The Online Photographer

Rant: Smartphone Contest

This post relates to the last one. In fact I almost put them together in one post, but I thought the point here might get lost if I buried it.

Disclaimer: This is none of my business. Anyone can have any sort of contest they want to, and judges can judge however they want to.

But: Somebody sent me a link to some of the iPhone Photography Awards winners, and, based on the sampling presented, at least, I really strongly disagree with the judges' approach.

See disclaimer.

Further qualifying/waffling (in advance of the big slam): of course, anyone can take any picture they want to with any camera they want to. If you want to use an iPhone for the same kind of pictures you'd take with an SLR—"across categories such as Nature, Abstract, City Life, Portrait and People" [groan]—knock yourself out.

However, I think that misses the point of what makes smartphone cameras unique and different as cameras, and it totally misses the character of what I think of as the best sort of smartphone pictures. The salient properties of smartphones are that most everybody—well, for some first-world definition of everybody—has one, everybody carries theirs most of the time, and they're so simple anybody can use one and anybody can get a well-exposed, color-balanced shot most of the time. Cropping is as simple as pinching and spreading two fingers. People tend to use them to take pictures of quotidian things in their humdrum lives, remarkable things they were unprepared to encounter, and pictures of casual but extraordinary intimacy that they have access to only because of who they are and their relationships to whomever or whatever they're photographing. Not to mention serendipitous accidents that happen totally by chance. (In cue sports when a ball goes in in some purely lucky fashion, it's called a "fluke."* Great smartphone shots sometimes are amazing flukes, pure and simple.)

So where is the best of that sort of thing? The sort of thing iPhones are peculiarly and specifically good at?

Not long ago a friend here showed me a wonderful snap of his twin grandsons, toddlers in diapers, who were energetically helping each other climb up into the family refrigerator after bedtime. By chance they were as well composed as putti in a Renaissance frieze**. That's one example of the kind of thing a non-photographer grandpa can get a picture of only because of his unique access and familial intimacy. That's the kind of picture a smartphone can enable that an outside photographer coming in all prepared with serious kit would never get.

I just do not need to see some conventional anodyne desiccated "Abstract" shot with an iPhone as opposed to being shot with an ordinary camera. Who needs it?

Go find some shots that only exist because smartphone cameras do, and then come back and see me.

That's my take.

But see disclaimer.  :-)

Mike

[How to put a picture in a comment]

*The snooker at the end is my favorite. (A snooker is when the object ball is blocked from the cue ball.)

**Pun intended.

Product o' the Week:

Fingertip Pulse Oximeter. The link is from TOP to Amazon. This relates to health, not photography—it replaces one of the advanced functions on the latest Apple Watch. Takes your pulse and measures your blood oxygen. For heart monitoring, checking for COVID (low blood oxygen is an early warning sign) and slow heartbeat. I'm learning to correlate the way I feel with the readings. Works with iOS and Android. Nifty little device, super easy to use, and cheap.

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:

Andrew L: "I agree with you. I have long been an avid proponent of what could be called the snapshot, but maybe 'slice of life' or something would be a better moniker, since snapshots were traditionally very posed much of the time. But these images that capture life events in the making, people at their most unguarded, memorable glimpses, these are vastly more interesting than the competition winners, which are all aping traditional 'real camera' genres and stylings. If you're trying to get something that looks exactly like what would have been gotten much easier with a full-size camera, a high-quality lens, and fully available settings, you may be nothing more than a masochist!"

Peter Komar: "Hello Mike, I loved every single image in that link. I know I am not smart enough to get your point of your post but it succeeded in getting me to look at the images. I would love to have any single one of those images framed and hanging in my home. They are exceptional in my humble opinion. Do you appreciate any of them as simply good photography?"

Mike replies: Hi Peter. I would be the last one to tell you what to like! But what I personally miss in the group presented by the WaPo is emotion, whimsy, chance and happenstance, a sense of any personal meaning for the photographer, mystery and wonder...the "snapshot or slice of life" that Andrew L mentions. I guess my basic problem is that I really love realness and life and meaning and a sense of the poetic in photographs, and really great iPhone snapshots, while rare, can so easily have all these things. Maybe I should mount a protest exhibition and go find some smartphone photographs that I feel actually represent the best of the genre....

Bill Poole: "Hmm. The Post's editors must have debated using 'iPhone'—a registered Apple trademark—as opposed to 'smartphone,' which you used. Apple marketing may be pleased; Apple legal, perhaps less so."

Mike replies: I haven't been able to find out much about it, but it's not the Post's contest. The Post had nothing to do with it except that it's publicizing some of the winners. The contest is run by an outfit called "iPhone Photography Awards (IPPAWARDS)" at 401 E 76th Street 3W, New York City, New York, 10021, which, according to zoominfo, has 25 employees and annual revenues of $4 million. It charges entry fees of between $3.02 and $5.50 per image, and the prizes, per the IPPAWARDS.com website, are: 

18 Gold Bars :: The 1st place winner of the 18 categories will win a Gold Bar from the most recognizable private gold mint in the world.

18 Platinum Bars :: The 2nd and 3rd place winners of the 18 categories will win a Platinum Bar from the most recognizable private gold mint in the world.

[...] and the top 3 winners will receive a prize to be announced later.

The pictures on the IPPAWARDS website appear to show gold and platinum bars of 1g weight (right), although this is not stated in print that I can find. As of today, 1g of gold is worth $57.77, and 1g of platinum is worth $34.02. So that means the announced prizes are worth a maximum of $57.77 to one winner and $1,642.22 in toto (give or take, according to fluctuations in the cost of precious metals), or about the cost of one iPhone 12 Pro Max and one high-end iPhone SE (give or take, according to fluctuations in the cost of iPhones.)

Someone else can do the explaining of the differential between the above and revenues of $4 million, as I'm not a business-y type of guy.

Bruce Bordner: "Well, as soon as you see 'iPhone' it's obviously marketing. There was nothing wrong with any of the photos, but they didn't seem like 'winners' to me. I liked two. However I am very interested in the evolving low-light and other capabilities that phones have with multi-image processing. CPU-assisted photography is branching out, with instant effects and 'filters.' These things have a look of their own; let's see that. Don't just compete with DSLRs; show the way forward."

Steve C (partial comment): "I was also pleasantly surprised by a lot of the pictures in the competition, and agree with everyone who says who cares what kind of camera they were taken with...except that they did seem almost as if each one had been chosen based on its ability to [impress] the viewer that a phone could be used to produce that picture. And I think this kinda gets at where you're coming from, Mike. They're phone pictures that look like pictures you'd expect from bigger cameras. A good picture is a good picture, but different cameras do have a certain look or at least certain mode of operation—and you can work with or against that for various kinds of effect. This competition did feel like it was pictures taken against the mode that phone cameras are best known for. Mike, you're asking the question 'What if we went with their grain instead?' I think it's a really good question."

Kenneth Tanaka (partial comment): "To say the least, I’m disappointed by your reaction. I’ve no energy to debate the matter. It just seems so self-evident that '…photography ain’t really about cameras.'"

Mike replies: But...it wasn't me who named it the iPhone Photography Awards! Seems like they did kinda make it about the cameras....

Stan B.: "Smartphone companies no longer have to convince anyone that their phones are capable image-makers for their everyday tasks and encounters. They've been busy selling that they are formidable cameras in their own right, capable of competing with 'real' cameras on their own terms—the underlying theme of that contest."

Rick: "I think I agree with you here; these photos are technically fine to good, but most of them don't exhibit the particular intimate spontaneity that phone cameras (and in the past, small point-and-shoots) are well equipped to capture. However, I think there's a couple of seemingly disparate threads that address this:

1.) Contests generally exist to make money. This one charges a fee. I won't guess at the motivations of those who started this competition, but it seems to me that the pool of potential customers—the competitors—for an iPhone-specific contest is much larger than the pool of customers for a contest targeting 'serious' photographers. More customers = more $$$. The judges are simply looking for technically good images that fit a reproducible aesthetic and have a universal appeal that they might be able to use to further promote the contest so the contest can continue to make more money.

2.) This contest promotes the idea that having a smartphone camera is just as good as having a 'real' camera because this idea can do nothing but popularize the contest and therefore make more money. People have ideas of what a good photo is; these ideas are informed by media consumption of all sorts. We can see how the winners match all sorts of cliches of what 'professional,' technically good images look like. People see these images, equate them with professional and serious photography, see they too have a phone, and feel then that they too can create such if they just have a phone with a decent camera. Then they enter the contest and make more money for the whoever is putting it on.

"This is a long-winded way of saying that—in my opinion—this contest trades on stereotypes of 'serious' photographic imagery to promote itself so that it may make more money for whoever is putting it on. The types of images that smartphones are uniquely positioned to be able to do—the ones you want to see—don't predictably fit the 'serious' aesthetic that the contest uses to appeal to iPhone users."

Sunday Support Group: Watch Watch

Mike Disfarmer, East Faust

Another Chance: My old friend Kim K. has posted an accessible mix at Mixcloud. Called "2nd Chance," it includes The Grateful Dead, XTC, Gomez, Bob Dylan, Another Sunny Day, and more. I've always loved the opening Dead song, and check out that zany harmonica on this version of "Desolation Row." Funky and funny. Typically, I liked the song that turned out to be Nick Lowe. (I like Nick. Jesus of Cool was an album I liked in the days of the old New Wave.) And check out that "cover" photograph: oddly touching, isn't it? The missing part graced a heart-shaped locket maybe. And I wonder what became of the locket? Surely the lover and the beloved are gone now, but what treasure the memento must have been to each other in their time. The more you can honor the one you love and the love you share, the happier both of you will be. By the bye, I use the Shazam app to identify the cuts—it can peg most of them, although Kim regularly stumps it. 2nd Chance is a nice listen for this cloudy Sunday.

Moose demos: TOP reader Moose posted a comment yesterday that linked to a couple of wonderful graphics—by hovering your mouse over several labels, you can compare and contrast various processing applications for phone pictures.

Sunset, Alameda Lagoon

Salad, Barley & Hops Pub, Occidental, CA

Quite a difference! I've never done much in the way of processing of phone snaps, but Moose has explored it thoroughly. Don't miss this. It only takes a few minutes to check it out and it's pretty eye-opening. Thanks, Moose.

Watch watch: Almost four weeks ago I did a post called "My New Watch," and I started a watch collection. I'm collecting only quartz watches, mostly in the "affordable" category. You might think affordable is a euphemism for "cheap," but it's actually one level above cheap, because cheap watches are really cheap*. I wanted to start out with a small group as a core, so I've had eight watches pass through my hands, and three of them have made it into the collection. Here's a fourth I'm considering now:

You can see the tag is still on it. I haven't decided if I'll keep it yet. For a guy who doesn't like color much, I find I really like touches of color in watch designs. You can see some of the little green accents in this one. Very pretty. Goes with my green shirt. On the other hand, I really don't like watches with advertisements printed on the dial like this one has. I had to buy this from the Netherlands for an inflated price...Casio doesn't bring its better Oceanus watches to the U.S., and the Edifice line is hard to find here too (although you can get the chronograph version of this one from Amazon.) This set me back $120 and change, which is higher than it was when you could buy it here, yet it's still high value: it's got a sapphire crystal, for one thing, which is rare at this price.

I call myself a "quartz snob." It's a joke, because watch people don't like quartz. Quartz watches have so many disadvantages: they require much less tending, you don't get to pay for regular servicing, they're less expensive to begin with, and they're far more accurate. No fun at all, in other words. I'm timing out that little Seiko I bought back on June 22nd, and after nearly a month, it is slow—but by about half a second. What a terrible watch—you hardly ever get to reset it!  :-)

Annals of the legal profession: Do you remember Mike Disfarmer? He was the Vivian Maier of the 1970s, a local "find" by a man named Peter Miller who rescued and publicized the work. By now the subject of many books whose prints sell for high prices, Disfarmer has joined Maier in that his archive is in legal dispute. A group of about 60 distant relatives are fighting for control of the valuable estate. It's the subject of a new article in The New Yorker called "Who Owns Mike Disfarmer's Photographs?" written by Eren Orbey. I haven't actually read it yet, but I'm a-gonna.

Mike

*In fact, I doubt any other single class of product has a wider range of prices on Amazon. At the high end, there's a Breguet Double Tourbillon in rose gold listed for $299,999.00, and at the low end there seem to be numerous Chinese watches listed for 1¢...apparently they make it up in the $10+ shipping charges.

Product o' the Week:

Ringlight for Zoom, Facetime, vlogging, streaming, video recording, remote working or remote learning. Holds a phone, or you can set it behind and above a desktop computer with a built-in camera. The following image is also a link: 

Original contents copyright 2021 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.

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

Joe Holmes: "That Mike Disfarmer article in The New Yorker originated with Ron Slattery, who is mentioned in the article. I'm an old online buddy of Slattery, and he contacted me a few months ago to ask if I knew any magazine that might be interested in writing up this crazy tale. My wife Sara Bennett had worked with Eren Orbey at one point...

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/photo-booth/life-after-prison-for-women-who-served-decades-behind-bars 

...so I put Orbey and Slattery together and the result you can now read at The New Yorker. I told each of them that I feel like the guy at the wedding who had introduced the bride and groom way back when."

Polarizing Filters on Digital

Does anyone have experience with using ordinary polarizing filters on a digital camera? I really have very little experience with them, even on film. I'd like to hear from you if you use them, or if you've experimented and decided against.

All I know is that I have a pair of good prescription sunglasses that have polarized lenses that I use as driving glasses, and I really like them. They don't appear to be "colored" at all—they're more or less just neutral-density filters. But the way they enrich colors, cut haze, and, especially, render clouds, is quite addicting. I don't always remember to put them on when I'm driving, but on good days—meaning, bright, clear days—I'll usually go for them because they enhance my enjoyment of looking at the landscapes passing by. I'm wondering if or how much a similar effect might translate to digital sensors.

Item second in regard to filters
TOP reader Sroyon Mukherjee (he comments using his first name) has written a very thorough article called "Colour Theory for Black and White Photography Part 1: Digital and Analogue Filters" over on Hamish Gill's 35mmc. It's a deep dive (even if you don't continue into Part 2), but even if you don't read every word, many of the illustrations are excellent and thought-provoking, and well presented. Well worth enjoying. The article is more like a book chapter than a blog post but it's worth scanning through it (my smaller computer balked at it, archly informing me that "This webpage was reloaded because it was using significant memory") and you might well like to return to it for a thorough perusal.

Sample illustration from Sroyon's article

One thought it inspired in me was that black and white really requires a point of view as regards tonality. Maybe we can get by in color just "going with our guts" and picking whatever seems nice with any particular picture, but the tonal differences with B&W are so marked and so different in their effects that we really need to make some fundamental decisions about tastes and goals. It used to be easier; we'd just settle on films, developers, papers (FDP) and filters we liked, and let the tonality play out as it naturally did; but digital is so much more plastic that radically different effects on the same file are possible and we need to have a firmer sense of what we're after in order not to get lost. For instance, the blue-filter devil-child in the above illustration. I would never use a blue filter with humans; then again, I never have owned a blue filter. The only thing they're good for is as a demonstration of what not to do.

I always recommended keeping a small pile of prints and magazine clippings with tonality you liked near at hand in the darkroom, to use to calibrate your tonal palette in your mind before or during working. Still good advice. Maybe better advice now than it used to be, even. Tonality is tougher than color; it has a wider range, and a broader range of expressive effects are potentially admissible and acceptable.

Anyway: recommended. Nice job. And Sroyon must be young, because that was a lot of work.

Mike

Product o' the Week:

The Apple Watch Series 6. This is a portal to Amazon from TOP.

The following image is also a link. You support TOP by buying through these portals.

Original contents copyright 2021 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.

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

Martin Doonan: "I used to use polarizing filters extensively (when I was shooting a lot of landscapes in bright light) on digital. They work the same as with film because the incident light is 'corrected.' There are creative ways to use them, too, for which I think digital has an advantage (chimping, live view, etc). For example: a polarising filter can be used to eliminate reflections from the surface of water to 'look under the water' so to speak. But the effect can be tuned as a rotating polarizer enables this to be tuned so you can see partially below the water, maintain some surface effect. Quite easy to get right with digital, much trickier with film."

Jim Metzger: "I will not be the first to say this…you need a circular polarizer, not a linear polarizer for digital sensors. I use Nikon or B&W and have observed no color cast, just intensification of color. I have used them on artwork reproduction and the artists are very happy with the results. Polarized sunglasses will darken the LCD screen on the camera and sunglasses in general will distort the colors in a scene, and I do not use those. I also go so far as to get my prescription glasses without UV filter coatings."

David Rayburn Haynes: "I use polarizing filters on my digital cameras and find the results to be the same as when I used them on film cameras—reduced glare, accentuated colors, increased contrast, and so forth. I rarely use color filters with digital cameras. I find that the Photoshop 'black and white' filter provides much more control."

Brian Geyer: "I find polarizing filters vital, and use polarizers frequently in pursuit of the wildlife and nature subjects that I seek. The benefits are identical, regardless of whether shooting ’chromes or digital images. I'm a Nikon user, and generally find it best to avoid matrix metering when using a polarizer. I auto-bracket the exposure in 1/3rd stops after first setting a fixed +0.3 stop of compensation, using center-weighted manual metering. I've standardized on using B+W's premium series of 'KSM' MRC circular polarizers. Other brands and grades may be equally effective, but do be sure that you use a circular (not linear) polarizer. Polarizers provide the only practical way that you can easily cut through glare and thereby enhance color saturation. I find a polarizer essential in lots of daylight outdoor settings, including city-scape scenery."

Bryan was the founder of Really Right Stuff (RRS). —Ed.

Sroyon: "Thank you Mike for linking to my article; it's an honour to be featured on TOP! I should really thank Hamish too, for giving me the freedom to go down whatever rabbit-hole I like and write about it—at great length! And yes, I'm one of those annoying millennials who enthuse over film photography and darkroom work, without knowing what a drag it was (or some of it was) back when film was the only option and not a fun alternative and luxury :-) .

"Re polarising filters, I have a circular polariser for my 'landscape lens,' a Sigma 10–20mm ƒ/3.5 for Nikon APS-C-sensor DSLRs (I bought the lens off eBay and the filter came with it). But it's new to me and I haven't really tested it yet. I read a book called Light: Science and Magic which has a good discussion of polarising filters, culminating in a remarkable example (at least it seemed remarkable to me): page 47 of this (legal) PDF. I'm not sure if it was recommended on TOP or somewhere else, but I liked the book in general, and learned a lot from it."

Rob de Loe: "Circular polarizers are needed with cameras that have mirrors. Linear polarizers work with mirrorless. I use polarizers extensively because I often work near water. They let me decide very precisely whether or not I want reflections, and how much. Usually you need some reflection to show it's water, but I don't like so much reflection that you can't see bottom in shallow water bodies. Unfortunately my lenses have front filter threads ranging from 39mm to 82mm, so I have to carry five filters.

"Black and white is my thing, so I'm going to enjoy reading Sroyon's chapter. On film, I was much more accepting of whatever decisions the film manufacturer made about how to represent colour with luminosity. I did carry a set of colour filters, but found them a bother and never got much beyond Deep Yellow and Orange. Digital changed all that. Digital laid siege to Castle Tone and sacked it. Tones are what I say they are now. This is why I have no interest beyond technical curiosity in monochrome sensors. I make the call on how colours are represented, and I now have so many different ways to do it in Lightroom (none of which include someone else's presets). Despite talk of sacking, I have my own guardrails. I use the 'Toupee Rule': if what I've done with tones sticks out (or worse, like bad HDR, draws the eye to itself for its wrongness) then I've gone too far. It's not about tones being 'natural' or 'faithful' (compared to what, and to what?). Instead, for me it's about tones being pleasing and balanced. My choices should make sense relative to what's in the scene."

The Picture on the Penny

(I know. It's a cent, not a penny. The U.S. does not have any currency called a penny. But cent does not alliterate with picture.)

(Only I would start out a post with a parenthetical, right?)

On Fridays I usually try to leave you with something fun to see or visit for the weekend, but I just couldn't get to work yesterday. It's been a heckuva week. And I'm fried.

Summer reading
So here you go—two things. First of all, the Times* published a nice list of Summer Reading books. Of course they recommended as "Summer" reading more books than I read in an entire year, but never mind. The authors of the article did a nice thing—instead of putting each book under its own subhead, they wove the discussion of one book into the next, which caused me to read far more of them than I would have if I were scanning subtitles.

So in the Historical Fiction segment of the list I discovered a novel called The Bohemians by Jasmin Darznik. It's fiction, but is narrated in the first person by Dorothea Lange! I'm way too conservative about, you know, reality to be comfortable with this as a literary strategy, but apparently it's a thing that's now done. (I did read Grendel by John Gardner after reading Beowulf, but as "the real" Grendel was mythical, that's a bit different. Although Dorothea is a "monster" in the sense of being huge as a celebrity among Photo-Dawgs.) Anyway the author imagines what Dorothea is saying and thinking and that's the basis of the book. Ansel Adams and Imogen Cunningham, among other luminaries of Old San Francisco, put in cameo appearances.

Interesting. If you read the book, I'd love to know what you think.

The picture in your pocket
Second thing: "Pawn Stars" is not the place I'd expect to encounter a drop-dead great photograph, but the picture in this little video segment is just way, way cool—the photographer, the subject, the signature, the format (first time I've ever heard the term "parlor card," by the way—all such things were always cartes de visite in my reading) and what the picture was the basis for. The appraiser says it's "the top of the pyramid," and I can sure see why. I wouldn't want the responsibility of owning this, but it really does have it all as they say. Wow.

Enjoy.

Mike

*I live in New York. I know "The Times" = "...of London" in the UK, but to a New Yorker "the Times" is The New York Times. As a New Yorker I also read The New Yorker, come to that. Have a nice weekend!

Book of Interest this week:

Ralph Eugene Meatyard: American Mystic (Fraenkel Gallery, 2017). An excellent introduction to Meatyard's quirky, spooky worlds. "Photography is a dream of awaking to a world still dewed in sleep." And Fraenkel Gallery's productions are always a cut above. The link is a doorway to Amazon.

Also sponsored by...

Original contents copyright 2021 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.

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

'The Picture That Changed My Life'

David Hurn, now 86 years old, is one of the great "plain-talkers" about how to approach being a photographer. This great interview is packed with simple but profound insights, and is well worth reading carefully. Fron Lensculture, and I don't see a date, although it must have been from some time in 2017.

Just a couple of quotations, because I can't resist:

The first is David quoting something Sergio Larrain told him: "Most of what you’re doing is not your best work. Concentrate on what you do well." After 40 years in photography I think that applies to most photographers. It leads to two related problems: one is work that's "all over the place," and the other is that what they do best remains tragically invisible to them...they do so many things they don't ever really know what they do best. Of course there's nothing wrong with being a dilettante if that's they want to be. But those who really concentrate and strive to honestly express their real concerns eventually have to become themselves. "If you are yourself," David says, "then something of your particular personality and way of looking at the world will come out in what you do. But you only get there if you genuinely follow your own interests."

I love the incisiveness of these appraisals: "Don [McCullin] loved anything that raised his adrenaline level, Philip [Jones Griffiths] had astute political knowledge, Ian [Berry] was basically a traveller." 

Enough tidbits. For younger and newer photographers, I don't actually recommend reading this interview. I recommend three things:

• First, read it twice;
• Then, go think about it as deeply as you can;
• Finally, read it again, slowly. 

Okay, I'm kinda kidding. But also kinda not. Much good and true wisdom in few and simple words.

Mike

Lens of Interest this week:

If you should happen to be looking for an all-purpose zoom for the Sony APS-C cameras I've been discussing lately, here it is. The Sony E 16–55mm ƒ/2.8 G is a high-quality, constant aperture APS-C zoom of manageable weight and appropriate size that covers the true wide-angle to short telephoto range.

The link above is a portal to Amazon. Also available from:

Original contents copyright 2021 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.

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

Kye Wood: "The photograph of his father. That photograph. Hit me like an anvil. Along with the clear text of someone who is so immersed and versed in their work, they can convey what's important without seeming effort. Great choice to share Mike. Thank you."

Mike replies: Yes, I had never seen that before, but I think that's one of the best photographs I've ever seen. Of course it has to have its "caption," its story, the explanation, to go along with it, or it's just a pleasant picture of an old man.

Lee Rust: "I'm not a young photographer, but thanks for this link. The message applies to all ages."

In Appreciation for David Thorpe

Wise, insightful, modest, honest, sensible, informed, mature...those are some of the adjectives that spring to mind when describing David Thorpe. Micro 4/3 users will no doubt be familiar with some of his many camera and lens videos. If you don't know him already, sample a David Thorpe video or two to see how such things are done when they're done as they ought to be.

A short voice-only message posted a few days ago brings the unwelcome news that he has suffered an illness and is saying goodbye.

Never an arm-waver or shouter, he didn't glorify himself. What came through in the videos and through his gentle, articulate voice and easygoing, respectful manner was, here's a friend we can trust.

We hardly knew ye, as the song said, but God Bless you all the same, David—you're one of the very best.

Mike

UPDATE: There's a nice bio page here. Thanks to Trevor Johnson for suggesting this.

Original contents copyright 2021 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.

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

Steve Rosenblum: "I loved David's voice and the quality of his videos. I generally avoid YouTube camera gear reviews because they are frequently done by inexperienced photographers who have used the gear for a few hours only and really have nothing to offer in my opinion. David brought a very long and deep experience to his reviews which I really appreciated. And maybe I'm just an American who is too much of a sucker for a beautiful British accent, but I find his voice a pleasure to listen to. I am deeply saddened by whatever health crisis he now faces and wish him a compassionate journey."

Paul B: "As a Micro 4/3 user, I have found David’s videos to be an invaluable resource. If you use this format you will be well served to view them. I appreciate his style—calm, honest evaluation, and no hyperbole. As a proponent and champion of our format, and as just a fine person, he will be greatly missed if this is indeed the end. My prayers are for a full recovery! Best wishes, David, and a warm-hearted thanks!"

The Girl in the Kent State Photo

"Last May, when Mary Ann Vecchio watched the video of George Floyd’s dying moments, she felt herself plummet through time and space—to a day almost exactly 50 years earlier. On that afternoon in 1970, the world was just as riveted by an image that showed the life draining out of a young man on the ground, this one a black-and-white still photo. Mary Ann was at the center of that photo, her arms raised in anguish, begging for help.

"That photo, of her kneeling over the body of Kent State University student Jeffrey Miller, is one of the most important images of the 20th century. Taken by student photographer John Filo, it captures Mary Ann’s raw grief and disbelief at the realization that the nation’s soldiers had just fired at its own children. The Kent State Pietà, as it’s sometimes called, is one of those rare photos that fundamentally changed the way we see ourselves and the world around us...."

Keep reading at WashingtonPost.com

I don't know if you'll be able to see this or if it will be behind a paywall for you. I hope the former. It's a fascinating article. By Patricia McCormick in the Washington Post Magazine, April 19th, 2021.

Articles like this take us back to first principles, by reminding us of the power and depth single images can have in the culture—and, in this case, of the sometimes sinister influence they might have in the lives of those photographed. "That picture hijacked my life," Mary Ann Vecchio said. She blames an Indianapolis Star reporter who turned her in to authorities.

A telling comment: "I'm a living person, and I'm in a history book!" Mary Ann says at one point. And, but for that picture, "I might have stayed anonymous forever."

If you can't see the article, you can see the picture here. (Again, I hope you can. I don't have a subscription to TIME.com and I can see it.)

The student photographer who took the picture, John Filo, is now head of photography for CBS. The article also describes the effect the photo had on him and his life. For example, he felt very guilty when he realized Mary Ann was not a student protester at all but merely a 14-year-old runaway who happened to be passing through the area. She had met the dead boy, Jeffrey Miller, only 25 minutes earlier. The article recounts John and Mary Ann's emotional eventual meeting.

Thanks to Scott Kirkpatrick for alerting me to this. You might remember Scott from this post.

Mike

Will you help sustain "The Online Photographer"?

Also sponsored by...

Original contents copyright 2021 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.

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

Rene: "This murder and those of the other victims at Kent State and Jackson State in Mississippi on May 15th had a profound effect on my life. I was a 25-year-old graduate student at a state university in a conservative state. As the only graduate who went out on strike at my university as part of the national student strike, I tended to stand out. Within days I was purged from the university and 'strongly advised' by the State Police who came to my home to leave the state. Discretion being the better part of valor as they say, I left within a day or two; my decrepit old Volkswagen bug just making it out to a more liberal city in another state before collapsing.

"It all turned out well in the long run (I'm now 75) but it changed the course of my life and took it in directions and to places I never would have imagined. It's part of the journey that led me to photography."

Douglas Howk: "Being a Kent State alumni (class of '68), I was invited to a fundraiser at Ted Kennedy's home in McLean, VA. Most of us were still in shock at what happened, but we remembered the animosity of the Kent townsfolk toward us students. Being both anti-war and a veteran (Army, '65), I could sense the hatred of a polarized nation. Sounds familiar."

Phil: "Thanks Mike. That's an incisive lesson: to contemplate the effects of a photo on both the person who took it and especially the people in the photo. It's something that all us street photographers should stop and think about, once in a while since, by definition, we're snapping pictures of people who didn't choose to be in our photos.

"I was 10 years old when the Kent State massacre took place. I don't really remember it at the time. But I do remember that summer, during our family trailer trip across Canada, somewhere in the prairies the CSN&Y song 'Ohio' came on the radio from some local radio station and my older brother and I stopped and listened raptly. I've always remembered that moment. My parents weren't keen on that 'hippy music' but my brother pointed out that this was protesting when the students were shot and my parents both stopped and listened with somber attention. That moment certainly was one of those inflection-points one has as a kid."

albert erickson: "I am a Kent graduate class of 1970. Yes I was on campus that day. It was my last day of undergraduate school. I was not directly apart of the demonstrations but nonetheless it affected my life more than I would ever realize at the time. I was commissioned a second lieutenant a month later as a result of completion of Army ROTC and faced with a decision about Viet Nam. Fortunately I never had to make that choice but was assigned stateside. I hold a place in my heart for Kent and those who were a part of that demonstration and following events. To this day I sit on a board at the University and make several trips a year back to the school. That day and those events were a large part of who I am today. Thanks for mentioning this today."

What Does Cindy Sherman Look Like?

Cindy Sherman as Cindy Sherman

When a reader left a tip asking the question in the headline, I laughed. The very question seems preposterous. Cindy Sherman, look like someone? Cindy Sherman can't look like anyone. Or rather, she looks like everyone.

Cindy has been around for most of my whole life in photography. I never quite "got" her work—even when I have it explained it to me in a way I grasp intellectually, I still don't quite get it. If I'm honest.

One thing that taught me, though, is that maybe it's not for me. It's a peculiar kind of egocentrism to think all art should be for us. Of course it isn't. Maybe Cindy reaches just the audience she ought to and that she seeks to, and I'm just not in it. That's no crime on her part or mine. The older I get, the less egotistically demanding of others I get, and, also, the more I forgive myself for all the potentially interesting things I don't engage with.

So much art, so little time.

I'll tell you one thing, though, she's the real deal. When I first became aware of her, which must have been in art school—she's only a few years older than I am—my knee-jerk reaction was to suspect that her schtick of being just another attention-grabbing gimmick. Wrong-O, Dektol-breath. No one can sustain such a rich career, varied yet consistent—not to mention remarkably unique—without being sincere and authentically motivated. My initial bratty wet-behind-the-ears insolence was gradually displaced by admiration and respect.

But one question for sure never occurred to me to ask...what does Cindy look like? The question itself must be existential art-world doublespeak! Heh.

Anyway, as you know I take Saturdays off, so on Fridays I try to leave you with something good to occupy your Saturday, in case it might be, for you, a lazy day in which you have some free time. Today it's Art:21's "Cindy Sherman in 'Transformation,'" from Season 5 of that wonderful series.

I enjoyed it so much I watched it twice. Hope you enjoy it too.

Mike

Book o' this Week:
Black in White America 1963–1965 by Leonard Freed, a new reprint of this classic from the Civil Rights era. I got to meet Leonard Freed once. <—This is a portal to Amazon; also available at the Book Depository for global delivery with free shipping.

Original contents copyright 2021 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.

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

James Bullard (partial comment): "I don't 'get' her either but then I belong to the 'witness' tradition of photography and she's a conceptual artist. Her photographs are not about the subjects in the photographs. Her subjects are just a medium, a proprietary visual vocabulary to express her ideas. I don't get her work because I don't share or understand that visual vocabulary."

Rickard Grangården: "Surely that question has been answered ages ago.... :-) "

Mike replies: Great find, thank you! I love it. Never saw that before.

Daniel Speyer: "I don’t look for artist’s interviews or reading usually what they say about their art, but having said this it was interesting to see what my three favorites had to say—they being Hockney, Arbus, and Sherman.

—Sherman is talking about the mechanics (your link was the first time I heard/saw the [real?] Sherman).
—Hockney being interviewed in a (what do they call it: a coffee table book?) book is very intellectual.
—Arbus—well she committed suicide.

"I guess those are three extremes for talking about one's art. In no case, at the level of viewer, do they tell you about their art."

Kenneth Tanaka replies to Daniel: " Right on, Dan! Whenever you have a chance to hear an artist, or photographer, speak directly about their own work, grab it! Even if you don't like the work. Actually, especially when you don't like their work [I second that —MJ]. I have been very fortunate to have had such opportunities many times and it always enriches my understanding of the work. I may still not engage with their stuff but I feel I have a better understanding of why. The case of this Art:21 doc of Cindy Sherman is a good example. This was my first time hearing directly from her about her work. (My earlier encounter with her was largely social.) I still feel the work it kitschy but I understand its genesis much better.

"There are so few artists and photographers still living who affect our aesthetic trajectories or sensibilities. Even fewer can coherently discuss their work. Make time to see or meet with them if possible. If the Internet is the only way to do so, fine! But do it if you have any interest in maturing your appreciation and sensibilities."

Angela Weil: "How Cindy Sherman looks like? I always enjoyed her work as she presented quite a spectrum of the female experience. Now, a few years ago, a person very dear to me did a project as homage to Cindy Sherman—in B&W. I had the pleasure to assist in some of the setups and the costumes."

Mike replies: She did a great job. I really like that.

David Brown: "I only wish I could do something at the level of her work! Not 'her' work, mine, but at that level. Genius."

Stephen Cowdery: "I saw her 2012 retrospective (MoMA, Walker Art Center) and I wasn't expecting much but I was stunned and I am not usually impressed by staged photography. Nearly every image spoke to me, sometimes apparently in a foreign language, but I felt challenged. As David P. Goldman said: 'We may judge what is merely beautiful, but sublime art judges us, or better said, it challenges us to judge ourselves.'"

Dogman: "I've liked her work since 'Untitled Film Stills.' It's not the kind of photography I do but it's engaging and well done. I also like Crewdson's vignettes. Both make little mysteries without resolution."

hugh crawford: "When my friend Jamie Livingston lived in a loft on Fulton street in the early '80s I kept seeing this woman in the elevator who seemed really familiar but I couldn’t quit remember her from anywhere. Turned out that Cindy Sherman was the upstairs neighbor. I thought she sort of looked like Shirley MacLaine."

Ernest Zarate: "For me, what you describe is what I call letting go of expectations. As humans, we seem particularly determined to lay our expectations at the feet of others, and then get mightily offended when they fail to live up to those expectations. Expectations cover so many aspects of life: what we do, what we wear, what we eat, what we drive, religion, politics, sex... and so on. And those expectations, in my book, pave the long, torturous, and soul-sucking road to disappointment.

"A few decades ago, I realized that no one was put on Earth to live up to my expectations. Every person is free to make up their own life, without having to consult me first. I found this revelation to be quite liberating. For me, life is like going to a restaurant with your friends: each person orders what they like from the menu, without regard to what anyone else is ordering. If I order the salmon, and someone else orders a salad, and someone else wants to dive into a bowl of fresh strawberries, it matters not one whit—except to the person ordering it. We all sit down at the table, enjoy our unique meals, and the company we each bring. In truth, the only person Cindy Sherman’s work needs to satisfy is herself. That others (though not everyone) find value in her work is no doubt icing on her cake."

Zyni Moë: "Pretty sure people who do not ever have to obfuscate or hide their identity would find it hard to understand what Cindy Sherman has done. If you are American man (especially white American man), well you never really have to conceal who you are unless you are a criminal or something. We all sneer at you (not you specifically, at all Americans), but you come to us bearing money, nuclear weapons and sometimes even you pretend to high principles, so we accept you as you are. Unless you enjoy playing identity games, you do not need to play them.

"If you are, perhaps, female of Roma (Gipsy) background from Eastern Europe then things are very different. If you say you are romani, people will think you live in a vardo and ride coloured horses and that you are dirty and stupid. Perhaps they will try to help you escape from this imagined squalor, perhaps they will spit on you: certainly they will not accept that you just want to do maths which (despite being smelly and stupid) you are good at. If you tell people on the internet you are female and dare to be more clever than them you will get rape threats (yes, you will: I can show you them). And there is worse I will not say. So, if you will not give up, you hide. You wear masks, you invent characters and play at being them because being what you really are is somehow asking to be ignored or attacked. And that is how you make your way. And Cindy Sherman is interesting to people who must do these things, and what she does is a little more interesting than yet another macho photographer sticking his camera in people's faces."

Mike replies: Thank you for that. It really helps me see Cindy Sherman's work differently. (Your first paragraph reminded me of something my black freshman roommate told me in college: "the difference between you and me is that you think about race whenever you want to. I have to think about race all the time whether I want to or not." I've never forgotten that.)

Crabby Umbo: "I have to respond to Kenneth Tanaka and say I've made some of my biggest mistakes going to hear artists talk about work I admired, only to lose interest because the artist was less than expected. I now make it a policy to never go and listen to artists talk about their work, under that old art director's adage that '...if your work doesn't speak for itself, I don't need to hear you talk about it.' I remember going to a lecture by a photographer (who shall remain nameless), in the '90s, whose work was very out of the ordinary and dark, I thought one of the freshest things I'd seen in years! When I went to the lecture, I realized this person wasn't a weird troubled soul, but his work was all an MFA degree calculation; like he had a marketing crew planning the look to be 'different' (he didn't, but...). I came home and sold my books by him. I've never been to an artist lecture since then...."

Street Photography: Andrew Kochanowski and Don Hudson

Photo by Andrew Kochanowski

Andrew Kochanowski left a late comment to the "New Pentax" post yesterday, which reminded me that it had been a long time and I should catch up a little with his recent work. I turned to Burn My Eye, the collective of which he's a member. There, you can see his Featured Gallery. I particularly like the one with the gun. And that last one, very subtle.

A street photograph is easy to love, if you love it. If a particular example happens to work for your eye/mind and your taste, it can seem like it's somewhere on the spectrum between lucky and miraculous. On the other hand, if a particular street photo doesn't grab you, it can seem haphazard, lame, even puzzling—it can be difficult to see what the photographer saw in it. It would be my guess that most street photographers have to shoot an awful lot to unearth that occasional gem that works for them. And it can be the same way for viewers, too—you have to look through a lot of what seems to you to be dross to find the ones that (again, to you) are golden.

I spent some quality time at Burn My Eye and looked at a lot of the Featured Photos. Check out Don Hudson's picture of the fans all reaching for the fly ball, the Photo of the Month for last January. That's one, for my taste, that has got it all goin' on—love it love it love it. Truly deserves the overused compliment "nice capture" (or as he says, a nice catch). At Instagram he is @Don Hudson. Doesn't hurt (yet again, just for me—you're getting that, right?) that it's historical and also B&W....

Photo by Don Hudson

Andrew has photos in a lot of places around the web. Fortunately, he also has a pretty good "Internet name"—he's pretty searchable. Try "Andrew Kochanowski photographer" and it will lead you to a number of street sites. Here's his website.

Mike
(Thanks to Andy and Don for permission to use their photos)

Book o' this Week:
Accidentally Wes Anderson, the group-sourced book of the Instagram trend, endorsed by the director. <—This is a portal to Amazon; also available at the Book Depository for global delivery with free shipping.

Original contents copyright 2021 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.

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

Gordon Lewis: "Thank you for pointing me to Andrew Kochanowski's work. It was delightful. The number of people who call themselves 'street photographers' is countless these days. Andrew is one of the few who has a distinctive enough style and eye to reward those who take the time to explore his photographs, collectively as well as individually. Anyone who thinks what he has accomplished is trivial or easy has clearly never tried it themselves. It takes not just luck, but extraordinary vision, skill and timing."

[Ed. note: Gordon wrote the book on street photography.]

Kenneth Tanaka: "Bravo Andrew! I have admired his work, and that of the Burn My Eye group, for years. Skilled, patient, insightful, often ironic. Browsing their work induces more DIWITT spasms from me than nearly anything outside of a browse through a book of Haas, Leiter, Herzog, et al. A touchstone to remind us all that the pinnacle of photography is vision and capture reflex.

"DIWITT = Damn, I wish I took that."

Andrew Kochanowski: "Thank you Mike for a nice surprise! In case you want a brief note on my thinking about street photography, and even if you don't, let me add one: There is too much of it that doesn't grab my interest because in my view, the genre is too focused on the single, grabby shot. The easy, cheap snap, and the instant Instagram gratification, are addictive. If you make it dramatic, if you make it complicated, if you play with reality, yes, there are a lot of likes out there. Thousands of photographers (several Instagram street photo aggregators have followings of over 100,000 people) essentially copy each other over a few tropes to get that shot before a big aggregator and get 5,000 likes. It's a very different world from Joel and Gerry and Helen and, you know.

"I prefer the essay form to show street photography. I find that I unconsciously look for a few things and when I think I have enough, a photo essay springs to mind. I've put up a number on my site, www.akochanowski.net. While you're right, I can be found all over, I prefer that the viewer look at my work in the context that I present. Thanks again, and thanks for featuring Don Hudson as well. We're both Michiganders, disproportionately represented in our international group Burn My Eye. —Andy."

Blake: "Street photographers are a funny breed. A lot of chest-pumping and declarations, and arguing over what is or isn't street or which ones are good or bad or this or that.... Maybe this happens in other types of photography too, I'm not sure. But street photography seems especially prone.

"Anyway, for contemporary street most of the action is now on IG. I would recommend browsing there to get the lay of the land. Websites are OK too but more static and less relevant in my opinion. Wherever you browse, caveat emptor. It's a minefield of mixed quality, age, style, and promotion. But if one is patient there is much to see. Andy and Don's photos are among the best."

J.B. Forbes Has Retired

[Ed. Note: The primary purpose of this post is a link to a portfolio by an American newspaper photographer, and the link appears to be inaccessible from other areas of the world. The video however is available on Facebook at this link: https://www.facebook.com/STLPD/videos/234414541362864 (thanks to Dave_lumb and Sean for this). —Mike the Ed.]

-

Photojournalism isn't art. Or rather art photography. It doesn't have the unity of vision of art photography, the subtlety and individuality of purpose or consistency of style. As far as feeling-tone is concerned, sometimes photojournalism clubs you over the head with sentiment. But at its best, there's a vigor to photojournalism that's tough to beat—there's always meaning, and usually, significance. You come away from it with your feathers flustered, feeling like you've been jostled by human contact and touched by the energy of that. You've had an encounter with the world.

It's really nice to be writing this and linking to this when it isn't an obituary, by the way. Too often we only grant a flurry of notice and attentiveness to someone when they die. By which time they are, under most belief systems anyway, unable to appreciate it. Ever notice how death notices are sometimes the first you ever hear of a person? Sad when that happens.

But in this case it's only a retirement—Missouri Photojournalism Hall of Fame member J.B. Forbes has retired after 45 years as a photojournalist at four newspapers, most recently as Chief Photographer for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

Upside-down Ozzie
As you know, TOP takes (that is to say, I take) the day off on Saturday. It's the day of the week we get the least visits. So I sometimes make an effort to leave you with something to chew on that'll hold you for the weekend.

Perhaps never more so than this. Check out this portfolio and video of some of the highlights of J.B. Forbes' career:

"The stories behind the images: The photos of J.B. Forbes"

Although I never knew his name, I'm amazed by how many of these photographs I know. I have a good visual memory (not so good with names, numbers, or the exact wording of quotes—my editor friend Jim Schley has great retention for exact quotes). I do remember pictures, though. Often for a long time. I'm almost sure I haven't seen upside-down Ozzie Smith since around the time it was taken, but I've always remembered it. I know I've seen many of the photos in this portfolio before. The fireman and the little boy who wouldn't let go of him, with its particularly poignant caption; Spinks landing one on Ali; the prisoners playing dominoes; the girl with the tears in her eyes; that distinctive pose of an energetic candidate Barack Obama; the child holding the AK-47; the young boy watching the couple kiss on the statue; Harry Carey and Jack Buck. I'll bet I haven't seen a lot of these since they were taken, but they're still old friends.

And some new ones, too. I especially like the one of the deer in the graveyard. That scene has a graceful gentleness about it, doesn't it? And the one of the two soldiers on the snowy road with "Santa" in red beside them.

Anyway, this weekend, if you have a spare hour, take a leisurely look through this portfolio and watch the video (I watched in installments). I bet you'll find something to appreciate.

I'm sure we all wish J.B. Forbes a long and productive retirement! Maybe photojournalism isn't art—but hey, art isn't photojournalism, either.  :-)

Have a nice weekend! See you on Sunday.

Mike
(Thanks to Ray Hunter)

Product o' the Week:

A fantastically comfortable ergonomic mouse for PC users. Should be considered incompatible with Mac unless you want to use only default settings. Available in regular and small sizes, right and left hand, and wired and wireless. WARNING to Mac users: Do NOT download USBOverdrive! It broke my computer. But really, for you PC users, you won't believe how easy on your hand this mouse is.

The link above is a portal to Amazon, through which most anything you purchase will be credited to TOP. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

And here is a portal to...

Original contents copyright 2021 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.

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

John Robison: "What a treat. Thanks for that link. My favorite was the night shot of the St.Lewis arch with the snow falling. But really, what a great body of work."

Larry Wilkins: "I think the photo of the coffin of the Franciscan friar, Rev. Valerian Schott, in the grave is just about perfect. Thanks for the link."

DB: "A spectacular portfolio and career. Thanks for posting, Mike."

Hugh Lovell: "A stunning collection of images by J.B. Forbes, many overruning with emotion. Thank you for the link."

Quote o' the Day: Amy Frearson on Simone Bossi

"At a time when digital photography makes it easy to take hundreds of photos on each shoot and correct mistakes in the edit, he prefers to spend more time thinking than shooting, to ensure that every picture is carefully considered."

—Amy Frearson, writing about Simone Bossi in Dezeen

Italian photographer Simone Bossi has done something weird and different enough that it merits an article on Dezeen, an online architecture and design magazine: he shoots architecture with a large-format film camera.

Seems to me that's been done before...but okay. It's all good, as the kids say. I liked the article and what it tells us about his approach.

He believes the use of digital cameras leads architectural photography to become too contrived; he claims it's better to appreciate the beauty of imperfections than it is to make images feel too polished.

Digital 'was too much to digest and too many pictures to control,' he said.

I think you can follow his principles and aesthetics with either digital or film cameras, but you know what he means. And it makes sense.

Jane Bown, one of my heroes, said that when she took lots of pictures of her subjects she noticed that the first and last ones were usually the best, so she just cut out all the ones in the middle. (I always liked that. You can't quite tell how serious she is versus how much she's, well, winking.)

In the '80s, I learned the lesson with a roll and a half of film I shot of some mud-wrestlers on the Mall in D.C. The pictures were all broadly the same but subtly different, and I had the devil of a time editing them. I reached a point almost of paralysis. I resolved not to shoot so much, but to pay more attention to trying to anticipate the peak moment.

(I have to admit that when I was in art school I would sometimes find myself taking almost a whole roll of the exact same thing, only because it was such a pleasure to see it through the viewfinder and such a pleasure to photograph it. It was like a form of meditation or of reverie. Or like a lab rat pressing a button for more sugar-water, take your pick.) It was wasted motion either way, though, because three rolls of film took an hour and 45 minutes to develop, from setup to cleanup.

At around the same time I learned that you could shoot away at something with a motor drive (well, I had a motor winder, 2 FPS, which might have been lucky in that it imparted the lesson more clearly) and still miss the actual peak moment. I decided then that I would work on trying to concentrate hard on pressing the shutter button at the exact right moment but not take a lot of pictures of anything. (On static subjects, I continued to take two frames just in case something went wrong with one negative.) The Leica M6 I had in the early '90s was the one camera I ever owned that seemed completely on board with this plan. In fact that sense of instantaneous, unquestioning response might have been the best thing about a Leica rangefinder.

What I do now when I shoot people is to still concentrate on trying to shoot at just the critical moment, but I put the camera on "H" (high) so it takes a quick sequence. That saves me from momentary oddities such as blinks or an awkward momentary arrangement of blowing hair or an awkward juxtaposition of a passing automobile in the background. It's like one picture but with extras.

(By the way, lately I've been noticing that I don't shoot enough. I've taken minimalist shooting maybe just a little too far. If the guiding principle would be "shoot as few pictures as you can, but no fewer," maybe I've strayed across that line a bit where it comes to the "but no fewer" clause. Pixels are free.)

I don't know how many people follow my article links any more, but if you do, I hope you enjoy Amy Frearson's article about Simone Bossi. I did.

Mike

Product o' the Week:

A fantastically comfortable ergonomic mouse for PC users. Should be considered incompatible with Mac unless you want to use only default settings. Available in regular and small sizes, right and left hand, and wired and wireless. WARNING to Mac users: Do NOT download USBOverdrive! It broke my computer. But really, for you PC users, you won't believe how easy on your hand this mouse is.

The link above is a portal to Amazon, through which most anything you purchase will be credited to TOP. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

And here is a portal to...

Original contents copyright 2021 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.

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

Merle Hall: "I enjoyed that. Reminded me of the story by John Weller in William Neill Photographer—A Retrospective, where John was out shooting with Mr. Neill. They had been shooting for about an hour and John looked up and realized Mr. Neill had been standing in one place the whole time. He finally said, 'Found one.' and then took out his camera. The comment about color as a filter or trend is interesting, too."

Moose: "Re missing the actual peak moment, Olympus introduced the answer to this problem. They call it ProCapture. I suppose someone else may do something similar, but it's not common. Press the shutter button halfway. It starts recording files, at up to 18 FPS with focus for each one, higher without. When the queue hits the number you have selected, the oldest fall off the end, into the bit-bucket. Finish pressing, and the queue is all saved. You can also set it to take a few frames after. Let off the button without full press and the queue is emptied. Go through the results in LR, or whatever you use, select the best, dump the rest. Perfect solution to eye/brain/finger/camera lag. It's for exactly the sort of thing you write about, as well as sports, wildlife, and so on."

Mike replies: Which cameras have that, do you know? And thanks for that very clear explanation of how it works—best I've read.

Richard John Tugwell: "Re 'The pictures were all broadly the same but subtly different, and I had the devil of a time editing them. I reached a point almost of paralysis.' This resonated with me. I shoot a few stock images, mainly landmark / buildings. Because of digital I tend to shoot many slightly different ones with the idea that "I'll edit/select later". Big Mistake. Especially when the differences are minimal. Paralysis indeed - do the selection before pressing the shutter button!"

James Weekes: "Neil Leifer recounted the time he took his new Nikon motor drive out on a shoot. He was filming a figure skater, I believe Peggy Fleming, and shot a whole roll of her spinning. He ended up with 36 slides of her back."

Edwin Land Predicts the Smartphone Camera

...In 1970. For context, start the video at about 10:44...

...And he pretty much nails it at about 12:30. Cool. The video was a presentation for a stockholders' meeting. Thanks to the reader who suggested this.

Land, as younger readers might not know, was the genius inventor behind the Polaroid camera and the genius marketer/businessman behind Polaroid Corporation, which is essentially gone now but was a great success story of its era.

Mike

Product o' the Week:

A fantastically comfortable ergonomic mouse for PC users. Should be considered incompatible with Mac unless you want to use only default settings. Available in regular and small sizes, right and left hand, and wired and wireless. WARNING to Mac users: Do NOT download USBOverdrive! It broke my computer. But really, for you PC users, you won't believe how easy on your hand this mouse is.

The link above is a portal to Amazon, through which most anything you purchase will be credited to TOP. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

And here is a portal to...

Original contents copyright 2021 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.

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

scott kirkpatrick: "Fascinating video, in many ways. The whole clip, not just starting at 10:44. His accent is incredibly Boston. I hadn't appreciated the size and complexity of Polaroid at its peak but he describes it all, down to the I.M. Pei factory that is probably still down on a hilltop in Norwood. I wonder what it does today. He sounds in some ways like a high-tech founder of today, but in other ways couldn't be more mid-century, post-WWII management."

Marshall Arbitman: "The Steve Jobs of his time. And, in many ways, twice the wizard. These days, the pretenders to the SX-70 throne, and inheritors of the title, cannot even manage a film that develops in daylight. Land invented it 50 years ago. As a kid, I'd ride past the factory at least twice a week, like Charlie Bucket gawking at Wonka's place."

Frank Gorga: "I enjoyed Victor McElheny's biography of Edwin Land titled Insisting On the Impossible: The Life of Edwin Land."

Kenneth Tanaka: "Edwin Land sure did land awfully close to today’s world in that talk! (I’d never seen it, so thank you for sharing it!)

"Edwin Land is unquestionably one of the true heroes and great minds behind photography’s history. Years ago when someone asked me who I most admired in photography I immediately named Land. ('Who?' was the response.) Unlike most of my contemporaries who started with B&W film, the Polaroid Land camera was my first camera as an early teen. I loved it. I would scrimp to buy film packs to feed it. Many years later I began reading of Land’s accomplishments not just as an engineer but also as a promoter. He was a remarkable person.

"If you want to see just how good of an engineer and visionary Land really was try to get your hands on the three-volume (two-book) set, Edwin H. Land's Essays. It’s long out of print, but still buyable on the used market. Much of it is deep technical presentations aimed mainly at helping to attract capital for developing various photographic technologies, including instant photography film. The volumes are titled, 'Polarizers and Instant Photography,' 'Science, Education and Industry,' and 'Color Vision.' That third volume features extensive detailed treatises on Land’s 'Retinex Theory of Color Vision.' It’s a remarkable series of papers for the technically-minded reader. There is a more human biography of Land’s life (which I can’t seem to find at the moment) but his essays are the best way to know what a real genius and oracle he was to photography.

"Thank you, again, for posting that video link. What a character, eh?"

hugh crawford: "When I was a child I would see advertisements for the Polaroid Land camera and always wondered what happened to people who tried to take a picture on a boat. I figured it must be pretty dangerous if they felt compelled to put the word 'Land' in the name."

Mike replies: Ha! I had that very same thought as a kid.

Around the Web on a Friday*

*First posted on Thursday, but I'll add more to it as the day wends on and then more on Friday.

Eight Grandicron: It's always been a matter of happy argument whether the 50mm or 35mm is the quintessential, the indispensable M lens, but it's certainly one or the other. Leica just announced a new Apo-ASPH 35mm Summicron to replace the now-venerable original 35mm Summicron ASPH (although I remember when that one was new). The new lens has 10 elements in five groups, four aspherical surfaces, a floating group for close focusing correction (it focuses to 30cm), plus six elements of partial anomalous dispersion glass. Leica's description asserts that the lens is a true apochromat and diffraction limited. It's also a wee tiny thing barely more than an inch and a half long (40.9mm), although it's solid for its size at 11.3 ounces (320g). The downside (or upside, depending on whether you value exclusivity more than...er, value) is the price: $8,200.

The Skin Deep Project:

"Ex-gang/gang members who have facial tattoos are photographed by Steven Burton. Then Steven digitally removes the tattoos, creating 'before and after images.' Interviews are then held with the subjects while presenting the before and after images. Many of the subjects have not seen themselves without tattoos for decades!" (I was taken aback by the young woman with "F---" and "You" tattooed on her cheeks under each eye. To old me they might as well say "I never want to be hired for a real job.")

Paul McCartney is still underrated: "64 Reasons to Celebrate Paul McCartney" by Ian Leslie. (A very well-written article, mention the other day in the Comments. Thanks to the reader who mentioned it.)

[to be continued...]

UPDATE Thursday evening: Right after I posted the above my work computer went down. After spending hours on the phone with Applecare we weren't able to make any progress with it. I have an appointment at the Apple Store tomorrow. I'll try to write a post tomorrow on my iPad but this one is now a postponed post! I can moderate comments on my phone but I can only pass them through, not add Featured Comments or add replies to comments.

All I did was try to download a small program called USBOverdrive which was supposed to allow me to configure my new Evoluent ergonomic mouse. After installing USBOverdrive it asked me to restart, and now the computer won't even start in recovery mode. Can't get into it at all. Fortunately everything is backed up twice, once on the Time Machine and once in the Cloud using a service. I've never done a restore from the Cloud. I'm hoping my Time Machine backup has me covered. 

I guess this is just life with computers, right? As the baby's bib said, spit happens.

—Mike 

The Catastrophic Crash of the Camera Market

The excellent site Lensvid, which has been analyzing and presenting CIPA data for the camera and lens industry for ten years (CIPA is the Camera & Imaging Products Association, which succeeds the Japan Camera Industry Association), has presented its information in simpler form this year, analyzing the years 2010–2020.

Summary first: there's that little box that says, "The entire camera market in 2020 saw 97% drop compared to 2010."

(That's looking at numbers of units, not profit or gross, but wow, still....)

2020 was obviously the pandemic year, and COVID-19 did no favors for camera and lens sales: year-on-year there was a 58% drop in shipped cameras from 2019 to 2020 and a 63% drop in the number of lenses shipped. Respectively, that's 8.7 million down from 14.8 million, and 8.7 million down from 13.8 million. Pretty bad, but there's no way of telling how much the "coronavirus economy" is to blame for that. Would we see a bounce-back if/when COVID-19 largely goes away?

Mirrorless has gone down from its high in 2018 but in 2020 made up a greater share of the market than it ever had before. Unfortunately, Micro 4/3 took a one-two punch as Olympus sold its camera and lens division and exited the camera business, and Panasonic turned its attention away from the smaller format and toward the vigorous development of full-frame mirrorless product lines.

Should you care?
I'm not sure if I was ever overly concerned with the industry and its fortunes. Medium-format photography in particular was a saturated, moribund market when I came along, with tiny profit margins, mainly held afloat by the smallish number of professionals and wannabe-pros who would invest heavily, but infrequently, in expensive equipment. I was a darkroom specialist early on, and the darkroom market was really a backwater. The biggest business development in the camera industry when I was young was the onset of the so-called point-and-shoot, all-in-one compacts the public loved for their simplicity. Those just didn't have all that much to do with me or people like me. The closest I ever got to a point-and-shoot that was important to me was the Konica Hexar, a fixed-lens, autofocus interpretation of the Leica M6. (I did review the Contax T2. Contax to me in those days was like Fuji is now). The Hexar wasn't even really a point-and-shoot unless your definition was pretty encompassing.

Enthusiast interest in cameras as business commodities is really a post-internet-era thing. I went to art school, and identified, then and since, as an art photographer. And although some art photographers have fetishized cameras, few of them felt strong fealty to the business as such. In a park in Georgetown one day I ran into David Hume Kennerly, then the unofficial White House photographer, and during our short conversation (I was a student), asked him what camera he shot with. "It doesn't matter," he repeated emphatically, "it doesn't matter." That's the way the majority of photographers in those day felt about it. I'd say it was actually actively uncool to care too much about gear. What mattered was what you did with it.

In 2021, yes, of course I'm concerned about photography as a pastime and a pursuit—I'm interested in its culture, and cultures don't survive in vacuums. But there is more interest in cameras now than ever before—it's just that most people are buying cameras as one feature of their smartphones, rather than as separate dedicated single-purpose devices. That's market shift, is all. It labels the traditional manufacturers' troubles as an instance of "creative destruction" rather than implosion or catastrophe for the medium itself. It certainly doesn't signal a shift of public interest away from taking pictures (or capturing images as the same thing is expressed now).

As far as "our end of the market" goes, I'm concerned, yes, but not panicked. We had a lot of good choices back in the '80s when I went to art school, and we have a lot of good choices now. There were 5.2 million DSLR and mirrorless ILCs sold in 2020. If you compare that to the top end of the market in 1985 when I graduated from the Corcoran School of Art with a degree in photography—setting aside all those point-and-shoots—well, I don't know for sure, but I'll bet the players at that time would be plenty impressed with that figure. Yes, I was sad we lost Olympus; but consider that, thanks to Andreas Kaufmann, Leica survived to thrive in the digital era, which looked pretty darned unlikely at times during the transition. I would have bet against it. And Panasonic was definitely not a player when I came up. Fuji was mainly a film manufacturer. Lose some, win some.

Consider, too, that in the late '90s and early 2000s, plenty of people were predicting that photographers wouldn't be able to buy film at all in five or ten years. And yet here we are, still with a lot of choices in films and papers.

So: the numbers are dramatically bad, but maybe really only in contrast to the transitory high point of an expanding market in 2010–13.

The numbers wouldn't look so bad if you counted smartphones. CIPA, and photo enthusiasts, might not count those as cameras, but the people who buy them do.

Mike

Book o' This Week:

Betty Edwards, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. The definitive 4th edition of this perennial bestseller, in print since 1979!

The above link is a portal from TOP to Amazon. The book is also available at Amazon Canada.

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. Here's a handy portal to B&H Photo:

Original contents copyright 2021 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.

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

Brian Small: "I'm 57. All the cameras I will ever need have already been made."

John Camp: "Cell phones are the point and shoot cameras of the 21st century, so we don't need point and shoots as a distinct segment anymore. And while there may have been (I'm sure there were) some art photographers who used point-and-shoot camera in the '80s and '90s, just as David Hockney famously used consumer Polaroid cameras, most serious art, pro and news photographers did not, because they were too limited. So, I think we're going back to the pre-2000-like photo environment where serious photographers use professional cameras, and people taking family snapshots (and a few odd professionals and art photographers) use cell phones.

"The big bump that camera companies enjoyed in the first part of this century was mostly a sales illusion caused by enormous jumps in the quality of digital cameras in that time period. I don't know how many cameras I bought between 2004 (Nikon D2 for me) and 2015, but I bet it was ten or twelve, at least. Probably a new camera every year, or more than one. So many I can't even remember them all. Since 2015, for me, the number is three (two GX8s and a Nikon Z6) and I still have and use all three with nothing on the horizon that will cause me to seriously upgrade, unless I back up the Nikon. I believe that there will always be enough enthusiasts to support three or four camera manufacturers, but the companies will be smaller and tighter, and the new releases will be fewer. And that's fine."

robert e: "It occurs to me that these numbers also follow a half-dozen or so years of technological sufficiency for general photography. There was a time when most of us, up- and down-market, anticipated steady progress in noise suppression, or low-light sensitivity, or responsiveness, or dynamic range, etc. These days, there seem to be more and more of us who feel that our cameras are not what's limiting what we can achieve (not even the camera in our phone, often)."

Bernard: "I see a huge upside: 97% of fixed-lens camera sales are gone, but they've been replaced with a much larger number of smartphone cameras. Should we pine for the days of near-disposable digicams that would stop working after 18 months? How about the demise of the 110 blister-pack camera sold at the supermarket checkout? I'm not. I certainly don't miss having to save-up my allowance for weeks to get a cartridge if 110 or 126 film processed. Kids growing-up today have access to great photography equipment, and you can bet that this will lead to a generation of great photographers, all over the world. That can't be a bad thing."

David Raboin: "Photography is doomed. That's why I bought a copy of Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain."

Dillan: "I do worry a little. It seems much more difficult for companies to shrink than it is for them to grow. If they get the timing wrong, companies are left paying for unsold product and unneeded production lines. I fear that there may be more casualties than Olympus.

"As for my own position in the market, your essay gave me some comfort. You are right. We did have decent choices before digital. I worry that photography will become too expensive for the likes of me, but again, you are right: where there is a market, there will be a supplier. The remaining market is likely to be larger than it was pre-digital, so my worries are likely unfounded. Thanks for tackling this subject, Mike."

David Dyer-Bennet: "Pocket computers were in SF well before they were real; Niven and Pournelle had them in The Mote in God's Eye in 1974.

"But then Edward E. Smith had portable radio phones in 1928 (not with cameras though).

"Robert A. Heinlein had portable phones at least as early as Space Cadet (1948)—with the remarkable insight of a character finding his phone a cumbersome leash, and finding ways to avoid that.

"Both those 'phone' examples, unlike Dick Tracy's '2-way wrist radio,' connected to the phone system, and could call or be called by ordinary phones."

s.wolters: "In 2011 we celebrated my aunt’s 95th birthday. At that occasion I was the only one who brought a camera and I took many pictures of the family. Everybody wanted to pose. The next day I made made them happy by digitally distributing the pictures.

"In 2016 at my aunt’s 100th birthday I wanted to repeat my act. But nobody was interested in me taking pictures. They all had their own smartphone. They took the pictures themselves, mainly of themselves. And of course they shared a countless number of images of babies. The role of photography has changed a lot in the last decade. It already changed our lives drastically in the last one and a half century or so, in how it plays an important role in supporting our memory. But now it also got a dominant role in our relationships and how we communicate."

Sroyon Mukherjee

I was pleased to learn that one of my favorite (and oldest) articles got mentioned and discussed in a new article elsewhere on the Web today. The new article is called "An Experiment in Looking at Photographs," and it was written by Sroyan Mukherjee, at 35mmc.

I actually carried out his 5X two-minute exercise (well I oughta!), and I also very much appreciated what he had to say about the exercise and, especially, why it works. He rightly mentions that it's difficult for many people to do...and, in fact, I haven't "read" a photo book by egg-timer for a long time now. (They say "three moves is as good as a fire," and in 2014–15 I moved twice, which was enough to lose a lot of things, including my old mini-hourglass egg timer.)

I read a study a while back that concluded that almost no one finishes news articles they encounter online. They read the first few lines or paragraphs then let their attention flit away like a butterfly. As soon as I read that, I determined that when I come across an article that seems to be worthy, I should read it carefully all the way to the end and maybe even read it twice. I can't read everything, naturally, but the idea is that I'll get more from reading one article carefully than I'll get from glancing superficially at more of them. I get The New Yorker magazine—one of very few magazines for readers left in the world—and I do that with The New Yorker too. I don't read every article, but the ones that engage me I'm careful to read all the way to the end and sometimes a second time. I just don't want the cacaphony of the attention economy to dictate the quality of my attention. Not to everything.

The quality of our attention is a big, big topic. I'm very tempted to amplify my thoughts on the matter further, but, here, I'd rather refer you to what Sroyon has to say about it in the context of photography, relative to the five photographs he chose—his comments are perceptive and engaging.

Suffice it to say: anyone who gets a stranger to look at one of his or her photographs for two minutes straight is lucky indeed.

Mike
(Thanks to Richard Parkin)

Book o' This Week:

Betty Edwards, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. The definitive 4th edition of this perennial bestseller, in print since 1979!

The above link is a portal from TOP to Amazon. The book is also available at Amazon Canada.

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. Here's a handy portal to B&H Photo:

Original contents copyright 2021 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.

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

Sroyon: "Thank you Mike, for linking to my article and for your words of appreciation! And thanks also for your egg-timer post. I don't do the exercise as often as I would like, but when I do, I invariably get a lot out of it (come to think of it, this sentence applies to a depressingly long list of things). I was going to send you a link to the article myself, but funny story: after spending a good deal of time thinking about what photographs to include, speaking to different photographers, explaining about the project and so on, I remembered at the last minute that in keeping with the 35mmc post template, I also needed to pick a header image, so I hastily picked one of my own (the man looking at a painting in a gallery). 'Hastily' being the key word. When the post went live I was appalled to see the amount of dust on the negative, which I would have noticed if I spent two minutes (or even 10 seconds) looking at the picture—my own picture! (I'm generally not too fussed by dust and stuff, but this is pretty egregious.) So I thought I would re-scan the negative and fix the header image before I send you the link. I should have known someone would do it before me.... Now I think I will keep it as it is—a salutary lesson."

Joe Kashi: "This exercise is very similar to one of Minor White's very useful training exercises, 'reading photographs.' On the flip side, some years ago I was helping run a regional fine arts centered and we had a juried show that encompassed 45 good quality original pieces in various media. I remember timing one couple that toured the entire 45 piece show in 177 seconds from the time that they entered the door until they exited. That's under four seconds per piece, including walking from piece to piece in the fairly large gallery. Then consider that the average person's reaction time is two to two and a half seconds to recognize a new situation and begin reacting to it."

Richard Tugwell: "I print articles that I think will be worth reading. Generally I will finish them. Plus, you can scribble on them while you're on the bus/train. I always find the act of making a few notes helps cement things in your memory."

Geoff Wittig: "One of the current motivating ideas behind advertising is the notion of the 'attention economy,' wherein the resource being mined is eyes on the screen. Hence marketers and advertisers are becoming ever more creative (if that's the right term) in finding ways to grab onto our limited capacity to pay attention to things and to make sure we're paying attention to their goals, rather than ours. So I quite like the book How To Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy. It discusses the issue in straightforward language and reasserts the truth that our time is ours, to spend as we see fit for our benefit, rather than the benefit of a corporate goliath."

Collin J Örthner "Back when my desk looked a lot neater and wasn't quite so loaded with things to do, I would take a book with me to work and open it to the first image. It would stay on that page for the duration of the day to be glanced at numerous times and gazed at for longer periods whenever I had a chance. Then, the following morning, I would turn the page. It would take quite some time to make my way through some books, but it certainly allowed me to absorb each image and come to a nice understanding of a book as a whole."

Mike replies: That's great. I could get into that.

Two New: Adger Cowans and Meshell Ndegeocello

I love it that there are so many artists out there who are completely unknown to me. Always somebody new to discover. And you never know when or how you'll do so. Ultimately, I have Black History Month to thank for these two, one a photographer, the other a musician, both new to me.

The first is photographer Adger Cowans, who is now 84. I found out about him through our friend Carl Weese, who sent me a link to a review of a photography show that appeared in The Nation. The show, at the Whitney, features a little-known group of Black photographers from the 1960s and '70s called the Kamoinge Workshop. Kamoinge is a word that in Gikuyu, the language of the Kikuyu people, means "a group of people acting together." The group when it was new was mentored by Roy De Carava, who was a half a generation older than most of the group's members.

Then Oren emailed to mention that some of the exhibit seems to be online—go to this link and then go to "Artworks" and click on each of the photographer portraits. The first one I investigated, Adger Cowans, is represented by only nine pictures, but the first two especially just blew me away—"Egg Nude" can stand alongside work in the same category by Edward Weston, and I love "Footsteps"—wonderful. He has a website, and there's more work there. He reminds me a little of David Douglas Duncan in the range of his visual interests. No little niches for those guys.

A few photographs are always just a clue, a lead so to speak. So how do I get to see more of this photographer's work? There is hope! There's a book. (Where there's a book there is hope.)

It will take me a little time to explore the rest of the Kamoinge Workshop members. Adger Cowans seems like a great start, though.

Songs like prayers
The second new discovery is a musician, and comes from my brother Scott—he's a big fan of NPR's Tiny Desk Concerts, and he sent me this link to a Tiny Desk (Home) Concert by Meshell Ndegeocello. She's had a whole career with me not even noticing, which always makes me feel like I've been living on a desert island somewhere. (This year, maybe I have been.)

I think you shouldn't enter into this unless you're in a reflective, contemplative mood, and willing to be openhearted. It starts off with a recitation of lyrics-as-poetry and continues with several songs that feel more like prayers. Scott said, "this is so peaceful." It is.

Mike
(Thanks to Carl, Oren, and Scott)

Book Product o' This Week:

Is it too late for this? 2021 is still young. There are two reasons to value these Michael Kenna calendars from Nazraeli Press: one is that his originals are 8x8", so these pictures are meant to work at wall-calendar sizes. The other is that Michael's calendars can actually increase in value! Dan Smith suggested this, and he reports that some older ones sell in the hundreds of dollars. "The printing is excellent," Dan wrote, "and the calendar is beautiful."

The above link takes you from TOP to Amazon. This week's pick is not available at Amazon Canada, but 2019 is. Hey, the pictures are still good. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

 

Original contents copyright 2021 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.

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

Colin: "Glad to hear you've discovered Me'Shell and thanks for the heads-up about this concert! We've seen her twice in London, both times were wonderful. If you're a Pat Metheny fan, he guested briefly on a track on her 2007 album, The World Has Made Me the Man of My Dreams, and she returned the favour by singing on his comeback album, From This Place. Her back catalogue is really varied—she made a jazz-adjacent album, The Spirit Music Jamia: Dance of The Infidel, Pour Une Âme Souveraine is dedicated to Nina Simone, but my favourite is the wonderfully heavy Comfort Woman."

Gary: "Sombitch, Cowans is a painter too. (See his website.) The paintings are not exactly to my taste, but still, a rare combination of talents. Thanks for the tip."

Photos for the People

Here's a nice story. A guy who works at a recycling center in the Shetland Islands, Paul Moar, discovered two bags of old slides turned in to be discarded. They documented local life on the Islands 30 and 40 years ago. A local history buff, Paul realized they were "a little bit of treasure."

The Shetlands, which are part of Scotland, are the northernmost outpost of the British Isles—about as far north as Anchorage, Alaska—and have a population of just 23,000 people, half of whom live within reach of the capital and the largest town, Lerwick, where the recycling center is.

The photographer turned out to be Nick Dymond, who used to run birding and wildlife tours on the Islands and was "just doing a clear-out." He has photographed around the world and his pictures of home didn't seem so special to him. He doesn't even own a slide projector to look at his old slides any more.

They've turned out to be a "sensation" to local residents, who feel like they've been given a window into their own pasts. Many are avidly identifying the people and places in the photos. For Shetlanders it's been a bright spot in troubled times.

Nick gave his permission for the photos to be digitized and put online, and for the 300-odd slides eventually to be donated to the Shetland Museum and Archives.

A fine feel-good photo-related story. The short article is called "A Glimpse of a Bygone Life on Scottish Islands, Plucked From the Trash," and it's at the world's greatest photography magazine, AKA the New York Times. Many readers tipped me about it. Thanks to all.

Mike

Paul Moar: "Hi Mike, thanks for your kind words and your little blog about it is actually much better than some of the newspaper articles I've seen! As someone commented to me, 'the right person was in the right place at the right time.' It's been nice to see it give a little uplift in theses trying times.  :-)  "

Book o' This Week:

In honor of Black History Month, an eloquent Black voice on the issue of race. Pulitzer-prizewinner Isabel Wilkerson's much-lauded book Caste: The origins of our discontents is a good book for our historical moment.

The above link takes you from TOP to Amazon. Here's the book at Amazon Canada. "As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases."

Original contents copyright 2021 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.

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

Dillan: "This is what photography is all about. These photos have meaning. May they serve as a lasting record of the inhabitants and way of life of the people of the Shetland Islands. By the way, with so many of your articles, you keep reminding me to take more photos of people. It's hard to do at the moment, but when all this is over, I've got to try harder."

Mike replies: I agree, but with a caveat, which is that these photos are of people still well within living memory. Once people are outside of living memory, interest in most of them goes down quite a bit. It's because these photographs remind so many Shetlanders of their own history, and people they themselves remember, that they resonate so much. Another half century and most of the interest might be academic rather than emotional.

This is one reason I think stories are so helpful and that stories with pictures go together so well. Take for instance the mini-story of the person feeding the lamb. Doesn't it enrich the picture? It does for me. Helps me "see" his personality, almost literally, in that it "changes" the look on his face by reinforcing the meaning of his expression. A story can be as simple as a caption.

Thomas Mc Cann: "John Hinde was a famous postcard photographer and publisher in Ireland. Every tourist shop had his postcards for sale on display in racks. The advent of the internet killed the business. We were tasked with removing the contents of the company's premises. We had to dispose a very large number of filing cabinets filled with his original slides. Perhaps they had been digitised. Who knows."

Mike replies: I absolutely hate stories like that...much better when something like the Nick Dymond/Paul Moar story happens. Remember my post "The Trough of No Value"? That wall of glass plate negatives haunts me. There were masterpieces in there.

Sunday Support Group: The Elusive Owen Edwards

Egotism is annoying, but excessive modesty can be problematic too.

I like essays, and their less prestigious cousins, columns, as literary forms. (Blog posts are a still more junior relative.) One of my early heroes and models was a fellow named Owen Edwards, who wrote a regular column for American Photographer magazine (he was its exhibition critic. The magazine's name was later changed to American Photo). Unlike bat bombs, the smell of rain, and the color of the Universe, however, American Photographer magazine does not have a Wikipedia page.

Neither does Owen Edwards, so I really know very little about him...including whether the "Owen Edwards" bylines I keep running across here and there all belong to the same person. Here's one, for instance, from Smithsonian, about the way Norman Rockwell tells stories in a single frame*. Same writer? Seems so, on the textual evidence. (Consider this playful little sentence: "Serious art critics often dismiss Rockwell as a cautious and calculating master of the middle way, a kind of mild moderator of lives too sweet and too narrow." Sounds familiar, although I haven't read those old AP columns for years and years.) Or this little article about the best management memo ever, dispensed by a tough-as-nails Marine Corps General. That one, from Design Observer, has an author photo, the only one I've ever seen for O.E. (if it's he), but as usual the bio says nothing except "the writer of this has written other things."

Owen Edwards, I think. Maybe.

If only the guy had a little more ego, if he would spend more time and effort on self-promotion—you know, toot his own horn a little more loudly—reveal more—disclose!—he might be easier to track. You can't go anywhere to get away from some types of celebrities these days, but each of us has a different definitions of what a celebrity is, based on what we ourselves value. It seems like the people who are celebrities to me always go hiding their light under a bushel.

So my question is, how long am I going to have to wait for Selected Essays and Articles of Owen Edwards? Or, more selfishly still, The Photography Writings of Owen Edwards? Because I don't mean to sound impatient, but I don't have forever. I'm beginning to get up there a bit. According to this Life Expectancy Calculator, the most realistic projection, statistically, is that I'll die at 83, which is 20 years from now. Considering how little I have to show for my other twenty-year periods on this globe, the thought that I might have only one more is a sobering thought. I recall that my most inevitable regret in life was crystallized when I saw it on a needlepoint pillow in a boutique in Harbor Springs, Michigan: "So Many Books, So Little Time."

Anyway, I've been waiting to re-read all of those American Photographer columns for many years now, and the window of opportunity for me to see such a book has now narrowed to 20 years give or take. Whoever "Owen Edwards" is (given that all I know about him is that he's a writer who has written things), I wish he'd get on the stick. I'd really like to buy that Best of... book.

While I'm on the subject, we need a Collected Writings of John Szarkowski and a Best of Richard B. Woodward, too.

I should live so long!

Mike
(Thanks to Becky Barnicoat and
Maximilian Zender for those Wikipedia pages.)

*It reminded me of this video, "Why THE FAR SIDE is a masterclass in storytelling" from The Gaze.

Book o' Last Week (new one coming up):

Peter Lindbergh On Fashion Photography, with text in English, French, and German. Original coffee table version or small 40th Anniversary version, take your pick. Both are hardcovers. The links above will whisk you away to Amazon.

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:

Kenneth Tanaka: "Re 'If only the guy had a little more ego, if he would spend more time and effort on self-promotion—you know, toot his own horn a little more loudly—reveal more—disclose!—he might be easier to track': Owens seems to be one of the great many legions of wandering tinkerer wordsmiths who make a living caroming between odd jobs of disposable work. And he’s probably been quite happy at it, too. Little of this, little of that, just like someone else we all know. There does seem to be a book of some of his essays available.

"Back to photography: I’m actually in the middle of whittling a short piece on two photographers, both now deceased, who made their way in the world of mid-century imaging essentially as wandering tinkerers. But unlike their countless peers, these snappers’ works easily rivaled, and indeed surpassed, much of the most renowned works by their much better known (more 'egotistical' self-promoting) contemporaries. Fortunately they each have a couple of books currently available as mementos of their works. More soon."

Michael: "Thanks for the link to The Gaze. Excellent piece."

Mike replies: It's really as good as a very fine magazine article or essay, isn't it? But told—effectively—in the medium of video.

David Aiken: "At the side of the article about General Shoup, there is the following note about Owen Edwards: 'Owen Edwards is the co-author of the design book Quintessence, and the author of its sequel Elegant Solutions. His latest book, Caught in the Act, a collaboration with Howard Schatz and Beverly Ornstein, was published in October of 2013.' I think you already have a couple of books you can chase down.  :-) "

Mike replies: Not really. Those don't fulfill the brief of collecting of his writings on photography...even though Caught in the Act is a book of Howard Schatz's photographs.

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.

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