constant thefts and subsequent fines, which the police department did nothing to prevent, he caught a street person stealing the fire extinguisher and shot him. He was charged with murder.

"One burglary cop told me that if you let all the one-time killers out of prison, and put all the ratshit little thieves in jail, we'd be a much happier country. He claimed the most killers would never kill again, but burglars committed maybe 50 burglaries before they got caught, were usually turned loose again without jail time, and went right back to burglary. I don't know if that's true or not.

"I lived in LA for a few years, and one of my favorite places was what we all called 'The Homeboys Shopping Network.' It was kind of a big barn-like place with an amazing variety of stuff for sale, most of it obviously stolen. (Why else would you have one large pack of toilet paper, or miscellaneous sizes and brands of laundry detergent?) My son in law was a trumpet player, and one time I asked a lady behind the counter if they had any trumpets, and she thought a minute and the said something like, 'Let me go look.' She looked, but no trumpet. She said something like, 'It was right here. Somebody must have sold it.'

"Biscayne Bay in Miami has a number of islands, high-end housing for rich people. And they had security guards, mostly retired NYC cops, and all of them armed. The story around town was that if somebody broke into a house and was spotted by one of these guards, the guards always shot them as often as necessary. In other words, the price of burglary was instant execution, with never a prosecution. I heard the story from a reliable source, and have no reason to not believe it. (I believe Trump's daughter and son-in-law now live on one of the islands, as did my source for the story.)"

hugh crawford: "When I lived in Manhattan in the late 1970s early 1980s, I kept a set of keys to the apartment duct taped to a telephone booth three blocks away. I figured that there were probably a few thousand apartments closer to that set of keys than my apartment."

John: "Another way, hopefully, is to find yourself living next to several embassies with cameras trained in all directions and a police officer permanently stationed on the corner, which is where we find ourselves now."

Mike replies: Nosy neighbors are a good deterrent too! My neighbors in Woodstock watched my house like hawks. I had to be careful not to do anything suspicious. When I set up a darkroom in the basement, I used an old marijuana-grower's trick and blacked out the windows with tinfoil. It's easy to handle and lets no light through. But I was careful to tell all the neighbors that I was blocking light because of my darkroom, lest they think I was growing something illegal in the basement.

David Dyer-Bennet (partial comment): "This level of paranoia about theft sounds really extreme to me—and my three houses in Minnesota have all been within the city limits of Minneapolis, not even in first-ring suburbs. I do pay some attention; we have an alarm system, we do lock the doors, there are no hidden keys. It's an older house so you can't really climb in through the windows from outside without a ladder, they're too high (the basement windows are barred). And if you did, you'd have to climb back out; you can't open the doors without a key. But I think having four residents not all on the same schedule might make the biggest difference. In this house we've always had at least two people not working outside the home, and we've got a third-shift worker. Very confusing to look at!

darlene: "I learned early on that the best way to protect your belongings during a break-in is to slow down the intruder. In every home I’ve owned, I’ve always had an alarm system. Today, my alarm system includes cameras in various rooms that record off-site and I can monitor and record from my phone. Additionally, I have locks on several rooms to slow down intruders. The alarm system is powered by both battery and AC, and it’s connected wirelessly. If someone is determined to break in, they will, but the goal is to delay them and capture their image.

"When I lived in Miami, I saw too many house fires where children died because windows were barred to prevent break-ins or hurricane shutters that couldn’t be opened from the inside. By the time the fire department would arrive, it was too late. I don’t have experience with impact windows, but if there’s a fire and the only way out is a window, I want to be able to break it if it doesn’t open.

"I’ve experienced home break-ins twice. Once, when my boyfriend and I lived in a mobile home, I lost a Yashica camera he gifted me. Another time, while working during the day and attending the School of Visual Arts in the evenings, my jewelry was stolen. Although it wasn’t valuable monetarily, it had great sentimental value. The police educated me on how the break-in likely happened and advised me to visit the station periodically to check for recovered jewelry. Unfortunately, my pieces were never recovered.

"When I traveled on the NY subway to SVA at night, I was advised to dress like a guy. Despite being short, I wore my boyfriend’s jackets and hoods. I was never bothered, and carrying a large portfolio case and a box full of X-Acto knives probably helped.

"During my studio business in Atlanta, I always had two vehicles for jobs that didn’t advertise my business. The Yellow Pages and other marketing tools were for that. One vehicle was a 'mommy van' with the middle seat removed, and the other was a big Ford Bronco, often the Eddie Bauer version because they were attractive. I made sure my vehicles did not give away my profession.

"Despite these precautions, cases with lights, stands, and other gear were occasionally stolen at events by people working there. My assistants did their best to watch the gear boxes stowed under skirted tables, but they couldn’t be everywhere at once. I was never angry when it happened and always replaced the stolen items, knowing they might be taken again.

"Ultimately, I try to slow down intruders, keep my business private, and secure my gear with an alarm system and multiple locks on doors.

"I loved reading about the vehicles in your post, but I’m pretty sure my clientele or neighbors would’ve freaked out if I rolled up driving a Ghostbuster wagon on a mission. Who you gonna call? Definitely not me!"

'Flowers at the Edge of a Field'

Comments are up to date as of 1:44 p..m. ET Friday.

One of the side benefits of shooting with a sensor that's had its CFA removed is that every pixel records information. There's no color array that has to be interpolated. The resulting files don't just have detail; the detail is also somehow "clean," or crisp you might say.

This picture is for some unknown reason one of the most popular I posted on Flickr when I put up a bunch of pictures during the pandemic. It's gotten a lot of views. There's only one commenter, who says, "I'm amazed at what’s visible as I zoom in on the buildings in the distance. It’s as if the fictional CSI world of 'zoom and enhance' has finally come to be."

Plus, this is only a 24-MP sensor. Sigma also makes the same camera with a 61-MP sensor. That would be something with its CFA removed, wouldn't it? Although I can't imagine needing it. Plus, I actually reduced the size of this file before posting it on Flickr. I don't recall, now, why.

But many of the other pictures have the same amount of detail. The mystery is, why is this picture so popular? I mean, it's nice and all, and I like it okay, but I don't get what makes it nicer than some of the others.

Mike

P.S. I have a feeling of déjà vu again. Have I expressed my bemusement about Flowers at the Edge of a Field before? Maybe. I worry that I repeat myself. I worry that I repeat myself.

Original contents copyright 2024 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

darlene: "For me, 'Flowers at the Edge of a Field' captures a beautiful quality of light and exceptional tonality. It makes me feel as though I'm standing there, experiencing it firsthand. My eye is initially drawn to the barn's striking brightness, then travels across the field to the shimmering flowers among the grass. It's a truly beautiful experience."

MikeR (partial comment): "I believe that you did post that image before. But, so what? I've noticed the same as you the amazing detail, from my own monochrome camera. Pictures are especially striking when I print them from my recently converted monochrome printer. People just stare at the prints, drawn in by the never-ending detail."

Dave millier: "There is no absolute criteria for goodness in a photo, just what appeals to the individual viewer. There are a few principles or guidelines that, if followed, might help remove annoyances and help appeal aesthetically and emotionally, but there are no guarantees and the photographer has no control over the sensibilities of the viewer. The lighting on this one appeals to me but there isn't much composition-wise that excites me. If I'd shot it, I would probably have deleted it or ignored it. Which just proves my points. As you note, plenty of people have different taste to me. It's not truly possible to understand why something has mass appeal and attempts to explain it are confabulation."

Jeff Hohner: "I haven't looked through your Flickr extensively, but here's my take on the appeal of this pic.

1.) The lighting creates an extraordinary sense of depth. Depth in a photograph is always appealing because it's so hard to capture. Human vision excels at rendering depth. We perceive it as naturally as breathing, so when an image captures this experience we rejoice. Here is reality, not the flat, compressed rendering so typical of most photos, especially many landscapes that fail to capture real space.

2.) The flowers in the foreground accentuate the depth of the photo even further. They are small and adjacent to us, the viewer. They become a proxy for the viewer, for our humanity. They make us feel ourselves standing there at the side of the road, in the sun, in the weather, in the moment. Flowers are evocative symbols. In many cultures they have elaborate meanings, but broadly they represent beauty and the fleeting nature of life. Again, this makes us feel ourself, feel alive.

"I could go on about the many other strengths of the photo: texture, balance, strong one-point perspective, liveliness to the eye. But I think the photo's strong sense of being-in-place is what makes it most compelling. It's a lovely photo and a powerful one."

Mike replies: Thanks. A sense of space that gives the feeling of real volumes as I experience them has always been important for me. Not for me those real-estate photos in which super-wide-angle lenses make small rooms look vast, or the common trick of using long teles to flatten subjects into two-dimensional designs. (I mean not for me in my own work. I can appreciate things in the work of others that I wouldn't do myself.)

Jim Arthur: "Hi, Mike. I’m your lone Flickr commenter on 'Flowers at the Edge of a Field.' In addition to the CSI detail I mentioned, there is just something interesting about bright shafts of sunlight breaking through on a dark and gloomy day. I always stop to admire when that happens, even if I happen to be standing in a strip mall parking lot. This type of lighting effect seems to enhance the moment, as if you’re suddenly standing in a movie.

"It can also seem a bit mystical…kinda like a sun shower. Wikipedia lists all sorts of folkloric names for sun showers that have a common theme of tricksters like the devil or witches. In your picture, the impact of the moment is enhanced further by the detail and vast landscape. Another factor for me is how clean the air is. Here in the Sonoran Desert, there always seems to be dust and heat distortion in the distance.

"As for this picture's popularity, I think people view it because it’s well done, because of the lighting, because the technical details you provided are unusual and interesting and because the social media aspects of Flickr allow folks to direct their friends to see it."