The Online Photographer

The Best Camera, According to CR

The "Top Picks of the Year" issue of Consumer Reports (CR), November/December 2023, arrived in the mailbox a little while back. I don't subscribe to any paper magazines except The New Yorker, but you get CR as a paper magazine if you pay for access to the website. This issue features full rankings on cooking appliances—oven, ranges, and cooktops—as well as "The Best Cameras from Our Tests."

Cooking appliances did not fare so well. CR looks askance at cooking appliances. Microwaves especially—the pages for microwaves were full of light green (merely good) and yellow (middling or neutral) bars. With few dark green bars (the best rating) to be found. According to CR, the best microwave you can buy, a standout in a sea of mediocrity, is the Panasonic NN-SE7-85S.

So I was almost...well, proud when I came to the Mirrorless Cameras page. Solid dark green bars almost all the way to the bottom, and an unbroken string of those black checkmarks-in-circles that mean "CR Recommended." That's not the only page; there are seven more mirrorless cameras on the page before this one (all CR Recommended) and 13 more on the following page. All of the latter are the lighter green for "good," but even the lowest-rated camera they listed—the Olympus OM-D M10 Mark IV and 14–42mm—did not fall so low as to earn a yellow bar, the meh rating. However, 11 of 13 at the bottom of the list did fail to win the coveted Recommended checkmark.

I know, I know—we don't need no stinkin' CR to choose our cameras. We are way past that. I was just kinda proud, as I say—according to CR, our whole category be boppin'. We strong. They don't like microwaves. They do like cameras.

Top recommendations overall? The Fuji X-T4 (whut? Right, 4) with the 16–80mm OIS lens is No. 1, and the Fuji X-T4 is in second place as well! Paired with the 18–55mm OIS. That seems a little out there, but hey, their house, their rules. The Nikon Z6 with 24–70mm S rounds out the top three (they recommend the plain Z6, but I linked to the Z6II. You can search out a non-II if for some reason you really have to have CR's third-best camera recommendation).

I'm almost right there with them—my top recommendation, for people who do not have a camera at all and want one—which includes virtually not one single person reading this—is a Fuji X-T5 body (Amazon agrees with me; it's their Top Pick too) with the 35mm ƒ/2 Fujicron as a first lens. I'd actually prefer the ƒ/1.4, but that's not a mainstream recommendation any more. I prefer the X-T5 because it has the World's Most Perfect Viewing Screen (IM Hmbl. O) and the 40-MP sensor for great big prints. The X-T4 has the flip-out screen (an anomaly in the X-T[x] line) and the (slightly) older 26-MP sensor which is merely wholly adequate for 99.9% of everything your might ever want or need to do with it. I ought to do an X-T5 vs. Z6II shootout sometime. Who else cares?

But the Fuji X-T4 is the Honda Accord of cameras. Or rather, the Hyundai Santa Fe Hybrid of cameras (that's CR's top pick in vehicles over $30k).

That's random
Oh, and, the weirdest thing the entire issue calls out? Features, even, picture and all? The Kohler Moxie BT showerhead, which they rate highly for its performance as, ahh, well, a showerhead. What makes it weird? It's got a speaker in it. Because naturally. And you thought the folks at CR were all practical and fuddy-duddy and buzzkill! They sing in the shower too.

Mike

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

Featured Comments from:

Kirk W.: "That takes me back to about 1983, when, inspired by my uncle Stu with his Minolta SRT-101 and my eighth grade science teacher’s patience with us as we learned how to thread film on to developer tank reels (shout out to Mr. Jacobsen!), I was in search of my first 'real' camera. I dropped my hard-earned berry picking and haying income on the top-rated Consumer Reports camera, the Pentax ME Super. I remember poring over that list for hours, even pre-internet, being dazzled and paralyzed by the range of choices. There were Nikons and Canons and Minoltas and Olympuses of course, but I can still remember some more obscure brands as well, such as Topcon, Konica, and Ricoh. Looking back now, that was not the ideal way to buy into a camera system, but it did work out. The camera still works like new (at least the last time I ran some film through it) after decades of use and abuse. And it will still be ready to go long after my current magic digital cams are obsolete."

robert e: "Actually, I think we camera geeks do need a 'stinkin' CR'...to help us recommend gear suitable for non-geeks (or for when we want a more casual, forgiving or incognito camera)."

Niels: "My parents always selected larger household acquisitions based on the CR equivalent in my country. They chose the best rated item within their budget—and often that meant buying at a lower price than they originally expected. I think it served them well—I never heard them complain about purchases done this way, although they were generally quick at complaining about a lot of other things.

"When I left home, my mother gave me a subscription to the magazine, but I could never use it the way they did. My compulsive behaviour of researching the life out of anything that I plan to purchase prohibits me from just picking from a list, although it could have saved me much energy it seems: for my first full frame mirrorless camera, I ended up buying a Nikon Z6 with the 24–70mm S—and I am very happy with it! I would never have thought my preferred product would be at the top of such a list. Maybe my requirements aren't as special as I think?

"I should possibly revise my behaviour, although I'm afraid it would violate my nature."

David Dyer-Bennet: "My first SLR was chosen largely as a result of the Consumer Reports rating. In 1969 (bought late in December).

"It was a Miranda Sensorex, and it was not a very good choice for me. I largely liked the quirks, like a removable pentaprism, a bottom-weighted meter (the sensor actually on the mirror), and a front-mounted shutter release (it was considerably easier to hold really steady for vertical shots that way) [Burt Keppler of Pop Photo also liked the front-mounted shutter releases. —MJ]. But it didn't have the range of lenses, especially fast telephotos, that Nikon did. I think Pentax or Nikon would have been better choices for me at that time. (With access to hindsight, definitely Nikon.)

"Of course, as I figured out later, they are rating cameras for, gosh, 'Consumers,' as it says on the cover, and even then I was not anything like a normal consumer of cameras.

"They are the only consumer testing outfit I've encountered who have any understanding of statistics and quality control and such (they get multiple samples through normal distribution channels and test those). But the things they choose to measure and the priority they assign to various things is very much consumer-oriented."

Amazon Warehouse

Ta-dah!

I post this not because you need to know every little thing about my everyday life, but because I wanted to alert you to "Amazon Warehouse" for your photographic purchases. I saved about $65 by buying this in "Used Like New" condition from Amazon Warehouse, options which appear on the page for the item in the right-hand column and down a bit, in the rectangle that is slightly grayed out (see inset). When it arrived it appeared to be an open-box item, but otherwise new.

On the small faucet, for drinking water, I saved about $40 (the new price has been reduced since I bought mine). The one I got was also intact in new packaging but in a re-taped box.

It doesn't look like going to Warehouse directly is likely to be very satisfying—first of all, when I click on "Cameras and Photo," three of the "Sponsored" items that come up are fishing waders, a subwoofer, and peanuts, which seems—how shall I say it—a tad lacking in focus. And the photographic items I sampled did not make it clear what the normal new price is, or made it seem like the Warehouse price was the new price. I was a bit confused.

In any event, this might be something to look out for when shopping on Amazon. Look around the page and see if you can find offers.

Tradeoffs
As far as the new faucets are concerned, I have a feeling I have just bought a present for the next owners of my house. But hey, you gotta have a faucet that works, right? Falls under the category of routine maintenance.

By the way, my Q&D research indicates that "pull-down sprayer" faucets are not especially long-lived. The pull-down parts are under-engineered, and they tend to fail when the faucet ("tap" in Britspeak) is still relatively young, like my old one did (its age: between seven and 11 years). But they're handy. I wouldn't pay $600 for one, or even $400. But you can make your own calculation about that.

Mike

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

Featured Comments from:

Kye Wood: "I'm all for savings. But open box on house hardware is beyond my risk appetite. Scene: plumber arrives. You present the box to him. He opens it and says 'where's the flange thread adapter? It should be in here.' But it probably fell out or was, um...'borrowed,' by the person who opened the box originally. Sure, you can send it back to Amazon. But you've got to eat the plumber's call-out fee and minimum charge. Semper vigilance or carpe widget."

Mike replies: You've just adroitly exposed the risk I took to save that ~$100. Good thing I didn't think of any of that beforehand, because it might have paralyzed me!

Tim Urban Did a TED Talk in the Past

If you're a procrastinator, Tim Urban nailed it once and for all.

His thesis...well, I won't spoil it.

But a similar thing to what he first claimed about his thesis once actually happened to me. I was a freshman at Dartmouth taking an art history course, and near the end of the term we were given two and a half weeks to write a 10-page paper which was to be a big part of our grade. The paper was due at 4:30 on a Tuesday afternoon, just before the professor left her office for the day.

Those were the days before personal computers. It was normal to write a paper in longhand, with a pencil, on lined paper, and then type it on a typewriter to be turned in. As a completely unnecessary aside, I will mention that I completely visualized a laptop computer one day in 1976 while failing to take notes in an astronomy class, right down to the folding book-like design and just about the exact size that laptops eventually turned out to be; the size gauged, of course, by the needed keyboard. My mental image was just about like a current MacBook Pro, although the real MacBook Pro can do a lot more than I was able to imagine. I believe that ideas of coming things often occur to many people's minds just before the things actually come into existence, like the idea of photography occurred to many people's minds in the 1820s and '30s. My imagined laptop was just what I would have needed to take notes in the astronomy class that was happening at that moment—if you overlook, conveniently, the fact that I could not type.

I had it in mind what I wanted to write, but, the day before the paper was due, I still had not actually written anything. So, I thought—calmly—I'll just write the paper today and type it tomorrow.

That I did not do. 

So, with the panic monster still not present, I realized that I would have to pull an all-nighter. No big deal; my sleep problems at the time included an inordinately long circadian cycle, so I was in the habit of pulling at least one all-nighter a week, sometimes just to get myself back in approximate sync with the World's inconveniently short 24-hour clock. So I settled down on my bed with a yellow pad and three sharp pencils and got to work...

...And woke up the next morning with one paragraph on the yellow pad and seven and a half hours to go till the paper was due.

So I composed the paper on the typewriter. What else? There was nothing else left. Typewriters, if you don't remember them, were basically a write-once medium. You could correct little mistakes with Wite-Out, a brand of correction fluid, which itself was invented, and I kid you not, by Bette Nesmith Graham, the mother of future Monkees guitarist Michael Nesmith, who wrote "Mary, Mary," which was later recorded by Run-D.M.C., a founding member of which, Jam Master Jay, was murdered in 2002. (Down, Instant Gratification Monkee*.) You rolled the paper upwards, painted out the mistake, and retyped over it. This was best for small, infrequent mistakes, and more of a PITA if the mistake happened at the bottom of a page. Typing is not a good medium for on-the-fly rewrites. I always say I would never have been a writer if it wasn't for the Macintosh; I've already done more corrections, rewriting, revising, and reshuffling on this little post than would have been possible on a typewriter.

Anyway, I worked at an intense pitch at the typewriter without food or beer for seven hours and fifteen minutes straight.

Well, not exactly straight; in the middle of page seven, I suddenly typed, in a fit of tension-induced mirth, "Quack quack, I am a duck! Ducks do not have to write art papers...", and then proceeded to type three utterly inane paragraphs from the point of view of the duck, chucking maniacally the while. My dormmates at our end of the hall somehow did not find this funny. In my pressurized delirium I was temporarily serious about turning in the duck version, reasoning that the professor, sick of reading papers, would be delighted by the sudden turn. My roommate Roosevelt Morris patiently talked me off the ledge and got me to re-type page seven and get underway again.

I ran across campus and dropped the finished paper in the slot at about 4:28 p.m. The rumor was that at 4:30 sharp, the professor removed the basket inside the mail slot and replaced it with a wastebasket. Or maybe I'm conflating one professor with another. It was a long time ago.

I got an A on the paper. Really. It was possibly the worst thing that ever happened to me, from an academic-process standpoint.

By the way, Dartmouth traditionally did not give grades of A+; A was the highest grade you could get. The idea was that A sufficiently described excellence, and nothing more was needed. Cf. "Mint+++" on eBay: "Mint" does all the work by itself, and therefore cannot meaningfully be plussed. The only thing higher than A was a College Citation for excellence. I later got an A and a Citation in an English class. I'm not even sure Citations were ever given for mere papers.

Anyway, this turned out to be bad for me because it made me believe, wrongly, that I could perform adequately at the very last, last minute. What I failed to realize was that an essential component of last-minute performance was panic, as a motivator, and, if you suffered from the belief that you could do whatever was needed at the very last minute, then you did not panic.

Tim Urban nails all this much better than I just did.

YouTube is an interesting phenomenon. Yes, it's in the process of being ruined by commercialism. (One of my personal axioms is "commercialism ruins everything.") But it's still functioning, more or less, at this late date. It's a giant morass of drek with the occasional absolute gem buried deep within. Not unlike the process of moving tons of earth and stone using industrial methods to find single little nuggets of gold. Although not efficient—nowhere is there meaningful editing or culling—it's still a true pleasure when you unearth, or are given, one of those gold nuggets.

And this is one. This might strike the more disciplined amongst ye like the duck in my art paper struck Rosey Morris, but it made me smile and LOL (yes, actually OL) the whole way through. (Biggest laugh: the bit about getting to know India.) Big thanks to reader Patrick, who gave us this big, fat nugget this morning. And thanks, of course, to Tim Urban—who can not only say he did a TED Talk once, but that he did a great one. I'm sure I'll watch it four more times, as I usually do when I find these rare bits of true YouTube treasure.

Mike

*You saw what I did there.

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

Featured Comments from:

Joe: "Oliver Burkeman's book Four Thousand Weeks and his twice-monthly letter are right on point for these issues. (And his first book, The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking, (obviously on a different topic) is one of my all-time nonfiction favorites.)"

Mike replies: I wrote about The Antidote here. Great book, one of my favorites from this year's reading so far.

Neil Partridge: "I have been a very infrequent visitor to TOP over the last five years due to house moves...family events...and not having the time to take any photos (other than snapshots with a phone). Something nudged me this week to return and I encountered this wonderful video about procrastination. I have recently been wondering whether I should ask for a very late diagnosis of something which has caused decades of depression and an inability to focus. I have only watched the first five minutes, literally laughed OL several times, and found the idea of the Instant Gratification Monkey 100% accurate. Thanks for a timely post, and I look forward to browsing five years of missed posts."

J D Ramsey: "The TED talk was brilliant! The scariest part came at the end with the boxes representing the weeks of a 90-year life. Wait, there are so few! How can that be? OMG, there goes my Panic Monster."

Charles Jacobs: "Mr. Urban is close. But the instant gratification monkey and panic monster are the exact same entity. It is a Clark Kent/Superman issue. You never see both at the same time. When the deadline is close, the highest level of instant gratification is completing the job (with the potential superwin of getting high praise for a job well done.)"

Mike replies: Incisive insight! You may be right!

Open Mike: Peak Track (OT)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mike

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

Featured Comments from:

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

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

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

The Ugliest House Ever

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bad design, like entropy, never rests.

Mike

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

Featured Comments from:

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

Mike replies: You got me.  :-)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Around the Web: Signs, Portents, and...Falcons?

AI anyone?

"In recent months, the signs and portents have been accumulating with increasing speed. Google is trying to kill the 10 blue links. Twitter is being abandoned to bots and blue ticks. There’s the junkification of Amazon and the enshittification of TikTok. Layoffs are gutting online media. A job posting looking for an 'AI editor' expects 'output of 200 to 250 articles per week.' ChatGPT is being used to generate whole spam sites. Etsy is flooded with 'AI-generated junk.' Chatbots cite one another in a misinformation ouroboros. LinkedIn is using AI to stimulate tired users. Snapchat and Instagram hope bots will talk to you when your friends don't. Redditors are staging blackouts. Stack Overflow mods are on strike. The Internet Archive is fighting off data scrapers, and 'AI is tearing Wikipedia apart.' The old web is dying, and the new web struggles to be born."

That's a quote from an article on The Verge called "AI is killing the old web, and the new web struggles to be born." The whole article is worth a read. Especially interesting (ominous?) is the notion of Avram Piltch, Editor-in-Chief of Tom's Hardware, that Google might soon be moving away from helping people search for independent information and moving toward simply appropriating it. (Power corrupts, and....)

Disneyfication at National Geographic
Elsewhere in the news, The National Geographic just fired the last of its staff writers, according to multiple sources including tweets from two of said writers, continuing an already-ongoing process of Disneyfication. Disney bought a controlling 73% interest in the 135-year-old National Geographic Society's NG Publishing unit in March 2019. The National Review commented, "...the news that the illustrious magazine National Geographic has laid off all of its last remaining staff writers is a demonstration that we, as a society, have largely chosen to stop paying for news or entertainment, with far-reaching consequences for our lives."

Poetic?
You could be excused for thinking the World currently has a bit of an apocalyptic edge or tinge to it, what with the onslaught of AI, political disunity, the American Midwest currently under a shroud of wildfire smoke, and Texas "rivaling the hottest locations on the planet, including the Sahara Desert and parts of the Persian Gulf," according to NBC. Might be a good time to refresh our familiarity with this poem by William Butler Yeats (pronounced "yates," as you might know.)

The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre   

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere   

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst   

Are full of passionate intensity.

 

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.   

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out   

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert   

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,   

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,   

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it   

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.   

The darkness drops again; but now I know   

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,   

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,   

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

It just occurred to me that "The Second Coming" might be the greatest poem I know. (The best two-stanza one, for sure.) Better than any horror movie in my view (sorry) and as prescient as Orwell. Always given me goosebumps.

Smoke?
I'm only on the edge of the Canadian wildfire smoke currently, but the AQI here is the worst it's been, 178. The problem is 2.5 nm and smaller particles, small enough to get deep into your body and wreak havoc. To put you in context, a typical human hair is 100,000 nanometers in diameter, so, no, you can't see or feel these particles directly. If science tells you something but you can't sense it, do you tend to believe it anyway? The guy who sold me my house neglected to inform me that the radon level in the basement was 56, because he didn't "believe" in radon*.

You can see the smoke particles as a grayish-yellowish haze when looking at distant objects, even on a sunny day, and if you feel a burning in your eyes or in the back of your throat, you're probably breathing too much of it. You also might not "smell smoke": the VOCs in wildfire smoke generally lose their smell after about 24 hours, so, depending on how long it took to get to you.... Counterintuitively, being farther away from wildland fires is actually more dangerous to peoples' health than being close to one, because many people dismiss the dangers if they can't see flames or smell smoke, or if the smoke isn't thick. I just saw a woman pass by walking her dog.

Fight back!

If you can, stay indoors, don't exert yourself, get into the habit of checking AQI every morning when you check the weather, and get an air purifier, for whatever little room you spend most of your time sitting around in. The one I bought is the Coway Airmega AP-1512H Mighty. The Wirecutter, the product review arm of the New York Times, says, "After nine years, during which we’ve tested more than 50 different air purifiers, we believe that the exceptional Coway Airmega AP-1512HH Mighty is the best among them—as we have since 2015." The otherwise identical Coway 200M, available from the same link, has a more conventional appearance and has control lights that you can turn off, making it better for the bedroom. Both are quiet and efficient. Both are economical, to buy and to run. Available in white or black.

Getting to the point
Oh, and the point I started out wanting to make? TOP doesn't use AI. There is no TOP bot. It's just little ol' flesh-'n'-blood me, aging but game, sitting on the front porch at TOP Rural World Headquarters hunt-and-pecking away at a keyboard. No ChatGTP, no AI, no funny business, with my longstanding and finely-honed (albeit not infallible) instincts for that increasingly rare mental skill, "the evaluation of competing claims."

Same as it ever was.

Well, except for the air purifier.

Don't let it all get you down,

Mike
(Thanks to Jay Townsend and George Andros)

*The official safe level is 4 pCi/L (picocuries per liter), but that was "negotiated for" by the realty industry. The real safe level is 2.5 pCi/L. My sellers cured the issue by paying for abatement after the sale. The current level in my basement hovers around 1.1. I don't spend a lot of time down there.

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

Featured Comments from:

Smoke Time-Lapse

The air quality is bad again today. But check out the astonishing (and, in its way, beautiful) time-lapse image in this article. (You have to scroll down.) Wow. I live straight above the "w" in "New York" on that map, about halfway up New York State, so, as you can see, we're right in the path. Normally, the air quality where I live is unusually good.

But consider that amazing time-lapse map for a sec. To think, Europeans were migrating across the North American continent in wooden wagons pulled by oxen as recently as a hundred and forty years ago; ruts from wagon wheels are still visible on some of the heavily traveled trails to this very day. And now we can make a map like that one from a satellite. The rate of change boggles the mind.

Mike

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

Featured Comments from:

I-R Is Gone

Imaging-Resource, which has been sputtering and dying for some time now, is finally completely gone. Thom Hogan has the whole story on ByThom, which is not gone.

The other of the Big Two major gear sites of the transition period, DPReview, Thom notes, is still on life support "for some reason."

Mike

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

Featured Comments from:

The $20k Car (Culture Notes) (OT)

I had to un-stick the sticky. For some reason, sticky posts make traffic drop. I guess too many people look at the same headline on their devices and just assume that nothing new has been posted.

Just a little note in passing. In 1976, when I was 19, my Aunt Anne, who was an heiress but frugal most of her life, treated herself to an extravagance: a top-of-the-line Mercedes-Benz. It was a 450SEL, and it cost $20,000.

A few years later, my father decided to buy my mother a Mercedes like her sister's as a birthday or maybe anniversary present. I went to the dealer with him. He owned a 1971 Buick Electra 225, and he was fond of saying, when I asked if I could borrow the Buick, "son, that's a six-thousand-dollar automobile." As in, too expensive to risk with the likes of you. A Cadillac, which was what my father really wanted but which I had talked him out of because the writers in Car & Driver scorned them, was the only American car you could buy that was more expensive. When we went to the Mercedes dealership, my father asked to look at the second most expensive Mercedes, one down from the top of the line. My father did not approve of foreign cars, I should add, and he was frugal too, having been born in the year of the Crash with parents who were scarred by the Depression. He looked the car over on the showroom floor, skeptically, and asked his favorite question, "how much?"

I don't know what he expected.

"You won't spend more than twenty thousand dollars," the salesman answered. To express his high dudgeon at that, my father ostentatiously said not one more single word to the salesman, and walked out of the dealership in silence. He expressed his indignation rather more floridly at me on the ride home. My mother did not get her new car.

Inflation is a thing
An article at The Street, by Jena Greene, posted yesterday, points out that now, there are only three new cars left in America that sell for less than $20,000. She names them:

• Kia Rio subcompact sedan: starting at $17,875
• Mitsubishi Mirage hatchback: starting at $17,340
• Nissan Versa sedan: starting at $16,925

I read once, a long time ago, that peoples' sense of the value of money tends to calcify at about age 50. We're mentally flexible up till that point, but afterwards it increasingly starts to seem like everything costs too much. I don't know if that's true.

I'm off this morning to Syracuse, to help my neighbor and her daughter pick up the daughter's new Honda. I don't know what the sticker price is, but I do know it costs more in nominal dollars than my Aunt's fancy Mercedes. Time marches on.

Mike

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

Featured Comments from:

Gary: "I don't know if it's true that a person's perception of the value of money tends to calcify at age 50. I do know that inflation of late has been very real. I have a phrase to describe the phenomenon: Everything Everywhere Twice as Much."

garlo: "According to the St. Louis Fed, median sales price of house sold in the US back in Q4 1976 was only $45,500. That is less than 1/10 of sales price by the end of Q4 2022. So I guess car price inflation is not as bad as that of housing cost? Thanks for your efforts to keep this educational site running. Much appreciated."

Stan B.: "I distinctly remember a professor in my second year of college complaining (circa '74) that "there's absolutely no way you can get a new car for less than $2,000!" That afternoon at the school library I saw a print ad for a new Beetle- '$1,998.'"

Mike replies: I took my first driving test days after my 16th birthday, but I had already been saving up for a car for two years at that time. My dad had said he would put me on his insurance, which in those days made insurance for an additional car cheap. As soon as I had enough for a decent used car, my dad changed his conditions—he specified that he would only add me to his insurance if I bought a new car (he didn't actually want me to succeed). So I buckled down and started saving for that sub-$2k VW. But that was the early '70s, one of the times in history when the prices of cars skyrocketed. Every time I started to get close to the cost of the cheapest new car, the cost of it would go up. My memory for numbers is poor, but I believe by the time I had enough for that VW, the cheapest car in America cost $3,600. Maybe it was $3,300. I believe it was a Toyota. Anyway the target kept moving, and I eventually gave up. I ended up not getting my first new car until I was about 30. I believe it cost about $7,500.

Lois Elling: "My parents were both pretty frugal, having lived through the depression. My dad had a good-paying job that he loved, but always bought used cars and worked on them himself. Until he retired, that is, when he took my mom to a Lincoln dealership. Being six feet tall, he wanted something with plenty of headroom. I heard later that she asked him while they were there, 'Herman, do you realize where you are?' Although he was thrifty, he also knew when it was important to spend money for quality—or comfort. He did come home with that Lincoln."

Lawrence Plummer: "But, but, a $20K car in 1976 is $108,574.10 in 2023 dollars!!!"

JH: "I've mentioned before that I've owned a lot of cars in 60 years of driving, so below is the list of all I can remember and the prices on the ones I bought new.

"But first, comments on some car prices. Back in the mid-1960s my brother ran a dealership in Nashville that sold Porsche, Alfa Romeo, Mercedes Benz, Ferrari and a few other European brands you never heard of like Borgward. I do remember some of the prices.

"Around 1963–4, an Alfa Giulietta Spider cost ~$3,000 and a Porsche 356 closer to $4,000. The first Porsche 911's were around $6,000 but the 912 came soon after at under $5,000.

"I think the Mercedes sedans were priced at ~$4,000–6,000 except for the 600 series. One year my brother sold two 600s to executives at Monument Records, both over $20,000. Coupes and convertibles of the 300 series were in the $12–15,000 range.
Ferraris were around $14,000 and my brother sold several each year, one to the son of an oilman who went to Vanderbilt U down the street—his father gave him one each year when he made Dean's List!

"In those days, auto transporter companies were reluctant to carry cars over about $10,000 so we often got a trip to pick them up at the docks and drive them back to Nashville. I drove a $14,000 Mercedes coupe from Mobile back to Nashville once—nearly got thrown in jail in Tupelo, Mississippi, but fortunately had enough cash to pay off the local cops and Justice of the Peace late on Saturday night.

"JH Cars (in order of acquisition), starting when I got my drivers license in 1962. Prices are approximate—memory fades...."

'55 Dodge two-door HT (family)
'57 Ford two-door Coupe (family)
'57 Mercedes Benz 219 long wheelbase/limo
'59/'61 Fiat 1200 (counts twice—became a '61 after being totaled and rebuilt in a donor body)
'62 Alfa Spider (co-owned with brother, raced, sold in ’68, recovered in '93, raced for nine more years)
'67 Alfa TI Sedan traded for first Duetto in 1971 ($2,421—dealer cost—college graduation present from Father)
'68 Plymouth Sedan (company car)
'67 Alfa Duetto
'69 Alfa GT Jr 1,300
'69 VW Type 3 SW
My wife bought a new VW Super Beetle in 1970 for $1,700.
'71 Chevy Monte Carlo (company car) $4,000
'68 VW Bus
'71 Alfa GTV (used, < one year old) $3,000 (sold for $4,500 three months later)
'68 Rover TC2000
'73 Mazda RX-2 (first rotary car in New England) $3,100
'60 GSM Delta w/Holbay Ford 105E
'67 Alfa Duetto (different one)
'75 Ford Granada $4,000
'79 Dodge Omni. $3,000
'84 Pontiac 6000 SW (company car) (leased)
'63 Alfa Giulia Spider $1300, sold several years later for $20,000
'86 Plymouth Horizon (totaled by 240Z) $4,000
'89 Chevy Beretta
'74 Alfa Giulia Sprint GTV
'59 Alfa Giulietta Sprint (racecar) (totalled at Mosport, '93)
'59 Alfa Giulietta Sprint (parts car)
'89 Mercury Sable Sedan (company car) $7,000
'84 Corvette
'70 Zink C4 FV (racecar)
'91 Jeep Cherokee (company car) Tow car too $9,000
'62 Alfa Spider (second time around—see above, sold in 2002 and is still being raced in SCCA and vintage—you would not believe what racing it for 12 years cost!)
'94 Jeep Grand Cherokee (company car, tow car too) $18,000 (leased)
'59 Alfa Spider (racecar)
'73 Alfa GTV
'91 Mazda Miata (used—three years old) $10,000
'57 Alfa Spider w/Pininfarina Hardtop (sreet/racecar) $8,000, sold five years later for $22,000
'97 Jeep Cherokee (company car) Tow car too. $16,000 (leased)
'99 Jeep Grand Cherokee (company car) Tow car too $24,000 (leased)
'59 Alfa Giulietta Sprint (racecar, sold unfinished)
'01 BMW 330i $42,000
'02 MINI $23,000
'99 BMW 323Ci
'04 Ford F150 $20,000
'04 BMW M3 SMG $54,000 (sold for $47,000 after 18 months and thousands of track miles)
'05 Nissan Maxima $30,000
'94 Mazda Miata
'06 MINI John Cooper Works $35,000 (broke even when sold 18 months later)
'08 Nissan Frontier $20,000
'09 Ford F150 $24,000
'12 BMW 128i $38,000 (leased)
'11 VW Jetta Sportwagen TDI Diesel $24,000
'16 Mini Cooper $25,000 (leased)
'16 Honda CR-V $27,000
'21 Honda CR-V $31,000"

Mike replies: Impressive. My life-list is as follows:

• Ancient 1960s rusted-out Toyota, late '70s. A Dartmouth assistant professor flat-out cheated me when he sold it to me. He told me numerous flagrant lies, for instance, that the radio worked when it was simply a faceplate with nothing behind it. I had various misadventures in it (some of which were actual crimes, I'm sorry to admit—I drove it without registration or valid plates). Abandoned in a fraternity parking lot where a tree fell on it.
• New Mazda 323, maybe an '87? Can't remember the year. My mother paid for half of it as a graduation present from art school. Kept it for nine years.
• Dodge Neon "Sport," bought because David E. Davis named it "Car of the Year" at one of his magazines. Worst car I ever bought. It ran well and was nice and tight when new, but after three years it had lost performance badly and was as loose, rattley, and rickety as a 15-year-old car. There's a good reason that you almost never see old Neons on the road today.
• Ford Escort ZX2. Bought new. Kept it for nine years. Mine was a great little car, although other owners did not have good experiences (I always asked other owners when the opportunity presented itself.
• Used Mercedes C-Class. Drove it for two years and it lost $11k in value! The maintenance expenses cured me of any further GAS (CAS?) for German cars.
• Used 2001 Mazda Miata, my only-ever second car. Kept it for three years while I had the Mercedes and the RAV4 and sold it to a TOP reader to help finance my move to the Finger Lakes—which was the exact wrong move, because it would have been perfect for the roads around here, and in fact you see a lot of them here in the summer.
• 2012 Toyota RAV4, bought new on model closeout on 0% financing. Most expensive car I ever bought at $26k. I lost a lot of money on this one too, because I set myself up for five years of ownership and bailed on it early because I missed having a stick shift. It's still the only SUV I've ever driven—not owned, driven—apart from a couple of dealer test drives.
• 2014 Acura ILX 2.4, which has the same drivetrain as the 2014 Honda Civic Si. Nine years later it's still going strong at 114,000 miles, and I intend to try to keep it at least until 200k miles. It's the only car I've liked better when it's older than I liked it when it was new.

So that's eight cars in 50 years of driving. The Mercedes, Miata, and RAV4 were purchased in an orgy of self-indulgence during the years that TOP was making a lot of money. After years of pent-up desire I went wild!

Dave Levingston: "Now at least you can say that you've written your AutoBiography. (Sorry...someone had to say it.)"

Lee and Maria Friedlander Meet Joel Coen and Frances McDormand

As regular readers know (and might be tired of hearing), I refer to The New York Times as "The World's Best Photography Magazine"...although, of course, its photographic content tends to be interspersed with a whole lot of other stuff. And I recommend subscribing. If you don't subscribe, you can access up to 10 articles a month for free. Another way of getting everything is to subscribe to the print version of the Sunday paper, if it's available in your area, as that comes with all digital access included.

Anyway, a number of readers (thanks to all) have tipped me about this: "Filmmaker Joel Coen Puts His Spin on the Photos of Lee Friedlander: Working in his California home 3,000 miles away during Covid, the director struck a sympathetic chord with the venerated photographer. A book and two gallery shows resulted." Not to be missed.

Joel Coen at Cannes, 2001. Photo by Rita Molnár.

Lee Friedlander is, in Yr. Hmbl. Ed.'s humble opinion, one of the two greatest photographers of the second half of the twentieth century, and at age 88 he has published more than 50 books. Joel Coen (b. 1954) is one-half of the famous Coen Brothers film-making team (although recently they have been working separately), whose works include Raising Arizona (1987), Miller's Crossing (1990), Barton Fink (1991), Fargo (1996), The Big Lebowski (1998), O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000), No Country for Old Men (2007), True Grit (2010), Inside Llewyn Davis (2013), and The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018). And The Man Who Wasn't There from 2001, which is my favorite...because it's in black-and-white (please don't kill me, please).

Lee Friedlander, self-portrait, 1994

The catalyst of their project together was the San Francisco gallerist and book publisher Jeffrey Fraenkel, who started his gallery, now on Geary Street, in 1979. His second show back then was Lee Friedlander. 

A couple of quotes from the article I liked. Lee says of Joel, "he says all kinds of nice things that I don’t recognize. Splitting, splintering. Evidently my pictures are that way, but I didn’t think, ‘I want to take a splintering picture.’ If you’ve done the same thing for 60 years, you don’t think of motive very much. I just walk and see something interesting [...] it's just a great game." Joel says, "I’m extremely sympathetic to Lee’s point of view in how he thinks about his own work. It comes up with any writer, photographer or filmmaker, because you’re always asked to analyze your own process or the obsessions of your own work. I’ve always been very much of the opinion that the obligation of the person who makes the work is to make the work, and the obligation of the people who view the work is to think about it."

Most of Jeffrey's books are terrific—some of them are faves. I need another Friedlander book like I need a hole in the head (only because I have no place to shelve books here, and it's a problem)—but I had to order this one from the gallery. Too cool to pass up. The cost is close to $100, after shipping and tax are added. But hey, once they're gone....

Check out the article. Worth a read, and some good links. Thanks to everyone who suggested it.

Mike

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

Featured Comments from:

The Jeff Keller Article

I managed to track down Jeff Keller, who told me that the article I remembered is actually on DPReview, where he worked for almost nine years, beginning right after he closed the Digital Camera Resource Page—which, by the way, was the very first camera megasite, and lasted an impressive 15 years. (TOP is 17 years, 3 months, and 26 days old). Which made me slap my forehead and say, "of course." Not only did I read it when it first appeared, but I wrote about it once before, too. The brain cells where that information was once stored are apparently among the ones now missing.

It's called "Throwback Thursday: the ups and downs of running DCResource."

Mike

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

Featured Comments from:

The Earliest U.S. Veterans

Photo by N.A. and R.A. Moore (Nelson Augustus Moore and
his brother Roswell) of Hartford, Connecticut, 1864

I never knew this until robert e pointed it out yesterday: there exist photographs of Revolutionary War veterans. Some of the youngest soldiers lived into the era of photography. Evidently no one thought to photograph them in the 1840s, but the Reverend E.B. Hilliard wrote a book in 1864 called The Last Men of the Revolution that recounted the biographies of some of the last remaining veterans, and the book contained six albumen prints. The Library of Congress has a set, in the Prints and Photographs Division.

Lemuel Cook, pictured above, lived through the entirety of the Civil War and died just after it ended at the age of 106, the fourth-to-last living Revolutionary War veteran. He fought with the 2nd Continental Light Dragoons in the Virginia campaigns and at Brandywine, and was wounded more than once. He was present at the 1781 surrender of Lord Cornwallis to George Washington at Yorktown. His discharge papers in 1786 were signed by General Washington. Cook lived out most of the rest of his life in various counties here in Western New York State.

Mike

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

Featured Comments from:

Mani Sitaraman: "This is simply extraordinary. Seeing the photograph and reading the account gave me the chills. Thank you, Mike.

"And thank goodness for the French photographer Disderi's brilliant idea; he patented the idea of carte de viste photographs in the 1850s, which were trading-card-like photographs of famous people, for people to buy, collect in albums, or trade. That innovation ensured that so many portraits from that early age of photography have survived, as the commercial incentive ensured that numerous copies of each portrait were printed."

Carl Siracusa: "The closing exhibit of the Museum of the American Revolution here in Philadelphia, 'The Revolution's Veterans,' is a whole wall of photos of people who fought in, or simply lived through, that war. When I first saw it I had the same amazed reaction as most people, I assume—there are photos of them?!? Extraordinary, really. Worth visiting this excellent museum for that alone."

robert e: "Hi Mike, Just wanted to point out that even older photographs have turned up since the Hilliard book was published, including from the 1840s and 1850s. Some of them can be seen in this article. And I just learned today that Maureen Taylor, who calls herself 'The Photo Detective,' has published two volumes of photographs (and paintings based on photographs) of people who lived through the American Revolutionary War. The names of the over 100 subjects are on Taylor's own page about the project."

Michel Hardy-Vallée: "Reminds me of that comment by Roland Barthes about the photographs of the last surviving members of Napoléon's Grande Armée: 'these eyes have seen the Emperor.'"

Daniel: "One fact many don't realize is that until the invention of the permanent photographic image we do not know what anyone actually looked like. Many portrait painters through history did a good job but had to please the one who commissioned the painting. How accurate were these portraits? Maybe as accurate as many Photoshopped portraits being done now? Vanity interferes with historical truth."

Mike replies: Some of the Gnostic gospels refer to Jesus as being physically ugly, which might have been one of the reasons why those accounts were nixed at the Conference of Nicea and in St. Jerome's Vulgate.

Conspiracy Theory

Julian Ward, from the Hans Weston film

A couple of short video links this morning, both good.

First, meet Julian Ward, a photographer from Wellington, New Zealand, born 1948. The short film by Hans Weston, "Julian Ward: Gifts from the Gods," which shows him working both on the street and in the landscape, is informative and companionable. It introduced me to the work of the painter L.S. Lowry, too. Julian's pictures were mostly new to me; so far I've only recognized three that I've seen before. There's lots by and about him on the web, and he's published several books.

Second, a film about a comprehensive analysis to determine whether a notorious photo is real: "Why people think this photo of JFK's killer is fake," from Vox. The main expert consulted by the filmmakers is Hany Farid, one of the country's foremost experts specializing in the forensic analysis of digital images and the detection of manipulated images. He's at Berkeley now; the last time I wrote about him he was at Dartmouth. "The visual system didn't evolve over millions and millions of years to reason about about a flat piece of paper," Professor Farid says at one point. I won't give away the conclusion.

I also attempted to watch the 2020 Dutch film "The Forgotten Battle," alleged to be the second most expensive Dutch film ever made (I don't know what number one might be), because one of the plot points is a boy taking pictures that will be useful to the resistance, developing them in his basement. The film is so relentlessly brutal and gory that I couldn't take it, and had to bail on it halfway through. So, no further comment.

Mike
(Thanks to Allan Ostling)

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

Featured Comments from:

Nico.: "World War Two, The Netherlands, Photography…

"You could try The Darkroom of Damocles. A classic, over here. Nico, Amsterdam."

Mike replies: Thanks Nico, I'll try that.

Tom Burke: "'Zwartboek'—Black Book—is apparently the most expensive Dutch film ever made."

Pierre Charbonneau: "The film on Julian Ward is most lovely. I found interesting that a man so charming and gentle has the boldness to photograph so close strangers on the street. How different from Bruce Gilden's approach. Of course, their respective photos are not the same."

Jim Simmons: "Thanks for sharing the Julian Ward movie. Julian is a treasure to New Zealand, with his decades-long dedication to recording our culture with his uniquely kind and curious vision."

Photo News

—> From The Virginian-Pilot: "Longtime Virginian-Pilot freelance photographer dies after fall from parking garage." No foul play is suspected in the death of freelance photographer of Jason Hirschfeld, 48. His editor at the paper said, "He had a loud laugh and he definitely had a big personality. He just exuded positivity and enthusiasm."

—> From The New York Times: "The Risks That Define New York Times Magazine Photography: In her own words, Kathy Ryan, the director of photography for The New York Times Magazine, unpacks some of the biggest challenges of the last year."

—> From PetaPixel: "Nikon is Doing Everything Right." Jaron Schneider didn't think Nikon would recover from its financial woes. Now, he argues it has come back from the brink the old-fashioned way: with superior products.

—> From Visual Science Lab: Kirk Tuck is "Reporting in from the Central Texas Ice Storm. Nasty out there." It doesn't stop him from exercising, even though it closes the pool. At the end he gets down to the real peril: "Sadly, when the weather gets really bad my resistance to shopping for photo gear goes down. I've found several items online that are battering my will to resist." You can go find out what those are; I need to not look.

—> From Fstoppers: "An Effective, Professional One-Light Portrait Photography Setup." Alex Cooke highlights a video by Jiggie Alejandrino. Portraits indoors are a great winter pastime.

—> From DPReview: Richard Butler thinks Sony's new A7R V excels at still photography in his in-depth review.

—> From lensculture: In The Editorial Portrait, Lucy Conticello, Director of Photography at M, the weekend magazine of the French newspaper Le Monde, is interviewed by Sophie Wright and shares some of her insights. This republication of a 2019 article is part of a recent slew of articles on lensculture about photographic portraiture.

—> From Thom Hogan: "Why Do We Speculate About Future Products?" Thom says he has to, because his readers all do.

—> From NPPA: "University of Missouri announces the 77th College Photographer of the Year competition winners." Congratulations to Vincent Alban of RIT. "Judges viewed nearly 10,000 images submitted by 570 students from a record-setting 127 colleges and universities in 47 countries."

—> From LensRentals: "How Front Element Scratches Affect Your Images." Spoiler: they don't, much. But these guys are among the few who can show you. If you want to test the general principle yourself, without scratching your lens, tear off a bit of a Post-It about the size of a small pea and stick it to the front of your lens. Compare the result to a frame shot without it. Interesting, no?

Mike

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

Featured Comments from:

Speed: "From PetaPixel: 'Nikon is Doing Everything Right.' But...Nikon's biggest competitors in the camera business, Canon and Sony, are very much in the amateur/commercial/professional video business...and Nikon is not. Big moves in our lifetime: Film to Digital to DSLR; DSLR to Mirrorless; Still to Video. It looks like Nikon won't be making that last move."

Tam: "There is nothing wrong with what one of my blogfathers referred to as an 'All Linky, No Thinky' piece. All blogs are, at heart, a LOG of things we’ve found on the WEB…A WEB LOG, if you will.  ;-)  "

Andrew Bearman: "Love these curated links; thanks!"

Mike Ferron: "The little city I live in borders Austin, Texas, to the northeast. It looks like a powerful hurricane came through with amount of tree limbs that came down. The last night of the storm was the worst. You could hear one crash after another all night long as the big limbs fell. Crazy. The local weather said it was the worst ice storm in 60 years. Two and a half days of rain with the temps just below freezing."

The Story of 'Grace'

A 1918 photograph goes viral in a big way. The story is interesting—even if the truth behind the picture might be a little disillusioning. But then, we all know that things are not always what they seem in photographs, right?

Interestingly, I'm not aware of ever seeing this image before Jay Townshend sent me this video a few days ago. (Thanks to Jay.)

Another link people have been sending me: "You're Pointing Your Camera the Wrong Way," by Margaret Renkl. A quotation: "My son and daughter-in-law, who are frequent campers, have seen people queued up at least 50 deep to take phone selfies at popular national park waterfalls and rock formations."

Mike
Flickr page / New Yorker author page

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

Featured Comments from:

Jon Peterson: "We had it in our home. As a young lad just getting interested in photography (1970s), I used to joke with my mom that I wanted to steal the frame and put my own photo in it. Decades later, that same water-stained print in the same cheap, chipped frame hangs on my wall. Makes me think of my mom."

The Rest Is History

If you haven't seen this stunning animation yet, you need to. Not a big investment, takes only a few tragic seconds to look at. It tells a tale of many things. From Visual Capitalist, via Dan Carnagey.

Sadness and despond!

But I have my Sigma contraption (I need to name the blunt beastie) armed and ready for the return of the good light in the springtime. Never say die, never give up!

Mike
Flickr page / New Yorker author page

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

Featured Comments from:

Dogman: "I'm even more of a dinosaur than I thought!"

Greg Adkins: "Interesting, although it's important to note the inherent bias in comparing sales of dedicated cameras to that of a device with many features in addition to a camera. People choose and buy smartphones for a variety of uses that are unrelated to making photos."

Joe: "As long as Nikon keeps repair parts in stock for my Nikon D850, I'm happy."

Nick: "A smartphone camera is still a (very good) camera, and do we really care what sort of cameras are being sold to the masses, as long as the sort we want (flexible, controllable etc) are easily available? The advanced cameras and lenses available today are better than they have ever been, and the total number of photos being taken every day are more than ever before. I don't see anything tragic unless the major specialty camera manufacturers start to go out of business."

R. Edelman: "When I consider some of the tricks that my iPhone 13 can do, for example very low light hand-held images, I wonder why these tricks can't be incorporated in digital cameras. I understand that digital cameras and their lenses have image stabilization, and there are some with pixel shifting, but the iPhone seems to have software that enables it to perform photo miracles, such as taking a photo in very, very low light levels, that, if applied to larger digital cameras, would really add value to those cameras, and perhaps boost their sales to people who would like to move up to the next level of acquiring images."

Keith Cartmell: "Yes, smartphones have dramatically outsold both film and digital cameras. They have also outsold alarm clocks, portable radios, and other devices too numerous to name. But it's a bit of an apples to grapefruit comparison. Many of those phones are forced purchases because the completely adequate in most ways old one cannot run the newest software or is crippled by it, or the network was removed. (It happened to my wife and she's still cranky about it.) Or there is some new gewgaw offered that attracts the attention. (Look, shiny!) For many of them I suspect the camera is just one aspect of the overall functionality, but they didn't buy the phone because of the camera functionality. Maybe I'm wrong. Seems like most of the actual photographers I know are busy switching out their old DSLR for a new mirrorless camera, complete with new lens, and software that can already talk to our new AI overlords. Me? I'm happy carrying around my MMM cameras, metal, manual, mechanical."

Thom Hogan (partial comment): "...The thing no one is talking about in that animation is at the very end: smartphone sales peaked and are in an erosion pattern now. That's the reason why Apple wants to try to sell you a hardware subscription to the iPhone these days (yearly 'free' updates). What goes up, must come down. It's just a matter of time."

Ed. note: The full text of "partial comments" can be read in the full Comments Section, accessible in the footer of the post.

Eamon Hickey: "Miniscule point that nobody but me will ever care about, but the figures in that animation for periods before about 1980 are completely unreliable. The author clearly relied on CIPA historical data, because it's the only such data available, as far as I know. But it counts only Japanese cameras. Millions of cameras from American, European and Eastern Bloc manufacturers are not included. The graph shows 75,000 as the total cameras sold in 1951. That's way, way, way too low. Kodak by themselves would have sold many times that total just in the U.S."

I Don't Want to Farm

I was a Reedie* for a miserable year in the long-lost '80s, and met a Reedie when I was there who had developed a human developmental theory based in Gilligan's Island. The concept was that every human being can be explained by a major and a minor inflection of one of the Gilligan's Island characters. Gender did not have to match. So in his view I was a major of The Professor with a minor of Mary Ann. In other words, mainly distracted and remote, unbalanced in the direction of excessive intellectualism—too "heady"—but with a partially compensating dose of niceness and wholesomeness on the side. I hated to admit it, but....

An alternate theory of aggregated human wisdom is: there's a Mitch Hedberg joke for everything. The one that concerns us today is "Can You Farm?"

The video/stills divide
That's how I'm starting to feel about photography these days. (Oh, you like photography? What do you think of AI?) If you read behind the lines in the recent short interview with Panasonic's Yosuke Yamane published at DPReview (he gives a similar interview pretty much every year around this time), you get the sense he's being careful not to insult still photographers, while at the same time saying that Panasonic cameras will be ever more concerned about video. "Mirrorless, which has a strong affinity with video, is used in a wide range of applications, from professional video production, such as cinema production, to individual video production, such as YouTube. We believe that the need for individual video production will increase in the future." DPReview went on to comment that while there remain people who only take stills, "[Yamane] didn't make it sound like Panasonic would be the company to address that need."

You work your ass off to become a good cook. And then everybody wants you to farm. As Mitch put it, "that's not fair."

Mike

*Here's a recent article by Colin Diver, a past President of Reed College, about the oppressive consequences of the U.S. News and World Report college rankings and Reed's decision to buck the system.

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

Featured Comments from:

David Elesh: "As a Reedie myself, one of the things I am quite proud of was Reed's decision not to supply data to U.S. News. It may have been the first to make that decision. Stanford followed. I don't know how many institutions refuse now. When I checked the U.S. News formula some years ago, it placed significant weight on the percentage of alumni who contributed. I found that appalling and still do. It has little to do with academic quality. Yes, it is a significant factor in the decisions of those applying to college (and their parents), but so is the success of their athletic teams. At the university for which I taught, I saw that our basketball teams reaching the final four raised applications and fall enrollments by substantial amounts. I don't recall the exact percentage of the increase in applications, but I think it was around 20%. But the increase wasn't evidence of the students' academic ability."

Arg: "I grew up using Polaroid cameras and took perfectly photographic photos with them...only to discover that everyone wants me to go into a dark room and play with noxious chemicals. Don't want to. That's not photography."

Dan: "I’m going to sound like an old man yelling at the sky, but what improvements in still cameras do we need? They are already so good that even old ones far exceed artistic demands. Perhaps making then more fun to look at, fondle and use would actually be more effective at selling more units. Video is the next horizon and improvements there would be visible and marketable."

Peter Cameron: "I have little interest in video and, to he honest, I don’t even know if the video function worked on most cameras I’ve owned. Over the last 20 years I’ve probably taken fewer than 20 videos and most of those were B roll for the video department of the company I worked for. I realize wanting a stills oriented camera is niche these days, but I do appreciate manufacturers that let you reassign video buttons to other functions (or at least let you disable them so you don’t accidentally end up shooting video)."

Stephen S.: "For anyone chasing views/engagement on Instagram, it has been true for a while that the best way to do that is to forget about posting photos, and instead post short videos. That's right—Instagram is not for photos anymore."

Readings and Viewings

"Tony Vaccaro, 100, Dies; Photographed War From a Soldier’s Perspective," at the World's Best Photography magazine (the New York Times. You get ten free articles, but you should subscribe, because they publish a broad range of meaningful photographic content, from articles like this to original commissioned photojournalism and many other things besides). I had never heard of Tony Vaccaro before, but I like his work and I enjoyed this article. I especially liked reading the descriptions of his shooting technique. As an idle aside, if you had to choose between Karsh's photograph of Georgia O'Keefe and Vaccaro's picture of her looking through the piece of Swiss cheese, which would you choose? Those are two very different modes of what we call "photography."

# # #

An interesting picture of Dr. King from 1959. What's interesting about it is that it was taken by a Black photographer, Calvin Littlejohn, the chronicler of Fort Worth, Texas, who lived from 1909 t0 1993. A trope of modern criticism is the idea of the "gaze"—in other words, that the view cannot be separated from whomever is doing the viewing. To me it seems clear from the evidence that this was how Dr. King looked when he felt comfortable with the person who was taking his picture. Compare this with the more serious look we're used to seeing from Dr. King in his public role, when the ones doing the viewing were mostly representing the white-dominated media and, beyond them, the white world they worked for. For more about Calvin Littlejohn, see his bio at blackpast.org.

# # #

As long as I am on old pictures, readers of, er, a certain age will remember a famous picture from LIFE magazine of Lt. Col. Robert L. Stirm returning from a North Vietnamese prisoner of war camp and being greeted by his family on an airport runway. The picture is known by the title "Burst of Joy." A print, signed by the photographer, Slava "Sal" Veder, brought in by Stirm's daughter, known as "the leaping girl" or "the jumping girl," was appraised on the most recent episode of Antiques Roadshow. This link should take you to the segment, but, if it doesn't, the segment starts at 36:26. Sal Veder won the Pulitzer for his shot.

# # #

Mystery Man: Who is this? Hints: his arrest was for possession of more than 650 grams of cocaine, and he served two and a third years in prison following the bust. And the guy was really a Dick. (I'll post the answer tomorrow.)

UPDATE Thursday afternoon: A lot of you guessed this. It's "Tim 'The Tool Man' Taylor," a.k.a. actor/comedian Tim Allen, who was born Timothy Allen Dick. He was also the voice of Buzz Lightyear in the Toy Story movies, and now has a net worth that Fox Business reports to be $100 million. Allen was the only comedian I ever saw in concert, and his language was so blue and his subject matter so filthy that I vowed to stick with clean comedians thenceforward. (Current favorite: Nate Bargatze.)

I guess this was an easier "Mystery Man" than I thought. I didn't recognize him from this picture and couldn't make it look like him even after knowing who it was!

# # #

"'Art is dead Dude'—the rise of the AI artists stirs debate," from the BBC. The quotation is from one Jason M. Allen, who went on to say, "It's over. A.I. won. Humans lost." Not sure if this really has anything to do with photography. But I'll just point out the famous quotation attributed to the French painter Paul Delaroche, who, upon first seeing a Daguerreotype in 1839, said, "From today, painting is dead." (Although one would suppose he said it in French, and I haven't been able to find that.) Curiously, Paul Delaroche's historical paintings looked a bit like A.I., don't you agree?

# # #

Photographers we lost in 2022: photojournalist Dirck Halstead, 85; fashion photographer Patrick Demarchelier, 87; art photographer Jerry Uelsmann, 87; war photographer Tim Page, 78; Letizia Battaglia, who bravely documented the Sicilian Mafia, 87; paparazzo Ron Galella, 91; editorial and advertising photographer Kurt Markus, 75; Fred Lyon, photographer of San Francisco, 97; advertising photographer Melvin Sokolsky, 88; art photographer and filmmaker William Klein, 96; celebrity photographer Douglas Kirkland, 88; and editorial portraitist Eamonn McCabe, 74—among many others. Consolations: everyone gets their favorite camera in heaven, the photo opportunities are limitless, and you never, ever miss a shot. R.I.P.

Mike
Flickr page / New Yorker author page

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

Featured Comments from:

Gordon Lewis: "It might be that Dr. King was more relaxed around black photographers. It might also be that this image was taken in 1959, before all the major stressors in his life happened, such as the Freedom Rides, March on Washington, FBI harassment, violence in Selma, etc. To put it another way, as the years wore on he had a lot less to be relaxed about. He was assassinated nine years later, in 1968, at age 39."

Chris Kern: "Re 'As an idle aside, if you had to choose between Karsh's photograph of Georgia O'Keefe and Vaccaro's picture of her looking through the piece of Swiss cheese, which would you choose? Those are two very different modes of what we call "photography."'

"A better comparison, it seems to me, would be with Vaccaro’s 1960 photograph [here's a link —Ed.] of O’Keefe holding one of her paintings in a field in New Mexico, with its unorthodox, arresting composition: the subject in perfect profile, revealing the characteristic contours of her face; her hands cradling the painting to signify that she is its creator; the painted canvas bleeding into the left side of the frame; and the mountain in the background conveying a distinct sense of place. The image is also technically outstanding—well-illuminated, with wide tonality and excellent color, and with the figure and canvas in sharp focus and just enough bokeh in the background to keep the viewer’s attention on the subject. Offhand, I can’t recall seeing a superior posed photographic portrait."

ASW: "I'm sure others have already answered, but that's Tim 'The Tool Man' Taylor (aka the actor/comedian Tim Allen) in the mugshot. I hope he didn't drag his friendly neighbor Wilson into the drug world with him."

Winfried Heyland: "I can only recommend Tony Vaccaro's work. i.e. Entering Germany."

hugh crawford: "Re: Leap of joy There’s a whole lot of misery in that photo. [That's worth reading. Thanks. —Mike]

"Dick? I thought the guy was a tool.

"I’ve been playing around with AI art and I find it sort of like street photography crossed with surrealist art practices. You have a vague expectation of what you might get, but no control, and the outcome is something of a surprise. I don’t think that AI software like Stable Diffusion, which I am working with, is as much a threat to photography as Photoshop and the current generation of photo editing software."

Ed Hawco: "No shade on Karsh, but I’ll take the Swiss cheese shot any day of the week."

Steve Jackson: "Mike, I was kind of stunned that you didn't know about Tony Vaccaro. Although his B&W photos are better known, some of his color portraits are amazing. This is a link to one that I think really shows how to use environment and depth of field in a way that rivets you to the subject: Picasso. Compositionally and technically it is a lesson for all of us. Here is a link to that image (but I would suggest you look at all of them at Monroe Gallery)."

Mike replies: I did look at all of them, and I'm pretty convinced I've never seen any of them before. (I no longer think I can remember every photograph I've ever seen—I used to think so—but I usually get a sort of spidey-sense if I've seen a picture before.) I'm glad to find out about Tony.

Bruno Gonzalez: "Hello Mike, 'À partir d'aujourd'hui la peinture est morte.' The following is an extract copied from the French Wikipedia page about Paul Delaroche; the text says the quotation is probably apocryphal. 'Après avoir vu pour la première fois un daguerréotype il aurait prophétisé, selon Gaston Tissandier: «À partir d'aujourd'hui la peinture est morte.» Cependant, cette citation, sans doute apocryphe, est contestée par Stephen Bann, pour qui il n'existe pas de phrase plus ressassée et plus fallacieuse.'"

Mike replies: Thanks! For others, the French means, "However, this arguably apocryphal quote is disputed by Stephen Bann, for whom there is no more rehashed and fallacious phrase." (Google Translate.)

It's odd, but at some point, does it actually matter if someone said certain things or not? The quotation is so widespread, and so consistently attributed to Delaroche, that I'm not sure it matters if anyone can prove he said it. Also, I've noticed that quotes (and facts) that have a literary rather that oral origin tend to be much more readily accepted. For an example of oral transmission, take the famous "Serenity Prayer." The earliest recorded version is from 1933, by a student of Reinhold Niebuhr, quoting Niebuhr. Niebuhr himself might well have used it before 1933. He didn't publish a version himself until 1951, but he was known to have used it in many sermons and was quoted many times between '33 and '51. For this reason, many different wordings and forms came to be accepted as the "real" Serenity Prayer, and various sources are still modifying its wording. My thought would be, how do we know that Paul Delaroche didn't speak his famous quotation orally and that it spread the same way?

In any event, if he didn't say it, he might as well have.

Rod S.: "I'd already taken your advice to subscribe to the New York Times and had already read that obituary on Tony Vaccaro. Imagine one morning finding and photographing a fallen soldier's body mostly covered by fresh overnight snow, and then realising that it was your friend. Imagine being in a French town so delighted in being liberated from war that its women linked arms and danced in a circle around a little ceremony in which a small girl and a foreign soldier kneel on the ground and kiss. Hard to imagine? Tony Vaccaro photographed it."

darlene (partial comment): " I was once an New York Times subscriber but grew tired of their political undertones. It may go unnoticed if you like their politics, but it isn't very pleasant if you are an independent thinker."

John Camp: "Timothy Dick. Another photographer took a photo that is virtually identical to Sal Veder's. Veder won the Pulitzer for it, the other guy didn't. I think it had to do with which one went out on the AP wire first."

Mike replies: The Turnley twins have a version of that story. They both took the same picture, more or less, and one of them won a prize for it, the other one didn't. I'd have to look up the details. And according to one of my favorite books on photography, there were about 15 photographers present for the crash of the Hindenburg. The famous picture is the one that hit the wire services first; the rest are virtually unknown.

James Kirkpatrick: "The mystery man and I attended Seaholm High School in Birmingham, Michigan. He was year behind me so would have graduated in 1970. I only found this out years later looking in my yearbook. A very funny and talented man in later years."

Franz Amador: "From the article on Tony Vaccaro: 'Private Vaccaro improvised as he moved through Europe, finding his film and his processing chemicals among the ruins of camera shops in towns his unit passed through. He developed the film in Army helmets and hung the negatives on trees to dry when he wasn’t on night duty. He carried them in his backpack.' Dang!"

Mike replies: I was struck by that too. And have you ever photographed with an Argus? Very awkward camera, but Georgia O'Keeffe was impressed with the speed with which Tony Vaccaro used it.

Keith B: "Can I choose the portrait of Georgia Ansel Adams took with her and Orville Cox at Canyon de Chelly?" [Sure. Here's that one. —Ed.]

Dan Gorman: "The 'mystery' man is Tim Dick, otherwise known as Tim Allen. My in-laws knew his family—he grew up in suburban Detroit."

Jerome: "AI can't create art, because AI has nothing to say about anything. It can imitate what humans have said about something, but that's like repeating a poem in a language you don't understand. AI is a pattern-matching machine. It will recognise patterns and re-arrange them, but has no idea what it's doing."

At the Limits of tl;dr: Sam Abell at B&H

I don't usually post on Saturday, but I also usually leave you on Friday with something tasty to occupy some of your free time on the weekend, and I didn't do that yesterday. So, this video, suggested by Josh R.:

(Here's the link to it on YouTube.)

Some of you will no doubt remember the book, which was a bestseller through our links. The book is still in print (and quite inexpensive—it's a nicely made hardcover [UPDATE Monday the 26th: it apparently sold out after I mentioned it. Only used copies available now]). If anything, the talk is even better than the book, because you hear Sam's voice and get some measure of his character. Although of course you see the pictures better on the printed page.

The video is probably pushing the limits of "tl;dr"—"too long, didn't read." You might have noticed that YouTube recently has started pushing "shorts"—little micro-videos that possess the depth and profundity of greeting cards. Perhaps the apotheosis of society's collective attention-deficit disorder*. Not for Sam Abell such truffles. His talk goes firmly in the other direction, clocking in at just under one hour and fifty minutes. 

And yet it's engaging the whole way through, and not difficult to watch. You get into it. He does something in this video that I have long thought would be an invaluable tutorial about shooting—he shows the evolution of a number of shots, starting with what initially attracted him, and then how he works it to end up at the final result. I don't know about you, but that's how I shoot. You see his "visual thinking" visually, with voiceover. Very valuable.

I haven't watched even a large minority of the videos that were suggested here recently, so I'm in no position to declare where this one ranks relatively speaking. But it's excellent.

And really, it's no longer than a movie, or a football game, whether American football** or World football. And we watch that on weekends. So perhaps this is something for a change.

Mike
(Thanks to Josh)

P.S. I got out photographing yesterday! Didn't get anything, but back in the saddle again. ::thumbsup::

*I did hear a good Dad joke on one: "My wife asked if I'd seen the dog bowl. I said I never knew he did."

**I watched "Thursday Night Football" the other night, which now streams free with Amazon Prime. First football game I've seen in several years. Naturally, this is dwarfed by the fact that the U.S. Open starts in only 16 days!! I know, you can't wait. Me neither.

Book o' the Week

Migrant Mother, by Sarah Meister. "Each volume in the One on One series is a sustained meditation on a single work from the collection of MoMA." Forty-two pages with many illustrations. An engaging guided tour of the history and lore of "American photography's Mona Lisa."

This book link is a portal to Amazon. You're very kind use our links, as they help support the site.

B&H Photo

Original contents copyright 2020 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.)
Featured Comments from:

Ken Bennett: "We were super lucky to get Sam Abell to speak when I hosted our conference of professional university photographers a few years ago. He gave a similar presentation, working through well-known images and showing how he got there. (Yes, he was sponsored by Canon, and many thanks to them.) I had seen Mr. Abell back in the late '80s or so, at a news photography conference at the very beginning of my career, and that presentation had a huge influence on my work.

"At the conference that I hosted, Mr. Abell gave a great presentation, then came to the hospitality room and stayed talking with our members all night. He was super easy to talk to and I'll never forget that."

Bob: "It is a fascinating talk! His advice is obvious and valuable, yet I don't think I've encountered most of it in all the way-too-many how-to videos I've watched. Thanks for sharing...."

Kenneth Tanaka: "Ah, Sam Abell’s semi-autobiographical 'The Life of a Photograph' talk (and 2008 book). His book has been a bit of a touchstone for me for a long time. Abell’s work straddles what’s become familiarly known as the 'Geographic' style (skillfully constructed but often overly sentimental and scenic) and a more conceptual 'fine art' style, pretty much where I usually aim to live! And while I’ve not yet seen this B&H presentation of his talk, I have seen him give mostly the same presentation in a more formal venue (a Nat Geo Live! presentation, I think). His style of presentation hasn’t changed; a bit slow and a bit too artificially dramatic and important for me. But containing plenty of nutrition. That aside, I have tremendous admiration for Sam Abell’s work. Anyone who could make a living for over 30 years shooting Nat Geo assignments has big chops as both a craftsman and as a politician. And his father’s guidance of 'compose and wait' became a primary strategy of my own work since first hearing it from Abell. So thank you for highlighting Abell's B&H talk! It’s on my watch list for Sunday."

Rohitha Gunetilleke: "I spent five days in a Sam Abell workshop. His teachings changed my photography. These days my rangefinder window lingers on a shot until the micro focus elements fall into place, often a frustrating and finally a satisfying experience."

The Ten Best YouTube Videos for Photographers?

I sat down to try to compile this the other day and so far have failed. I realize I keep a "mental list" of a lot of things, including remarkable YouTube videos that impressed me with their excellence—but I haven't kept track of such a list of videos relevant to photography.

But it seems to me that we should be able to do this as a community, with contributions by visitors as well. If we take the recently-mentioned video by Henry ("Hank") Wessel as a starting point, what other outstanding videos do you know that would together make up a list of videos that photographers can learn from, or greatly enjoy?

We need to keep variety in mind, and include lots of different things from different eras. I'm sure I'm forgetting some that we've already discovered and discussed.

Can you think of anything you'd like to nominate?

Mike

Book o' the Week

Migrant Mother, by Sarah Meister. "Each volume in the One on One series is a sustained meditation on a single work from the collection of MoMA." Forty-two pages with many illustrations. An engaging guided tour of the history and lore of "American photography's Mona Lisa."

This book link is a portal to Amazon. You're very kind use our links, as they help support the site.

B&H Photo

Original contents copyright 2020 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.)
Featured Comments from:

Ed. note: Rather than post featured comments, since I can't review all the suggestions so quickly, I'll just leave all the comments in the Comments section. If you're suggesting a video, please leave a short description with the link to help guide other readers. Thanks!