The Online Photographer

Lucky

One way I've been lucky in photography over the years (there are a number) is that technology has tended to come along just as I needed it.

I remember how smug I was when autofocus first came to my attention. I was sitting in the stands at a fall football game at Dartmouth and a friend and I were talking about photography, and he mentioned to me that "they" even had cameras now that focused themselves automatically. You didn't need to look through the lens and turn the ring yourself. I believed him, but recall thinking, in a superior way, that the tech itself was pointless BS—I'll focus my camera by myself, thanks. Never had a bit of trouble with that. That was when the Konica C35 AF was the only AF camera in production, and I was pretty haughty about point-and-shoots, too. (Point-and-shoot, by the way, started out as a derogatory term. Like "PhD" camera for "press here, dummy.") I'm pretty sure I said something like, "focusing my camera is not something I need help with."

Except that it wasn't all that long before I did. My first AF camera was the Nikon N8008 in the Summer of 1988. I can well remember the freedom of simply waving the camera around and pointing it approximately at something and hitting the shutter button, trusting it to focus itself. (A technique that yielded not one single decent picture for me ever, by the way.) Not long before that I got enamored of Tessars and Tessar-types, and bought the Contax 45mm ƒ/2.8 "pancake" Tessar for my Contax RTSII. And I could barely focus it. In good light it was relatively easy, but in subdued light it was a guessing game. I know I've said this recently, but, again, originally ƒ/1.4 lenses were to make SLR focusing easier—you only actually shot at ƒ/1.4 as a last resort. I don't think that was just me. Now, lens design has progressed to such a degree that many lenses are superb wide open.

Then came image stabilization. My first exposure to that was in some Canon binoculars—my uncle Cam had a 28-foot fishing boat he used as a cabin cruiser, and he bought some stabilized binoculars to watch his grandson and namesake Cam's sailing regattas. Old Cam was no slouch at the tiller of a C scow, but young Cam was remarkable—you'd see the pack of sailboats, and then way, way out front would be Cam, all alone. Quite an amazing first experience, to be able to see a clear image while swaying insecurely on a heaving deck. The first camera I tried with IS was not the very first Canon lens that had the feature, which was a 75–300mm in 1995, but the first normal-range IS zoom from a year or two later. I'm sorry I don't recall the specs. I bought my first camera with IBIS, the remarkable Konica-Minolta 7D, in 2006. It was two years old and I bought mine used. The IBIS on that thing worked far better than numerous cameras with IS that I tried later. Only recently have I experienced cameras with IBIS as good.

The point here is not the technologies, just that they've gotten better more or less in tandem with me getting worse! They seem like gifts, is all. Almost like it's personal.

I just lifted the Fujifilm X-T4 and did four quick test shots at 1/4th of a second. It's overcast and rainy this morning. And note that it looks darker in real life that it looks here. Here's the whole image of the best result:

And here's a detail of that camera in the middle:

Above, from the OoC JPEG; below, from the processed raw file. I'll tell you, after working with the monochrome sensor, everything from a Bayer-array color sensor looks blurry.

Note the screening. Not much motion blur showing there. So not only did the camera focus in murky light, but the IBIS stabilized the image at a very slow shutter speed. I could probably have focused a manual-focus lens in this situation, but I couldn't handhold 1/4th sec. even when I was young, hardy, steady, handsome and smart.

Technology to the rescue. I'm lucky that it's counterbalancing my slowly declining physical skills.

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:

Joseph Kashi: "Several technologies came decades late to consumer and professional cameras. Auto-exposure cameras were invented by Albert Einstein, literally. He and his friend Gustav Bucky received the patent in 1936. Practical invention was a hobby for Einstein, and probably a welcome change from his 'day-job' as a mathematically-based theoretical physicist. Early in his career, Einstein worked as a patent examiner in Switzerland, tasked with rejecting patents that would not work as claimed.

"Heavy cannons on US tanks and warships were stabilized in at least some directions by WWII to keep targets centered despite fast movement by ships and tanks."

Mike replies: The Einstein-Bucky patent was never prototyped as far as we know, and it was never produced, and Kodak's first production version worked fundamentally differently, so I'm not sure Einstein and Bucky can be said to have received "the" patent for AE. He was exploring an idea for it is how I'd put it. But it's interesting! 

psu: "Speaking of lucky.... We were leaving a local soccer game in Pittsburgh on Saturday evening, well after the early Spring sunset and I stuck my iPhone out the car window and took this three-second 'Night mode' exposure of the Fort Pitt bridge. I will never get used to the fact you can do this in 2025 with a camera that sits in your pocket all day. Is it as good as stuff I used to get standing in the cold with a tripod and counting off five- or 10- or 30-second exposures? Maybe not. And surely a full-sized digital camera on a tripod will do better with some work (manual HDR merging!). But still. I'm not sure I even held the camera with two hands."

G Dan Mitchell: "I’ve noticed some photographers saying 'I don’t ‘need’ this or that new technology' in reference to things like AF (still!) or IBIS, and so on. 'Heck, I made photographs without it for years!' Why, yes. You did. Because it didn’t exist! But for the most part these technologies make us better photographers, producing better photographs more consistently, and sometimes allowing us to do things that were formerly (at least next to) impossible. (And if you don’t like them, you can still turn them off.) I remember back in high school, as a member of the 'photography club,' shooting the school’s football games, some of which were at night—using a manual focus telephoto and 'high ISO film.' Could I still do that? Maybe. Would I want to? No. Are the results better now? They sure as heck are!"

Unlucky

I was very enamored of a certain idea when I was a "yoot" (youth). It was probably inspired by Henri Cartier-Bresson, and a little bit by Nicholas Nixon (who, inconveniently, publicly embarrassed himself later in life and lost his teaching gig and some of his cred as one of the good guys, but who was dedicated, inventive, and inspiring in his own yoot—he visited and spoke when he had a show at the Corcoran Museum during my student years). I got this notion that I would remove gear from my photography, and make up for it in technique, skill, and hard work. I would use a cheap camera and an ordinary 50mm lens, ordinary "fast" (ASA 400) B&W film, the universal standard developer D-76, and make full-frame prints, including the blackline, the filed-out edges of the negative carrier, on 8x10 paper. Pretty much what any beginning photo student in those days used. I called it my "Photo 101 Technique." But I would master it so thoroughly that it would transcend its limitations. That was the idea. (Yoots can be idealistic, with a dollop of foolishness slapped on.)

And then, inspired by Eugene Atget, I would just continue using that same technique for my whole life. That appealed to me strongly for some reason. I liked the idea of going my own way, I guess. Here's a portion of Atget's bio at the National Gallery of Art website:

Atget's equipment was simple. Because clear, sharp details were necessary to his work, Atget used a large view camera that held 7 x 9 inch glass negatives, standard when he began to photograph but antiquated by the end of his career, when smaller and more versatile cameras were available. He developed the negatives in his workroom and contact-printed them in sunlight on the roof of his apartment building. He usually printed on albumen papers, even well after most photographers had abandoned the process in favor of platinum and silver papers.

When he started out, his equipment was mildly obsolescent. At the end of his life, it was obsolete, if not antiquarian. But he soldiered on. I loved that.

I wrote a one-page manifesto of my own intentions and lovingly re-wrote it a number of times until it was just so. I was very fond of it for a while. Most of all I loved the feeling of having my ambitions clear and settled. There can be great satisfaction in working your ideas until your decisions are fully thought-through. You know you've made the right decision because of the feeling of rightness and clarity you get when you arrive at the correct solution.

I needed one thing to happen, though, and I wasn't sure that it would: for 35mm film photography to become obsolete! Back in those days, I couldn't quite see that happening.

Of course it did happen, eventually—which you would think was lucky for me and my early ambitions. But not so much. By then I was writing about photography, and you can't ignore new developments if you expect to write coherently about something. And life, by which I mainly mean penury and having to live as a nomad, kept interrupting my work anyway. Not to mention alcoholism (now long in remission). Digital interrupted and fractured my photographic work significantly, but it wasn't all digital's fault—I mostly have my own laziness and lack of foresight, dedication, and determination to blame.

And to think, I could have done it. They still make Tri-X. You can still buy photosensitive paper. The cameras still work. There's no real reason I couldn't have worked that way till this day. I just didn't have enough fight in me.

Naturally, that half-inspired, half-boneheaded youthful idea dimmed and slipped away over the years. I'm okay with that. I got more consistently rewarded for writing, and got less reward for my photography. What the culture encourages you to do tends to be what you do. The fork in the road led the way it did. But I still think of that "future that never was" from time to time...and you know what they say: Oh well! 

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:

Mark: "I have always been jealous of Michael Kenna's ability to stick with his Hasselblad and darkroom printing at the same size for his entire career. I often think I would have been financially and artistically better off to stick to what I used in 1975. I'm not sure my current output is any better. Wow, that's a reality check to admit that. Not sure I enjoy it anymore either."

In My Yoot (OT)

I got started writing about my youth this morning—one way I've been lucky since then, and one way I've been unlucky. But I got distracted by thinking again of a former coach and his wonderfully thick regional accent.

He was the athletic—or, as he would say it, attah-letic—director at my prep school, an aging three-sport athlete and former college football standout named Howie Boese (pronounced BAY-zee). I didn't know him well at all, nor he me, because gym and "intramurals," never mind inter-school varsity and junior varsity sports, were not my thing. As a student I made the assumption that Mr. Boese was just a local guy, the very soul of a blue-collar everyman, but that was wrong. He only talked like one. In reality he was quite an accomplished guy. He retired in 1980 and died only a few years ago at the age of 99.

Howie, as we called him, was one of those guys who are the opposite of mimics. He could only talk the way he talked. (Comedian Nat Bargatze says he's the same way. Can't change his "Tinnissee" accent.) It used to be that if you watched the local news anywhere in the country, most of the presenters would have standard accents, but the sportscaster would be the one person who had the accent of that region. I haven't had a television for years now so I don't know if that's still true. I suspect every region of the US has a few people who speak the local accent more strongly than everyone else—I knew a North Carolinian once who consciously cultivated his traditional accent. A guy I met from Evansville, Indiana, must have done much the same thing—if you mentioned to him that you liked his accent, he would say, in a velvety mild drawl, "Oh, we don't speak with an accent in Evansville...but them folks across the river t' Kentucky do speak with a little bit of a twang, now that you mention it." I asked his wife is that was the first time he ever said that, and she rolled her eyes and said, "oh God no." If you go watch a video of Shelby Foote, the Civil War historian, you'll hear a Mississippi accent. Howie had a wonderful and very strong Sowt Mwaukee (South Milwaukee) accent. It was delightful. It was about as hardcore Sowt Mwaukee as it got, and he was not being deliberate about it. Not at all. Not that kind of guy. I learned to mimic it very well, although not to make fun of him; I was just fascinated by it and by his inability to modify it. He sometimes referred to us kids in the third person as "da yoot," which always seemed funny to me, and I don't believe he could have said "youth" in standard pronunciation for a twenty-dollar bill. Boese-isms still pop to mind from time to time all these years later. But I especially like "da yoot."

But now on to my own yoot and what I started out to write.

Mike

CORRECTION: The first version of this post said Shelby Foote had a Virginia accent. But I was going from memory. When I checked it I found that he was born and raised in Mississippi, around the Delta region and culture. Sorry for the error.

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:

Nick: "My parents are from Minnesota, but neither of them has lived there for the last 48 years. They both have (well, had, in the case of my deceased father) fairly 'neutral' accents most of the time, but both could drop entirely into the accents of their youth: My dad was from 'up der on de iron range, near Hibbing' (he remembers seeing signs for Zimmerman Motors, owned by the family of Bobby Zimmerman, who has gone by a different name for a while now...), while my mom was from working-class South St. Paul. I still have relatives in South St. Paul, and most of them have some variant of the local accent (which I can imitate pretty well myself). When I went off to grad school in Madison, the local accent was instantly familiar, a slight-to-moderate variation of the Minnesota accents of my family. I once asked a student in one of my classes what part of Wisconsin she was from, and she responded, 'How did you know?' I said, 'From your accent.' She said (in her usual heavy Sconnie drawl), 'I don't have an accent!...Do I?'"

Mike replies: Other readers might know the Minnesota accent from the movie Fargo—which perhaps hits it a little hard, although I'm never sure if the Coens meant that to be affectionate or mocking.

Funny, when I'm tired and under stress (like when I got pulled over once), I sometimes revert to the accent of the region where I spent only the first six years of my life. It surprises me that it's still "in there." I recall that Dan Rather said he spoke with a standard broadcast accent but that signifiers of the Texas accent of his youth would sneak in when he was very tired.

Why Haven't We Talked About the Sony A7Cr?

I'd get the Sony FE 35mm ƒ/1.8 lens with it instead of
the one shown, but you choose

So how come we've never talked about this before? We talk about handy, easy to carry, high-image-quality cameras with premium-level build quality, but have somehow skipped over the full-frame Sony A7Cr. Two people, Mike Fewster and psu (Pete Su), mentioned it in the Comments the other day. Who's leading the discussion here? He's been negligent.

The Sony A7Cr has Sony Semiconductor Solutions' formidable high-speed, low-noise, ultra-high-performance 61-megapixel back-illuminated CMOS image sensor. That's quite a draw. (The 24-MP A7C and 33-MP A7C II are still available too.) It adopts that and the BIONZ XR image processor from the A7R IV (which you shouldn't buy now because the A7 V and A7R VI are on the way, probably in 2025 and early 2026 respectively). Yet it's the same size, almost the same weight, and almost but not quite the same design as the more affordable APS-C A6700. I owned the A6600 (still available, for a bargain price and with a free extended warranty) briefly a year or two ago, and it was one of the few cameras I've seen or held in the last decade that felt truly premium in its solid, deluxe-feeling build quality. I have to imagine that the more than twice as expensive full-frame version would be equally satisfying in quality. I appreciated the A6600's big, powerful NP-FZ100 battery, too, and the same battery is used in the A7Cr. Another plus, but maybe just for me: I can remember its alphanumerical jumble.

My only problem with the crop-sensor version I had was that I couldn't quite work out the lens situation to my satisfaction. I liked the image quality of the Sigma 30mm I settled on quite a lot (so much so that it led me to my current Sigma lens), but it didn't seem to work as well on my A6600 as the native Sony lenses. Eye-focus only worked part of the time on mine. Too bad*; otherwise the two would have made a nice pairing.

The lens situation is better for the full-frame version.

Exudes, I say!
Historically I've had a certain problem I struggle with, which has worked its way into my camera investigations a few times—I give up on things too quickly. The A7Cr makes me think that maybe I should have pursued the Sony rangefinder-style cameras more doggedly. Instead of just bailing on the A6600 when I didn't immediately find "the" lens for it (I'm very picky, perhaps irrationally so), maybe I should have considered sidestepping over to the FF versions. (I didn't. Consider it, I mean.) There are more and better lens solutions in FF. I think I'd personally choose the FE 35mm ƒ/1.8 despite its high price and despite the existence of the 40mm ƒ/2.5. If you like 50mm there's the new GM one in the picture above, which is getting lots of buzz. (It appeared in stores two years ago right now.) In any event, there are choices in whatever focal length range you like. 

It's not like I like all Sony cameras. I tried an A7II when it was current, and didn't care for it. It wasn't bad at all; actually, quite good. But for me, it seemed designed to look good rather than feel good and work well. A little unfriendly to the hand, not very ergonomic in layout, and I didn't even care for the "touch" of its surfaces. It wasn't so bad until the Nikon full-frame mirrorless cameras came along and schooled Sony as to how it ought to be done. In fairness, Sony has modified the body design of its FF SLR-style cameras now and is in the process of migrating the new style into the various models. While the A7II just didn't invite me to pick it up for some reason, the A6600 was the opposite. It's beautifully solid and exudes a strong impression of premium quality. Nice. And inviting. And tickled the endorphins, every time I picked it up.

We should talk about the A7Cr sometime. I wonder if I should review it? It would enlarge my horizons, no pun intended—I've never tried a 50-MP+ sensor in any camera. It's probably past time to do that.

Mike

*I wonder what the ideal APS-C camera is to use the Sigma 3omm on? (It's too long for me with Micro 4/3.) That would be interesting to investigate.

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:

Bob Rosinsky: "I think the A7Cr's big drawback is its low-rez EVF."

Jeff Kott: "I’ve always been drawn to high quality but small photo gear, which is why I shifted from Nikon to Pentax to the Sony system starting with adapted M mount lenses on Sony NEX cameras. For me, the A7CR is the best camera I’ve ever owned. The only thing I would change is the EVF, which is OK to use, but there is clearly room for significant improvement."

Mike: "Actually the 30mm Sigma on Micro 4/3 is really great, especially since as a 35mm shooter I really enjoyed 60mm lenses on my Leica R and Contax system bodies. Paired with a 24mm ƒ/28 and a 135mm, it’s a very versatile kit. The 60 is a very good portrait length, even for tight headshots."

Mike replies: I'll go add the words "for me" to that sentence. As you say, if you like 60mm then that's a different story.

Christer Almqvist: "If you are to get the A7Cr, reconsider the 40mm ƒ/2.5 Sony G lens. I have three of the four Sony lenses you mentioned (not the 35mm ƒ/1.8 though). The small size of the 40mm makes it a very good fit for the A7Cr. I use it a lot on my A7R V especially for making pictures of people where I do not wish to hide behind a huge lens. Only ƒ/2.5? Yes, but with stunning sharpness wide open. Sony lenses, at least the G and GM, have excellent build quality. Buy a secondhand one. All mine are."

Steve Rosenblum: "The A7Cr is a very compelling camera. Put a 28mm or 40mm lens on it and you basically have a Leica Q3 or Q3 43 at half the price, with the advantage of being able to change lenses. I rented one to see for myself. Technically it has the sensor and the basic form factor of the Leica, but: 1. The Sony EVF is not nearly as nice, it has lower magnification and less resolution; 2. It has a flip out screen instead of one that tilts up and down (and I like waist level shooting), and 3. The menus, controls and general haptics are not nearly as intuitive and useful as the Leica Q3. On the other hand, it's $3,000 less."

DB: "My most-used travel camera."

Andy F: "My partner wants to get into wildlife photography, so we went to a trade show last Autumn, and we were both blown away by the handling of the A7Cr. When the body grip was attached, we found it superior to the A7r V. It's basically the A7r V, but with a low-res EVF and only one card slot. You should hire one with a GM lens and do a review."

Where Are You On the Scale?

If you try hard to see yourself objectively, how balanced are you?

Note that I'm talking here about your interest in gear and your own personal practice of taking pictures—you, making your own pictures in whatever way, shape or form you do it.

I've known, or known of, people smack in the middle at zero—interested in both equally—and others who are way out toward one end or the other—those who care so much about gear that they don't even take pictures at all (certain collectors, photo-scientists, some camera store owners, some repair people, etc.), and those who areway into photographing but they don't even think about gear at all any more. Longtime readers will remember this story: we got a nice portfolio at the magazine once from a woman way out in the rural parts of the Plains States, and when I asked her what kind of camera she used, she said, "I don't know...would you like me to go look?" It was a 35mm Pentax, as it turned out, but she didn't know that offhand. But she had an outstanding eye.

I have to score myself pretty well here...I'm fairly balanced. But forced to be objective, I'm probably a little more interested in gear than I am in taking pictures. Just a little. I'd score myself maybe 10 or 15 toward "Gear" on the scale. (If it's not obvious, the larger hash marks are increments of 10, the smaller ones increments of 5.)

Mike

P.S. TOP doesn't publish on Saturdays, while Yr. Hmbl. Ed. catcheth up on ye olde housework, yardwork, bills, taxes, errands, etc.

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 Krumm: "We need another axis pointing to obsessed and casual, something like that, so you can be both gear obsessed and photography obsessed! The internet demands precision."

Bill Akstens: "I was a 95 on the Photographing side, because I buy a new camera maybe every ten years and I'm quite happy with what I have. Then you posted about the Fujifilm GFX100RF, which looks like a really fun camera. So now I'm a 90."

Peter Williams: "Once I have the tools for the job I'm 90 on the photography side. But if I decide to try a new subject/genre, I'll be 90 on the gear side until I've sorted a lens or whatever for that use."

Jed: "I have to agree with Bill because I'm still using and loving my trusty X-T1 and 35mm ƒ/1.4 that I bought ten years ago (highly influenced by you), but today I'm going on a Fujifilm workshop and get to try out the GFX100RF and X-T5. I'm so excited that I may have slid down to 0, maybe even onto the gear scale."

Bob Johnston [no relation to Mike]: "I would put myself around the 50 mark toward Photographing. My first priority is to make pictures and print them. However, I am a retired engineer and have always had an interest in what makes gear tick. I don't buy new stuff very often though, as I can't afford to do so. The fact that photography is a fusion of art and engineering makes it a perfect hobby for me."

Paul: "At this point, I mostly read about both. When my kids were growing up, I had my inspiration. Juggling the crazy schedule, I managed to capture some great memories. Never purchased a new camera. Now that I can afford one, my inspiration is not there. Photography is fun to read about as well as scan the gear offered today. It has always been a hobby when time allows, so it's quite difficult to justify the cost of most offerings today."

Mike Shwarts: "I lean towards photography. I do think about gear a lot. However, my thoughts on gear are what photos can I get with new gear that I can't get with what I own. That new lens is enticing, but only if it helps be get the photo I want."

SteveW: "Funny thing for me is that since I've been mostly using my iPhone for photography that I'm pretty much 100 on the Photographing spectrum. (Otherwise, prior to dedicating myself to the iPhone camera I'd be somewhere in the Gear range, probably 50). If photography software counts as gear, then 90 for photographing and 10 for gear."

David Raboin: "The graph should be a triangle with 'organization' forming the third access. Or, maybe a make the diagram a square with the forth access being 'sharing.'

"Organization can encompass everything from planning your photo outings to how you manage your catalog of photos. Organization can also mean having an ongoing photo project or group of projects. Without organization, one's photography results in a nebulous heap of photo files. Without organization photography can become a source of anxiety and futility. Right now, I'm building a slide show and album for my daughters graduation. I find myself both cursing and thanking my former self as I search through my stack of hard drives. On the organization front, I did some things right and a lot of things wrong.

"Sharing is also important. An artist needs feedback. Today, it's easy to share on social media but it's important to remember that social media is a terrible platform for sharing art. On social media subtlety and quiet contemplation are drowned out. As a photographer, you must find ways to share your work on your own terms. That might mean large prints, a book, zine, or a collage print meant for the refrigerator door.

"Shopping gear and taking photos are the fun parts of photography. Organizing is a pain in the neck. Organizing is why this hobby loses to smart phones. Out of all the young people I introduce to photography, most give up because handling files across devices is clumsy and maintaining a catalog of photos is a nightmare. The sugar rush of photography is snapping the picture and posting it on social media. Nobody wants to eat their broccoli. If Canon, Nikon, Sony, or Adobe came up with a storage and tagging solution that was as convenient as a phone, they'd rule the market. Transferring files from a card to a computer is so 2003."

G Dan Mitchell: "To frame this a bit more broadly: Are you more interested in eating at a restaurant where the chef’s focus is on replacing all of the knives every year with the latest knives that are .1% sharper, or at the restaurant with the chef who focuses on the best and most imaginative cooking? Or going to a piano recital by a musician who is always careful to own the very best piano and tunes it to .001 Herz accuracy, or the one whose virtuoso playing is legendary? Photography, like most human endeavors, makes use of technologies. But what is expressed though the use of those technologies transcends the technologies themselves."

Mike replies: Hey, no fair, you're being sensible!  :-)

Benjamin Marks (partial comment): "Oof. I didn't know there would be a test. This is an unexpectedly deep question. I am not a collector, but I have a collection. Mainly this is because I am terrible at getting rid of things. But I am also (or perhaps this last quality makes me) a gearhead. I have more cameras than I need. But also more fountain pens, more safety razors, more watches, more kitchen knives, more pocket knives, more spatulas...you get the idea. It is less than healthy, but not quite hoarding. Rich people have money, and poor people have things...."

Mike replies: Here are the first few paragraphs from a post I wrote a year ago:

In 2021 (probably as a COVID distraction) I decided to start wearing a watch again. But I needed a watch. Just one. I bought, um, eight.

Last year, I decided I could make myself happier if I learned to enjoy all the everyday things I dislike doing. High on the list was to learn how to enjoy shaving. (I had always disliked shaving.) I looked into all kinds of shaving methods and decided to try "wet" shaving, the term of art for shaving with single old-fashioned double- and single-edged razor blades. Once I settled on that, I needed a razor. Again, just one. Instead, I bought a drawer full of supplies and...well, seven razors, eventually.

Sensing a trend?

Well, now I've bought three new computer keyboards. Please don't throw popcorn at me. I feel bad enough.

The number of offbeat keyboards I ended up buying? Seven. A fair amount of dosh went swirling down the drain. At least for "idealists," things accumulate when you're trying to find the "right" thing in any category. In my defense, I now use only one razor, a cheap antique; I alternate between two watches, one of them moderately expensive (~$400), although I could be happy owning just the expensive one (a Casio Oceanus that appears to be discontinued); and I've reverted to the current version of my longtime keyboard, which is being made again by Incase. I have one newish one that I'm using and two new ones waiting in reserve. So I did settle down with all the "things" listed above. I appear to have settled down with "main" cameras, too, since I got my converted-to-monochrome Sigma. I wish I had more time and money for photographing. I could do an epic project on the Finger Lakes.

Len Metcalf: "My father was way out on the camera end. When I opened my first gallery I asked if he had a few cameras to put in a display case. He had over fifty he’d collected over the years. Most were broken as he planned to repair them. After he passed I found another fifty or so in his workshop. There is only a handful of his prints. One of some trees he hand coloured and a few of my mother. Stunning, all of them. So a hundred cameras and three finished prints.

"Me, I try not to be at the gear end but unfortunately I enjoy studying what the latest and greatest is. I spent years studying lenses and cameras and trying different ones. When I was into large format this was an expensive operation. And so many mistakes at first.

"But I do have one favourite lens. And I use it for most of my work. Let’s say 98% of my work. I dream of my next purchase and spend time finding out about the possibilities. My archive is huge and is causing me all sorts of problems in Lightroom. 800,000 images in there now. So I am no slouch on the taking end. Fifteen exhibitions. Published four books and 25 journals. So my output is still consistently high.

"All in all I have to put myself in the middle."

Mike replies: Sounds good. But...you're not going to tell us what your favorite lens is?  :-)

William: "I am so crazy I will buy a lens with just one photograph in mind. It's not that I am flush with cash, but I work as a photographer so can find ways of justifying this behaviour. I think this image/lens fixation amounts to a zero on the scale. I do rent equipment but many of the things I am after are pre-digital and also I am a repeat visit kind of photographer so if renting is possible it soon adds up. Just bought a 120mm Hasselblad Planar S in chrome to solve a particular problem for one artwork, oh dear; however it is a very delightful thing."

Mike replies: I like the way you think and can't perceive anything wrong with it.  :-)

Old News About Old News

I really screwed up yesterday. I posted an "obituary" blissfully unaware that the event was well out of date. Then I had to remove that very nice portrait of Louise Fletcher with her Oscar—I hope you saw it. The Fair Use provision of the Copyright Act allows for using pictures of people in obituaries without securing permission—but in timely obituaries, but not two and a half years later. Considering I also talked about a 50-year-old movie, it was really out-of-date news about out-of-date news. I know I'm not always (ahem) up to the minute, but that was ridiculous.

Never hurts to celebrate women, however.

It was my second major screw-up this month, too. I assure you, I'm not actually losing my marbles. That I know of.

A further confession: I actually thought it was a coincidence that Ms. Fletcher happened to pass away just after I rewatched One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest on YouTube. Other way around, Skeezix. I got fed the old videos about her passing because I had just watched the movie. The Algorithm Knows All.

Old / new: William Manchester / Brigitte Lardinois
So. Speaking of old news about old news, I wanted to put in another brief plug for a fun book I mentioned the other day. I happened to notice that it's possible to still buy William Manchester's In Our Time: The World As Seen by Magnum Photographers for a decent price. This is a big, fat book with hundreds (but it seems like thousands) of pictures from the first 40 years of the existence of Magnum Photos, the for-photographers, by-photographers photo agency founded by Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, George Rodger and David 'Chim' Seymour in 1947, and staffed over many years by a constellation of the stars of photojournalism. There are more copies on eBay and a few on Abebooks.

Now then, there's one big problem with this book. One I've mentioned before. It was pointed out to me years ago by my friend Nicholas Hartmann, whose late father Erich (a wonderful gentleman, and the acorn did not fall far from that tree) was one of the "second wave" of photographers recruited into Magnum. Erich served as the agency's President for a while. Nick pointed out that part of the purpose of Magnum was to allow photographers to have control of their own work, such that they could insure that all the photos in a photo-essay could be shown together and in a way that they approved of. So a treasury of individual photographs plucked out of context sort of goes against the whole raison d'être of the agency. Magnum itself does that a lot these days, trying to leverage its assets, but that doesn't mean it's not a problem.

Still and all, the old book is a big box of chocolates, a guilty pleasure, a treat. Lots of fun to look through and study, even to get ideas from, or from which to learn more about composing images. It's a must for Leica enthusiasts, since so many of the Magnum guys preferred Leicas.

Another problem, of course, was that it was published in 1989, when digital was just a glint of light before the dawn, so it has nothing current in it. Someone should do a book of Magnum photographs 1990–now; oh wait, they have. I haven't seen that one, but in its original incarnation it was a very significant bestseller in the photography space, and it's just been republished in a splendid new edition. (I've been trying to leave "verys" out of my writing for a while now, but it was needed in that previous sentence. Very significant bestseller.) The new one is perhaps a better choice because, you know, we're here in now. The new one is by Brigitte Lardinois, who has the wonderful job title of "Reader in the Understanding of Public Photography at the London College of Communication at the University of the Arts in London."

Anyway, just a tip. A WTTW (word to the wise).

The Manchester is a book I mention from time to time because I love it and it was formative for my taste, but mentioning it again of course it means I'm repeating myself, repeating myself, and is that even worse than old news about old news?!

Good thing you're patient with me! I'd fire the Editor but....

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:

Allan Ostling: "I knew those guys in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Not the actors, but three of the actual inmates. It was 1970, and I had been working as a Palo Alto taxi driver for several months. I got a call to pick up some fares at a bar. When the three men got into my cab they directed me to the V.A. Hospital on Willow Road (Menlo Park). This was the facility where Ken Kesey had worked as an LSD test subject while he was getting his MFA at nearby Stanford University. (That, and the ensuing saga, is described in Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.) It was a short drive to the hospital. As the guys got out I told them the fare. 'Oh,' one of them said, 'we don't have any money.' I followed them into the building and told the woman at the reception desk about the situation. She reached for a volume of pages, and looked up the names. 'That's correct,' she said. 'They don't have any money.' I drove off, smiling at the joke on me."

robert e: "For what it's worth, Louise Fletcher's death was news to me, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is still on my 'to watch someday' list, so I, for one, appreciated the old news and the watch reminder. Maybe I'm in the subset of your readers who may be losing their marbles at a compatible rate."

Mike replies: I can't make a list of "best" movies, because I don't watch enough movies. And for me, as for many people who are not diehard movie fans, most of my favorites are from my formative years, movies I saw when I was young and impressionable. I did watch a lot of movies then. (I could make an argument for the era, though, too—Altman, Milos Forman, Arthur Penn, Fellini, Woody Allen, Scorcese, Lucas, Kubrick, George Roy Hill, Peckinpah, Malick, Lumet, William Friedkin, Bob Fosse, Francis Ford Coppola, Ingmar Bergman—those were very good days for what I consider "real" movies, i.e., not primarily showcases for graphic violence or special effects and not sourced from comic books.) But for what it's worth, Cuckoo's Nest might be at the top of my best-I've-seen list. If I've encouraged you to see it for the first time, I'll consider this detour to have been a success.

Albert Smith: "Re '...It was my second major screw-up this month, too....' Well, the month's almost over and you can soon reset the screwed-up meter to zero. 0️⃣0️⃣0️⃣ "

The Most Common Mistake I See In Photographs Today

The three people who introduced the Japanese idea of "bokeh" to the Western photography enthusiast community were John Kennerdell, Oren Grad, and Harold Merklinger. My part in it was that I published their articles, and commissioned Oren's and Harold's. As a lens enthusiast hobbyist for a number of years, I also got rather too obsessed with the aesthetics of the bokeh rendition of lenses, and probably discussed it in forums and and published articles to excess.

So this might sound very odd coming from me, but, as I look at amateur, enthusiast, and hobbyist pictures all over everywhere on the Internet and in books and on display, the single technical mistake that ruins more amateur photographs than anything else is: focus problems. Not enough depth of field (D-o-F). Not enough of the main subject in focus. Imperfect placement of the plane of focus is also common.

I really dislike showing, or linking to, actual work as examples. It seems unkind to single out specific photographers to hold up as negative examples; I'm uncomfortable even appearing to shame or ridicule others. So I'll just describe three random pictures that I happened across yesterday. All are digital JPEGs taken with decent ILCs, posted online at a photo-sharing site.

—> In one, an object is being thrown off a bridge, in full sun. The picture is taken from the ground and shows: the object in the air; the bridge; two people rendered relatively small up on the bridge looking down at the falling object; and, in the foreground, several waterfowl standing on the bank. The birds aren't large in the frame—they're still reasonably far from camera position—but because of perspective they're rendered significantly larger than the people up in the corner of the frame on the bridge. Although it looks very much like the photographer had positioned him- or herself so as to include the birds in the composition, they're well out of focus. The picture was taken at ISO 500, 1/4000th, and with an ƒ/1.4 lens at  ƒ/2.4. In other words, there was plenty of room in the camera settings to have used a smaller aperture and gotten the birds in the D-o-F, while still retaining enough shutter speed to freeze the falling object. (Generally, falling objects in the middle distance, especially when viewed at an angle while still accelerating, rather than directly from the side in full freefall, require no more than 1/1000th to freeze the action, and that includes a "safety factor.")

—> In the next, not by the same photographer, the subject is stone columns holding up a structure, a bridge or a pier. Again, full sunlight, and there's no action anywhere, nothing moving. We don't see any sky except a little through the columns, so no moving clouds even. Everything is sharp save one thing. Along the entire left-hand edge of the picture is a fat strip showing the edge of the closest stone column, not particularly close to the camera. It's jarringly out of focus, with poor "front bokeh." Why? Why wouldn't you simply stop down a stop or two, or recompose a bit?

—> In the last, again by a different photographer, we're seeing a scene by the side of a raised highway, looking down the long view parallel to the highway. Again, full daylight. The natural features form a sort of visual gully or halfpipe. The picture area mostly comprises the side of the embankment on the left, plenty of foreground, and scraggly woods and brush on the right hand side, which altogether makes up well over half of the image area, maybe even two-thirds. In the distance, in the center of the composition (and possibly the location of a central point of focus indicator), we see a rise with many buildings and their surroundings, rendered very small in the frame. The distant buildings are in focus, and everything in the middle distance and closer, all of the foreground, all of the embankment, and all of the woods on the right, are out of focus, but not pleasingly so. The comments say, "Nice!" and "Good capture" and so forth. I can't see any redeeming quality or subject matter in the picture at all, or in the composition or lack of it, but of course it would be impolite to say so.

These aren't exceptions; it sometimes seems to me that half the pictures I see have the PFP disease.

The poor focus problem has been made worse by the fact that in recent years, shallow D-o-F has become a signifier of the ownership of large-sensor cameras and large, expensive, fast lenses, such that the poor focus problem morphed into a status issue. And you know how those humans are when it comes to status-signifying.  :-)  Another thing making it worse is the increasingly common but wrongheaded idea that if you pay for a lens with a large maximum aperture, you should use that aperture all the time or as much as possible.

We definitely need an adjustment. A picture needs the right D-o-F, not the least possible D-o-F.

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:

jt: "Preach, brother! I think I made this same comment before on TOP, but I have a cookbook where nearly every photo has very narrow D-o-F, and it drives me crazy. These are illustrations. I want to see the food. All of the food."

Norm Snyder: "Interesting thoughts here. They are timely, in my case, as I recently acquired a fast 90mm lens to use for some performance photography. It's decently sharp wide open at ƒ/2, but it definitely works better stopped down a stop, so as to get, for example, the eyes, nose and mouth of a subject all in focus.

"I should have learned. I once owned an 85mm ƒ/1.2 lens for some Canon gear I was then using, and thought it was wonderful, until I looked carefully at images of a performer, shot from perhaps six feet away, in which the eyes were sharp and the tip of the nose well out of focus. It turned out to be a very heavy 85mm ƒ/4 lens."

Steve W: "Thank you, I really enjoyed this, and agree. I think this is why I enjoy using my iPhone so much: no D-o-F issues, lol. (And I can, if I want, control D-o-F after the picture is taken)."

Doug Anderson: "I have the same reaction to photographs that get the near-far focus relationships wrong. I have settled on two simple rules for my own work: 1.) Nothing closer to the camera than the principal subject should be noticably out of focus. 2.) If there is more than one principle subject, e.g. in a group portrait, none of them should be noticeably out of focus. If I can't avoid either of these problems, I don't take the picture."

Dave: "Using the widest aperture just because you have a fast lens—especially with the high ISO speeds of digital cameras—is like driving routinely at top speed in your sports car. You just get fewer tickets, that's all."

Kodachromeguy: "Don't forget the BS belief that more out of focus means the photo has better bokeh. The characteristics of the out of focus portions of the picture are not important, just the total surface area. Sigh...."

Stan B.: "I understand why you don't want to single out unsolicited examples for criticism. But it is important people understand when they are making mistakes in order to grow, mistakes they are very often completely unaware of. I remember when you commented that I had a very original color rendering on a certain photo—or something to that effect. I remember laughing, and very much appreciating such an 'original' (and kind) way of telling me that my color sense needed some real work. It's something I struggle with to this day, but at least I am now no longer oblivious to it...."

B.J.Scharp: "As happens so often in the modern world, many people confuse 'good' with 'a lot.' You can use a slow lens stopped down, and still get 'good' bokeh, and use a fast lens wide open and get 'bad' bokeh."

Stephen S.: "I had a long-term photography gig that I was shooting with Micro 4/3 cameras with zoom lenses, and for a few days, just for fun, I also took a full-frame camera and an 85mm ƒ/1.4, which of course I shot wide-open or close to it, because that would be most different from my other camera setup.

"A few days after submitting the photos, the person I was shooting for called me and was very concerned, telling me that my photos were 'out of focus.' I was surprised by this, as I always reviewed my photos and deleted all the misses and duds before sending them along. After a bit of back-and-forth discussion, and getting the offending photos sent back to me, I discovered they were all the shallow full-frame shots, and even though the close eye of the subjects was tack sharp in all of them, if the far eye was out of the depth-of-field, that led the editor to call the photo 'out of focus.'

"You don't argue with the tastes of the person commissioning you, and, faced with the choice of shooting Micro 4/3 at ƒ/4 or ƒ/5.6, or full-frame at ƒ/8 or ƒ/11, I left the full-frame camera behind."

A Great Movie Villain (OT)

Saul Zaentz [producer], Jack Nicholson, Louise Fletcher and Michael Douglas [producer] posing with their Oscars at the 1976 Academy Awards on March 30, 1976. [Photo and caption courtesy Los Angeles Times Photographic Collection at the UCLA Library.]

Anne Bancroft turned the role down. So did Ellen Burstyn, famous from movies like The Last Picture Show, The Exorcist, and Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore. So did Angela Lansbury. None of them wanted audiences to see them on screen embodying someone so evil. The role went instead to Louise Fletcher, a talented actress who had put a promising early career on hold for more than a decade to raise her sons. Some people are born to play a part, and Louise Fletcher at 40 was perfect for the role of Mildred Ratched, the dreaded "Nurse Ratched" in Milos Forman's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, adapted from Ken Kesey's novel—the self-controlled, rigidly controlling, and ultimately monstrous driver of the plot's action. When she won the Academy Award for Best Actress, she thanked the audience for hating her. And thanked her parents, who were both deaf, in sign language.

Nurse Ratched might actually be the greatest female movie villain, if you count only naturalistic portrayals of plausibly real people. Fletcher's Mildred, as written by Ken Kesey and screenwriters Lawrence Hauben and Bo Goldman, is wholly believable, a fully rounded character. True, Nurse Ratched did once come in only second on a list of the greatest female movie villains—but she lost to the Wicked Witch of the West.

Louise Fletcher in a still from One Flew Over
the Cuckoo's Nest and in later life

One of the great fundamental human dramas that affects us all is also the subject of Sigmund Freud's best book—the never-ending tension between the freewheeling id of individual impulses and the degree to which we must all conform to society's requirements of orderliness and rule-following in order to get along and get by. Cuckoo's Nest the movie is the best work of art on that theme ever put on celluloid. At least as far as I've seen. Even Fletcher herself said, "I envied the other actors tremendously. They were so free, and I had to be so controlled."

The film was Jack Nicholson's breakout role—his arrival, at least, as the familiar, inimitable, first-name-only perennial A-lister of top actors and celebrity personalities. Many of the supporting players went on to fame and accomplishment later in their careers. The movie was one of only three—one from the '30s, one from the '70s, and one from the '90s—to win all five major categories at the Oscars. I'm not much of a movie reviewer, but man, do I have opinions about that one. We could really get into it.

I watched the movie for the third time just the other night. I've been catching up on movie watching since I discovered all the free movies on YouTube Premium, watching many I missed when they came out alongside a few old favorites. This one gets better with age. Truly a masterpiece. As with A Beautiful Mind, which I'm watching for the first time now, the book is also excellent. (There are a lot of books I've read that were made into movies I never saw.) I particularly like tragicomedies, because life is a tragicomedy.

Louise Fletcher died on September 23, 2022, of natural causes, with her family near, at her home in Southern France. She was 88. She had many other accomplishments, not all of them professional, although Mildred Ratched overshadowed the rest of her career in one way or another. Her first credits date from 1958, and she worked until 2020. Director Forman discovered her from her role as Mattie in Robert Altman's Thieves Like Us. If a career can have only one peak, though, what a soaring, frosty peak Louise Fletcher gave us at her best. R.I.P.

Mike

CORRECTION: Well, I'll be damned...this site needs a better Editor. I watch two videos last night, both saying she had just died, as if it were news, and I wrote this post this morning as if her death were recent without ever questioning it...or noticing. Joseph Reid caught my error. (Thanks, Joseph.) Very sorry to be spreading misinformation! I'll leave the post up anyway, corrected. Sorry for getting it wrong at first. —Mike, Yr. Fallible Ed.

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 Holland: "Yes, RIP Louise. An amazing talent in a difficult role. She seemed to live a long full life. Ave atque vale as they say. [A Latin phrase meaning 'hail and farewell' or 'I salute you, and goodbye.' —Ed.] A friend of mine once wrote a comment to some long-gone blog post about this movie, explaining why Nurse Ratched was her hero. Not a popular take to be sure, and I don't remember the exact wording, but her argument was based on the fact that she had a Randall McMurphy in her own family: a volatile narcissist, a destructive sociopath who was charming in a manipulative way, but swept an F5 tornado of obliteration through every life he touched. And then smiled and sweet-talked his way into the next disaster. To her, the planet breathed a sigh of relief when Nurse Ratched ordered McMurphy's pre-frontal lobotomy. Now, Ratched was still a flawed, nasty piece of work, but by my friend's reckoning McMurphy was probably far worse. Ratched had the thankless job of being the white blood cell in society's immune system. Something to think about, anyway."

Mike replies: That's an interpretation I had never even thought about. I guess that's one of the amazing things about works of fiction: they can be interpreted in many ways, including ways that the author or authors don't necessarily intend.

Revealing Question

Image courtesy CameraSize.com, used with permission

Thought experiment only: If you could have one or the other to shoot with, financial considerations removed, which would it be for you?

By the way,

Weight of GFX100RF: 26 oz.

Weight of OM-3 with OM System 20mm ƒ/1.4: 26.2 oz.

If you're tempted to make a comment regarding fruit, just go ahead and ignore the above question and go ahead and tell us whether you like apples or oranges better.  :-)

I feel your answer reveals a lot about you. I just don't know exactly what.  :-)

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:

Steve Biro: "The Fuji. And I say this as a current Leica Q2 owner…and former Micro 4/3 shooter."

jp41 (partial comment): "I'm currently not impressed with the new OM3. I reached out to OM Systems to request a repair for my Pen F, but they declined, stating that the OM3 is its replacement and that they only support one product cycle. I would lean towards the GFX100RF."

Merle: "I agree with jp41 on the concern for OM Systems' long-term support. Not only will they not repair the Pen F, but they don't import the parts so nobody else can repair them either. If there was a way to get mine repaired in Japan, I'd send it there, but I imagine it's the same story."

Rod S.: "The GFX100RF. For me, there's no contest. Its small size and light weight would enable me to carry a handheld camera in addition to my normal kit and still get images with nice resolution and clarity. The GFX 50R, which I have, is a bit too bulky—with its lens—to include in the pack. But the GFX100RF would sneak in.

"My real camera—for architecture—is a Phase One IQ4-150 digital back on a Cambo WRS 1200 technical camera with a set of Schneider Apo-Digitar lenses. The IQ4-150 is like a compact never-ending box of super-high-resolution instant film, only better. Once you get accustomed to clarity and resolution there's no going back. It's amusing for me to read comments from people who don't own a 100-MP camera saying 100 MP is too much. Nope, not for me. High resolution makes a successful photographic image even more realistic and life-like, and therefore better, than it was before. "

Bob Johnston [no relation to Mike]: "For me it would be the OM-3. Notwithstanding the cropping capabilities of the Fuji, the restriction of not being able to use longer or wider lenses would rule out the GFX. If you have to crop to get a longer lens perspective it rather defeats the object of having all those pixels. Having said that, Fuji have created a bold and innovative design and I wish them a huge success with it. In my opinion they are the only makers designing cameras that offer anything new."

Stephen S.: "It's often said that a weakness of Micro 4/3 is difficulty achieving shallow depth of field, and that it's a strength of medium format. With the GX100RF, as soon as you crop it to 35mm-equivalent, Micro 4/3 will have shallower depth of field with the inexpensive Olympus 17mm ƒ/1.8. By the time you crop to 50mm-e, the Fujifilm is at ƒ/5.68-e, so an ƒ/2.8 zoom lens for Micro 4/3, at ƒ/5.6-e, will have shallower depth of field. When the GFX100RF hits 63mm-e, it's only got 20 megapixels, which matches the OM-3, and the OM-3 will have shallower depth of field with even an ƒ/4 zoom lens! Shallow depth of field isn't everything, but I think it's an interesting comparison."

Bill Giokas: "Because of the ability to change lenses I would go with the Olympus."

Kristine Hinrichs: "I chose the OM3 and have been using it since the day it was released. I like the slightly smaller profile and have a great selection of OM lenses. I also think the OM IBIS is a deal maker; a large sensor can’t compensate for a blurry image."

Clyde Rogers: "I love the vibe of that Fuji...I'd love to try it out for a few months and see if it grew into something for me. I have the OM3, and my primary lens is the 20mm ƒ/1.4. What I'd miss most with the Fuji (based on reviews) is the amazing speed of the OM3. Not the useless-to-me astounding frames per second rate, but the virtually instantaneous focusing and shooting. The OM3 with 20mm ƒ/1.4 is shapely, easily held, compact, well balanced and light. The controls I need are easily accessed, the IBIS is excellent, and the lens is sharp without any harshness. It is a seriously powerful quick handling camera. If I had to choose one, it would be the OM3."

Patrick Cooney: "I'd love to have a GFX100RF to play with. I already downloaded a RAW file from DPReview and worked on it in Lightroom. I was very impressed, both by its detail and dynamic range. But do I really need one? No. In fact my current Micro 4/3 collection of lenses and bodies are beyond perfectly adequate for my photographic needs."

Gary Mortensen: "I'd definitely go with the Fuji—I do my best photography with fixed lens cameras, like my X100VI."

Andrew L: "I feel like everyone is going to say the Fuji, mainly from pure format envy—I will say that if it were a question of buying them with my own money, and these were the only two choices, I would go for the OM3 and some nice Pro lenses. I'd spend the rest on travel to use the kit in new....

"Oh, who am I kidding? I want medium format."

psu (partial comment): "If I were to go dabbling with newer cameras that I have never bought into before I'd probably try Sony first...the already mentioned A7CR for example. The focus systems on modern Sony, Nikon and Canon cameras are really a lot nicer to use than anything else. They allow you to pick a thing in the frame and tell the camera to just keep that thing in focus no matter where it, or the camera, moves. Great."

 

My Thoughts About the New Fujifilm GFX100RF

I thought the announcement of the Fujifilm GFX100RF would generate more discussion, but the response has been a bit muted. I wonder how come? Here go a few of my own thoughts:

• It's a medium-format X100[x], naturally. Yes, there are some differences, mainly in the viewfinder, but you can't have everything.
• It's very cool. As in hip. Or however young people express that these days. Carry one of these, and the one per thousand persons-on-the-street who recognize it at all will be impressed.
• I think it's likely to be very practical as a picturetaker, taking its specs into consideration. Not everyone can use 102-MP 43.8 x 32.9mm-sensor images, but for those who can....

And take a gander at this:

Wow! That's amazing. Half the lens is in the body. There's your reason why the camera has a fixed lens. Try to imagine that thing as an interchangeable one—well, ya can't. I wonder how far that rear element is from the sensor.

The prospect of aspect
People are quickly—too quickly—arriving at conclusions about the dedicated aspect ratio dial. I personally am going to reserve and withhold judgement until I actually handle the camera and give it a try in real life. Jonas Rask, in his "biased as can be" review / love-letter to the GFX 100RF, actually has a whole section on how the GFX100RF is the digital XPan, in the section titled, "The 65:24 ratio—TX1/XPan mode engaged!" He has many examples of pictures taken with the camera in "XPan mode," including this attractively stylized one.

Anyway, it turns out the sensor is natively 4:3, because the 4:3 aspect ratio uses the entire sensor. But there are many other choices—just about all the choices as far as I can tell, from square to panoramic and including 6x7, 4x5, and a vertical 3:4, so you can shoot 4:3 ratio as verticals with the camera held in the horizontal position. Shades of the old 645 cameras like the Fujifilm GS645s I reviewed long ago in...where? I guess it was in the original Camera & Darkroom. Anyway, I want to see how that's implemented between the dial, the viewfinder, and the files before I rush to judgement. Could be it's not much more than other cameras offer in their menus, but maybe it's done better.

By the way, you really do need to read Jonas Rask's review. Not only was he deeply involved in the development of the camera, but he was the one who suggested it to Fujifilm—and Fujifilm actually admitted in public that they initiated the camera as a result of his suggestion! That's amazing. Companies almost never do that. A company once marketed a variant of one of their cameras based on my suggestion, and they acknowledged that to me, but didn't acknowledge it to the public. Oh well—there went another seventeen seconds of my allotted 15 minutes of fame. Here's one small fun nugget from Jonas's article: the GFX100RF doesn't have a leaf shutter like the tiny X100IV's; it's the exact same shutter.

I like the GFX100RF well enough as it is (without a lot of "if only it had..." objections, is what I mean), and I'm very interested in it on a number of levels. It's been a lot of fun to look into it and I'm still eager to learn more. I think it will appeal to the exclusive coterie of connoisseurs who can afford a "point-and-shoot" with a 43.8 x 32.9mm sensor, but it would be more accessible to me and others like me if it were full-frame and had half the megapixels and cost half as much. I guess that would defeat the uniqueness of the whole exercise, but me buying a $5,000 digital camera is just not going to happen. It would be like taking a Piper Cub into Class Alpha airspace—I just don't fly at that altitude. I don't even think I could get one of these to review. At least not easily, or any time soon.

Just like the digital good old days
Fun stuff, though. It would be interesting to count how many "new" cameras in the past few years are truly all new, such that they embody new ideas, new thinking, new design. Not very many, is my guess. This is surely one, and that makes it fun and interesting.

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:

Mike Plews: "'Digital Xpan' completely put the zap on my head. The samples are enchanting. If you look up what a clean XpanII/43mm combo goes for, the Fuji starts to look like a bargain. It's nice to see something bold come to market. Fuji has a history of medium-format fixed lens film cameras and the GFX feels like a logical extension of that approach. Can't afford it but it sure is growing on me."

Stan B.: "Yes, I wondered if the lens retracted when the camera was shut off upon seeing that diagram! The camera seems fun, with some features that promise to be quite useful, or prove quite trivial in actuality...I'll never get to find out, so it's yet another exercise in living vicariously. It's one very practical, innovative and yet another, somewhat odd brick of a camera in the same sentence. A 50-MP $3k version woulda been one hot commodity indeed!"

Mike replies: I see what you did there. Glad I didn't correct it as I started to.

Tim Walters: "I’ll be trading in both my X100V and my GFX100S for it, which should reduce the pain a bit."

Andrew L (partial comment): "I like most everything about the design. I like that it's tall—a taller grip makes a camera so much more comfortable. My Pentax K-1 has the best camera grip I've ever used, and it's because it's tall (and well-shaped)."

Andy Munro: " I think the lack of interest is mainly down to its price and its size. It is too big for a compact. Throw in the non-stabilised ƒ/4 lens and the number of potential buyers is even fewer. The only plus as far as I can see is the ability to crop using the 102-MP sensor. Good try, but I can't help but think that the X100VI is about the maximum size for compact. It's also got stabilisation, and an ƒ/2 lens."

Patrick Medd: "For the past year I've been using a Hasselblad X1D II with the 45mm ƒ/4P 'affordable' lens from the Hasselblad X system (secondhand, this outfit will set you back about half the price of the GFX100RF). One of the revelations of that system is the crop modes, including XPan and my favourite square and 5x4 crops. Yes, you could crop after the fact but you need to compose before the fact and the crop modes allow you to do that. A dedicated control to access them quickly sounds like a good idea to me."

Tex Andrews (partial comment): "This is the first piece of camera gear I have ever preordered (except some Kickstarter stuff, which were neither cameras nor lenses). I expect it to be absolutely wonderful."

[The full text of partial comments can be found in the full Comments Section, accessible by clicking on "Comments" in the footer, or on the title of the post. —Ed.]

Gary Booth: "I believe that the rear lens element in the Leica Q's is a mere 0.8mm away from the sensor."

James Bullard: "The price tag muted my reaction by more than a bit."

Open Mike: An Alternate Take on the Camera Market

tl;dr version: "There are two problems with any analysis of 'the camera market,' seems to me. It's 1.) that 'cameras' got inextricably entangled with another product, smartphones, which everyone also wanted; and 2.) that smartphones are the replacement for digicams from the perspective of the consumer but not from the perspective of the established camera industry."

Courts: AI Images Can't Be Copyrighted

Sorry.

Speaking of copyright, as I was in the previous post, Ken Klein at PetaPixel reports that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit has unanimously affirmed a ruling denying copyright protection for solely AI-generated images. At issue is the "human authorship" requirement adopted by the Copyright Office in 1973 and subsequently enshrined in the Copyright Act passed by Congress in 1976.

Alicia Calzada, Deputy General Counsel of the National Press Photographers Association (NPPA), told PetaPixel, "Judge Millett explained it best that, 'machines are tools, not authors.' Interpretations of the Copyright Act would be nonsensical if the 'author' could be a computer or other machine. Machines do not have children, they do not die, they do not have nationalities or hold property. All of these concepts referenced in copyright law would have absurd results if authorship was granted to a computer program, and courts are simply not allowed to re-interpret statutes or ignore portions of a statute."

The ruling implicitly distinguishes between a dumb machine used as a recording device (i.e., a camera and subsequent tools used to manipulate a camera image under the guidance and control of a human author) and a smart machine such as generative AI, because the lawsuit being ruled on asserted copyright for an entirely AI-created image.

Here's the article...but read the comments too, especially the one from Eckcooties. By the way, the ChatGTP prompt for the illustration above was "picture of a surprised machine."

I agree with my friend Steve R., who commented, "sometimes the courts get it right."

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 Camp: "A camera is a tool and all the crucial 'creative' decisions are made by the human using it. The same is true of a computer used as a word processor: I push the 'r' key and the computer registers an 'r' but not because the computer wanted to, or decided to. In both situations, the person is the creator, the machines used are simply tools.

"In the case of AI, a human enters prompts, but using identical prompts doesn't guarantee the AI will produce an identical image or story each time those same prompts are entered. Those crucial decisions about image or story will depend on what the AI has ingested as its resource library, and that may change from minute to minute, out of the control of anyone. So the human is prompting, and the AI is creating. (It's like a kid prompting his mother, 'Tell me a story.' The mother does. Is the kid then the story-teller? No.)

"The other key aspect of this is the copyright legislation which specifically intended copyright to apply to humans (and not machines, and not animals.) So the court got it right. If the Congress wants copyright to apply to machines, it could pass legislation saying so, but that would open a can of worms of unimaginable dimension."

Calling Card

Thought you might like to see my business card. The domain name and email address are the two things that don't change; for address and telephone number I use a rubber stamp on the back of the card. That way I can use the same card through different house moves (two so far).

The logo or, er, "logo" is the block diagram for the 1902 Zeiss Tessar designed by Paul Rudolph and his assistant Ernst Wandersleb. Pretty sure I couldn't use it as a logo online even though it's in the public domain, because I wouldn't be able to assert copyright, but hidden in the person-to-person relationship of a business card it flies below radar. The higher profile anything is, the more robust it has to be in standing up to scrutiny. In any event I can claim it's a decoration for the card rather than a logo. Because that's true. I grabbed it at the last minute because the printer thought the upper right corner was too empty.

The printing is "raised" and glossy but I can't recall the process. I had it made by a shop in Wisconsin that's been in business since 1948. It's 99% percent certain this is going to remain my business card until, um, organic expiration; I have roughly a 110-year supply.  :-)

Mike, thriving as an organism

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:

Alan: "Thermographic printing, or simply 'thermo,' is the name of the process you’re after."

Dan Khong: "The 'TOP' is eye-catching. Not using your name right in the centre (like almost 99% of people out there) shows humility. I respect that in a person. The Tessar lens design is also my favourite. It's simple, elegant and can be a conversation starter. Overall, a very well thought out and elegant design for a name card."

Mike replies: Thank you Dan! Note my lack of humility in Featuring your comment.

Mystery Build

For 5 Life Points, what are these? A minor clue: they're handmade in the USA.

I'll post the answer tonight.

Mike

ANSWER: Five Life Points to Jeff Sprang. Jeff was the first and only person to get the answer right, despite all the creative and/or humorous attempts:

"I'm pretty sure those are 'dashboard consoles' for horse-drawn buggies. I live in a Mennonite community in Ohio and most of my neighbors and friends are 'buggy' Mennonites. Of course the etymology of the word 'dashboard' is especially interesting in this context."

["The word 'dashboard' originates from a wooden or leather board attached to the front of horse-drawn carriages and sleighs to protect drivers from mud and debris 'dashed' up by the horses' hooves." —Ed., from Google]

My friend Andrew Sensenig, who we visited when he made my spice rack, makes these for a relative of his who is a carriage maker. From time to time I see a batch of them in his showroom waiting to be picked up.

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:

Supercool New Fujifilm Fixed-Lens Rangefinder-Type Medium Format

It's the Fujifilm GFX100RF—an all-in-one, portable, fixed-lens GFX camera with a 102-MP medium-format sensor. Just announced, moments ago. Here it is at B&H Photo.

A few of the basic facts:

• It has a selectable aspect-ratio dial! A first for Fuji. So you can have native 4:3 if you like that.
• It's very light at only 735 grams (about 26 ounces). That's with the lens of course. (Coincidentally, that's right at my longtime personal preference for the perfect weight of a 35mm film body + normal prime).
• The fixed (i.e., permanently attached to the body) lens is a 35mm ƒ/4, but read below.
• Costs $4,900. ($6,999 for our Canadian friends.) That includes the lens too, though.
• "The sensor features evolved pixel structure and micro-lenses that enhances dynamic range and low-light performance, as well as providing further improvements in peripheral image quality and autofocus (AF) accuracy." That's right out of the press release (as is most of this).
• It has a digital tele-converter selector lever on the front of the camera to select angle of view. From its native 35mm focal length, which is 28mm in 35mm format, the angle of view can be switched in three steps to 45mm (36mm equivalent), 63mm (50mm equivalent), and 80mm (63mm equivalent). Those crops (rounded) are 79 MP, 57 MP, and 45 MP. Pretty impressive that at the narrowest crop you're still at 45 MP. I guess when you have all those pixels to play with....
• Controls look to be very simple, à la Leica.
• "Surround View" function displays the area outside the image range as a semi-transparent frame, so you can see around the image area in the viewfinder like you can in a classic rangefinder. This is selectable, so you can turn it off.

• Flip-up style viewing screen. Also flips down. (You can see the aspect ratio dial in this view.)
• The lens has a leaf shutter (!), which allowed a significant shortening of the flange distance. (Leaf shutters allow flash at any shutter speed.)
• Aperture selection ring on the lens.
• The lens takes the same 49mm filters the X100VI does.
• Lens construction is 10 elements in 8 groups (2 aspherical).
• No image stabilization for stills, but it has it for video.
• NP-W235 battery allows approx. 820 shots per charge.
• Dual SD card slots.
• Close focusing down to 7.9" from the front of the lens.

• Black or silver.
• Built-in 4-stop ND (neutral density) filter, a first for a GFX camera.
• Includes a "rope-style" camera strap, precision-machined aluminum lens hood, dedicated adapter ring, and 49mm protective filter. The filter when used with the adapter ring "achieves dust and drip resistance, making it safe to use even in outdoor environments where it may be exposed to light rain or flying dust."
• Dedicated exposure-compensation dial on the top plate, which by the way is milled from a single billet of aluminum. The dials are machined from aluminum as well.
• All this and video too.

More pics and info at B&H.

Discuss!

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:

robert e: "Wow. This thing ticks so many boxes that it would be a terrific camera at a number of sensor sizes, let alone MF. I mean, it's a right-sized metal body--M11 except a bit taller, and at half the price of an M11 body without a lens, and has a built-in grip (which looks right-sized, too). But, yeah, let's see if they can satisfy demand."

Mike replies: You know, I found myself thinking the same thing. I was thinking it would be great if there were a FF version at $1,600-$2,200, somewhere in there, with a 36- to 50-MP -ish sensor. But Fuji's made the decision not to go with FF in anything.

John Camp: "Sort of a head-scratcher. Maybe designed for landscape guys who might occasionally want to do something else at lower res? Made for tripods? Dunno. I think the same effort that produced an X-Pro4 at ~40mp would have interested more people. But that's just me."

Steve Deutsch: "Wow. But no IBIS/OIS for photos no sale."

Tim Walters: "Having upgraded from X to GFX in September, I can testify that while the megapixels don't really matter (I'd be happy with 50), the bigger sensor definitely does, for the same reason as in the film days: you don't have to enlarge the image as much to get to the same size. My 24-inch X prints don't look as good as my 24-inch GFX prints, even though both have full print resolution. And truth be told, I can see the difference even on the screen. Whether that difference is worth the extra $$ is another question, of course!"

 

The Niftiest 50 By All Means

I'm still working on the revised version of the "History of the Pentax Fast 50" article. Having just wiped egg off my face, I have to get it right this time. While you wait, a little tidbit to hold you over; still on the topic of Pentax lenses. And why in the world so much perseveration on lenses from a company that now commands .08% of the camera market? Because this is TOP, and I am your knight-errant and loyal servant Don Quixote. Which is to say, I didn't actually mean to do all this, and it's not exactly smart for the blog, but. The hobby first, dollars and sense (sic) second.

The Pentax HD FA 50mm ƒ/1.4 SDM AW ($996) and the Tokina Opera ($699) being the same lens or nearly the same lens optically makes for a weird situation. It means that Nikon and Canon FF shooters can get Pentax's "big honkin' normal" for their cameras...for $300 less than Pentax shooters can get it to use on a K-1 II. Odd state of affairs, no? (A reader pointed out this anomaly; as complex as the blog has gotten this past week or two, I can't locate his name. Thank you, whoever you are.)

Reminds me of my and Carl's articles about the Pentax Limited 35mm ƒ/2.8 DA Macro, my favorite 50mm-equivalent for crop-sensor Pentaxes. It's now pretty cheap, compared to its price when it came out—it was $750 MSRP when new and soon enough thereafter sold for $6xx if I recall. It's got a built-in, extensible lens hood, did I mention that? So you save yet more money.

That one was in a similar situation vis-a-vis the Pentax-Tokina connection, whatever that is. The Tokina version of the 35mm DA Macro lens was the discontinued and now-rare Tokina 35mm ƒ/2.8 AT-X M35 PRO DX Macro available for Canon and Nikon. It will probably be cheap if you do find it. Although the barrel is very different, it's the same lens in terms of construction (number, shape, and arrangement of elements) as the Pentax 35mm DA Macro Limited, which is a beautiful, beautiful lens. However, some reviewers have said the Pentax version has better flare behavior. Since flare behavior is one of the strengths of the Pentax lens, you want that. It's also possible that the Tokina version might not be compatible with your particular Canon or Nikon APS-C camera, so be sure you get return privileges if you do decide to buy one. I wouldn't recommend buying one, actually, for those reasons, but it's cheap enough to be a toy, so people can do as they please.

Last complication—the lens is/was available in two versions. Using official naming-strings now: the Pentax SMCP-DA 35mm ƒ/2.8 Macro Limited (green ring, pictured above) had the older SMC coating, and the HD Pentax DA 35mm ƒ/2.8 Macro Limited (red ring) has the current (post-2012) HD coating. As far as I can see, the two are almost identical. The only possible way to tell them apart would be in a direct comparison: overpoweringly bright light sources in the picture frame might have slightly less ghosting* with the HD than with the SMC. In certain situations. Otherwise it's a wash. (I suspect, on no evidence, that HD is cheaper for them to produce. With .08% of the market, they're not making up in volume what they lack in unit profit. There I go, making assumptions again.) If you find a used SMC version, which might actually have a lower price because it's not the latest one, I personally wouldn't hesitate. But there's also nothing at all wrong with HD. The HD version is the only one available new at this writing.

Just get it
Somehow the 35mm DA Macro got left off the quirky list of "My Favorite Normal Lenses OF ALL TIME." An oversight; the Great Brain is deteriorating with age. It belongs on the list.

If you shoot with a Pentax crop-sensor body such as a K-3 III and want a ~50mm-equivalent normal—yeah, that's .08% x 2%, but you're out there—then get the Pentax 35mm Limited DA Macro by whatever means necessary. I can almost guarantee you'll love it. Its images are lovely to look at. Your eyes will drink them in like cool, clear water.

And it's got a built-in lens hood.

If the lens is so good, then why didn't I keep it? Well, I might have, except 50mm is a bit long for the way I see with a camera. I learned that when I had my M6...I bought a 35mm Summicron and a 50mm Summicron, and I found I was forever suspended squarely in the middle when it came to putting one on the camera and leaving the other one home. That's why my favorite main lenses now are all in the 40–45mm range: the 35mm Summicron vs. 50mm Summicron battle never resolved.

More's the pity for me. A 35mm DA Macro on a K3 III or K3 III Monochrome would be the ant's pants. You could live happily ever after. Assuming you want to shoot with a ~50mm prime.

Remember, you don't have to take closeup pictures with a macro lens! Be like me, or like John Loengard, whose normal lens was a 55mm Micro-Nikkor, and use it as a normal "nifty fifty" that happens to focus real close. Ahh, that way lieth lenticular heaven! (Behold! A windmill! Charge, Rocinante!**)

Mike

*Remember, two basic kinds of flare: veiling glare, which is an overall cast of non-image-forming light, resulting in slightly to greatly reduced overall contrast, and ghosts, which are "object anomalies" like spots, rings, color rays, etc. The picture of Butters in this post has ghosts (color rays) but, surprisingly, not much veiling glare.

**The No. 1 bestselling book of all time, by the way. Excepting religious texts and, possibly, Mao Zedong's Little Red Book.

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: "For what it's worth, I shot TOP's 2X print offering 'Precipitation' with a Pentax K7 and 35mm DA Macro. Here's a link to a higher resolution version than TypePad can reproduce. It would be silly to suggest that this photo couldn't have been taken with any other camera and normal focal length lens. On the other hand, the fact that this was a SOOC [straight out of camera] JPEG with no image adjustments whatsoever (or at least not on my part) suggests that one could certainly do worse."

Stew Epstein: "Funny you should mention the 55mm Micro Nikkor. That was my general purpose walk around lens for years on an old FE body. I shot Kodachrome 25 in those days, and boy oh boy was that lens sharp. I never found the 'slow aperture' a problem.

"Fast forward to today and I still use a similar style modern lens, the excellent Olympus 30mm Macro for the same purpose. The finest lens I have ever used, my personal favorite, was the Carl Zeiss 45mm Planar for the Contax G—in a word: stunning! I have a penchant for sharp, contrasty and versatile normal lenses."

Mike replies: That Contax 45mm got a lot of love. I believe it was John Kennerdell's favorite lens. He wrote the main article on bokeh for Photo Techniques, and some great articles for TOP.

Jeff Kott: "Any Sony shooters who might want to use Pentax K-mount lenses on their Sony bodies should check into the Monster LA-KE1 autofocus adapter. I was thinking about getting a Leica Q3 43 and wanted to see how I like using just that focal length, so I used the Monster adapter to put my old Pentax Limited 43mm ƒ/1.9 on my Sony A7CR to use for a few weeks. I’ve been loving the images so much that my Q3 lust has fully retreated. Being able to use Sony’s eye AF with my Pentax lenses is a dream come true."

I Was Wrong

Interesting question—what should I do if I'm just all wrong about something?

Usually when I make a mistake, I can add a CORRECTION or an UPDATE, or re-edit the post on the fly, or Feature a comment that explains an opposing view. I don't actually mind being wrong—I'd rather get to the bottom of something than post incorrect information.

I can usually depend on commenters to set me straight, and it's looking like a difference in coatings isn't the main difference between the Classic 50mm ƒ/1.4 and the renewed small 50mm ƒ/1.4 (we're talking about the two smaller 50mm ƒ/1.4's in Pentax's lineup here). I was making an assumption, and my assumption was a wrong guess. In the Classic, Pentax just added a reflective element inside the lens or removed one of the design measures that prevents internal reflections. Which kind of negates my whole conclusion, and makes a lot of my comments beside the point. (And begs the question, why would they do that? The Classic lens then becomes just a gimmick, something to play with. Isn't that rather un-Pentax-like?)

I added an explanatory note as an update, but...well, even as I write this, the right thing to do is becoming clear: I have to take the whole article down. When you're wrong, you're wrong. Gotta take my lumps.

Yeah, I do. I'll leave it up till noon as I look into this some more, and then remove it. I'll post a revised version of the post as soon as I can get it done. It's going to take some time, though.

Mike

Open Mike: The Complete History of the Pentax Fast 50

 

[Withdrawn]

 

Notice that the comments are still posted. I'll leave those up.

I'll probably post a revised version of this, but I'll need some time. More soon!

Mike

The Big Honkin' Normals, Part II: for DSLRs

[Part I is here]

And now, time for a wallow in some glorious gear.

Moose said the other day, "Yeah, I know, this is bash contemporary huge, fast lenses month..." Not at all! I come to praise Big Honkin' Normals, not to bury them*. Even if you don't choose to have a fast ~50 in your arsenal, which one would you get if you were to get one? (Prices are from B&H Photo and current as of this writing.)

Here's an honor roll of "The Fantastic [~]50s of '25":

Although these first ones are actually "old style" fast lenses, I think we can make room on our list for these two beauties. They are not modern maxi-element OTT (over the top) statement lenses after the current fashion, but they are the latest in a long, long line of fast modified normal double-Gauss types that have been coming down the pike since forever. Depending on your preferred flavor of camera, they are among the good reasons to still shoot DSLRs today even though DSLRs are on the way out.

Canon EF 50mm ƒ/1.2L USM ($1,399)

and

Nikon AF-S Nikkor 58mm ƒ/1.4G ($1,156.95)

I've owned the 58mm Nikkor, and enjoyed it very much—it has a lot of vintage character, improved by modern design—but today I looked through many dozens of pictures made with the Canon ƒ/1.2L lens and I must say it was an exceptionally enjoyable experience. What a treat that lens must be to own; such ravishingly lovely imaging qualities. From what I saw, I would guess it's something really special. Makes me wish I had a Canon DSLR.

This next one might be flying under your radar, but it shouldn't—it's a true BHN, with 15 elements and weighing in at over two pounds. And yet it's relatively a great bargain. Drum roll:

It's the Tokina Opera 50mm ƒ/1.4 FF ($699) for Canon and Nikon DSLRs, introduced in 2018. Stephen S. reminds me that I wrote about it in 2018, here. It bears a strong resemblance to the Pentax lens below. Well, stronger than strong.

Tokina was founded long ago, in 1950, by designers and engineers who once worked for Nikon but were frustrated with Nikon's conservatism in that era and wanted to make more adventurous products. They were one of the manufacturers who made lenses for Vivitar. More recently, Tokina made lenses for Minolta, one of which I used in the early years of digital and loved. The company is now under the same ownership as Hoya, the Japanese maker of optical glass products. The samples from this lens look great, and the price of this lens seems particularly keen compared to the competition—even compared to this next lens, which is much more famous.

Sigma 50mm f/1.4 DG HSM Art ($949 in Nikon mount—there are various other permutations)

The original Sigma "Art" series of DSLR lenses were a landmark in camera lenses, or certainly, at least, a landmark for Sigma, completing the company's transition to major lensmaker status. The Art lenses were as famous as the Tokina Opera is obscure. When I was in art school, in the 1980s (those were such great days—we really had fun), Sigma was the lowest of the low, a maker of happy-crappy budget lenses that were so cheap that I had a great time inventing many ways to ridicule them, such as, they'd go out of alignment if you sneezed while carrying one. With my German Zeiss lenses I was so proud of, I looked down my nose at them. Well, that's been a while. I myself shoot with a Sigma now. A dozen years ago when the Art lenses came along, Roger Cicala famously announced that the 35mm ƒ/1.4 Art was the sharpest lens that he had ever tested (I liked it too), and Ken Rockwell said this lens was the sharpest he had ever tested. These lenses are exceptionally well made, for what were originally relatively modest prices.

But remember that the category of the Big Honkin' Normal is meant to be biggest fastest bestest mostest, or whatever I said the other day. So wait for Part III of this article series before you plunk for one; time has moved on, and there's more news to come.

Zeiss Otus 55mm ƒ/1.4 ZE for Canon EF (a cool $3,990). Also available in Nikon F mount.

We would be remiss not to mention (again) the OG (original gangsta**) of the category, the fabled Zeiss Otus 55mm of 2013.

This was so obviously a statement lens, huge and heavy—12 elements (extreme at the time), five inches long, over 1,000 grams, with a 77mm filter size—that it got hushed respect at the time even from Leicaphiles. And it kicked off the whole BHN fashion, or fad. One major practical problem is that it is manual focus only. But it really appealed to those on a quest for the absolute best. The bloom has faded quite a bit since then; the mighty Otus been discontinued. But B&H Photo still has some brand new ones if you've got the wallet.

The last big honkin' normal lens we'll mention in the now-fading DSLR category is the HD Pentax-D FA* 50mm ƒ/1.4 SDM AW ($997).

Pentaxians in the audience inform me that the scuttlebutt on the Pentax fora is that this is the same lens as the Tokina Opera, which certainly seems to be the case, and that it was designed by a Pentax team but made by Tokina, the two lenses sharing the same optics but each with its own lensmount. (It's less and less known these days, but there are no more steadfast brand loyalists anywhere than Pentaxians—you just don't hear about it much because they're quiet, modest, and down to earth folks.)

In any event it is a true BHN—15 elements and a giant scalloped lens hood, and it weighs in at 955 grams with the hood in place. It's a little smaller in both length and girth than some of the other lenses above. It's an all-new modern design. But what's most remarkable about this lens isn't in the actual lens—it's that it represents a true departure from a traditional lens lineage of fast Pentax normal lenses that's been going since the early 1960s. But that'll have to be another post.

Which one of these would I get, independent of camera considerations? I think for me it would have to be the Canon at the top. Despite a little tizziness (just a little) in the bokeh at times (see Moose's comment in the Comment Section), it's a pretty lens. Its images, I mean, of course.

In Part III, which I'll get to sometime this month (or, er, next), we'll get to the real meat of the category, the mirrorless examples, which are more "of Now."

Mike

[Part I is here]

*The reference and my little twist on it is possibly a little too subtle to go without explanation. Marc Antony in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar says, "I come to bury Caesar, not praise him," but then he uses his eulogy to subtly dig at Brutus and the conspirators; so he speaks with forked tongue. Possibly I do too, as my own personal preference, as I have admitted repeatedly, is for smaller, handier lenses—having been imprinted in my youth by Leica M lenses, Olympus OM Zuikos, tough workhorse AI-S Nikkors, and the Carl Zeiss C/Y lenses for the hybrid Contax cameras (originally, if you are too young to remember firsthand, Contax, as a marque name, was the premium line of cameras from Yashica, and Carl Zeiss in Germany made the lenses). My heroes were photojournalists and, especially, artists who practiced like photojournalists, for instance the Magnum photographers. Gilles Mora even published a book about some of them, and of course there's the commodious Magnum sampler, William Manchester's In Our Time, which is an endless feast for the eyes if also perhaps a contradiction in terms. But on the other hand, I mainly just want photographers to be happy. If a statement normal lens is for you and will make you happy, then that's all to the good. We're just having fun here.

**See for instance Melvin Williams. The link is totally off-topic but it's a fascinating story if you've watched The Wire.

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:

Albert Smith: "I was shooting with a full frame Nikon DSLR and remember when that 58mm ƒ/1.4 was announced. Even well-heeled Nikon users were quite shocked at the price, considering the basic same generation 50mm AF-G ƒ/1.4 Nikkor was under $500. The online back and forth was contentious with people that bought it saying how great it was versus people that never used it saying that those people were trying to justify the financial outlay. Me, I spent a lot of hours looking at images online made with the high-end Nikkor and then bought the 58mm ƒ/1.4 Voightlander which also had many fans online who posted a lot of nice images made with that optic. Right or wrong, I tell myself that I have a terrific 58mm f/1.4 lens and many hundreds of dollars still in my wallet."

[Here's that lens —Ed.]

Frank Petronio: "I own the Nikon 58mm ƒ/1.4 (twice now!) and actually bought a Canon 1n to use with the 50mm ƒ/1.2. Both are fantastic lenses only spoilt by the significant amount of plastic and somewhat 'cheap' rattly feeling. But I've been training myself to overcome my aversion to plastic and even replaced my Leica M4 with a $100 Nikon N80 because, contact sheets side by side, my hit rate and success are far higher with plastic fantastic."

OT: Covert Sugar (on a Day with Blog Problems)

I've been soldiering through some technical problems with the blog lately—it happens rarely but recurringly. This morning, illustrations won't load, and everything having to do with comments returns a 404 Error. I'm currently working on a "parallel blog" on a different service, but it's a long way from ready for prime time. I need help but can't find anyone to help. I probably couldn't afford them if I did. Wish I was more gooder at computering. I started using computers during freshman year in college. By the end of that short year I already knew I do not have the gene.

In the meantime, here's a short, text-only message about sugar. Those of you who hate these diet posts will have to admit there hasn't been one in a long time. (And don't forget you can skip this one.) This is just because I need to work on something today which, if it's lost or won't load, won't matter. I'm working on "Big Honkin' Normals Part II," which will be long, and illustrated, with lots of links, and if that one gets lost it's going to cost a lot in terms of lost work.

Anyhoo....

I've been trying to get off sugar. As an alcoholic in recovery and a former smoker who quit, I have a bit of firsthand knowledge about addiction. Does sugar fit under that heading? I think so. For me it does. Here's how I sometimes put it:

On a 100 scale of addictive substances, if crack and meth are 100, heroin is 90, alcohol for those who are addicted to it is 80, and nicotine is, let's say, 65; then sugar is like 10 or 15. It's not much, but it's not nothing, either.

That's if you have the innocently named "sweet tooth," meaning a food addiction to sugar. Some (many?) people don't. But you might: sugar is the perfect industrial food, and it's all over the place in the U.S. Hard to escape. It keeps forever; it's cheap but has high perceived value among consumers, so the people who sell it can charge a lot for it; it robustly resists efforts to paint it as unhealthy; and it can be added to almost anything, often invisibly. And it's mildly addicting. Great! The foodlike-substance industry loves it.

Overt and covert
There are two categories sugar in foodstuffs: overt and covert. Overt sugar is any obvious "sugar delivery system," meaning something everybody knows has sugar in it: cakes, candy, doughnuts, breakfast cereal and pastries, sodas. This category also includes sugars you add yourself: maple syrup on pancakes, honey, or granulated sugar sprinkled on stuff or scooped into your morning coffee. Et cetera ad infinitum.

The sneaky sort of sugar is covert, meaning hidden or partially hidden: sugar going by different names on labels, or quietly added to things you wouldn't normally think of as a dessert or a sweet. For example, in 1989 a McDonald's hamburger had 2.6 grams of sugar in it, but now that's risen to 10 grams. Ten! That's equivalent to two and a half teaspoons of table sugar. In a hamburger. You've got to be careful out there.

Here are a few of the covert sugars I watch out for when I'm trying to kick sugar:

• Jellies and jams
• Yogurt
• Sushi
• Ketchup
• Pan loaf (i.e.,"bread")
• Barbeque sauce
• Fruit juice
• Peanut butter

Jellies and jams are made with copious amounts of sugar. Contrary to received wisdom, yogurt is not healthy—it's pudding. Most of it is loaded with sugar. It's not food; it's dessert. There might be a few yogurt types that you can purchase that are plain and real, with no added sugar, but good luck finding them in an American supermarket. Sushi is the rice, not the fish. Sushi rice is made with vinegar and sugar; it's eaten as a dessert or a sweet treat in Japan [CORRECTION: The clause with the strikeout is wrong; see Christian's Featured Comment below]. It's deeply beloved of sugar addicts who are certain it's the one "healthy" food they really like. I love it—it's my favorite food—but it's sugar. How do I know? See below under "Cravings." Sushi triggers my cravings when I'm trying to avoid sugar. Ketchup, a.k.a. catsup, surprises a lot of people. Homemade ketchup is made of tomato paste, vinegar, maybe a spice or two such as mustard powder, and sugar. A lot of sugar. Ketchup should be thought of as sugar sauce. A tablespoon of ketchup has a teaspoon of sugar in it. By weight, ketchup has more sugar in it than Coca-Cola. Pan loaf is supermarket bread, the kind that's in loaf shape (or as hot dog and hamburger buns) sold in plastic bags in the "bread" section of the supermarket rather than the bakery section. It has all sorts of additives in it, including, usually, lots of sugar—up to a whole teaspoon per slice. Pepperidge Farm Farmhouse brand Honey White bread has six grams of sugar per slice, five of which are added—that's one and a half teaspoons of sugar in each slice! A clue as to what you're eating is how long it lasts. Pan loaf will last a week or even two with no problem. Real bread goes stale in one day or two and gets moldy within 4–6 days. Pan loaf is not real bread. It's engineered fake bread. But it's pushed all the daily bakeries that used to be all over everywhere in America out of business. And if you do find a bakery, the last thing it will sell is un-sugared bread.

I used to pick one of the last available low-sugar barbeque sauces. Then it suddenly had a "NEW AND IMPROVED" blaze on the label, and sure enough, they had sextupled the sugar content. Try to buy a pre-made sugar-free or low sugar barbeque sauce from an American supermarket now; bet you can't. Fruit juice is one of the great swindles of the entire supermarket, hiding in plain sight. So many advertise "100% Real Juice." That's true, but it's mostly apple juice, which is very close to plain sugar water. Add chemical flavoring and coloring, and sometimes a small amount of real juice from whatever fruit it's supposed to be the juice of, as if the purveyor were honest, and voilà, 100% Real Juice. It's actually worse than soda because it masquerades in plain sight as something that's supposedly healthy. Peanut butter is low in sugar only if it's one of those additive-free "natural" peanut butters, which are either made with only peanuts, or peanuts with a little salt. But bear in mind that some peanut butters with "Natural" in the title, such as JIF Natural, are not natural, lower-case n. The most heavily sugared peanut butters have a teaspoon of sugar in every two tablespoons, so only half as much as ketchup. But still a lot.

Sugar is relatively easy to kick compared to most addictive drugs. It takes four days of abstaining to get over the worst of the cravings, and a mere two weeks to get off it entirely. [UPDATE: See Bear.'s comment in the Comments Section.] But, and it's a big but, avoiding relapse is especially difficult, not only because temptation is everywhere, but because people persistently feel that "it's not that bad" or that it's okay in moderation.

Cravings
Ah, but there's the rub. Eating sugar, for sugarholics—sorry, those who have a sweet tooth—is a trigger. Sorry for using the language of political correctness, but it's apropos here. Eating sugar triggers cravings: cravings for more sugar, sure; but there's also plenty of evidence that eating sugar to excess also increases appetite, and cravings, for all foods. You eat more if you feed on sugar. That's also great for the processed food industry, whose mission is to get you to buy as much product as possible.

Add it all up and it's not easy to reduce your sugar dependency. I'm working on it. Wish me luck. And with TypePad, too.

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:

Terry Letton: "You think sugar is insidious, try avoiding salt. Whatever you eat if you don’t make it completely from scratch it’s got salt in it, and probably a lot of it."

Peter Conway: "Last weekend my wife and I were picking up some dog treats to bring to a friend, and we had a surprisingly hard time finding ones without added sugar. Who’s the sugar for??? Can’t be the dog! Maybe it’s in case the humans decide to taste the treats?"

Christian Cael: "As a decades-long reader I say with utmost respect that as a decades-long resident of Japan I can assure you that while sushi vinegar does contain sugar people here do not consider it a sweet and do not eat it as dessert."

Mike replies: Thanks Christian. I added a correction to the text.

ugo: "Yes, but the profiterole...I've eaten one when I was a kid and, oh my, it did taste good. Yum. We're going towards a healthy future with no sugar, no salt, no coffee, no reckless driving, no toying with firearms, no swimming in shark-infested waters, no tickling the alligator's tail."

Mike replies: My stance in the post doesn't have anything to do with crushing joy or being averse to risk and adventure. I did make a foundational decision years ago to be honest with my readers, but, in this case, exact honesty with specific examples would be embarrassing. What I didn't describe to you was the extent of my sugar addiction. It ain't pretty. I display distinctly addictive behaviors around sugar. I'm not a normal mature adult in this respect. Okay, one example: I once drove the 15-mile round trip to town to get a Baby Ruth. Okay, now I am ashamed.  :-O

Quitting or at least cutting down is a logical, explicable, and desirable goal in my particular individual case. You'll have to take my word for that. If you'll also please accept my word that I am not telling you or anybody else what to do! You may have your profiterole.