The Online Photographer

Film Friday (Two Days Late): Two Printing Exercises

This is not likely to be useful to anyone beyond a tiny core group of eccentrics: film photographers are a tiny minority to begin with, and I understand most Y/N (young/new) film photographers have their negatives scanned and then go from there. So nobody does darkroom printing any more, for an n>zero value of "nobody." But I thought I'd mention it just in case it's suggestive of anything else that might be helpful.

As a photographic craft enthusiast > photography teacher > custom printer > darkroom expert (I was on the staff of, and then Editor of, and then a columnist for, several darkroom magazines back in the day), I observed over the years that people's personal temperament determined, as much as anything, their preferred working styles. To funnel the many types into two bottles, let's say one type liked to work loose, freewheeling, and fast, and the other liked careful control and craftmanship.

So I decided I would periodically force myself to do opposite exercises that covered each, so as not to get cornered into one set of skills at the expense of the other.

The first exercise was that every now and then I'd print some number of negatives right after picking them from the contact sheet, working fast. That is, no workprint stage. The workprint stage was to print images on anything from 4x5" to 8x10" resin-coated paper (paper didn't come in 4x5" sizes; that's an 8x10" sheet cut into four) and then using those to choose what to make a fine print of. Workprints could also be used for editing and sequencing. So for the exercise I'd just pick a few negs right off the contact sheet and give myself two pieces of good fiber-base [sic] paper to make the print. I printed enough that I could get in the ballpark without a test strip. The first whole-sheet print was my best guess; the second one had to contain any corrections as to density or contrast, and any burning or dodging—just winging it. I wouldn't stop to contemplate in between. One print, look at it for a minute or two, second print. Then that was that and I'd move on. That was the fast-and-loose exercise. I got surprisingly good at it.

And by the way, that's about how professional custom printers at labs worked, although they might use sophisticated tools, such as light meters under the enlarger, to get to the guide print stage. The lab wouldn't make money if they took half an hour and ten sheets of paper to make one print.

For the second exercise, the care and control side of the coin, I'd print more like Charlie Pratt. Here's Ralph Steiner from the foreword to the book Charles Pratt: Photographs (please note that the cover photograph is a picture of bramble!):

He [Charlie] came one evening fifteen years ago to a photographic discussion group which I sort of ran. We were looking at a couple of dozen rather ratty photographs, which had been brought in by a pleasant week-end photographer, who boasted: 'I knocked off these prints in just one evening.'

I was horrified by the prints, by the idea of two dozen in an evening, but mostly by the sacrilegious 'knocked off.' I was afraid of what might slip off my sometimes acid tongue, so I said: 'Charlie, why don't you tell us how you go about making a print.'

Rather shyly he told the group that he would take half to a full day to make from four to six rather good proof enlargements from one or at the most two negatives. He told the group that he would mount them all, and stand them up on a railing in his workroom, and would look at them for a month or so. Then he exploded into his normal, earth-shaking laugh, and said: 'I don't mean that I stand in front of them for a month, I leave them up for a month, stop to look at them some time each day to see how I feel. One day an idea will hit me how I want to print them, and I'll really go to work. Then I'll spend time on them.' That was Charlie.

For these prints, I resolved to take as much time, and "spend" as much in materials, as I needed to make the absolute best print I could make. Sometimes it would take a Pratt month and dozens of sheets of expensive paper. I might start by spending a whole evening making a great print, but then think about it for a week, perhaps deciding on a different paper or toning, and then do it all over again. Once I spent two successive days on one 8x10" print—not a total of 16 hours, but perhaps 10. I would just work until I had it exactly right.

Both methods eventually sort of collapsed into the middle. The "fast printing" style made me more decisive about getting down to the result, more businesslike; and the "slow printing" exercise encouraged me to spend more time and paper if and when a negative demanded it. Learn how to work fast and then slow down when you need to.

But the thing I liked about this, as I say, is that I didn't feel like I was merely being a slave to whatever my temperament happened to be, whether breezy, loose, and not very particular, or slow, methodical, and careful. Both methods had lessons to teach me; it was good to be familiar with both ways of working. And by the way, if temperament leads you strongly to one end or the other of this (or any?) spectrum, would that make it more valuable or less valuable to consciously practice and learn from the opposite? I suspect the former. We can always gain from learning in ways that don't come naturally to us.

For the record, I think I lean toward "slow, methodical and careful," but I know that to some extent I encompass both extremes in my own temperament. I lack patience and I want my working methods to be easy and efficient; but I'm also fastidious and contemplative and I like things to be right.

I did a parallel pair of exercises with shooting, too. But that's another "Friday."

Mike

Original contents copyright 2025 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:

Luke: "All of these processes apply to digital. I make a fairly quick pass through the latest dump from the camera, but I also periodically go through older photos and sets to see what I missed. I usually find a couple that make me think 'I can do better.' These, I spend some time with, and maybe try varying approaches."

Ira Sacher: "I was Arnold Newman's printer/assistant for several years. No test strips, etc. Arnold liked a full 14x17 print that we looked at wet and to which we made corrections. We moved slowly. He was a delight to print for, calm, meticulous...."

Terry Letton: "Apropos of absolutely nothing you’ve written of here but anyway. I took a roll of Kodak C-41 process black-and-white film to a local chain drugstore for processing, as I have a good scanner if there is something I actually want a good print of. The theory is that the volume guy should have the freshest chemistry. Well, I discovered the fly in the ointment. Reading the claim ticket, buried in the finest print (font borrowed from unsubscribe buttons), 'you will not get your actual negatives only a CD.' I’m actually hoping there is nothing any good on that roll."

Glenn Allenspach: "Mike, this post should be useful for anyone who prints, film or digital. In my own darkroom days, I worked like your fast and loose type, mostly because I hated pouring out the chemicals and pouring them back again. With my computer and printer, I feel much freer to run one or a few work prints and mull them over a while before getting into the weeds. It also saves me from wasting time on a weak image if I get tired of the work print, or opens one up that I didn’t feel too strongly about at first."

Mike Fewster: "An aside. From my cynical and age-influenced observation, I've also noted that the young film-camera crowd have their images scanned and then digitally post processed and digitally printed. Can anyone see any point in this? Further, in Japan I saw lots of youngies toting venerable film cameras but I saw few shots being taken with them. A fashion accessory or a film renaissance?

"I'm with Mike on the craftsmanship of the print. I can see a niche but significant future market foe analog images. Shot with film and darkroom printed. Such images will retain a craftsmanship provenance that distinguishes them from digital/manipulated/AI images. I can see, well, I hope I can see, a different market emerging for these images. In time, I think older analog printed images will have a higher value as well."

Mark B: "Hooray for Film Friday! I’m more in the slow methodical camp, though every once in a great while I make a particularly easy-to-print negative that needs only a test strip and a final print. Paying attention to making a good negative definitely pays off when I try to coax a print from that negative. I think Saint Ansel wrote something along those lines."

Steve Deutsche: "I find that these approaches apply to digital printing as well—even the 'watch the print for a month' technique."

David Brown: "I can certainly identify with this post. In the 1980s, I was employed by a security company managing their darkroom and hundreds of cameras in almost 100 locations. The cameras shot 100-foot rolls of 35mm film. Most of the work was 'test shots' made by me, and 'suspicion shots' taken by bank tellers and nervous jewelry salesmen. There was the occasional actual 'incident.' Processing tens of thousands of feet of film and making hundreds or thousands of prints, I became very efficient in the darkroom. The quick and dirty method. In my own work, I strove to be methodical and take as much time and material as needed when making prints.

"Somewhere over the years, the two merged. I work fast, but I make proof prints, test strips, evaluate changes, experiment, and often wait a bit before making a final print. In teaching, I tried to split the difference as well. Ironically, there was usually not enough time.

"Photography is not for the faint of wallet! Perhaps my being married to a painter helped me with this. I know the cost of canvas, paint, brushes, etc., and most photo materials pale in comparison."

When Good Things Happen

After my previous post, where I told the story about the guy who photographed bramble, Eric Lawton wrote:

I make photographs of bramble, just as you described. I’m not sure why I do. I guess I just like how they look. I usually find other people's pictures of bramble fascinating. I also like Jackson Pollock.

I have one photographer friend who was unaccountably drawn to the guy lines that anchor telephone poles, especially if they had that protective sheathing near the ground (called "safety covers"), and especially if that sheathing was a color or was striped or something. They showed up again and again in his work. Another is mysteriously magnetized toward the juncture between exterior walls and sidewalks, especially if there is a weed or two trying to grow there. Ctein photographs Christmas lights like he's making a catalog, which I personally never "got" (to me, the attraction of lights is that they're light-emitting lights). But I used to feel a near-compulsion to photograph waterfowl and also newfallen snow, almost as if those things were an assignment or an obligation.

I recall a book dealer friend who had a large photography book collection. I asked him what he collected, and he gave a detailed, erudite answer, with many facets, and then added, with a sideways bob of his head and a half-shrug, "...oh, and of course books about New York City." He said that last in a tone which implied that everyone loves books about New York City, and that this was natural, so of course he collects those, because who wouldn't? I have one picture of New York City that I like, but it's mainly a portrait of Gordon behind his camera. I've always liked country living, and have been happiest in those interludes when I got to live in rural areas.

Why are we drawn to certain things? It can be mysterious. A bit of a discussion about Lee Friedlander got kickstarted under the previous post as well. From what little I know, the way he works is that when he realizes he's repeating certain themes, he starts throwing related prints in a box. Then when he's got a lot of pictures in any given box, he edits them and makes a book. He's published more than fifty books, including a book about all his books. Evidently his house is stuffed to the rafters with remainders of all the books, and his son Eric was selling complete sets for a while. (If memory serves. And my memory is full of holes these days. So take this with a big lump of salt.) But it starts with the recognition that something tends to draw him in. So he has a book on American monuments, and one of self-portraits, and one of pictures that include TV screens, one about apples and olives, one of pictures taken from the car, one about chain link, one of nudes, and so on. His most recent one consists of six booklets, slipcased together, of pictures of six of his famous friends, whom he photographed repeatedly over the years. I mentioned John Szarkowski (one of the six friends, by the way) the other day, the Director of the Photography Department at the Museum of Modern Art for ~thirty years. Mr. Szarkowski was also a photographer, and used to begin his standard lecture about his work with a joke that "a ladder never hurts," after showing six or seven pictures that included ladders. He was acknowledging that he was drawn to ladders. He was known to like pictures of apples, too, because he was an orchardist.

Synchronized with the sun
I've only intermittently lived in more or less rural areas, but I've enjoyed the lifestyle each time I get to live that way for a while. One of the living situations I liked best in all my life was a week-long "Freshman Trip" at Dartmouth, when we hiked every day, cooked dinner on a campfire, and slept and rose with the sun. As long as I don't have to hunt or fish for the food, that's the life. One of the first things I realized about my own photographic aptitudes was that I don't do very well in cities. The Corcoran School of Art, my beloved alma mater, was in downtown Washington, D.C., which is not a very city-like city—there are lots of parks and public spaces and greenery—but I had trouble connecting to subject matter there. We were supposed to photograph regularly, and I feel like I walked all over D.C. but didn't get much in the way of pictures out of it. Whereas when my art school class would sometimes gather for a party at our classmate Sarah Huntington's farm way out in the Virginia countryside, all of a sudden I'd see pictures everywhere.

Life as a photographer is a long process of discovering what interests you, both in the photographs you like to look at as well as the photographs you like to take. Those two things eventually begin to influence each other, too—I'm convinced that in many cases people learn to like pictures like the pictures they themselves are able to take. It's a wonderful thing when a photographer with specific or idiosyncratic aptitudes locks in on the subject he or she is best suited to by temperament, interest, understanding, and sympathy. That's when the best things happen.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2025 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

John Custodio: "Re 'Why are we drawn to certain things? Lee Friedlander...the way he works is that when he realizes he's repeating certain themes, he starts throwing related prints in a box. Then when he's got a lot of pictures in any given box, he edits them and makes a book.' This is what Brooks Jensen of LensWork calls PBWA (photography by wandering around), which is basically going to various places and photographing whatever interests you without trying to fit the images into a preconceived concept or any kind of project. After a while, some of the images you’ve made may coalesce into a theme. I found that I was drawn to objects like monuments, statues, and other odd or interesting objects isolated in the wider landscape, and eventually made a book."

Mike replies: I like your book. I like the way you morph from one subject type to another again and again.

MikeR: "Of George Tice, he of Paterson, New Jersey fame, it was said that he never saw a water tower he didn't like."

Mike replies: George just died. I suppose I shall have to do what I am dreading and do a post of recent obituaries. It's too sad. People I idolized in my vanished youth are vanishing. The books, Paterson and Paterson II, two among many, are long out of print.

Yonatan Katznelson: "When I was younger, I liked taking pictures of pigeons. These days, I find ravens more captivating (but I still like pigeons)."

(Blog Note)

"Film Friday" will have to occur on Saturday again. Management apologizes for the delay!

—Management

The Artist's Statement (Bones Part III)

One more post about this (to those of you waiting for me to move on*). I confess it's probably more useful for younger, newer photographers...who aren't reading this. But oh well.

The A.S. and the wall placard
I said the other day that "an idea is any intellectual notion that facilitates and motivates working," and Gary Nylander very sensibly brought up the topic of the artist's statement. I'll abbreviate it "AS" for this post, although that's not a standard abbreviation, so don't use it in the outside world and expect it to be understood. To the AS I would conjoin the "wall placard," those often exquisite orchids of text that are put on cards and sprinkled amongst the pictures at an exhibition. The AS is more closely related to the wall placard than it is to a working-process idea.

I take a somewhat jaundiced view of artist's statements, that woeful sub-category of compulsive literature cheerfully lampooned by the phenomenon of the "artspeak generator" and IAD, international artist dialect, but I love wall placards, usually the responsibility of the curator of the show you're looking at. Szarkowski used to write some of the wall placards for MoMA shows, can you imagine? That's a bit like Édouard Manet drawing New Yorker cartoons. I wonder if those were properly cherished and preserved. (Why do we still not have a collected writings of John Szarkowski? That's a scandal.) Many times, the wall placards are plucked from the exhibition catalog, and are preserved in that manner. Wall placards give added information about the work, from a more objective and more professional perspective, and their presence ranges from neutral to positive, in my opinion, as a component of museum shows; they never detract, as you can ignore them if you wish. Most museumgoers ignore them, I feel like. But my heart sinks a little if I look around a gallery room and see no wall placards. (Some of which are painted right on the wall itself. How do they do that?)

So, are the working idea and the artist's statement the same thing? No. The AS is usually a back-formation, created to justify the work after the work exists. They're meant to imply that the work is deeper than it looks and also that the work lives up to the artist's intent. They also are probably meant to signal [verb] that, if the viewer might not like the work, then the viewer might not understand the work.

My signal [adjective, meaning "striking in extent, seriousness, or importance"] example came from a group show I saw many years ago. One participant had photographed...bramble. Tangled branches of bushes with no foliage. The tangled, twisted, interlaced stems filled the frame and showed no surrounding context. Some from a little closer up, some from farther away, some in hard sunlight, some in soft overcast; and so forth. So they're just pictures of bushes. It wasn't enough of an idea for one picture, much less twenty-two or whatever. But the fellow had constructed the most elaborate and convincing apologia for what he had contrived to do that I couldn't help but admire the chutzpah. It was so clever, so compelling, so convincing, so insistent, that it made me see the bramble photos in a more sympathetic light...for a while. Then I went back to the more clearheaded reaction that the fellow had had no clue what to make pictures of.

Which gets us back to the idea of the idea. (Sorry. I've known that was coming.) An idea is any intellectual notion that facilitates and motivates working, but here's the thing about the idea as the framework, the "bones," of a project, theme or mission: the quality (subtlety, erudition, nicety) of the idea often doesn't have a direct correspondence to how well it will work. A dumb idea can lead to great pictures and ongoing growth, and brilliant-sounding ideas can lead to dull pictures or dead ends. Many times over the years I've questioned photographers about what they were up to, and often they give simple, unsatisfactory answers. One's crest falls. Ideas are not always good. Or smart, articulate, or well-conceived. Academic people have the most trouble with this, because they're trained to work with ideas and they're well aware of the beauty ideas can have; and they're afraid of stupid ideas—having long since learned the trick, crucial in academia, of not looking stupid. They will often construct beautiful, intricate, dazzling ideas...and then, from it, create bad, weak work that trails along behind like an unwilling child.

Because here's the thing: you can't evaluate a working idea for art by the usual standards. An idea is good if it facilitates and motivates working, so that's how you have to evaluate it. I mentioned William Wegman the other day. What was his idea? Presumably it was something like, "I'm going to make a portrait of my Weimaraner dog." On its face, that sounds like the dumbest damned idea for a photographic project anyone's ever heard. But it has literally inspired a lifetime of work, and that work has earned acclaim, renown, remuneration, and Guggenheim Fellowships. He's been endlessly creative in thinking up new ways to make pictures with the dogs in them. It was therefore not a dumb idea. It was a fantastic idea. It hasn't even been copied: Weimaraners belong to Wegman. It has proven infinitely flexible, consistently enabling, and unaccountably rich. But will "I got bored and started taking pictures of my Weimaraner with a hat or a tie on" do, at all, as an AS? Of course not. For that we need something a good deal more highflown.

August Sander, Pastry Chef (l.), Bricklayer (r.)

Or take August Sander. His idea was to make an extended typology of the German people during the interwar period, the period of the German Republic—as if people were defined by their work and "types" gravitated to specific work. According to a page at Tate Modern, "He believed that, through photography, he could reveal the characteristic traits of people. He used these images to tell each person's story; their profession, politics, social situation and background." Again, kind of a blunt, even misguided idea. Photographs do not actually tell all those things. But it launched him into working at portraiture, to looking for his "types" and examples of his categories, and set him to roving far outside his normal circles for subjects; with the result that he created one of the great bodies of work in the history of photography. Although the bricklayer might have been interchanged with the pastry chef and none would have been the wiser**.

'Caught my eye'
One final example: I've observed that a lot of part-time digital photography enthusiasts don't want an idea, because they think it will hamper their freedom and constrain their activities. They want to haphazardly grab any "photo opportunity" that happens to pass their way. Which, if that's what you want to do, that's fine with me; you own your own photography. But it's pareidolia one day, a sunset the next, an architectural detail here, a bride in the park there. (Not to forget the quintessential: flowers and cats.) And they'll say something like, "I just take the camera when I go for a walk and photograph anything that catches my eye." That seems like a dreadfully weak-dishwater idea for working, a framework for little more than desultory camera-pointing. (I confess to never having liked the phrase "caught my eye.") But then, consider Henry Wessel—wasn't his whole life's work really just "what I saw on my walk"? He worked incredibly hard at it: putting high mileage on the ol' shoe-leather, photographing persistently, editing thoroughly and all the way to the conclusion of the finished fine-art print and book after book. And, sure enough: "The world is filled with incredible things," Wessel said. "So I’m happy to just let my eye be caught by something. If something catches my eye that’s enough reason to take the picture." He said that. (Of course it was further honed.)

tl;dr: evaluate your own working idea not by its beauty or how profound it sounds but by how well it works for you. A good idea enables and inspires. It has flexibility and adaptability. And consistency; it keeps on working. It lasts through time and keeps you motivated to pursue it further. It promotes creativity rather than stifling it. It gives your photographing direction and a framework (its "bones" as I started out calling it), a purpose, and richness.

What, me worry?
Yeah, I know, we all think we can photograph anything. August Sander's work included landscape, architecture, and nature. But it might as well not have. As a quick litmus test, I'd say you probably don't have a working idea yet until you recognize pictures you might take but that don't fit. A list of "I do this too" categories. To do something in addition to the main stream of your work, you need your work to have a main stream.

And don't worry about the AS. That can be constructed after the fact. If it's ever needed at all—being honest, the world seldom cares. How many photographers are shown in museums? 0.01%? As many as that? The working idea doesn't have to justify or explain you. It can be deep and/or smart, why not, but it doesn't have to be. It just has to rev your engine and get the camera in your hand, and result in the kind of picture that hits the spot for you. And do it again tomorrow. And the next day. Those who find an idea that becomes a style that becomes a signature that becomes a lifetime's work are the lucky lotto winners.

As before, these thoughts are not prescriptive, merely a quick attempt*** to be descriptive. If they lead to any thoughts that help you, then good; if they don't, don't worry about it. I'm just frinkin'.

Oh, and I actually have one more thing to say about bones. I'll try to intersperse something else in between, in the meantime, in case you are bored.

Mike

*I sometimes have a hard time getting off a topic, and I know it. I get enthusiastic. I want to take a deeper dive.

**I had the idea of taking Sander's idea and turning it on its head. Ed Meese, one of Ronald Reagan's top advisors, once came to the Corcoran School to "volunteer," because his wife was on the Board. They set him to work painting a wall. I thought of taking a picture meaning to title it "House Painter" in a Sanderesque typology of Washingtonians, but the Secret Service wouldn't let me get near him.

***This essay: begun at 9:15 a.m., finished at 11:35 a.m. How good could it be?

"Bones" Part I and Part II

Original contents copyright 2025 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:

Not THAT Ross Cameron: "Thanks for this Mike. That’s what I was getting at with my Q in my Bones Part II comment. Ideas can also be poorly conceived and well executed, and vice versa. OK, so it’s not just me that finds AS and placards sometimes a dense babble. I appreciate I’m not in the art scene, and so might not understand where the concepts and language have been and are going. Your story of the bramble photos reminds me of going to see the Sydney Biennale several years ago. Someone had taken a few black-and-white photos of a large area of grass, either early a.m. or late p.m. There were some mounds, which stood out via their shadows. But there was nothing of interest to catch the eye in these photos—no composition. The placards indicated that an infamous building / institution used to stand on the site. Translation—all idea and no execution. And probably the initial germination of an idea—may not have been well thought through."

Mike replies: One of my critical principles, not very popular or respectable in my lifetime generally, is that a photograph should be good to look at.

In some way. Whatever else it is or does.

To me, one of the glaring weaknesses of some of the work given attention in museums I've seen (not that I see all that much of it), as you point out, is that it's all idea—and the ideas sometimes aren't even good ones. For instance, I saw a show in Chicago of "pictures" that were putatively of the night sky, each one titled with the coordinates of the sky where the camera was supposedly pointed. The "pictures" were all rectangles of pure black. That struck me as wrongheaded in several ways—for one, you get the joke right away, and seeing multiple examples of it across a whole exhibit didn't amplify or clarify anything; next, it deprives a real photographer of attention from the institution (in diets this is called displacement—one of the reasons for eating lots of non-starchy plants is that they displace less healthy foods in the diet); and it's not accurate, because there is often lots to see in a night sky. I'm sure real astrophotographers would have been greatly surprised to learn that there is nothing to see in the night sky but unrelieved, featureless blackness.

Look at Dave Lumb's Blurb book linked below—that's a modest idea, but it works, in my opinion, at the length of the book he's made, and I've never seen it before. It's a better idea in my opinion than those rectangles of black.

Dave_lumb: "As a UK Fine Art graduate in 1982 I didn't have to write an artist statement. They were never mentioned. So when did they become 'A Thing'? Meanwhile: 'I just take the camera when I go for a walk and photograph anything that catches my eye.' Sometimes that works for me. Something caught my eye and when I saw another example it became an idea."

Mike replies: We haven't talked yet about how we get ideas.

MikeR: "I needed an AS recently in order to submit work to a state sponsored art exhibition. Cripes! Most such statements make me want to puke. But, forced into it, I crafted something that didn't offend me with flowery language, but more or less retrospectively 'explained' how I go about things. My wife, then my daughter, edited and made suggestions. I let ChatGPT have a go at it. The result was partly barfable, but brought in some good points, so I incorporated those, reworked the thing again, and again passed it to wife and daughter for further scrutiny.

"I learned something about what I actually do from this exercise, so it wasn't totally pointless. I've taken to crafting my own wall placards, a 5x6" thing affixed to the rear of the framed work, that borrows a bit from the IPTC standard, with 'Caption' and 'Description' blocks, the latter containing technical details about the piece. Finally, at 83, I feel focused and organized about my photography. Most of it still sucks, but there ya go."

Nick Cutler: "Ideas have you. Long ago, a colleague I very much respected said 'You don't have ideas, ideas have you.' And once an idea has got you it's impossible to ignore; you have to run with it wherever it goes...."

James Meeks: "In museums where I’ve worked, we usually call the wall placards 'didactic panels,' sometimes 'text panels,' meaning they are informative panels, placards, labels, etc. Other institutions may call them something else.

"As for the text painted right on the wall, nowadays it’s typically vinyl cut on a plotter and applied by staff. I did do some by screen print but that was a disaster. There are other methods I’ve heard of or seen but have not tried. The pieces of paper by a work are merely referred to as labels and come in all sorts of forms. Some are short and sweet while others can be fairly long and are typically written by the curator. When you put the works in a gallery, we say we’re doing an install, and when it comes down it’s a de-install. Not a real word except in the museum field as far as I know."

James Bullard: "I hate writing artist statements. They are only done when exhibitors demand them; to me, they are meaningless. The last one I 'wrote' was done using AI. It didn't read much differently than the pap I would have written myself but it caused me much less anguish to produce."

SteveW: "Re 'Caught my Eye': Thank you for this. This is how I am with a camera anymore, and why I switched to using my iPhone as my primary camera. It's always with me, easy and quick to use, and I'm capturing images that I would have had a difficult time capturing with my 'real camera.' It's been liberating and fun. The iPhone images are well into the 'good enough' zone for me. I suppose my genre of work would be snapshots. It's weird, but if I go out with my real camera (Fuji X-T5) it's harder for me to find shots than simply carrying my iPhone (15 Pro Max) and letting the shots find me. I'm not saying I'm capturing anything tremendous, or building any kind of body of work, but it's more fun for me this way. The Happy Snapper."

Dave Millier: "The Royal Photographic Society have the concept of the 'Statement of Intent' in their distinctions programmes:

A Statement of Intent that defines the purpose of the work, identifying its aims and objectives. A cohesive body of work that depicts and communicates the aims and objectives set out in the Statement of Intent. A body of work that communicates an individual's vision and understanding.

"For their ARPS and FRPS distinctions, a candidate submits a portfolio of images along with the SOI. The SOI is used by the assessors to help them judge the portfolio. I think it is useful for the photographer, too, as it focuses their attention on exactly what they are trying to achieve and portray and helps in the decision-making about what images to include and what to leave out. For me, thinking about the RPS approach has led me to shift gears away from shooting individual images that I later attempt to group into genres, to thinking with a project/portfolio mindset right from the start. The SOI is essential to that shift."

Jim Simmons: "Lee Friedlander liked that one of his friends said Lee wouldn't know an idea if it bit him on the ass. He claimed to have no 'ideas' that he worked from, not even any interests. But after years of photos piling up that had commonalities, the photos revealed to him what he'd been interested in. He, like Wessel, just went out into the world and took the photos that presented themselves to them. Of course, they had the talent to see them."

Mike replies: I think Lee is being disingenuous about that. (Which is his right.) He's got his own way of working, but the titles of many of his books describe ideas. And the ideas are easy to see in the work.

Jim Simmons replies: "I don't know, Mike, I'm inclined to accept Mr. Friedlander's statement at face value. A day before your post, I was rereading an interview with Lee by John Paul Caponigro in a 2002 issue of Camera Arts magazine. He was a little testy/evasive with some of Caponigro's questions, but he especially refused to be pinned down on working from ideas. I quote: 'Anything that looks like an idea is probably just something that has accumulated, like dust. It looks like I have ideas because I do books that are all on the same subject. That is just because the pictures have piled up on that subject. Finally I realize that I am really interested in it. The pictures make me realize that I am interested in something.' He continues, 'I hardly ever think about doing work. I think about going somewhere that might interest me.'

"I am currently in the process of creating a monograph of my 1970s black-and-white work, and I'm trying to apply Friedlander's concept of looking at the photos to discover what my ideas actually were, because aside from a few documentary projects, my work tends to be, like Friedlander's and Wessel's, visuals I stumbled across while living my life with a camera slung over my shoulder. The photos are more a framed arrangement of 2D and 3D shapes reflecting light in interesting ways than they are photographs of the actual objects within the frame. I'm only realizing this in retrospect."

Tom Burke: "I've seen some of Sander's images before, and liked them. Like you, I'm not sure his AS stands up. Looking at those two images today, however, what struck me was how both men were being injured by their occupation. The bricklayer is compressing his spine with the repeated weight of those platforms of bricks, and sooner or later his back wouldn't have been able to take the load anymore. As for the pastry chef, I can't help but wonder how long it was before he had his heart attack.... Time and knowledge helps us to see things in a different light."

The What ('Bones' Part II)

Old print in a box

Photography is unique among the arts and crafts in that it can't (or mostly doesn't) come from nowhere. There had to be what you might call a "what"—the pretext, the thing the camera was pointed at when the picture was taken. That was the case with photography, defined as any method of dumbly capturing the image cast by a lens. The situation changes with digital imaging, which is ten times or a hundred times more easily and undetectably altered, and now by synthographs, made by "AI," in which a photographical-style illustrative image with no pretext in the real world is generated by a computer. Digital imaging is a different thing than photography, although the two have been willfully jammed up together into one thing ("digital photography," which always struck me as an oxymoron, or at least an oxymoron waiting to happen) because of the fact that it is possible to not alter and manipulate a digital image beyond simple correction, thus making it into a photograph (even though the viewer cannot be reasonably certain it is). But synthography is a different thing altogether, and belongs to a completely different class of imagemaking altogether. It is as unlike photography as linocuts or stone lithography. But put all that aside and pretend that we are talking about an art/craft that involved making pictures by pointing a lens and recording its image—the sort of thing that required a "what."

For the creator, the photographer, the classic big question then was, what is the what?

Pants legs
In photography school I got interested in the question "how many possible photographs are there?", and, as an experiment (ever the empiricist), I shut myself up in the lowest, half-underground level of my mother's townhouse on O Street in Georgetown one dull Sunday afternoon—Mom was away—and resolved to shoot as many pictures as I could find. The entire house was only 11 feet wide, but deep, and five stories high. The lower level consisted of a small dining room with a fireplace and a round table on a pedestal, a tiny kitchen that mother claimed she could cook in without ever moving her feet, which was only a slight exaggeration—it had a fold-down table that blocked the entryway when it was up, such that when she had something going on on that table she had to get down on all fours and crawl under it to get in and out of the kitchen—and of course the descending end of the staircase, under which was a powder room, which is what Mom called a half-bath. French doors opened onto the stone patio and the walled-in garden, but I set the condition that I had to shoot inside. I was armed for the experiment with two six-packs of beer; my robust Gitzo tripod, which I quickly became too lazy to deploy; the small television which was located on that level of her house; of course my camera, a Contax 139Q; and a 100-foot "bulk roll" of Kodak Plus-X that I had just rolled into reusable cassettes using a Watson bulk loader. So I had something like 21 rolls of 35-exposure film—I used 35, not 36, because that way they all fit in a 7-row x 5-frame PrintFile sheet, which in turn all fit on an 8x10 proof sheet. Enough film for 735 shots. For you film-virgin digital shooters out there, that was considered a lot. I had the cost of each shot tracked out to the very farthing, although it's been so long I don't recall what it was: the cost of the film, per frame, the developing chemicals, pro-rated (I developed my film myself, of course), the PrintFile sheet that held the negatives and the sheet of 8x10 paper for the contacts each divided by 35. The per-shot total wasn't much, but it seemed like it was, because I didn't work a job at the time—I was in art school for a living.

Anyway, I took every picture I could think of, and then many more. I wish I could remember how many rolls of film I used up; it wasn't all of them, and, simultaneously, it was way too many. I took pictures of the fringe of the rug, everything on the mantel, every object in the kitchen. I disallowed the television screen, because it imported "pictures" that were not native to that floor of the house. I took self portraits, pictures of cracks in the plaster, ten pictures of a doorknob, etc. I actually got into it for a few hours. The interest faded as subjects became steadily harder to come by. I was down there for more than six hours, and quit due to drunkenness.

I learned the obvious lesson, which is that the number of possible pictures even in the smallest space is infinity. I admit I thought contemptuous thoughts when, later, I read about the artist Robert Rauschenberg's discovery of photography, about which he said something like, "I wanted to photograph everything!" Every square inch of the world. Good luck*. 

Rather remarkably, I ended up getting something out of it, though. I edited all those pictures down, made prints of six of the pictures, and got a critique out of it. It wasn't poorly received, either, by the teachers or the class. They weren't bad, but only one was what I'd call "good," a picture of two silver candlesticks with overlapping shadows from several different lights. One was a picture of the ornate Kleenex-box cover on the back of the toilet (above), another was a picture of my corduroy-clad pants legs looking down at the base of the table, with almost nothing in focus. That one was probably taken when there were only a few beers left.

Here's the point
Anyway, to come down to it: for a photographer, an idea is any intellectual notion that facilitates and motivates working. What else could possibly have set me to taking endless numbers of pictures in a place with no pictures—what else, other than an idea? The idea can last six hours, like my little one just described, or it can last a lifetime, like William Wegman's idea, which I would argue is equally small, though obviously much more flexible and enabling. It can be purely visual, it can be technical, it can be subject-oriented, it can be illustrative of some concept, it can be documentary, it can be some notion of a methodology, it can be the pursuit of a feeling or some kind of stance—I could think of ten more things to say, but that would imply I had made an exhaustive list, whereas that can't be true—the number of possible ideas is as actually large as the number of possible pictures in the lowest floor of my mother's townhouse. It's what enables you. Whatever gets you past not-doing and into doing. Whatever you can think up that answers the question what is the what going to be. A good idea sets you free.

Mike

*By the way, did you know that photography was Rauschenberg's first interest, and he was torn between becoming a photographer or an artist? He ended up being both, in a way, because he used photographs so persistently in his work. David White, co-editor of the posthumous book Robert Rauschenberg: Photographs: 1949–1962 and Rauschenberg's curator from 1980 until he died in 2008, said, "it is surprising how little attention Rauschenberg’s photographs have gotten, considering it was his primary interest."

(Bones Part I)

Original contents copyright 2025 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:

Stan B.: "You could probably drop off John Gossage anywhere on god's green earth and he could make interesting, memorable photos of the most banal and mundane. That's not to say I'm gobsmacked by all of his images, it's just that I can't believe how many featuring the most everyday, overlooked objects, tableaus, or scenarios actually succeed in grabbing my attention and holding it—making me linger, question, marvel...see! Scenes I would have blissfully ignored in real life, walking right on through complaining all the while, 'Sh*t, there ain't a g-d thing to photograph around here!'"

Mike replies: Here's my portrait of John, inside an art installation on the roof of Dia Chelsea in Manhattan. I haven't been in touch with him in years unfortunately. The tones don't look great—I didn't want to take the print out of the book it's in.

Scott Abbey: "Re: digital photography, which always struck me as an oxymoron': If one would accept that photography is always grounded on a physical subject that exists in the real world, then I would argue that there is usefulness in appending a modifier such as the process used to the noun photography, as in wet plate photography, dry plate photography, film photography, and (yes) digital photograph . I might also talk about still life photography or wildlife photography. They are all just helpful qualifiers to further describe the photography you are doing. And all of these are distinct from digital art forms that don’t start with a real-world subject."

Nick Cutler: "What is 'The What'? I have a picture of a British policeman in full uniform, standing in a river, water up to his knees, holding a large fish. The picture could have been created by an ai image generator. The picture could have been created by hiring an actor, hiring a police uniform, borrowing a large fish, travelling to a location.... Both approaches create an artificial scene that is not a picture of a real 'what.' Neither would be 'true.'

"The 'What' and reality. Some friends of ours used to live in a slightly crumbling but lovely old house in a small English midlands town. For some incomprehensible reason they allowed a glossy magazine, Country Homes or some such, to visit and create a set of photographs of the interior. The published article had almost zero resemblance to the house: everything had been re-arranged, flower vases added, rugs draped, camera carefully positioned and pictures edited to avoid any semblance of any space that a family actually lived in. The magazine's advertising sales team needed to make everything resemble the aspirational interiors in the ads selling furniture and high class paintwork."

Music Notes: Stan Getz Needs a Heart (Open Mike)

["Open Mike" is the often off-topic, anything-goes Editorial page of TOP, in which we sometimes touch upon classic art. It appears on Sundays, usually. Sometimes. Every now and then. It aspires to appear on Sundays, let's just say.]

I wanted to alert any jazz fans out there (hi, Steve R. and you 28 other people!) to my latest find—a record by Stan Getz (tenor sax) and Bob Brookmeyer (valve trombone) on Verve entitled simply "Recorded Fall 1961."

First of all, compare the sound quality from two different sources. Here's "Minuet Circa '61" from an uploader called 60otaku4, with sound quality that's vivid and upfront; the whole album is available in gentler, smoother, more distant sound quality from Jazz Everyday! [sic]—here's "Minuet Circa '61" from that source. Very different experiences, no? Yet both are okay in their own way. I prefer the former.

(Portrait of Stan Getz by PoPsie Randolph
[I can't show it here])

Stan Getz was a prolific cool jazz saxophone soloist in the West Coast style, initially known for playing bebop, but he later became a central figure in the jazz / bossa nova craze. Brazilian bossa nova, an offshoot of samba, was only briefly popular in the U.S. (the Beatles were a-comin'), but intensely so while it lasted. You've heard him on the famous "Girl from Ipanema," and the album Getz/Gilberto is one of the all-time evergreen bestsellers in jazz, up there with Time Out and Saxophone Colossus.

He was similar in a way to Charlie Parker, Art Pepper, or Benny Goodman—facile, perfect and effortless in their musicianship, but men who had rather sketchy reputations as people. Getz lived a chaotic, destructive life, leaving ruined families and broken relationships in his wake. He can't have been easy on his children. At one point his second wife, Monica Silfverskiöld, while separated from Stan, was taking care of her children with Getz and his children by his first wife. It was Monica who suggested the collaboration with João Gilberto and Antônio Carlos ("Tom") Jobim. Reportedly Getz was reluctant at first because he had heard that the Brazilian artists had a reputation for being difficult. To which Monica replied, "Well, don't you have a reputation for being difficult?" Getz was a drug addict pretty much his whole life, and never escaped it, even after he started attending AA in '83. He held up a drugstore in Seattle once to get narcotics! Getz inspired one of the most wonderful little paragraphs of any jazz bio on Wikipedia—in its entirety, it reads:

Zoot Sims, who had known Getz since their time with [big band leader Woody] Herman, once described him as 'a nice bunch of guys,' an allusion to his unpredictable personality. Bob Brookmeyer, another performing colleague, responded to speculation Getz had a heart operation with the rhetorical question 'Did they put one in?'

I recalled that from years ago when I re-read it yesterday and it made me laugh again.

If you like or are fascinated by "The Girl from Ipanema," by the way, you owe it to yourself to at least sample Adam Neely's explanation of why it's so weird*. Adam Neely makes me feel like I understand things I definitely don't understand.

As a coda, here's Stan Getz doing a pop turn with Huey Lewis and the News on a minor hit from 1988, "Small World." Three-quarters of the way through the soft-rock tune, up steps 60+-year-old Getz, incongruously inserting a limpid, vaguely truculent cool jazz solo. It reminds me of a line from a Nate Bargatze joke: "You having fun? Because I'd like to put a stop to that." One of the very few times I've ever experienced Stan not quite coming up to his customary very high standard. Lewis is obviously delighted to have him there, however. (He did seem to like horns, as I recall.)

Anyway, give "Recorded Fall 1961" a try if you're partial to classic jazz. Ira Gitler gave it five stars (their max) in Downbeat, writing, "Getz and Brookmeyer are mature players, and everything they do on this record is in perfect balance...the most important factor in the success of this set is the ease with which these men communicate their thoughts and feelings to the audience. It seems to flow out and by the same token, right in," and here's the blip from The Penguin Guide to Jazz Recordings:

Four stars is Penguin's maximum, and they're stingy with it. I didn't even mention that Roy Haynes is the drummer. I've found him a reliable indicator of quality jazz, whether he's the leader or a sideman. Roy passed just last November at the age of 99. I once actually wrote Roy a fan letter, a thing I've almost never done my whole life long.

That was my Saturday morning yesterday.

I love art.

Mike

*Speaking of weird, after Friday's post I had to re-watch David Lean's 1946 version of Great Expectations for the first time since high school. That is just one of the weirdest, most bizarre stories I know—it's as strange as a Wes Anderson movie. It's a purely symbolic movie somehow, like some awkward half-formed myth, but it resists any kind of sense at every turn. No naturalism to it at all. The villain gets run over by a paddle steamer, the deus ex machina Magwitch dies on cue, boy gets girl in the end apparently forgetting that all her life she's literally been trained to be cold and heartless. The whole everlovin' shebang is such a melodrama that it's a parody of melodrama. I would love to hear a psychoanalytical interpretation of the sequence of events and the motivations of the characters.

I used to rather strenuously hate it—the book, the movie, even the Classics Illustrated comic book of it that I read as a boy. Now I simply wish I'd just never been exposed to it. That infernal plot, arising from some swampy place in Dickens' perfervid mind, half ruined fiction for me, by making it seem too obviously like implausible preposterous stuff people just made up. With the notable exception of A Christmas Carol, it soured me on Dickens, too. The plot of GE, which he no doubt made up as he went along (the novel was originally published in installments) ended up a coiled and tangled thing, like a big wad of fishing line. The moment in the movie that made me want to spit-take is when Miss Havisham—Miss Havisham!—says, "What have I done?" What, that's the moment Dickens picks for her to get a little flash of self-awareness?!? In the life she's been living all those years? With the wedding cake and the wedding gown and the fake cobwebs and the thirst for revenge and the vitamin D deficiency?

Maybe Dickens was following some social programmatic intent: the wealth of young snobs coming from the labor of the rough and persecuted, yet secretly devoted, working class, and the aristocratic rich (Miss Havisham) living useless neurotic lives shut away from the sun? I don't know. I certainly don't know why they made prep school students in my day read that ill-begotten lump—it's as strange as forcing Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter on a bunch of high school virgins of both sexes. (We had to read that also, as sophomores.)

/rant. Sorry; I get going sometimes. But hey, do other photography websites give you capsule reviews of Dickens novels in a footnote? They do not.  :-)

Original contents copyright 2025 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:

Terry Letton: "Now you’ve done it, you made me think I’ve missed something. Off to Barnes and Nobel to see if they have a copy of Great Expectations!"

Mike replies: If you think you must! They will have more than one edition. I will take a stab in the dark and guess you will find five different editions at a B&N, and if you look around you might find their own edition in a soft leather-like binding looking very ersatz-posh. It will probably be on a table with more like it. I would however recommend the Folio Society edition, from the UK; it has a nice brown leather spine (if memory serves), and all the original illustrations by Marcus Stone, and a slipcase. You can find one on eBay or AbeBooks.

Peter Wright: "As is not infrequently the case, you have managed to hit on more than one of my non-photographic interests in a single post. I quite like Stan Getz, although he's not one of my major jazz favourites (that would include Dave Brubeck, and Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, and many others before Getz), and I can probably go the rest of my life without hearing 'Girl from Ipanema' ever again.

"When I was in high school, I read (I think) everything by Dickens, simply because I liked his writing so much. Loved him! A Tale of Two Cities, A Christmas Carol, Dombey and Son, Nicholas Nickleby, The Old Curiosity Shop, and more! All classics! The only one where he is clearly writing for installments, and it does get tiring, is Pickwick Papers—a sort of 19th century soap, so I don't recommend that, but all the rest? Dive right in! Including Great Expectations!"

Bryan Geyer: "Perhaps it's of no matter, but do be aware that the formerly independent bookseller AbeBooks is now (since 2008) wholly owned by Amazon. And congratulations on remembering anything from Great Expectations! I recall reading it as a teenager, along with the Bronte sisters' books, but it was C. S. Forester's series on Captain Horatio Hornblower that provided more lasting impact."

Mike replies: True dat, but AbeBooks (ABE originally meant Advanced Book Exchange) is still where most independent used and antiquarian booksellers ply their wares online.

And man, I loved those Hornblower books too! I read the whole series probably three times over by the time I was fifteen. I'm not sure I've ever found any reading that's more gripping or satisfying. But do you have to be a young boy to feel that way? I suspect maybe so....

Steve Rosenblum: "Thanks for the tip, Mike! I've been looking for new jazz (new to me that is) to listen to lately so this is racked up for a listen tomorrow. Also, sadly, Huey Lewis has lost most of his hearing due to Merniere's Disease so he no longer performs. When they were at their peak, Huey Lewis and the News were fabulous to hear live."

Tex Andrews: "What a wonderful column! So, last things first, I love Lean's Great Expectations. He's an underrated director in my opinion. That film is visually stunning and creepy in so many ways.

"On Stan Getz: the Getz/Gilberto album is a must-have for any jazz head. Bossa Nova was so huge in the early '60s, it's hard for me to believe how it's fallen so far off most folks' radar. Getz played at my college (tiny place). I had suggested to the guy who ran the spring concert program that we get out of our rut and get some jazz. For some dang reason he picked Getz. They played in the basketball gym, first mistake. His female pianist insisted they move our one grand piano from the theater to the gym—what a prima donna. Then Getz...was drunk. Basically I agree with Peter Wright above on where I'd put Getz. Important, to be sure. I heard a radio interview with Larry Coryell in the late '70s—also drunk."

robert e: "This post itself read like a nice bit of jazz, footnote and all. Thanks for that, and for all the recommendations! For what it's worth, 'Minuet' on Spotify is more like 600taku4's post, which is good, because I feel like I'm missing things when I listen to the other YouTube post. This recording wasn't on my radar at all, so I appreciate the note. Two other jazz classics you mentioned were old favorites, but weren't in my Spotify library, because I really don't have one place that reflects all the music I own, or all the music I like, or all the music I want, or the music I'm intrigued by, etc., and sometimes that seems like a real problem. What do people do these days to keep track of their music across multiple media?"

Mike replies: Beats me. Mine's all over the place. It's very unsatisfactory.

Bones

"Alas, poor Yorick!" Engraving from a painting by Horace Fisher.

I'm big on "bones."

• Our bodies need bones; skeletons are the framework that hold all our other bits up and together and in their proper places. Our skeletons survive us, too—mainly to scare us on Halloween, or to remind Hamlet of mortality.
• Old houses can be said to have "good bones"—stout, sound framing that can be used again. I live in a house that was built in 1888, but the flesh and guts—the arteries (plumbing), nerves (electrical), fat (insulation), skin (cladding or siding), and eyes (windows)—were mostly replaced in the 2010s.
• A screenplay is the bones of a movie. All the people who make movies are wonderful at their work, performing an infinite number of jobs in symphonic coordination to realize a creative vision, but, no matter how well all that is done, without a good solid script it all falls apart. I like to call beautifully made movies with defective screenplays "jellyfish"—bad bones; weak story. No matter how well realized—acted, directed, set to music—a movie that's a jellyfish can never be anything but a jellyfish.

Somebody here confessed the other day to loving YouTube. It's a new medium—very vigorous, much maligned. The bones of a short-form video—the idea or concept—is not so easy to come up with; already we see rote formulae, and every conceivable form of mistake and error. My favorite is when AI is choosing random illustrations for voiceover and hopefully chooses a generic photograph, but it's of the wrong person, place, or thing. I watched a video about Brian Gottfried the other day—an old-tyme tennis player—and some of the photos were of Vitas Gerulaitis, another tennis star of the same era who superficially resembled Gottfried. Still a few "flaws in the ointment."

I like an old-fashioned and somewhat unpedigreed word for idea generation—ideaphoria. "Ideaphoria is the ability to quickly generate ideas, or to have a creative imagination. It can be measured using a test that assesses the speed and volume of ideas, but not their quality." David Foster Wallace and Robin Williams both had very high ideaphoria.

Pip and...Pip, from David Lean's Great Expectations, 1946

Media are all different and require different ideas
In all new media, it takes some time for people to understand which kinds of ideas work and which fall flat. For example, do you remember in the early days of movies when movies would be adapted from novels, and the novel tracked a character at different ages? Jane Eyre and Great Expectations both track their main characters in childhood and then on into adulthood. In written novels, this works fine—Willa Cather's My Ántonia tracks Jim and Ántonia from childhood to death, for instance—Ántonia dances for just a short interlude in the quick of youth. In movies, though, it's clunky, this scheme. You can't use the same actor for both (there's one early film version of Jane Eyre in which Jane the child and Jane the adult seem to have completely different personalities, mannerisms, and affect; it's hard to imagine how the one became the other), and the audience has to be clued into the fact that, oh yeah, this is supposed to be the same person, only later. That awkward break used to be familiar to moviegoing audiences, who were supposed to have learned to "suspend disbelief" about it, but, soon enough, screenwriters realized it just doesn't work all that well in movies, and they stopped doing it. (Richard Linklater eventually solved the problem in Boyhood [2014], a movie shot over a period of 11 years as the child actors actually grew up! The problem there was that the whole movie couldn't be scripted in advance—the director had to let it evolve as the actors grew into being themselves. Worth seeing, if you haven't.)

But I digress. Anyway, short-form informational videos being a newly dominant media, we're in the period where creators are learning how to generate good ideas, learning what works and what doesn't. Here's a stellar positive example, from a channel called Doctor Mike. The idea is simple, original (at least, I've never seen it before), instantly gettable, yet quite brilliant. He states it in words right from the very outset: "I asked a bunch of different medical specialists, what's the one thing that they would never do given the things that they've seen in their specialty?"

Brilliant idea: succinct, creative, and more or less infinitely flexible. The rest of the video is various specialists naming those things. An orthopedic surgeon, for instance (since we were talking about bones! You see what I did there), says he would never a.) ride a motorcycle or b.) play with fireworks. "My hands," he says, "They're critical. They're precious, I need them, and I don't want to blow 'em up."

The point is that every creative effort in every artistic medium needs bones: a structure to guide the work and give it a framework. A concept. Some kind of guiding set of aims, principles, or ways of proceeding. Even the absence of a framework is a framework! Stream of consciousness* writing, for example, that abnegation of structure, is itself a structure, isn't it? Isn't The Americans in effect stream-of-consciousness photography?

This is the topic I was struggling with two days ago and couldn't organize. I wanted to talk about how we get ideas for still photography and why ideas at their worst can be stunting and restricting and, at their best, enabling and freeing. It's a big, sprawling topic, one in which every specific claim is potentially wrong and yet still could be helpful. Very important and, still, seldom talked about, because it's big and blowsy and not everything will pertain to everyone. Difficult to reduce it to neat little categories and tidy theories stacked like blocks.

And yet. A photographer with a truly great idea can work that goldmine for a decade.

Mike

*William James, one of the most important writers now never read (he's very whitemale, for one thing), is thought to have coined the phrase, in The Principles of Psychology, 1890: "...Consciousness, then, does not appear to itself as chopped up in bits...it is nothing joined; it flows. A 'river' or a 'stream' are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described. In talking of it hereafter, let's call it the stream of thought, consciousness, or subjective life."

Original contents copyright 2025 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

John Camp: "This might be the most critical question faced by all artists—the question of 'what to do?' and then, secondarily, 'how to do it?' I've given this a lot of thought over the years, and the conclusion I've reached is that people want art (of all kinds) that deals with...people. The Americans has probably a dozen photos that don't have people in them in one way or another, and even those photos refer to people and their artifacts. No pure landscapes. No abstractions. I'm an art freak who has educated himself in a certain way, and so I do like (some) landscapes and abstractions, but in a sort of distant, intellectual art-freak way, not particularly viscerally. The very best photos and paintings, IMHO, have to have a visceral element. Have to evoke an emotional response based on memory and experience and human relationships."

Greg Boiarsky: "A lot of the bones for your ideas can be traced to Marshall McLuhan: 'The medium is the message.' (And, of course, many other clever variants.) Not only do we need to develop a structural language for each new medium (sorry—not media, which is plural), but we also need to find the match between our content and the affordances of the new medium. That is, we need to discover what is inherent or natural to the new medium. Going from print to the moving picture, for example, allows the creator to more easily and fluidly depict the flow of time or causal chain of a process. Going from print or TV to the internet allows the creator to add interactivity to the content. Of course, there are other fits/matches.

"What I find more interesting than what the new medium can do is what it can't do. When I want to do something with my photography that isn't natural to image making, I am forced to be creative within the bounds of the photographic language and limitations of a two-dimensional construct. The very restrictions that limit me also force me to think in new ways. The mother of invention and all that (pardon the sexist trope)."

Deep Concern for Friends in L.A.

This is a helpless and meaningless thing to do, but it feels callous to blithely carry on with no mention of it. Obviously we can't acknowledge many things that happen in the world at large. But today we acknowledge and express concern for all of our friends and their relatives affected by the terrible fires in Los Angeles.

I spoke to my cousin John yesterday, checking on him and his wife—they live near the Pacific west of Torrance. Thankfully there is no danger yet where he lives, but he said the stories there are truly horrible. Thousands of building have been lost and tens of thousands of people displaced. The fires have destroyed homes along the Pacific Highway, and the eastern part of Malibu is ablaze. In Palisades, with limited roads in and out, he told a story of people fleeing who got caught in slow traffic, and, seeing fire on both sides of the road, panicked and fled on foot. Authorities then had to send bulldozers down the road pushing abandoned cars aside to reopen the road. Today fires virtually ring the San Fernando valley. Pierce has not been heard from yet—Pierce (his first name is Bill, but he never uses it) is a good old photo-dawg and photojournalist who used to be a custom B&W printer for the professionals and famous artists in New York City. Given the location of his house he probably had to evacuate. I saw a report that actor James Woods was in tears when he related that his eight-year-old niece offered him her piggy bank to help rebuild his destroyed home.

A friend who works in public policy, in a different specialty, offered wise counsel—"Rule No. 1 for these occasions to ignore all immediate spin from politicians and pundits. Only after all the ashes have literally settled will it be possible to reliably sort out whether and where there have been preventable policy or implementation failures, and what might reasonably be done about them." Amen to that.

A well done BBC page offers perspective on what is happening, as well as many visual illustrations. It's called "In maps: Thousands of acres on fire in LA."

Our thoughts go out to those affected today.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2025 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:

Gordon Lewis: "I was born in Los Angeles and moved almost 20 years ago. The so-called Eaton fire in Altadena, California, just north of Pasadena, has just consumed the neighborhood I once lived in. Old friends who once owned multi-million dollar homes in Pacific Palisades and Malibu are now homeless. This is the paradox of Southern California: the very things that make it so attractive can be destroyed in an instant by fires, mudslides, earthquakes, riots, hubris, you name it. Those of us who live elsewhere shouldn't feel too smug though: climate change is spreading the same seeds of pending disaster worldwide. We just don't yet know what form it will take."

William Lloyd: "As a native Angeleno, I am particularly well-acquainted with the areas lost to these fires in general, and especially in the Pacific Palisades. I have spent much time working in these neighborhoods; I recognise many of the locations we see in the pictures of devastation. I still have family in Ventura and South Pasadena, who remain safe.

"But, in addition to my deep sympathy for those who have lost everything is a startling personal realization: perhaps as much as half my output in my career as a professional cabinetmaker has been lost in this and other recent fires. A trivial loss in comparison to be sure, and yet...I have outlived my legacy!"

Mike replies: I'm sorry to hear that. There are many kinds and forms of loss. The emotional impact of loss (and grief) doesn't follow a rational hierarchy. Many people think it should; they disapprove when someone, say, mourns a pet more than a sibling. Jacques Lowe's photographic archive was stored in a bank vault in the basement of the Twin Towers. That loss was not primary when compared to the lives lost that day and the first responders exposed to toxins that later debilitated them, not to mention the trauma to a nation and the political turmoil that followed. For years it seemed almost disrespectful to even bring it up. Yet I still think of it as a pity.

JH: "Until 3 p.m. this afternoon, the evacuation zone here in Santa Monica was 3.5 blocks from us and the evacuation warning zone across the street. Fortunately, the fires have burned as far S and E toward us as they will but are headed N into the hills where we hike. The fury of these wildfires and the speed with which they spread is unfathomable—until you see it personally. (This was our second one.) In this case there were winds pushing the fire toward densely packed neighborhoods at 40–60 mph (70–100 kph.)

"Here some photos.

"Noon Tuesday from the corner of our block. The fire had started less than an hour before.

"About 4 p.m. Tuesday, view from the oceanside park 10 blocks from us. The fire was gaining intensity fanned by the high winds, headed for the Pacific Coast Highway and the ocean..

"View from our balcony at 1 a.m. Wednesday. The fire was about 2–3 miles away but scary. Hard to get to sleep.

"Today 4 p.m. from the same oceanside park as above. The fire has leveled most of Pacific Palisades and moved North but still burning ferociously in mountain brush in the Santa Monica Mountains.

"Incredible losses—5–6,000 homes, probably average value $4–5 million. Homes and collections of many artists. Lost: a number of famous architect houses, Will Rogers Ranch (where we hiked several times a week...we think the Eames House survived, along with several other Case Study Houses.

"Scary from where we live...."

Abort! Eject! (Blog Note)

Sorry about yesterday. Sometimes I sit down to write, turn the processor on, hit the go button, and nothing comes out. The power's out. I struggled with a piece for a few hours, but the longer I struggled with it the worse it got.

The opposite happens sometimes too. I'll sit down with no idea what I'm going to write about and it it all magically comes together and I create something that people seem to enjoy. You never know what you're going to get. This is my twentieth year of doing this—I'm very accustomed to the patterns, the way it plays out, the warp and woof. This just happens from time to time. No big deal.

Back to work!

Mike, Director of Publications

 

Bittman 'n' Katz (OT)

I completely understand those who take a dim view of my nutrition enthusiasms, and I hope they have noticed (please) that I've gone very light on the subject in the past year or two.

However, in the meantime, many readers have contacted me to report good to outstanding results with their own change of diet, which in more than a few cases has been revelatory and/or health-changing for them.

So click through if you wish; it's short. Otherwise, please feel free to ignore!

Who's Winning: Nikon, Canon, Sony or PanaLeica?

It appears that the PTB (powers that be) want us all to be using full-frame mirrorless (FFM) SLR-shaped cameras with 24- to 60-megapixel sensors now. The main makers of these are all three of the largest camera manufacturers, Canon, Sony, and Nikon, in that order, and the L-Mount Alliance (in which Panasonic, Leica, and Sigma are participants).

It's true that Ricoh (with Ricoh and Pentax cameras), Fujifilm, OM System, and a few others make viable and attractive cameras. But, taken together, Canon, Sony, Nikon, and Panasonic now account for over 90% of the global interchangeable-lens camera market.

So who's winning?

Not in terms of earnings or market share—in terms of cameras that dedicated photographers want to own and use. I have to admit that at this juncture, I don't have enough experience with the various brands and models to make a call. I've never been as interested in cameras for their own sake as my career choice would seem to predict. I'm a serial enthusiast, but it has mainly been self-centered—that is, what's best for me and for what I want to do? What fires my endorphins and nourishes my enthusiasm? If I'm going to look at FFM cameras and imagine which one would be for me, I'd have to at least visit B&H Photo and spend a day learning the lay of the land and holding the various cameras in my hand and looking through their viewfinders. I'd go from there. I used to pick my cars by going to car shows and getting in the darn things. Eventually one would feel right.

With FFM cameras, I'd also have to accept certain hypothetical conditions—I'd have to imagine that a.) I'm not already invested in any camera or system, and b.) money was no object. That would be the only way to level the playing field between Canon, Sony, Nikon, and PanaLeica. The way we used to say it was, "imagine all your cameras got stolen and you got a big insurance settlement...."

This probably sounds odd, and it might tag me as an outsider or a contrarian (which would not be entirely wrong I must admit), but I think what I would choose would be a Leica SL3 and a small (3–4) set of Sigma Contemporary L-Mount lenses.

Simple. (Photos courtesy B&H Photo.)

This appears crazy on the surface, because why choose the one-off Leica body when slicker, more advanced bodies are available from the vastly larger and more technologically advanced Japanese companies? And, if you are going to choose Leica, then why "settle" for lenses that aren't made by Leica, considering that lenses are what Leica has been known for for decades, and that Leica is the company best able to make its lenses cost-no-object?

Here are my answers: because I have come to believe that higher-level Japanese cameras are too complicated and technologically intricate, such that the excessive complexity—for me, this is—gets in the way of an easy, intuitive, natural connection between tool and operator. If cars were so complicated, only fighter pilots could drive. Leica is the one company that has had the courage to go for a sensible simplicity. And mind you, making devices simple is as difficult as making them complicated, and maybe more so. So I wouldn't be getting an SL3 for the build quality, or the prestige, or the viewfinder, or for the high pixel count (well, maybe a little for the famously good viewfinder and the high pixel count). I'd choose it for its haptics, ergonomics, and controls.

I should try one to make sure. (Actually, I should test an SL3 and have a shootout between my Sigma 45mm and a similarly spec'd Leica L-mount lens. That would be wicked fun.)

And as for the Sigma lenses...well, I know the Leica lenses would be a siren song, beckoning as if from Shangri-La. But I don't actually like large cameras, and the sensibly-sized and light Sigmas would serve to lighten the whole package in the hand. Plus, it's been many years since any good top-quality lens wasn't good enough for me. It's not like all lenses are the same now, but I'm just not as convinced as I was in the old days that the lens is where the magic lies.

More testing would be needed, naturally.  :-)

Mike

Original contents copyright 2025 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:

Neil Swanson: "Very interesting to read this now, as just last week I returned a used Leica SL2S and sigma 50mm Contemporary lens. I really just had to try the stuff. I’ve used Nikon for over 40 years. I had a few years with a lot of Fuji gear that I used alongside my Nikon, and then I rented a Sony. For the paying work that I do now it is hard to beat everything the Sony offers. That Leica was nagging at me though, and it is really a very fine camera. As long as you don’t expect it—and you shouldn’t—to do everything a Sony or a Canon or modern Nikon will do. You’ll be fine. Yes that viewfinder is absurdly good. The auto focus is probably a lot like your Fuji XT one; well, maybe a little better. Anyhow, in the end I sent it back for a few reasons, but it’s a fine camera. I’d like to try an SL3 sometime and see how close it gets to the other big brands. I’m also fine with Sigma lenses. They are excellent."

Chris: "I agree completely that the Leica SL3 is a beautiful camera to hold, and indeed part of the reason is that it is so large and wide and yet comparatively thin. I use Sony because of the huge availability of native secondhand lenses from all brands, and in a huge range of quality and prices,. No other brand can match that. In terms of pleasure, though, I use the OM System, which is the only camera that gives me joy all the time when using it. Small and so powerful and well designed. Both Sony and OM systems have notorious menus, but once customized, it's easy."

Christer Almqvist: "I agree that 'higher-level Japanese cameras are too complicated and technologically intricate, such that the excessive complexity—for me, this is—gets in the way of an easy, intuitive, natural connection between tool and operator.' There are ways around that problem. My Sony A7r V has enough progammable buttons to help me avoid diving into the admittedly complicated menu system for day-to-day tasks. For the once-in-a-while situations not covered by the progammable buttons, I press the 'FN' button and I have a dozen easily adjustable menu items selected by me instantly available. When that is not enough, I just ask 'perplexity.ia .' (Remember when the first Sony 'testers' downgraded the camera because you had to insert the memory card the wrong way?)"

Luke: "Re 'If cars were so complicated, only fighter pilots could drive.' Yeah, well, most people on the road CAN'T drive. They rely on traction control and self-steering and radar cruise control and backup beepers. It's like AI controls cars."

Trevor Johnson: "Rather than going to a camera store, renting cameras with a couple of the lenses you would choose to go with it, is what I do. It may take a little longer, but the right choice is more important than living with the wrong one."

Mark: "I have been using the Leica SL2 S with Sigma contemporary lenses, the 17mm ƒ/4, 24mm ƒ/3.5, 35mm ƒ/2 and 65mm ƒ/2. I add in the 20mm ƒ/1.4 for low light city stuff and could not be happier. I suspect one Leica SL APO lens would cost more than all these lenses combined and still would not have an aperture ring.... Sigma is producing wonderful lenses these days. As the SL2-S is about to be replaced you can buy them new for less than a Nikon or Sony top-end body. A lot less."

G Dan Mitchell: "I can't say who is the 'winner' among these brands...and even if I did someone else would make a fine case for why their brand is better for them. The bottom line is that we have excellent cameras from all of these manufacturers these days—cameras that can do things that we could barely imagine a few decades ago. While I understand the appeal of the Leica name, I don't think that would be the right choice for many buyers, regardless of the price. The systems from the other manufacturers provide far more opportunities to tailor the camera to the user—more lens options, more accessories, etc. It isn't that you'll need or want all of them, but it is that you can configure the system almost exactly the way you want."

Then Verse Now

["Open Mike" is the anything-goes, often but not always off-topic Editorial Page of TOP, in which Yr. Hmbl. Ed. skids wildly on the ice and crashes into whatever is in front of him. It appears on Sunday so infrequently that it's useless to say that it appears on Sundays.]

SA*

A newspaper article is classically written "top down," in the so-called inverted pyramid format.

The headline gives the basic information in pithy and hopefully catchy form. For example, "Viral Texas Chain Collision Actually Happened in 2021."

The byline and dateline tell the reader who is responsible for the reporting, the umbrella organization which you will hopefully recognize as trustworthy, and when it was first published, for instance, "By Mike Johnston, The Online Photographer, 5 January 2025."

The lede (pronounced" leed") is a paragraph giving all the essential information contained in the article. For example:

"A video showing cars and trucks smashing into each other on an icy Texas highway has gone viral in the New Year in 2025, accompanied by the false information that it just happened. It was a real accident, but it happened almost four years ago, in 2021, during a Winter freeze that hit Texas particularly hard."

Then comes the body, in which the lede is fleshed out, usually in several paragraphs, if possible answering the traditional "five W's + how" of "who, what, where, when, why, and how." Telling, for instance, why the old news story is being recycled as if it just happened (a craven gambit to pull in social media views, which worked), what weather event caused it (a severe cold snap which led to President Biden declaring an state of emergency in Texas), when it actually happened (February 11th, 2021, the first day of the storm), and where (I-35 in Fort Worth), how many cars and trucks were involved and how many people were hurt or killed (133 vehicles, causing six deaths and 65 injuries), the wider situation it was a part of (power outages were widespread and 246 people died statewide as a result of the storm), what the source of the misinformation was (a wrongly titled video stating that it happened on January 1, 2025), and so on. The body might go one for several paragraphs.

After the body, minor details might be added, for instance, that a dog was among those rescued from the crash scene, that it took firefighters and emergency crews until the next day to clear the highway, perhaps a quotation from one of the survivors or one of the rescue personnel, etc.

What a traditional newspaper article does not have is distractions inline with the text block, especially unrelated diversions that can take the reader away from the article permanently with one click of the mouse!

A newspaper article also doesn't have a concluding or summarizing paragraph, for two reasons. First, all the salient information has already been given at the top; and second, so that compositors can trim the end of the article to fit whatever column space is available without omitting any necessary information—all they'll cut is, perhaps, the part about the dog.

As opposed to
the reason this format evolved this way is based on the way people read newspapers. Few people read newspaper articles all the way to the end. You scan the article headlines and read on if the subject grabs you. If you're only moderately interested you might stop after the lede; if you're engaged by the story you might get into the body, and only if you want the complete picture for some reason will you persist through the minor details at the end.

Efficient. And, one might say, courteous.

Now, of course, if you look at a typical news article online, you might notice that a different paradigm is evolving.

First, the headline is cut off, on the pretext that it's longer than the space available, viz.: "Photographers Missing Out on Free In...", such that you have to click on it just to see the whole dang headline and find out what the freaking article is even about. There's no byline, no name of any umbrella organization as the source of the article so you can get a clue of whether it's trustworthy or not (or a completely anodyne name you don't recognize at all), and the article is undated—which is especially unhelpful if you're looking for up-to-date information. Then, the headline turns out to be a deliberate tease: "Photographers Missing Out on Free Insurance That Could Save Them THOUSANDS!!!" Scrolling down, you come to a brief paragraph with seven typos, wrong words, and illiterate sentence structure, on account of the article has been written by a combination of ChatGTP and a non-native ESL speaker who resides in a distant land—no hate implied; he's making his $7 a day and he both needs it and earns it—bracketed by three large advertisements, including one right below the snippet of text. Your skills at discriminating meat from crud online are constantly improving, of course. Because they must. The text is just some blather about how times are tough and everyone needs to save money and you could too if you only knew to do THIS. You scroll down, blood pressure rising, and get to the second paltry text block, at which point the ads refresh and cause the text block to reset two inches down from where it just was, causing you to lose your place. Doesn't matter, because the second text block contains nothing but renewed teasing promises to get you to keep scrolling.

This goes on until you have seen 19 ads you have absolutely zero interest in and two which you were kinda tempted to click on except you know better because you're smarter than Pavlov's dogs. At which point, the article tells you that you might want to think about putting your cameras on your homeowner's insurance using a rider, which you already knew.

And then to add insult to injury you have to figure out how to get back to the page you were reading before you took the stupid bait and got a sharp fishhook painfully stuck in your lip. Which you do, only to find that the main page itself has refreshed in the meantime and the other articles you kinda wanted to read have disappeared and been replaced by something else.

Ah, progress.  

Mike

*Satire alert.

P.S. Culture and society will figure out the internet eventually. Right now it might resemble the picture above, but newspapers themselves had a "wild west" phase in which there were limitations but few rules. Standards of book publishing had to evolve over centuries. The ethics of good journalism and accepted best practices, such as simple matters of format, had to evolve slowly as practical effects were observed and lessons were learned. The same thing will happen to media online...someday.

Original contents copyright 2025 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:

Ed Otten: "Brilliant expose of the time-wasting machinations of the web. Particularly troubling are the algorithms which dog one between devices. Showing even a modicum of interest in a product results in a lingering cascade of related click baits...sooo annoying and, in a sense, quite frightening!"

Charles Rozier: "The really crazy thing is that these clickbait headlines you describe appear even within paid sites like the New York Times, which supposedly is not competing with itself for clicks. It seems to have become one of those cultural decline things…."

Craig: "I hate the teaser headlines that are becoming common even in mainstream news outlets. The San Francisco Chronicle has an annoying habit of writing headlines like, 'This Bay Area City Now Has Highest Property Values in Northern California,' making you click on it just to find out what city they're talking about, even though the actual name of the city would have taken up less space than 'This Bay Area City.'"

Mike replies: You make a good point: that the bad habits of online writing are spilling over into old-time print media now too.

Film Friday: 'Film' Baker's Dozen

St. Patrick's Day Parade, New York City, 1974
by John Custodio, New York, New York, USA

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Photo by Nick Depree,
Auckland, New Zealand

"This was one of the first pictures I took after getting back into shooting a lot more film in 2020. It's from Karekare beach, one of my favourite and most visited places. Something about the gentle colours and shape really grew on me, and it has been on my wall for a few years now."

Photo by Reg Feuz,
Wellington, New Zealand

"Thanks for the opportunity to re-visit an old favourite image from the wall: my Muddy Waters face shot from his Auckland, New Zealand concert, 19 May 1973.  Film loaded in my Nikon F2 Photomic was Kokak Tri-X rated at 400 ISO, and the lens used was the Nikkor 80–200 ƒ/4.5 zoom. Film developer was D-76.

"I developed the print shortly thereafter using Ilford bromide 10x12-inch double-weight paper in Dektol. It was the last sheet of paper in the pack, and the last print after a long night in the darkroom. And then I discovered that I had underexposed the print. Shucks! So, I did the only next best trick and flashed the paper under the enlarger light and ended up with this result. Never bothered making another print of that negative.

"Three years later, in 1976, I entered the print into The Dunedin Photographic Society's Autumn Print Exhibition, and much to my surprise, as well as to other longstanding club members, I was awarded The Pattillo Cup for best portrait by the club judge on the night.

"I haven't darkroom printed for two decades. Still got the gear though, and keep on threatening myself to mix up the chemicals and finish of those old unopened packs of paper."

Photo by William Barnett-Lewis,
Eau Claire, Wisconsin, USA

"This goes back to the fall of 2008 when my son was sitting in his first day of first grade at the neighborhood school in Madison. The bright Fall sun was pouring in through the east facing windows as he faced me so I'm sure I had the Summitar stopped a bit down on the Leica CL I think I was still using (may have been a IIIf by then), though the focus was still a bit muffed. I was a little bit close so that may have been the problem. Hard to remember after 16 years  ;-)  .

"I do know it would have been Fuji Reala 100 ISO film as it was one of the few color films that did justice to his looks. It is not the most technically perfect of images but it caught the feel of his excitement and the beginning of the new year so nearly perfectly that it still remains one of the handful of portraits I am pleased to have taken. I don't think I could duplicate this look with either my Leica M 240 or my Pentax K5 without insane amounts of luck and/or post-processing skills I don't possess. This, on the other hand, came from Walgreens' Fuji machines. That was, in the end, one of the great joys of the last days of the film hegemony...."

Photo by Pierre Charbonneau,
Montreal, Quebec, Canada

"Ancient car show, near a local airport in the suburbs of Montréal.

"This photo is from around 2004. Despite the fact that I had already started to shoot assignments with a digital camera, I have kept the habit of shooting film for personal pictures. The Canon 1Ds of yore was a marvel at the time, but heavy and less nimble than a Leica M6.

"The pattern did not change much in the last 20 years. If the pro Canon has been replaced by a current model, I still shoot 30 to 50 rolls a year with the old rangefinder camera.

"There is something in the highlight rendering and smoothness of film that is distinctive from digital. Hard to explain for me, actually. But very often, I prefer my film pictures over the digital ones."

Photo by Gordon Haddow,
San Carlos, California, USA

"This is a combination of two film images taken in the early '90s—one by me and one by my wife, Jane. The overall image was taken in Bodie, California with a Wisner 4x5 camera and 210mm Schneider lens on FP4 film, developed in D-76 at N+3. The image of the little girl was taken by Jane at a party where the child was longingly looking out of the window at the festivities.

"This image has always been special to me because of the emotional tones and the fact that it was a cooperative image with my wife."

Photo by Bob Keefer,
Creswell, Oregon, USA

"I took 'Pelican at Malheur'  of a pelican resting in a marsh at Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in eastern Oregon around 2005. [Ed. note: Bob now thinks the image was probably made on the Oregon Coast.] It's shot on Tri-X in my Canon EOS-3 with the old 100–400mm zoom, developed in Rodinal, and printed on good quality fiber-based, matte-surface paper in my late home darkroom (I succumbed to digital in 2007).

"After making the B&W print I used traditional Marshall's Oil Paints to hand color the image, giving it some quiet color and an early 20th-century vibe."

Photo by William Schneider,
Athens, Ohio, USA

"As one of a series made for my MFA degree, this print suggests how a person edits from space and time when photographing. It is a combination of two different prints—a smaller one inserted into a cutout made in the larger one. The surface of the two dry-mounted prints is flush except for a thin, X-acto-made cut line where they adjoin. The central print nestles into an opening cut in a 16x20 print, and they are dry mounted together to present a flush surface. (A close-up of this in glancing light may be seen here.)

"The center darkroom print, made on air-dried glossy Agfa Portriga paper, shows the photographer’s preferred cropping. Surrounding it is another print, made on Portriga matte paper that was pre-soaked in a contrast-reducing chemical (potassium ferricyanide solution) before developing. The surrounding print’s purpose is to show what the photographer chose to exclude from the scene. The two prints were made from two different negatives, with two different cameras (a Hasselblad and an 8x10 Deardorff), exposed days apart."

Photo by David Lobato,
Baltimore, Maryland, USA

"This is my Grandfather, feeding hay to livestock. Taken in 1979 on his farm in southwest Colorado. Camera was a Nikon F2S, probably on Tri-X film."

Lovers and Seagull, Portugal, 2022 by Soeren
Engelbrecht, Valby, Denmark

"Spending nine days of family vacation near/on a beach in Portugal, I decided to make a small photo project out of it. Apart from my Olympus OM-D for general photography, I also brought my OM-2n with a 50mm ƒ/1.8 Zuiko and one roll of Ilford XP2.

"Out of that project/roll came a small 'zine with 28 pictures, titled 'Between Estoril And Cascais—Holidays 2022' (I couldn't resist the acronym BEACH  :-). This by far my favourite—initially, I was planning to take a picture of the seagull, who was literally walking around at my feet, feeding off tourist scraps. As I followed it around with my camera, this scene appeared in the viewfinder, and I instinctively snapped the shot."

776 Nicola Street, by Francis Sullivan,
Daajing Giids, British Columbia, Canada

"Taken with my newly acquired Kodak Retina IIc with Kodak Plus-X film, 1974, in Kamloops, British Columbia.

"Pic of my partner having a break (back when we all smoked?) while young daughter naps in the baby carriage. In the foreground are ripe apricots. A very warm summer day."

Safety Pants by Darren Livingston,
Prescott, Arizona, USA

"My image was made using my first camera, the Diana all-plastic model, that I obtained in 1968 when I was 10 years old. The photo was taken on the streets of downtown Denver, Colorado, in 1978. I cross-processed the Ektachrome 200 film using Acufine film developer followed by the C-41 process.

"The camera still sits on a shelf in my office today."

-

And one more for good measure....

Another Year Over

Well, here we are, another year come to an end.

Wir werden zu früh alt und zu spät klug
(We grow old too soon and wise too late.)

—German folk proverb

A brief look back over the year that was here on TOP:

Way back in January '24, I expounded on two skillsets to optimize in order to carry a camera with you all the time. And we had a multi-way conversation about the implications of color in photography. I wrote about several photographers caught up in the Me Too movement as well as the problem of psychopaths, rapists and murderers hiding behind the role of photographer, in an article (very) inelegantly titled "Photographer Traumatic Stress Disorder, Or, Separating the Artist from the Art...Or Not."

In February I was adjusting to my new pacemaker and not feeling very good, and I annoyed readers by getting briefly obsessed with keyboards and belaboring the subject. Readers were right to complain; I posted way too much on the subject. We also visited the late Elliott Erwitt's country house for sale on Long Island (he also had a place in Manhattan), which gave us a glimpse of the great man's studio—but the link is gone now. I proposed the best enlarger ever made (film Friday before Film Fridays, except it was published on a Monday). The then-new Fujifilm X100 mark VI got IBIS—in-body image stabilization—which was exciting. It's one of my favorite features. There have been persistent shortages of that camera, and they persist.

Then, in March, Ctein made a brief return. I tried to give some examples of "punctum," Roland Barthes' famous term—there were several posts on the subject. Nikon acquired RED. I started a list of the World's Best Cameras, but eventually abandoned it due to lack of interest all around; those days have passed, I guess. And I made an off-topic excursion into all the off-topic excursions that occur on TOP. The consensus was, "keep TOP weird."

In April, guest author Tom Burke wrote a review of Paul McCartney's book of photographs from 1964, the Ansel stamps came out, I moved my office to the back of the house, and various readers responded inventively to the eclipse of the sun. A technical/aesthetic topic was "Shooting Wide Open."

May came, and we discussed the cinematography of the dark miniseries Ripley. Demand for batteries for Teslas affected Panasonic's bottom line. We reviewed Stuff White People Like, which, incredibly, called me out personally :-) . We talked about which old cameras we'd like to see reincarnated, wherein I cried again about the untimely death of the not-quite-perfect-but-tantalizingly-close Panasonic GX8 (I always had a soft spot for Panasonic's cameras).

In June, I wrote about the importance of word-of-mouth and creating goodwill when you're trying to run a photography business. The triggering topic of Leica was revisited yet again—we're hard on Leicaphiles around here, but they are a stalwart and sturdy lot and well girded to defend themselves. The Pentax 17 half-frame film camera arrived (again, the post fell on a Monday). In the arena of honing visual skills and techniques, I shared an idiosyncratic exercise about cropping. (It's really just a habit I have.) We tried to pinpoint the sweet spot in the Nikon Z range.

July saw an exploration of why it isn't actually the camera that matters. I described "Two Failures." One, the kind of failure that you learn from, that instructs you—the second, a missed opportunity, merely a loss. I still think about that missed picture when I drive past that spot! Curiously, though, the first of those "failures" turned out to be a shot of mine that a lot of people liked and that got a lot of compliments. A valued colleague from my magazine days, Howard Bond, passed away. A "Mystery Pic" was none other than the canine model for Buck in Jack London's Call of the Wild. History and literature both fascinate me.

August found me struggling with heart issues again, which, strangely, affects mood and outlook. I guess it is, you know, the heart, after all: not for nothing does it have such metaphorical significance across human history. If you've ever been truly "heartbroken," and I hope you haven't, you know that it makes your heart physically hurt. Speaking of bodies, we touched on the all-important but under-discussed topic of bodies of work. I reviewed a car, which is not relevant to the site, and a William Wegman show, which is. I was shooting a lot, which led to several posts. I got briefly enamored of the D-Lux 7 and 8.

In September we discussed faked photographs, photographs as gifts from the universe, disillusion (which might just reflect my own struggles in coming to terms with present-day reality in the medium), and, to complete the get-off-my-lawn picture, the decline of bands and guitar-based rock in popular culture. The iPhone 16 and a deluxe anniversary commemormorial [sic] edition of The Americans came out. I summarized in writing a video by Martin Evening. And took a picture of sunflowers. My best effort during that month (and maybe the year?) was "The Erasing of Arthur Rimbaud."

October and the months after it are pretty recent, so you might remember these unless you're really really new here. In October I was distracted by the purchase of a new computer; then again, everyone can, and did, relate. We discussed Leica books; Marques Brownlee and a $40,000 collectible original iPhone; and my favorite Macs. Former TOP reader and bicycle impresario Grant Petersen got profiled in The New Yorker. Also, I did a couple of real estate jobs for my friend Michelle, which was fun. (I don't do photography for pay any more, generally. I was a working pro for five years, and that was enough of that. But the RE experience was invigorating and rejuvenating, somehow.)

November was only a month ago. You remember—I went to the Nathan Benn show and saw inkjet prints of his Kodachromes. I also reminded everyone that old digicams really weren't very good cameras. And we cogitated on the subject of abstract photos. I visited Geoff Wittig in Dansville, and finally got to see his mancave filled to the rafters with photo and art books. Lucky guy.

December only ended yesterday. What was the best post from this past month? We talked about Realistic Minimalism and Synthography, discovered the Louis Mendes Test to identify street photographers, discussed digital film simulation recipes, launched "Film Fridays," and paused for Christmas. I got in trouble talking about a $6.2 million banana taped to a wall. We dissected a photo of an old building by Eero Saarinen, and along the way I learned something about Brutalism, not the least of which is that some people appreciate it.

And here we are!

Happy New Year

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May 2025 be good enough to us all. Thanks for hanging out around here from time to time, and, see you again soon. Kind regards,

Mike

Original contents copyright 2025 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

John Bennett: "June 2024: I forgot just how much vitriol was aimed at the Pentax 17 when it debuted. I bought one in August, and rarely leave the house without. It's just plain FUN...and when is that ever a bad idea? Happy New Year! "

Kodachromeguy: "Thanks for reminding me about Ctein's excellent exposé on the absurdity of aperture equivalence. Gawd, that wasted an immense amount of effort on photo forums. But as long as the equivalence warriors think they take better photos...."

Jez Cunningham: "Thanks for your hard work—the 2024 summary neatly summarises why I love this place and visit every day."

Mark P Morris: "I don't like year-end reviews. I like this one very much! Very interesting recap of your work for the year."