The Online Photographer

Celebrating Close-Up Photography

The Atlantic (the no. 1 "must-read" magazine in the United States, in my opinion, just by the way) has published a selected portfolio from the second Close-Up Photographer of the Year Contest. "The contest 'celebrates close-up, macro, and micro photography,' among seven separate categories. More than 6,500 entries were received from 52 countries this year."

Be sure to look at the portfolio in full screen. You can link back to all the winners from the link. If you've ever tried serious macro photography you'll know how difficult some of these were to do. Especially gob-smacking subject: "The most invisible animal I've ever seen." See if you can spot it on your first pass through....

Mike
(Thanks to Jim Hayes)

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.

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Featured Comments from:

Rob de Loe: "For fans of close-up photography, I want to offer a shout-out to Robert O'Toole and his terrific website. So often we limit ourselves to the lens options that manufacturers say we should use. In reality, there's a cornucopia of amazing lenses out there for close-up photography in surprising places. Robert is busily trying them all and providing a wealth of information."

Meta-Analysis of the iPhone 12 Pro

As you might know if you're in the Apple ecosystem, the iPhone 12 Mini and Pro Max drop this Friday.

My favorite diet doctor, the esteemed Michael Greger, likes meta-analyses. A meta-analysis is "a statistical analysis that combines the results of multiple scientific studies" (Wikipedia). Well, Amazon's Digital Photography Review, known as DPReview, because it was "unable to get ahold of review units," recently published a meta-review—a roundup of multiple iPhone 12 Pro camera reviews from across the Web, in longform (that's what we're calling text now) and video formats. It summarizes five advance reviews: from MKBHD, The Verge, Engadget, CNET and Andy To.

Andy's is just a video, but what a video. That guy is talented. I couldn't do that if I got to start all over with a fresh lifetime to practice. That said, there seems to be something mildly wonky with it technically—it's all a little greyed out or something. At least on my monitor.

One-line executive summary meta-meta review of the iPhone 12 Pro's cameras? Might go like this: Best ever, but maybe not enough difference to justify upgrading.

(There's the modern device product cycle in a nutshell, just sayin'.)

More reviews, surely, to come. (Just on a lark, I requested a 12 Pro Max to review. Haven't heard back.)

Mike
(Thanks to Mike Scott)

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.

Thank you to all our Patreon contributors

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

robert e: "Yep, at least some of Andy To's footage has somewhat subdued contrast and/or saturation, and possibly a slight bias toward sepia/grey. I can't speak to Andy's intentions, but I see this a lot these days in ambitious work, and in some cases at least I suspect an attempt to reproduce, or at least evoke, the look of projected film. It may be an in-camera filter, but I'm curious in general about the amount of in-camera vs post-production processing involved here. Overall, it's an excellent demo reel, and a great example of the centrality of editing—and more generally: rhythm—to the art of cinema."

Gordon R. Brown: "Here's another take on the iPhones from John Gruber of Daring Fireball."

Tim Fitzwater: "It's a style of color grading. A lot of modern YouTube was originally influenced by the teal/orange look (think Transformers). Now a lot of channels have tweaked it to have their own style. I think it will all look very dated down the road, but that is how everything goes right? Also—it is all in post-production—they are shooting in 'log' which used to be the closest video had to RAW—but now a lot of good cameras have RAW video so...."

 

Toot! (Thanks, Robin Wong)

As you might have noticed, I don't toot my own horn on this site much. Lord knows it's enough about me, me, me as it is, just because I'm the "I" who writes it. I figure it doesn't need any extra added ego—it's got enough already. So I tend to not feature comments that praise me, don't tend to push my own work forward (to the point that readers complain), and try not to make inflated claims of my importance or expertise (the more you know, the more you realize how much you don't know). I also try not to contend with self-appointed experts—the whole "dueling egos" thing bores me. (I had to referee several such tempest-in-a-teacup battles when I was a magazine editor.) There's room for everyone. The way I look at it, I might know more about photography—certain aspects of photography, anyway—than some of my readers, but the likelihood is very high that you know a lot more than I do about your field(s) of expertise. That thought keeps me from getting a big head, and I keep it front and center.

Robin Wong

Still, it's nice when somebody else says nice things about me. Robin Wong is a video reviewer who is already familiar to many in the photographic world. Born in the City of Kuching, Sarawak, on the island of Borneo in Malaysia, and an alum of the University of Western Australia in Perth, he was a civil engineer by training who started out writing mostly about Micro 4/3 and eventually joined Olympus Malaysia as a product specialist. Later he was a contributor to Ming Thein's popular website (a list of his articles for Ming can be found here). He originally conceived of his own photography as a creative counterbalance to his highly technical career, and he's the originator of the phrase "shutter therapy"—the notion that getting out and going photographing is a nice way to counteract the blues, engage with the world, and experience and communicate the joy of seeing. I know, and know of, many photographers who have felt that way about it. Too seldom do we stop to consider that it's a lovely hobby and a great pastime, whatever our level of engagement with it.

Anyway, I want to thank Robin for the too-kind things he said about me in one of his videos from a few days ago (starting at about 8:45). Of course I feel he overstates the case, but at the same time for some reason I'm disinclined to argue.  :-)  Very nice of him—and thank you kindly, Robin.

Mike
(Thanks to many readers)

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.

Thanks to all our Patreon contributors!

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Anton Wilhelm Stolzing: "Wow, Mike, you are the one who brought us the term bokeh??? You are a genius!"

Mike replies: Brought you? Sort of. Carl Weese explained the concept to me, and John Kennerdell, Oren Grad, and Harold Merklinger wrote the articles. The original term is Japanese. I changed the spelling, and publishing the articles kicked off the popularization of it in the West, is all. Or perhaps, rather than "popularization," we should say the awareness of it, since of course it always existed.

Here's the lowdown.

Four Distractions for You

Well, it looks like I'm taking a small unscheduled break, without, at first, intending it.

On Wednesday, purely as an indulgence and as a way of distracting myself from what has become The Great Wait (for the incompetent States, I want to add, but don't be snarky, Mike, don't be snarky), I started writing a post called "How to Buy a Pool Table." That would have been for "Open Mike," the "often-off-topic Editorial page of TOP," which I try to post on Wednesdays.

At the same time, the weather turned nice. We have had almost nothing but rain here for three weeks, although there was one sunny warm day and one snowfall, our first wintry day of this year. (The light was wonderful that day.) Tuesday was another warm sunny day, so I also distracted myself by working a lot. I have a balcony porch in the back of the house that was actively decaying and sorely needed attention, and I used the nice weather to finish all the repairs on that and to get two coats of stain on it. Then I mulched leaves till dark. Mulching leaves is a good enough way to clean them up—I have a riding mower and a push-mower, and the push-mower is the one that has the mulching blade on it—but I need dry weather to do it! Can't mow leaves in the rain.

And the good weather, like the Great Wait, has continued. Despite two days of working on it (in between bouts with the paintbrush and the lawnmower), I have not been able to finish the pool table post—in fact, I'm not even half done with it, such that I could post it as a "Part I." Today the weather report is for 68°F (20°C) and sun all day, so I'm going to get ambitious—I'm going to try to get a coat of stain or two on my back deck. Which is pretty extensive, as it includes the wooden walkway to the barn and pool shed (I need a name for the pool shed. Maybe I can mull over that as I work).

In case you're looking to me for your distraction, I'll pass along these links sent to me by various readers:

Chris Killip 1946–2020. Photo by Kent Rodzwicz.

—Chris Killip, the British documentary photographer best known for his work among the lower classes in the north and later a Harvard professor, died of lung cancer on October 13th. Here's an obituary from Harvard that includes examples of his work.

—Darin Boville, a TOP reader, has written an extensive two-part review of Rebecca Senf's Making a Photographer: The Early Work of Ansel Adams (here's the book on Amazon—I only provide a purchase link to it because Darin doesn't. By the way after an abrupt break I am apparently an affiliate again, to my great relief). Darin is a new blogger and could use some eyes. Becky Senf is Chief Curator at the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona in Tucson, one of the premier institutions in the U.S. in the field of photography. CCP holds Ansel's extensive archives.

—I still haven't gotten around to watching "Bokeh is overrated," a video on YouTube, though several readers thought I should. You're on your own with this one. I suspect I might agree with some of what the makers have to say. I will try to get around to watching this someday.

—New Lumix S 85mm—I suspect I'm like a Pavlov's dog with regard to 35mm and 85mm lenses. They just trigger the endorphins. A recent article I read about going to chef school said that some real chefs have only one large and one small kitchen knife (plus perhaps a bread knife), and if that's true then the 35mm and 85mm focal lengths (or equivalents) are my large and small knives. I've been shooting with those two forever. (All of the post about Andrew S. the spice-rack maker was shot with those two lenses, to name just one very typical fer-instance.) Anyway Panasonic has announced a new 85mm prime which, at only 12.5 ounces / 355 grams, seems to go against the recent trend toward larger, heavier lenses.

Now off to work! Miles to go before the sun sets. Hope you find some comfort in distraction yourself, too.

Mike

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.

Thanks to all our Patreon contributors!

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

scott kirkpatrick: "On Killip. I have always liked his photos but knew little of his course in life. Reading up, it turns out that after a few years in the 'big show' in London, he discovered that photography could be pursued for its own sake, and spent the next 10–20 years working out of his caravan with a field camera in dicey places around England. When he concluded that his approach had become dated (in the light of Martin Parr's and Lee Friedlander's hand cameras with attached flash), he accepted a lectureship at Harvard. He stayed for the next 10–20 years, becoming Harvard's Carpenter Center's equivalent to Richard Benson, a craftsman/artist administering a visual arts program. How's that for a high degree of self-awareness and a soft landing?"

Nigel Voak: "I was sad to see the passing of Chris Killip. Killip was on of that great crop of UK 'documentary' photographers that came out of the UK in the eighties and who now seem to have been forgotten as photographic fashion has shifted to 'conceptual' photography."

Dan Jansenson: "Regarding Chris Killip, a very nice article, with several links, was published in the Guardian."

Open Mike: Readings, Movies, and Music

[My apologies! I finished this this morning and thought I published it around 11:00 a.m. But apparently I just forgot to click the "Publish Now" button. That's only happened rarely in years of blogging. Anyway..."Open Mike" is the off-again on-again Editorial Page of TOP. Today's is a grab-bag. When Yr. Hmbl. Ed. is caught up with himself, it appears on Wednesdays. Even if only barely.]

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Strange & curious: Been feeling like a hermit lately? You've got nothing on Christopher Knight:

For decades, the residents of Maine’s Kennebec Valley believed that the North Pond hermit was a myth. According to local lore, a hermit had been living undetected in the woods since the 1980s; every so often, he would break into seasonal cabins to steal food and other resources. But no one could prove the hermit’s existence—if he was out there, he had taken great pains to guarantee his isolation.

Then, in April 2013, a man was arrested in the deep woods of Maine. His name was Christopher Thomas Knight. According to societal records, he didn’t exist. For 27 years, he had camped out in the forest, surviving on meager supplies that he’d burglarized from houses in the area. He endured winter temperatures of 20 degrees below zero. Every morning, he watched the sun rise over the foggy valley that he called home. He hadn’t had a single conversation with another person for nearly three decades.

His greatest challenge was surviving the Winters. He would deliberately fatten himself up at the end of the Summer and into the Fall. A night camping in the throes of a Maine Winter is not for the faint of heart; a week of it qualifies an outdoorsman as a tough guy. In twenty-seven years at his encampment in the woods, Knight never slept in anything but a tent. The cold was so intense it drove him close to suicide. He would wake himself at 2:30 in the morning in the dead of Winter because he knew he stood a better chance if he faced the worst of the cold awake. "It's dangerous to sleep too long in Winter," he told the reporter who visited him in jail.

But apart from finding an intellectual who loved to read (and loved Lynyrd Skynyrd!), who knew who the Kardashians were, and was so averse to human connection that he seldom made eye contact, the reporter could get little out of him about the central mystery, "why":

Anyone who reveals what he’s learned, Chris told me, is not by his definition a true hermit. Chris had come around on the idea of himself as a hermit, and eventually embraced it. When I mentioned Thoreau, who spent two years at Walden, Chris dismissed him with a single word: "dilettante."

The first quote is by Emily Buder. The second is from a long article in GQ from 2014 by Michael Finkel called "The Strange & Curious Tale of the Last True Hermit." Fascinating article; recommended if you think you're "isolating"!

Snob about fiber-base: When I was young I was a snob about fiber-base black-and-white papers. They were the traditional material, made the old way. RC paper was "plastic," and was tainted by its early reputation for self-destructing. Good for intermediate prints and prints for repro only. Don't extrapolate this any further than it goes, but I will say this: I have plenty of workprints made on Ilford RC papers from thirty and thirty-five years ago, and they look  as fresh and clean as the day I made them. I can't say if they'll last 70 years, or 200. But I like their chances.

Opinions about Bogart: I'm mildly a fan of movies made before I was born, especially the genre called "Noir," and if you like Noir you'll have opinions about Bogart. In his top three for me (the other two are The Caine Mutiny and of course Casablanca) is a little-remembered suspense thriller about a writer. To enjoy In a Lonely Place you can't focus on the murder mystery, which is nothing but a sub-plot—you have to get into its psychological portrayal of the doomed love affair. Movies that take this tack have to resonate with you in some way or they might not appeal much. But they can be deep and meaningful if they do touch you.

In a Lonely Place was directed by Nicholas Ray, who directed Rebel Without a Cause and influenced Godard and the French New Wave. It co-stars his now little-known wife, Gloria Grahame. Their marriage broke up during the filming but the two kept the breakup secret so as not to jeopardize the project. The script departed greatly from the book, and the director and actors departed greatly from the script—Ray cleared the set and crafted a new, more subtle ending with the two leads when the planned finale, which had already been shot, rang false. The movie creates characters who might now be understood as having what's called an avoidant/dismissive adult attachment style, but with sympathy for the tragedy inherent in being trapped in such a state. Glenn Erickson of DVD Savant put it beautifully:

Relationships are delicate animals—they can be killed by the wrong words, the wrong actions. Dix and Laurel are madly in love with one another, but that trust is destroyed when her terror and his rage go over the edge. It doesn't matter that he's innocent, or that they are both in intense remorse over what happened. It can't be taken back, and the romance is finished. Both will have to go back to their personal 'lonely places.'

Brilliant lines of criticism—so very much on the mark.

Of course another reason I love old Noir films is for the black-and-white. In a Lonely Place was shot by the cinematographer Burnett Guffey, who also did Bonnie and Clyde, a movie whose cinematography is naturalistic and plainspoken. Cinematographers have trouble being artists because they seldom get to pick their projects; the best they can hope for is to become the go-to of a great director. Guffey was a get-it-done pro whose life's list of accomplishments is a motley of good and bad, television and film, the trivial and the profound. But In a Lonely Place is as outstanding in 1950 B&W as Bonnie and Clyde is in 1967 color. A treat. I'd like to see more of his work.

Gloria Grahame and Humphrey Bogart in In a Lonely Place

Carrie Rickey of The Moviegoer considers the performances the best of of both Grahame's and Bogart's careers. The most disturbing thing I've read about the film? Louise "Brooksie" Brooks said that of all his roles, the role of Dixon Steele in In a Lonely Place came closest to the real-life Humphrey Bogart she knew.

As with all old Noirs there are numerous versions floating about. The print on Amazon Prime Video is great, and it's available on DVD and Blu-Ray from the Criterion Collection.  

Young Girl Blues: Like guitar? My good old friend Kim's latest is a lilting and wistful mix of guitars across genres—indie, Brit-folk, blues, alt, folk-rock. It's been raining here for a week, and it's a great hour's listen on a rainy day. I loved the Band of Horses song, which I had never heard before. And yes, the "cover" art of Young Girl Blues is in beautiful black-and-white.

Something I happened to hear on XM Radio in the car: it's a version of Led Zeppelin's "Going to California" with the vocals removed. It's one of those songs I've always loved and never tire of, but I found it fascinating how much the vocal serves as another instrument and another line, and how different the music sounds as an acoustic instrumental. Just a curiosity. Lend an ear if you're so inclined.

Aromatically yours: One final reading. Another of my old friends you've met in these pages before, Jim Schley, just published a review of a new book of poetry, Elizabeth A.I. Powell's Atomizer (Amazon).

Vermont poet Elizabeth A.I. Powell's way with words is daring, sardonic and ingenious. She enjoys mixing registers and realms—pop and literary culture, consumerism and religion, self-help and sacrament.

That just makes it sound like something I would enjoy.

The structure (or "scent and architecture," as Powell puts it) of Atomizer is fascinating. Along with its zany variety of forms, the book has a powerful through line, investigating the ancient, arcane and insidious role of perfume, tangled in seduction and deceit. The three sections of the book are named for terms used to categorize layered qualities in synthesized scents. "Top Notes" are "that which evaporates most quickly"; "Heart Notes" are "the distinctive aspects, most...charming, most intelligent"; and "Base Notes," the poet avers, "stay the longest...heavy and deep."

I liked the little tastes and teasers so much I had to order the book. Jim's reviews do that to me every so often. Here's Jim Schley's review of Atomizer, at Seven Days.

Mike

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.

Thanks to all our Patreon contributors!

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

HR: "With regards to your comment about RC papers I am reminded of this.  :-)  'We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it and stop there lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove lid. She will never sit down on a hot stove lid again and that is well but also she will never sit down on a cold one anymore.' —Mark Twain"

Mike replies: Thanks! Yes, that. In this case I can only personally recommend Ilford RC papers. I used several others too, decades ago, but they're gone now.

David Evans: "I'm really loving Young Girl blues. I'm not familiar with Mixcloud—is it possible to see individual track information?"

Mike replies: Only if you sign up for a Premium account, which is $8 a month. But there's another way for most cuts. Download the Shazam app from the App Store. It allows your phone to listen to music, compare it to a database, and identify it. Kim will fool it sometimes because his mixes sometimes include extremely esoteric and rare music, but most of the cuts it will identify. I'll ask Kim if he can provide a set list for Young Girl Blues.

Kim was a legendary disk jockey at WHFS in Washington DC back in the station's heyday.

Bob Curtis: "Michael Finkel expanded the article into a book, The Stranger in the Woods [Amazon]."

scott kirkpatrick: "My favorite Bogart has always been Treasure of the Sierra Madre, which captures the bottled anger in 'Nobody puts one over on Fred C. Dobbs!' But I wasn't aware of In a Lonely Place, which leaves out the humorous touches and the sentimental ending, and thus is truly terrifying."

David Comdico: "In a Lonely Place is my favorite Bogart film. It peels beneath the surface of the Bogart character. On the other hand, Johnny Guitar [Amazon Prime Video] is my favorite film by Nicholas Ray. He was a real American original."

Keith B.: "Burnett Guffey's outstanding lighting in Bonnie and Clyde may feel naturalistic, but is actually fairly romantic in style. Naturalistic cinematography (no theatrical lighting, existing light taken as found) was then, and is still, considered too ugly to be employed for commercial narrative motion picture storytelling. There are exceptions, but not many."

Andrew Bearman: "Thank you for turning me on to Mixcloud and to your friend Kim's sets. I am now willingly lost in the woods of great music! And that Bogey still captures a look that only an experienced, weary cat like he could give. A look not too far from how many of us have felt at least a few times during this pandemic. Off to watch In a Lonely Place."

johnbabineau: "Hunch re KK’s Mixcloud: Handstanding athlete on diving board is the actress Doris Day. KK’s comedic gifts endure...."

Animesh Ray: "Your post made me remember a funny experience. I used to do extensive black-and-white printing for work when I was a grad student in the late 1970s–early 1980s. This was related mostly to printing of black-and-white photomicrographs and autoradiograms, for which we were supposed to print on multigrade silver gelatin papers. After that period I did not do any darkroom work, because most of those tasks was taken over by Polaroid for B&W or Kodachrome slides for color.

"Some 30 years later, in 2003, I wanted to do B&W printing as a hobby, so I went to the local city recreations department, which had a darkroom for the photo enthusiasts. The deal was that the use of the darkroom was free if you passed a test; otherwise you would need need to take a two-week course on printing. So I thought I would take that test. As it so happened, I had never heard of RC papers until that time, as I had only used fiber papers in the past—in fact we never called it that! We just called it a printing paper of a certain grade. All the test questions had to do with how to print and process RC papers, so to my utter disbelief I ended up failing the test. In science, we often feel like hermits stuck in lonely towers."

Wiki Loves Monuments 2020 Contest

Photo by MichaelDPhotos (CC BY-SA 4.0)

There must be a lot of historic sites near anyone that they don't know about.

Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons are having a contest to encourage contributions. You can provide fresh photographs of historic sites in the U.S. to help them in their mission. There are a few modest prizes, but I suspect the prize money is not why anyone would do this—it's more that it's a fun way to get out and look around, a way to provide a purpose for photographic jaunts. Sort of a general assignment to give shape to your activities. I have a friend who does this, and it's been motivating and involving for him. He's in an area of the country that's new to him and his wife and they've found it's a nice way to explore their adopted community and the surrounding regions.

Here's the contest page. You can read about it there, but basically you're tasked with finding recognized historic sites local to you and photographing them for the database.

Sounds like it could be fun. A new way, perhaps, to get out and explore your area. The contest lasts through the end of the month but if you enjoy doing this, there's no time limit on contributing to Wikimedia projects.

Mike

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.

Thanks to all our Patreon contributors!

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Richard Tugwell (partial comment): "For folks in the UK (or England anyway) Historic England has a feature allowing users to contribute images and other things to the Listed Buildings archive. No prizes though, but quite rewarding."

Geoff Wittig: "I got excited by this idea since I know there are quite a few historic rural buildings near me. I got more excited when I saw one of the sites was an impressive and unusual barn quite close to my home. Surely I could photograph it in perfect light looking its best.... Then I remembered. This barn was photographed by David Plowden, as part of an entire book of beautiful barn photographs. Plowden gave a presentation about the project at George Eastman Museum about 15 years back, and I got to talk to him about it. He was exceptionally polite. Pretty unlikely I'll take a better photograph than David Plowden did."

Mike replies: But do they have a good photograph of the barn on the existing Wikipedia page? If not, then yours might still be needed.

MikeR: "Following their proffered link, I found a list of historic sites in Pennsylvania's Montgomery County, and was surprised to find that I live near, or near enough, to at least a dozen of them. In some cases, I already have the images."

tuco and STEPHANE

[Ed. note: This is an extra post written on my day off, because I know I'm writing too much about large format. There are a few more to come, too. If you don't like these discussions, don't worry; the weather always changes on a blog, eventually.]

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First a quotation. I've been doing a lot of roving about the internet (now, is it supposed to be capitalized, or not? I've lost track of the arguments) looking into large format stuff. I wanted to share two small things I ran across. One comes from a thread on flickr (I believe that's not supposed to be capitalized), and was written by one STEPHANE GUILLAUME, who wrote his name using all caps. STEPHANE wrote (I've edited his punctuation here, including changing "sinar f" to "Sinar F"):

Film does have a learning curve. I use a Sinar F and a 135mm lens. Scanning is done on a V700. I develop and scan all of my shots. Best advice I can give, start with one camera, one lens, one film type. Film is all about finding just the right light. You can't just shoot anywhere and have amazing shots. You have to find good light to shoot in.

As they say in Baltimore, true dat. He puts it nicely, in fewer words than I could have. (I evidently have too many words—I've been getting them out for years, yet there are always more.)

The second comes from someone named tuco, and we're back to no caps again. tuco (oww—how painful it is to an editor to begin a sentence with a lowercase letter!) found a model who would work for peanuts. But there was a downside. Models are so demanding, aren't they? Have a look and read about it.

That model's furious expression makes me smile. Cute little guy.

I like tuco's technique, too. Here's a picture of an old camera like the one he uses. These are not folding field cameras; they are called self-casing cameras, like my Rochester Optical Pony Premo. The difference is subtle; it has to do with the word "folding." You don't have to fold up a self-casing camera. It just retracts directly back into its box. Note too that both tuco and STEPHANE use lenses of the same focal length—135mm, which is about like 40mm on a FF camera*.

Reversible back, on my new old Wista. Left, portrait/vertical
orientation, right, landscape/horizontal orientation**

The difference between a Speed Graphic and a Crown Graphic—both were made by Graflex, Inc.—was that the Speed had a focal-plane shutter and the Crown didn't. Hence, the Crown was a little lighter and simpler. To get a cheap view camera (Graphics are press cameras), people used to "hot rod" Crowns by removing the rangefinder and some of the less useful appurtenances. Their real limitation as tripod view cameras is that the back isn't "reversible," meaning you can't switch it from horizontal, also called landscape, orientation to vertical, or portrait, orientation. The reason for that is that Graphic shooters would simply crop if they wanted a vertical. They were newsies—photojournalists—and their work was cropped ruthlessly all the time anyway, by editors showing only what was relevant and by compositors fitting the pictures to the column.

Cropping to a vertical is what Martin Munkácsi did with "Three Boys at Lake Tanganyika," which we saw here the other day. Martin liked to talk as if he were a 35mm shooter—the coming thing in his time—but mostly he preferred to shoot with larger formats and then crop, sometimes radically, to pluck out of his frame some part of it that he considered a strong composition. Sometimes he made pictures of surprisingly small bits of his originally much larger negatives.

My now 16-year-old niece, Hadley, does this instantaneously and reflexively with the pictures she takes on her iPhone and iPad. Her fingers fly so fast you can hardly see them as she works the screen of her iPad. She'll look at a picture and, zoom zoom, crop it the way she wants it with a few finger-flicks. She probably doesn't even realize it, but her cropping skills are practiced and fluent.

If I were a photography teacher now, I'd send students out to do this on purpose. Find a smaller composition within a larger one, take it with the wide or normal view of the phone camera module, then crop it down to what they visualized, to see what it looks like. Exercises like this help our seeing. Once you've got the knack (or so I believe), you've got it.

Mike

*The correspondences aren't exact, but, to convert 35mm (FF) focal lengths to those for 4x5 (5x4) inch or vice-versa, multiply or divide by 3.3. That gets you about as close are you're going to usefully get. Remember that the image on a 4x5 negative isn't exactly 4x5 inches, it's a bit smaller (and you don't know by how much, because film holders aren't standardized), and that the aspect ratios are different—meaning that precision is impossible. (Let's not argue that, okay? It's supposed to be my day off.)

**There are two ways you can tell these were shot with an iPhone. Can you spot both?

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Scott: "1.) We can see you taking the picture in the reflection 2.) You seem to have used Portrait mode, as things in the same plane show different degrees of in-focus. Did I win?"

Mike replies: Yes! You win.

Crabby Umbo: "Tuco? Like Eli Wallach in The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly? 'When you have to shoot, shoot, don't talk.' Now that's advice for a photographer!"

AlanH: "Yep, good light is certainly wonderful, but I prefer to follow something Brooks Jensen said, 'Find a subject that fits well with the light you have.' That's probably not a correct direct quote, but you get the idea."

Mike replies: That's good advice too. It came to me one day during the time I was wandering around DC every day with my Exakta 66. I was bemoaning the overcast skies and the lead-colored landscapes one day when it came to me that the light was perfect for portraits! Nice and soft, no hard shadows.

Taos Water Girls

Edward S. Curtis, Taos Water Girls, 1905

Whenever I get an email about some auction or other, I usually find something being advertised that charms me.

I know Edward S. Curtis's work and I seldom see one of his that I've never seen before. Correction, a good one of his, because every photographer has second- and third-rate pictures that haven't been widely published or seen.

Edward Sheriff Curtis, of course, was the protean but problematic documentarian of Native Americans at the end of the frontier period. Few photographers ever worked harder, but his pictorialist style and ethnographic assumptions don't fit well with modern ideas or tastes. My favorite book of his is Native Nations, the Calloway title with stunningly great reproductions. To my surprise, this book is still easily available for very reasonable prices—it's a beautifully produced book and I highly recommend it, to photographers, fans of fine printing, photobook lovers, Curtis fans, people interested in the Wild West or American Indians, or any combination of the above. There's a copy on Amazon for $24.91, and that's a steal for a book of this quality—new, it cost $60, and that was in 1993 dollars ($107 today).

...And there it is: "Taos Water Girls" is on page 65. Thought so. But it's one of the pictures the book's reproduction—dark and rich—doesn't suit. (There are so many that it does suit.) I was more charmed by this higher-keyed JPEG at the auction site. The writeup says that only about one in 500 of Curtis's prints are platinum prints. I'd love to see this someday as he printed it. Visualizing this JPEG in my mind as a platinum print makes me suspect it might be something special.

Unconscious style permeates eras
Curious, isn't it, how the style of 1905 comes through so strongly? "Taos Water Girls" puts me in mind of things like Gertrude Käsebier or something by one of the Brandywine School illustrators, maybe Howard Pyle's "Two Lovers in the Garden" (I couldn't find a date for the illustration—although you can buy it framed from Wal-Mart! What a fate—but Pyle died in 1911).

Gertrude Käsebier, Blessed Art Thou Among Women (1899)

Howard Pyle, Two Lovers in a Garden

Here's the writeup for "Taos Water Girls" at the auction site:

About This Lot
Taos is the northernmost of all the Native American Pueblos. It is located in present day New Mexico and was first visited by outsiders in 1540. The Pueblo had already been occupied for centuries at that time. The young women in the photograph are carrying water back to their pueblo in beautiful traditional jars. The trees on either side of them are cottonwoods, which are often found near mountain streams in the southwest. The sky is contrasted with the deep, rich foreground makes this image unusually compelling and three-dimensional. It is estimated that as few as 1 in 500 Curtis prints are platinum, making this vintage platinum print all the more desirable and rare. This print was created by hand in Curtis’ [sic] Seattle studio.

Bids start at $5,000 for the print.

Mike

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Geoff Wittig: "When Curtis was active, platinum printing was popular among fine art photographers and pre-coated platinum papers were commercially available. But his images were mostly experienced as photogravure reproductions, both in his magnum opus The North American Indian and as separate prints. Photogravures are pretty sympathetic to the tonality and 'feel' of platinum prints. I got to see the large collection of Curtis prints on display at the Crazy Horse monument in South Dakota some years back. They're amazing. It was worth the trip just to see them. Which made me pull out my copy of the late Richard Benson's wonderful The Printed Image (2008), a compendium of all then available methods of photo reproduction. Benson's explanation of how a photogravure works is a model of clarity. And unfortunately the book is now a collectible going for >$250."

Mike replies: Hopefully everyone who was reading TOP in 2008 bought Richard Benson's book, as it was our "Book of the Year" that year. And Native Nations was printed under Richard Benson's direction (and that of Nicholas Calloway) using a near-continuous-tone process Richard developed especially for printing these images.

LanceSaintPaul: "I did buy the Benson book back then as a direct result of your featuring it. Thanks again."

Kenneth Tanaka: "That's an interesting auction of Curtis’s work. I don’t recall seeing one of his platinum prints. The Art Institute of Chicago here has a small collection of Curtis’s prints, all photogravures, acquired from a collector in 1975. Given that the provenance of the Artnet pieces was specified as coming from a private collection in Minnesota I suspect (but don’t know) they’re from one of the most prominent collectors of Curtis works in America, Christopher Cardozo. I wish him luck with this sale. Like so many things these days, Curtis’s work has become culturally radioactive among top collectors and especially among major institutions. I admire the relentless dedication and sheer sweat that this work represents. But it was always a bit sentimental and schmaltzy for my taste. But for an excellent read try Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher: The Epic Life and Immortal Photographs of Edward Curtis by Timothy Egan. It’s available on Amazon in book or Kindle form.

Mike replies: Christopher Cardozo also had a hand in the making of the Native Nations book. The publisher was Bulfinch, by the way.

David Myers: "You might be interested in the 'Curtis' prints made by Jon Cone and his team using photogravure. Reasonable prices, I believe, around $800."

VSL Lowers the Lights

I got on a call with Kirk Tuck this afternoon and before I knew it we had talked for two hours and 15 minutes...that was a surprise. Felt like 35 minutes.

Kirk is stepping away from his blog again. He's done it in the past, but unfortunately it looks like he means it this time. I understand. Although I won't be joining him.

You can read more from the horse's mouth (so to speak). It was nice of him to mention me in his "see you around."

Check out the bokeh in that second image! I love it.

And one more
Thanks for all the mentions of photo-writers from the past who we miss. Another one I miss, by the way, is Ctein. Just because he didn't have his own site doesn't mean he wasn't adding a lot to the discussion online. I think he wrote almost 350 columns for this site.

I'm happy to say I won't miss Kirk—but I can say that only because I'm pretty sure we'll keep in touch. I suspect he's just starting down a new road, and, given his amazing chops and incredible energy, I can't wait to see where it leads. Kirk Tuck is one seriously accomplished guy. He deserves all the success he has enjoyed.

Mike

P.S. If only he'd see his way clear to get that sports car he wants, so I could enjoy it vicariously!

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Rick_D: "Kirk can't not blog. This is demonstrable. And we can't have Kirk not blogging, so the weird forces comprising the internet will intervene and he'll be back, as it was written. I do not understand how anybody endures a Texas summer so understand why, come September, any Texan wants to hang it up and go do...anything else anywhere else. (I write this eyeballing a weather forecast threatening us with 111 tomorrow.) My best wishes to all involved."

Cheap vs. Expensive Lens: A Visual Quiz

Leica Rumors did an interesting little quiz showing comparisons between a cheap and an expensive lens. The article is called "Blind test: Leica Summilux-M 35mm f/1.4 ASPH lens vs. the new 7Artisans 35mm f/1.4 lens." Spoiler alert—if you want to take the test yourself at Leica Rumors, do so before clicking through.

Sock It To Me

Do you need a pair of socks?

I'm pretty sure you need a pair of socks.

Mike

P.S. These would look perfect with sandals.

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Daniel (partial comment): "Nope. Polyester doesn't cut it for some of us. Merino wool or good high count cotton."

Mike replies: Perfect comment for this post! To find a "deal breaker" in the specs...made me laugh.

Kenneth Tanaka: "Re 'Sock It To Me': Do you have any idea how long it's been since I've heard that old Rowen and Martin Laugh-In Show line?! Wow, it's like getting a whiff of a long-ago aroma (ex: bar room smoke). BTW, I actually saw someone wearing those camera socks, or socks just like them, last year in Lahaina, Maui! The guy was wearing shorts and slip-ons but there was no mistaking them. Geeky me, I was trying to see what type of camera they depicted."

Random Excellence: Jose Luis Gonzalez

Linhof Color monorail, 1960
Photo by Jose Luis Gonzalez

TOP reader Jose Luis Gonzalez contacted me this morning to offer some friendly advice, and in the process I learned of his camera collection and the portraits he makes of his collectibles using light-painting techniques. You can view many examples at this 2016 post on Japan Camera Hunter. Great tabletop photography of a lovely camera collection. Nice, all around!

Mike
(Thanks to Jose)

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Fred Tuman: "That same exact type camera of camera was used every day in my studio from 1986 till 2004. It has bought me my home, paid for my wedding, and purchased five new cars over its lifetime. I paid $450 for it used at Ken Hansen's. When I sold it, with a couple of lenses, I took a trip with my wife to Vienna with the proceeds. Will any of my digital equipment reap the same emotional rewards?"

Peter Komar: "Back when I was shooting medium or large format product photography I absolutely recall the 'Light Wand.' It had many 'light end' attachments and a long tethered fiber optic cable to the base unit. It was quite the rage for a short time and the results were unique as far as product photography was concerned. The images of the classic cameras I would bet were shot using that technique, it was a lengthy process and, as I recall, always shot in very dim light studio settings. Nice to see that technique as I have not seen that in many years."

Paul McEvoy: "That Linhoff Color monorail is the most beautiful camera I've ever seen. I remember lusting over one in my LF days. I don't think there's a better looking camera out there."

After Fifty Years

Do you recall my friend Jim Sherwood, who bought a single original photograph for himself every year on his birthday, only to see his collection flourish over the decades and become worth far more than he had paid for it? (At this link, scroll down to "The not-a-collector collector.")

Jim's had a very successful and involved life in photography, which in recent years has extended to photobook collecting and selling. I thought I'd pass along a brief but moving comment Jim made on Facebook about what a customer said about one particular book. Here's the Facebook post in its entirety (very lightly edited):

"To my Facebook friends—some of you know I am a longtime, passionate photobook collector. Over the last 15 years I’ve been an online book dealer. In the process, you develop superficial client relationships with minimal communication. It’s the nature of web business. Rarely do I know anything about why someone wants to purchase a particular book.

"A few day ago I got an order for David Douglas Duncan’s War Without Heroes (1970), a powerful Vietnam War combat zone photo essay. Informing the buyer that I was on vacation and would ship the book upon my return, I received this message:

Understood. Enjoy your trip. I am in the book. I have waited fifty years to bring myself to see all of my friends that did not make it.

Signed, ______, Sergeant Major, U.S. Marine Corps, Never Retired.

"I was speechless, and deeply moved."

I wonder how that Marine Sergeant Major felt after viewing the book—I can imagine it bringing back both bad memories and good. I wonder if he was grateful to have had a part of his life documented that, in most soldiers' lives and experience, wasn't.

I have that book too, thanks to the recommendation of my friend and onetime book dealer Andy Moursund, who called it one of the three best books of war photography ever made. It's powerful work. DDD, as he was called, "embedded" with a combat unit long before that term was common, so it's a view from the inside of what it was like to experience the war in a U.S. Marine Corps unit.

DDD was a Marine himself who served in WWII. He donated the proceeds of This is War!, his book of Korean War photographs, to the widows and children of Marines who died in Korea. He himself passed away only two years ago at the age of 102.

Thanks to Jim for letting me republish this here.

Mike

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Ashton Lee: "In 1967 my father was given a copy of DDD's book Yankee Nomad. I have had a deep love for photography since turning the first page. If anyone had not seen and read it, you must. It is as important and revealing as Weston's Daybooks. I have long thought it interesting that Duncan published his retrospective 52 years before he died."

Dave Levingston: "I have that book and, I think, all of David Douglas Duncan's books. He was my original inspiration to become a photojournalist when I checked his Yankee Nomad book out of my library and read the whole thing. When he published I Protest after visiting Khe Sanh during the Vietnam War, I knew I had chosen the right hero."

Iain: "One of photography's most powerful attributes is that it is able to raise the dead."

Reminder!

If you have some time this weekend, you might want to treat yourself to Bill Jay's famous essay "The Thing Itself." We mentioned it the other day.

The phrase was Edward Weston's. Edward, behind the formidable veil of his artistry and mastery, was essentially a still-life photographer. Few kinds of photographers care more about things themselves.

Bill was an iconoclast, always a little outside the art-world mainstream despite his numerous publications and academic positions. He thought for himself, followed his path, went his own way. He was also a photographer. His primary subject was other photographers. He made a great many fine portraits. I've seen very few less than good.

I think it's probably unlikely that you'll agree with everything he claims and says in this essay. But I also think it's likely that you'll find it thoughtful and thought-provoking—and a constructive, rewarding way to pass time on a lazy Summer weekend.

And if you don't want to read it now, put it on your virtual bedstand for some future day.

Mike

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Ricardo Hernandez: "Thank you so much for linking this Mike. I was not aware of it and it sure is making me think about my photographic journey, what I want to do, and though a big part of me already knew it - how petty are all these tribal sports like fights in forums about camera brands. I really like in particular the example he gave of the violinist on the TV interview, the very pragmatic "if you have filtered subjects of interest and you remain with equal subjects, pick the one people are interested the most at that point (but only at that point)" (I am paraphrasing) - the pick a subject that you are passionate about because it's how you will carry on examining it over and over again. Great, great read. Thank you so much!"

Animesh Ray: "Written with unusual clarity...what a difference from Sontag's On Photography. While trying to read the latter I couldn't go beyond what it is not to get to what it is. Here Bill Jay gets to the heart in a few short strokes of his pen. He writes like the best of the journalists, which he was for a long time. I agree with him on the primacy of the subject in photography. The surprise was his opinion on a personal style, that one cannot make it consciously, that it is an unconscious by-product of passion and work (and, may I add, of talent)."

Bill Jay on 'The Thing Itself'

"...In order to photograph with any degree of continuous passion, you must have a fascination for the subject, otherwise you cannot sustain an interest in the act of creation for a long enough period of time in which to make any insightful or original statement about it. In spite of its seemingly heretical slant (in this day and age) what you photograph is usually more important than how you photograph it.

"The photographer is, first and foremost, a selector of subjects. The photographer makes a conscious choice from the myriad of possible subjects in the world and states: I find this interesting, significant, beautiful or of value. The photographer walks through life pointing at people and objects; the aimed camera shouts 'look at that!' The photographer produces pictures in order that his or her interest in a subject can be communicated to others. Each time a viewer looks at a print, the photographer is saying 'I found this subject to be more interesting or significant than thousands of other objects I could have captured; I want you to appreciate it too.'

"This immediate emotional or intellectual response to the subject matter is at the core of photography. [...]

"I have stressed the importance of subject matter because it is the fundamental principle of photography—and, paradoxically, the least discussed area of the medium, especially to young photographers."

—Bill Jay, "The Thing Itself"

The late Bill Jay (1940–2009) said of his essay "The Thing Itself," "This article has been reproduced more often than any other piece I have written. I think it was first published in Newsletter, Daytona Beach Community College, in 1988—but it is still being used by and copied for college students at the time of posting, 2006."

Bill's writings have been a continuous source of inspiration and enjoyment for me over my lifetime in photography. His book with his mentor and friend David Hurn, the Welsh Magnum photographer, On Being a Photographer, is a must-have for all photographers' libraries. (It's sort of the Strunk and White of photography—and I say that knowing that Shakespeare violated virtually every precept in Strunk and White, and White violated many himself.) It's worth setting some time aside to peruse this essay—something I do periodically.

In fact I think I'll remind you on Saturday morning, to help encourage a few more people to make the acquaintance of "The Thing Itself."

Mike
(Thanks to Mark Sampson)

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Dave Millier: I can see how this is vital to some photographers but not to me. By and large, I have little interest in the subject. For me, the subject is simply some convenient shape—it matters not what it is, because what I photograph is line, curve, pattern, tones and contrasts. I'm perfectly happy photographing a shadow, a crack in a wall, a bent nail, whatever meaningless object, as long as it forms some kind of graphical pattern, line, curve etc, often fleeting and transitory while the light strikes at the perfect angle. Come back 30 minutes later, and most of my photographs have vanished with the light and that angled rusty nail casting a perfect diagonal shadow across a textured yellow wall is now just an unimportant hook and there is no photo to be seen. I see photographic subjects, not as subjects in their own right, but as collections of graphical properties that interact with nearby objects to form a picture. Man consulting a map, or merely a bit of rusty old iron and the momentary perfect angle of light?"

Mike replies: Fair enough certainly, but could you be thinking in a little too limited a way about what "subject" is? You've eloquently stated your subject to be "line, curve, pattern, tones and contrasts" that "forms some kind of graphical pattern." Sounds (and looks) to me like you know exactly what your subject is.

Or maybe we're both thinking about the word "subject" more flexibly than Bill Jay intends in this quotation, I don't know.

Bob Keefer: "You inspired me to download this book on my Kindle and read it today. It's an excellent guide to how to go about actually being a good photographer, as opposed to talking and thinking about it. They rightly pick on academic photography and critical theory, offer sensible advice for how to approach a photography project and emphasize working on photography that moves you. Among my favorite sections was on the subject of gear. Hurn wrote that he originally used Leica rangefinders, but eventually switched to SLRs as his need for eyeglasses messed up the rangefinder view. 'I use the cheapest amateur model in the Canon line for one reason only: it is the quietest in operation. I certainly do not need all the bells and whistles even on this camera.' He does add, though, that his backup camera is a top of the line pro model—because it's resistant to the rain in Wales, where he lives and works. And Jay said, 'Beginning photographers are obsessed with equipment, but there comes a stage when they deny that cameras have any relevance. Yet the best photographers do seem to spend a lot of time talking about cameras again.'"

Mike replies: Supposedly David Hurn had six EOS Rebels around the time he wrote that book. I actually went out and bought one to mimic him...and lasted only a few months with it. Worked fine, but for me it wasn't satisfying to use because of the wee little tunnel viewfinder. I still remember a number of the pictures I took with it, though.

Curtis: "Dear Mike, Were you aware of the documentary film, Do Not Bend: The Photographic Life of Bill Jay? It can be viewed on YouTube and is a very interesting overview of his life. A one-of-a-kind individual I want to learn more about. Thank you for posting the quote!"

Mike replies: I was not aware! And I will watch that. Thanks.

Jim Henry: "Bill Jay's writings have resonated with me since I read them in Lenswork and then in his books. His language was simple, clear, direct, and free of words like 'vision' which I do not understand. I do miss his take on photography and his honest writings. They work for me. Thanks for reminding us all of him."

Camerasize

camerasize.com is asking for our help. Apparently expenses are getting to be too much for the site's owner and developer. I use that site a lot (in fact I found out about this because I was using it for the next post) and really appreciate it, so I made a donation.

Patreon and our Patreon supporters (thank you all) have really helped this site (TOP) survive, and I can tell you any little bit helps!

Mike

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Lenses and Losses

John Loengard 1934–2020

Sorry I didn't get to the Print Crit this week. We'll resume on Monday (not Sunday), and I'll be talking about three prints next Monday rather than one.

TOP reader Joe Holmes was quoted in this article about leaving New York. I met Joe at the Javits Center a few years ago—he's a very talented photographer and a chronicler of his city. Thanks to JG for the tip and a nod of respect to Joe.

Here are my top takeaways from the Micro 4/3 lenses post—first, I had never heard of the Olympus 12–45mm ƒ/4 zoom before. It looks to be small and light yet of good quality, a combination of assets that gets my attention and has done from the days of the Leica M and Olympus OM Zuiko film-camera lenses. I wonder why there haven't been more utilitarian ƒ/4 digital lenses—what with high ISOs and mirrorless camera EVFs, there really is no argument against them. Another worthy-looking lens that had not penetrated my consciousness is the Panasonic 45–175mm ƒ/4–5.6 that Christopher Midyet, Andrew Johnston, and others praised. Next, I learned that Ctein has switched allegiances from the Olympus 45mm to its Panasonic 42.5mm competitor—interesting. Finally, essentially the same lens as the 45–175mm but at the other end of the "basic to deluxe" range, the Panasonic/Leica 50–200mm ƒ/2.8–4, drew the highest praise possible from Harold Glit—he called it the finest zoom lens he has used in his career as a photographer across all platforms.

Izzy from B&H Photo is sending me a Panasonic GX9 for review. Should be here next week. I wonder if that means I have to test the kit lens?

Elsa Dorfman selling prints in Harvard Square

"It's true. I sold my black and white archive pictures at Holyoke Center in Harvard Square from a shopping cart wagon I borrowed from the Beacon St. Somerville Star Market. It was 1972. The Star Market basket had the perfect configuration: A shallow top tray and a very deep bottom tray. Probably to take home big packages of baby diapers and toilet paper and Kleenex. Or six packs of beer.

"I charged $2.50 for an archive signed original print!!!! I stayed up all night for weeks printing, trying to guess what wd SELL.???? I put each image in a plastic bag to protect it. I only accepted cash. No checks. No credit cards. I had a ball. I saw all sorts of people: people who I knew well and people I knew in a vague sort of way. It was such fun."

—Elsa Dorfman, from her website

Elsa Dorfman and John Loengard have left us. Elsa, who was 83, was one of the few photographers of her era who got to be defined partly by her technique—she made distinctive portraits using one of the rare giant 20x24-inch Polaroid cameras. She had a studio in Cambridge, Massachusetts and you could walk in off the street and get your portrait taken for three grand. John Loengard, a onetime hero of mine, was a LIFE magazine photographer—I still miss LIFE, and it's been 48 years since it was a weekly—who became a LIFE editor. He was part of a generation in which being a photographer could open doors, and he photographed a long list of celebrated subjects over many years. Shhh, don't tell, but he was also a photo geek not unlike some of us. He was fastidious about his technique and picky about his lenses. Mostly he used a Micro-Nikkor 55mm, and he often used closeups to bring out a telling detail about a subject, like when he photographed Louis Armstrong's lips, scarred from years of his forceful trumpet playing. I treasure his book Pictures Under Discussion, which I have looked at more times than I can count. One of my favorites. John was 85.

Mike

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kevin willoughby: "I was wandering around Cambridge one day. I dropped into a building next to a classic movie theater. I met a lady hanging wonderful portraits of people and pets. Yes, it was Elsa Dorfman. We spent a few minutes talking. She's a lovely lady. The evening of her death, we watched a lovely, almost autobiographical, documentary of her work: The B-Side: Elsa Dorfman's Portrait Photography. It can be streamed from Netflix, Amazon, VUDU and other sources and is strongly recommended."

Mike adds: The filmmaker is Errol Morris.

Joe Holmes: "Thanks for the hat tip, Mike! I remember what fun it was to chat at the Javits back then with you and...could it have been Ken Tanaka? I forget. [Gordon Lewis —MJ] My wife Sara and I also tried to visit you in your upstate home a couple years ago when we were passing by on our way to Rochester, but our timing was off—you were out of town. (Sara is also a photographer.) We'll try again one day."

Steve C: "Joe, I'm not sure if I mentioned this before or not, but, 15 years ago, when I used to work on Lonely Planet's design team, I would start every day at my desk loading up your website to see if you'd made a new post. Your pictures were a real factor in me becoming more interested in photography, and especially street photography." 

Mike adds: Joe, I looked and read all the way through Sara's project "Women Serving Life Sentences." Thought-provoking and eloquent.

Dan Khong: "Saying the four-letter word 'LIFE' is like bringing back all manner of fond memories from when I was in my growing up years. For some reason, my father brought home a copy regularly. Many B&W photos still stick in my mind. Moon landing '69. 'Nam war pictures. John F. Kennedy and Jacqueline. Muhammmad Ali in and out of the ring. I think those pictures have inspired the way I photograph and put into place my passion for street photography. Maybe even B&W darkroom printing. Be very mindful that saying four-letter words can get your readers excited. Just sayin'."

Gordon R. Brown: "Please tell your readers about the viewfinder on Mr. Loengard’s camera."

Mike replies: I'm not an expert on all things Nikon, now or then—the best person to ask might be Stephen Gandy—but I believe it's a DW-4, without the rubber eyepiece, on a Nikon F3. The DW-4 was a 6X, whole-image magnifier with a high-range (–5 to +3) diopter adjustment, excellent for exact focusing. Its disadvantage was that it reversed the image laterally.

Rene Theberge: "I was living in Cambridge when Elsa was a prominent character in the cast of characters that lived/worked/hung out in Harvard Square in those days. A very different scene then as opposed to now. I passed by her so many times, stopped to look occasionally, never bought anything (stupid me!) because I had so little money at that time.

"Funny how these casual encounters in one part of your life reverberate back so many years later."

Harold GLIT: "To be thorough I called the P/L 50–200mm the finest zoom lens I have ever used in my career. For fixed lenses I have other great lenses in mind. I also want to say that, like Ctein, I did change from my Olympus 45mm ƒ/1.8, which is a fine lens, especially considering the price and weight, to the Panasonic 42.5mm ƒ/1.7 which is better. First it is better in the corners at the two widest apertures. It has also a great minimum focusing distance, so, while we are all stuck at home, it became my macro lens when combined with an extension tube."

Mike replies: I made the change in the post. Sorry for my error.

Around the Web on a Tuesday

Still the gold standard for creamy bokeh: a comparison of the modern soft-focus Cooke Portrait PS945 and the ancient Pinkham & Smith Visual Quality IV Series II it was designed to emulate. Is it wrong to be a little alarmed by the Black Queen? Yikes!  :-)

Our friend Peter was featured on ABC-7 News New York.

On this day in history, April 28th, 1945, Hitler's poodle, Benito Mussolini, the narcissistic fascist dictator of Italy during WWII, was executed by Italian partisans while attempting to flee to a neutral country. The reason Hitler gave orders for his corpse to be burned after his suicide was because of the gruesome photographs of Mussolini's desecrated corpse being displayed in public. Don't Google that if you're squeamish.

Last year of war: The latest by S.C. Gwynne is out. He's the author of my favorite book about the Old West, Empire of the Summer Moon, a vivid history of this continent's most powerful Indian tribe, the Comanche. His new book is Hymns of the Republic, about the final year of the American Civil War.

Sam Gwynne

Interviewed by Benjamin Thomas on The Writing Train, Sam said, "A few years ago I wrote a biography of Stonewall Jackson, entitled Rebel Yell, that ended with his death in May 1863 and thus covered roughly the first two years of the war. When I was researching the last year of the conflict, I was struck by how much more violent, desperate, brutal, and vengeful the war had become. This was the product of many things, including the progressive destruction of southern property, southern industry, and southern wealth; the staggering body counts from the Grant-Lee fight in Virginia; the anti-civilian warfare of William T. Sherman and Phil Sheridan; the rise of the prisoner of war camps; the rise of a bitter guerrilla war; and the presence of 180,000 black soldiers in the northern army, which drove Confederate soldiers to unprecedented acts of violence. I wanted to try to convey how deeply the war had changed, and the final year gave me a mechanism by which to do that."

A lesson in visual literacy: I don't read Danish, but these pictures are worth several thousand words. The title auto-translates to "How close are people to each other? These pictures are taken at the same time, but show two very different things." (I was once hired to photograph a demonstration at which exactly six demonstrators showed up. My photographs cleverly implied that there were many more people protesting than there actually were. Although they amounted to propaganda—lies—they scrupulously followed all the standard rules of conventional photojournalism. The camera doesn't lie, but sometimes photographers do.)

This is how: How did NASA get those great film shots of Apollo and the Shuttle? A YouTube video.

Deaths in the family:

• Eric Renner died on April 9th at age 78. Eric was one of the world's leading experts and practitioners of pinhole photography. Sadly, he missed this year's Pinhole Photography Day, which is the last Sunday in April, two days ago.
• Ted Grant died on April 19th at the age of 90. Ted was a leading light of Canadian photojournalism, and had long been liked, admired, and appreciated as a member of the Leica community online and in person. 
• Peter Beard has died. He disappeared from his home a month ago (he suffered from dementia) and his body was found on April 19th. He was a larger-than-life wildlife photographer in love with the myth of Africa and fascinated by human destruction of the nature he loved. His obituary is certainly a riveting read; one of his three wives was supermodel Cheryl Tiegs, and he once narrowly escaped death after being gored by an elephant. He was 82.
• John Pfahl succumbed to COVID-19 on April 15th at the age of 81. He was an inventive, distinctive landscape photographer who played with perspective, references, and humor in his artwork.

John Pfahl. Photo by Sharon Cantillon, Buffalo News.

Is it Ned, or is it Lee? Our friend Ned Bunnell channels Lee Friedlander.

Serif's Affinity Photo for Mac isn't free, but close enough. It's currently on sale for only $24.99.

Fantastic book on color: I'm currently halfway through one of the best books I've ever encountered on color photography. It's called Lifelike by Pavel Kosenko, and, unless you read Russian, it's available only on Apple Books. Totally engrossing. Really good read.

MaxMax's most recent monochrome conversion camera is the Sony RX100 Mark III. They're selling deluxe masks now, too.

Nicholas Hartmann, Vase (no number). November 2019; 3-1/2" high. Wheel-thrown from Special Buff clay; grooves cut on the wheel at the rim, shoulder, and base; foot trimmed. Brush-glazed with Raku Copper Sand (body) and Raku White Crackle (neck) glazes and raku fired.

Got time on your hands at home? Catch up with Joni Mitchell's "Shadows and Light." All the performers are excellent in this and play beautifully together, but it's most poignant for showcasing Jaco Pastorius at his amazing best. Jaco was the Pete Maravich of the bass guitar, an astonishing, flawed, and ultimately tragic virtuoso—his was a sad, sad story, as you can read in this excellent, moving biography. One commenter said, "Jaco...forces you to listen to what he is doing to the bass line of the song...but never gets in the way. Impossible...how does one do that?" This was one of the great jazz records of the '70s (recorded '79, released '80), but got no respect as such because Joni came from folk and pop.

From the World's Best Photography magazine, two features about photography in these awkward times: "Still Lives: In this unnatural state of isolation, photographers show us the things that bind," and "Bored Russians Posted Silly Art Parodies. The World Has Joined In." You have to go look up the originals to appreciate the latter article, but both of these are wonderful.

Finally, the Shelter In Place Gallery. Don't give up on this one too soon—I suspect you'll be delighted when its secret is revealed! Shades of Michael Paul Smith. "…In my opinion," says the gallery's creator, "it's an extremely silly project. It’s the kind of idea that nobody would really care about except for now when we have no choice." Love this.

Mike
(Thanks to Richard Man, Oren Grad, MM, Ned Bunnell, Steve Caddy, Carl Weese, Rich Beaubien, Hugh Crawford and others)

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.

Many thanks to all for your support

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Jack: "That Peter Beard made it to 82 is amazing. I met him once at a gallery opening showing his African work. The gallery was lit as if we were in Africa including jungle music and a remarkably realistic campfire. It was a fantastic setting with Peter sitting on the floor next to the fire. Alcohol was served and I had my share, enough that I decided I needed to buy one of his works. I decided bigger was better and purchased a huge 5x3-foot shot of an elephant herd from the air that is featured in his book End Of The Game.

"I forgot to consider what I was going to do with it. It was huge and our house had no African theme. My wife, who had gone along with the purchase since she had been served alcohol, the next day stated there was no way I could put it in our house. It remained in our garage for twenty-five years until donated to the Milwaukee Art Museum. At that moment, Peter had been gored and the value shot up in anticipation of his death. So I had accidentally waited for the correct time to make a donation. The value was ten times the purchase price. One lesson for me was don’t drink at photo gallery openings."

Mike replies: Speaking of the value shooting up, hang on to that book. You need some luck to buy a decent copy for less than $300 these days. Abebooks lists copies all the way up to $7,500 for a signed copy with a lock of Beard's hair pasted into it!

DavidB: "I really enjoyed the 'Bored Russians Posted Silly Art Parodies. The World Has Joined In' and the 'Shelter In Place Gallery.' Now that people have been forced to slow down, their creativity is being given a chance to blossom. This might be the 'silver lining' to the current pandemic."

Richard Man: "Uncle Ted Grant was an incredibly kind gentleman who loved to share his love of photography and Leica. Even though he was a 'big name,' he would mingle with amateurs without any airs. He will be missed. (And thanks for the link.)"

David Comdico: "Great post! Lifelike is a good book and covers a popular topic for which, when you get right down to it, there is very little useful information. Interestingly, after publication the author seems to have moved to film and a Hasselblad."

Jim Arthur: "Shadows and Light: In high school I was a member of an 'elite' three-member basement salon. One of our members played bass and built his own speakers. Another had a brother who played bass and built his own guitars. I was the artist and so I painted the instruments. As a result, I have Jaco’s solo debut album (Chris Squire’s too) in my collection. I’m sorry to admit it has not seen the light of day in many years but it is now front and center, clean, and on the turntable. If I’m to be true to the tenets of my 'elite' 1970s high school salon I will now need some sweet weed from South of the border, cheap beer (Olympia as I recall, smuggled in through the basement window), and a bean bag chair.  :-)  "

Awful Tones for Awful Times?

Every time I talk about what digital B&W "looks like," I get a cascade of blowback—people saying things like you can make it look any way you want it to look.

Right, and a lot of people these days seem to want it to look bad.

And anyway, I'm just looking around me at what's typically being done—I'm not talking about best cases, or exceptions—I'm talking about what are emerging as shared cultural defaults, the styles and fashions that are emerging as prevalent.

As a brief case in point, take a look at Todd Heisler's portfolio entitled "What New York Looks Like Now: A Photo Journey" in the New York Times, especially the lead picture and the picture titled "Brooklyn Hospital."

The photographer is very accomplished, and the Times shows some of the best photojournalism being done these days, so this isn't meant as a general disparagement of either. But the tonality in this particular portfolio is too far over the top. A number of these pictures are obviously taken in daytime sunlight and yet much of the tonal range is rendered as...well, black. Not sunlit, unlit. And I get it—the topic is hospital tents and other makeshift temporary emergency shelters at New York hospitals, so the mood is meant to be grim and threatened. Hence the use of the extremely dark, depressed tones. Awful times, awful tones.

But this goes too far. It's as bad in its way as extreme HDR or "slider slamming" with color and saturation, or any other species of digital extremism. You can call it "expressive interpretation" if you like, and doubtless that's how it is meant. In my opinion, though, it's not expressive, just excessive. The question about whether manipulation (of the pictures, and of the viewers) to this degree goes too far for photojournalistic objectivity is one I won't raise. To me it's a question of taste rather than appropriateness. Exaggeration like this gives black and white a bad name.

Mike

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.

Please help support TOP through Patreon

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Omer (partial comment): "My guess is that there is a photo editorial processing concoction in place across the board meant to dramatize or infer seriousness for the sole purpose of attention. Not unlike the designs of supermarket tabloid cover pages. It probably works, unfortunately, meaning the public at large is acclimatized to that look and then won't consider a more subtle finish as worthy."

Eliott James: "While I think this was a creative choice reflecting the horror of what's going on in NYC right now, I agree with you. Being objective (FWIW,) I think it's overdone. I think it might have had even a greater impact if it weren't so dark. I favor creative choice over set traditions but in the end it's a matter of opinion."

Rob de Loe: "OK, so it's not just me. I saw that series before reading this article and had the same reaction."

Alan: "Personally, I like it! It's deep, dark, and moody. Basically, the way I feel today! Perhaps the lack of shadow detail is a metaphor; can't see into them...can't see the light at the end of the tunnel either."

Kye Wood: "I saw these too. And thought the exact same thing. A bit like music. It should be broadcast 'flat.' Then if you want, adjust the treble or mids or whatever, to taste. Season as required. But showing the images as they have, you're not free to interpret them using your own mind—which is like a movie that has overbearing music to push the emotions the scene is aiming for. Hey people! If you do it right, you don't need crunch the tones in the image, or deafen us with violin swells at the movies."

Mike replies: One of the great demonstrations of that I saw was during a lecture by the great photographer Ralph Steiner. He presented four short films consisting of various views of agricultural sprinklers in action, set to four very different pieces of music. He then asked the audience which film was the longest and which the shortest. Great argument ensued. I myself was certain that the piece with the slow music was about twice as long as the one with the bombastic Wagnerian music. Well, you probably can guess the upshot—in the great reveal, Steiner admitted that all four segments of film had been exactly the same. The only thing that was different at all was the music. I was amazed. Even knowing what he had done, it was clear that the music seemed to bring out, or emphasize, very different aspects of the visual presentation. Thinking of the slow music, I felt the slow-motion cascades of water were prominent; whereas the fast music seemed to emphasize the cuts from one camera angle to another.  

Easter in New York

Our friend Peter Turnley and some of his photographs of New York City under lockdown will be featured on CBS Sunday Morning this Easter Sunday. Here's his announcement on Instagram if you'd like to try to catch it. I don't have a TV or I would!

UPDATE: Peter sends this—

"I have been a documentary photographer for the past now almost 40 years. As it happens, I have covered most of the wars of the world of these past four decades. This time, I have found myself in the middle of a war against an invisible enemy, at home.  As I live much of the year in New York, since the beginning of this coronavirus shutdown, I have been going out and photographing and have been keeping a daily diary of my walks and a record of what the many heroes I have encountered tell me. I go out most days—always with mask and gloves and always keeping a safe social distance from everyone, and return to where I stay alone. I think it is essential that the human face of this crisis be documented for now and for all time. Every person has a story—and there are so many heroes, and victims, and too often, some people are both. I feel that it is essential for me that I contribute in giving voice visually to the people of New York during this extraordinary and unique crisis.

"I sincerely hope that anyone viewing this, aside from watching the short piece that ran on the CBS Sunday Morning Show this morning, will take a few minutes to scroll through my A New York Lock-down Visual Diary. This the human face and words of so many heroes and people living through this crisis at this time. This is their story. This is also our story. With love, Peter."

Mike
(Thanks to Ned, Neil, and Peter)

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.

Please help support The Online Photographer through Patreon

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Ray Wallace: "A few years ago I was fortunate to travel with Peter on one of his impressive Cuba photo workshops, and then later was able to bring him to my university for a well-attended presentation as part of the Louisville Photo Biennial. Besides his stunning body of work captured from all over the world, he is a fine public speaker and can relate well to a variety of audience levels. I have followed his work for years and he has been a great influence on my own photographic journey. Simply stated, Turnley is both a true genius behind the camera and an important humanitarian voice in front of it. We all, photographers and lovers of the artistic endeavor alike, can learn a great deal from Peter Turnley’s work. This is some of his very best! Enjoy. Ray Wallace, Chancellor, Indiana University Southeast."

Gary: "Thank you, Mike, for pointing me to Peter Turnley's photo essay of life in NYC during the pandemic. It's long but rewarding."

Luke: "My god, Peter's diary is intense. He is a treasure."