The Online Photographer

State of the Art Nature Photography

If you have some free time this weekend, take a few minutes to check out The Atlantic's presentation of a few highlights from the California Academy of Sciences’ BigPicture Natural World Photography Competition. Some very beautiful and unusual nature photographs, state of the art circa 2019.

There's a book.

Mike
(Thanks to Jim Hayes)

Original contents copyright 2019 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.

B&H Photo • Adorama

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David Evans: "Excellent pictures there. Interesting how they make an impression even at a measly 1.5 megapixels. 'Clouds of Salt' is the one I keep coming back to. I would like a large print of that on my wall."

The Million Dollar Fake Leica (Around the Web on a Tuesday)

924 Bel Air Road

Now That's Excess: Check out this wee little cramped house that's listed for sale on Bel Air Road in Los Angeles. How do people manage with so little room to move around in? You really should check out what the current owner has in the garage on the ground floor—see the garage down there, behind the grass? You might have missed it; some people look at this shot and don't even notice the helicopter on the roof. But for our topic, you need to see the fifth photograph at the listing—the dining room. Are you there? Now look over to the right.

Not sure I've ever seen any home decor like that! I guess it's one of the "100 curated art installations" within the house*.

One For the Birds: David Aschkenas has created a new portfolio around the theme of birds. I like the variety in this. Nice conceptual flexibility, to tie a photograph of a sculpture to one of a cobblestone mosaic. I took three passes through the 15 photos (and now one more to count them). Have a look**!

A Brief Survey of the Photographer's Life and Work: This is very short, and won't take you a minute to read. But it's funny***. Try to ignore the interruption of the ad near the end.

Mike
(Thanks to Gabe Bandy)

*Here's what I really think of the place, though. U.S. Americans should all be forced to read up on Roman history if you ask me. With special attention, at the moment, to the fall of the Republic. We're just Rome v.II. Trump = Sulla, the proto-emperor, who revived the dictatorship and permanently destabilized the Roman power structure. Alas, "those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." (George Santayana). I reserve the right to not publish comment on this footnote but you can write one if you want to.

**I should ask David to write a post about how he promotes his photography. In this position for the past 14 years, I've encountered all manner of photographers trying to cut through the noise and get noticed, in all kinds of ways. It seems to me that David does a better job of it than almost anyone. His early overtures to me were met with the usual, and necessary, armor plating of dismissive skepticism, and I promptly forgot his name—but now I look forward to his promotional emails, and I know his name. And he did that—it wasn't the result of any effort on my part.

***I also think it's hilarious that the New Yorker, following its in-house style as of course it must, puts periods in "O.M.G."

Original contents copyright 2019 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.

(Not) everything must fade away

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hugh crawford: "Apparently the artist Liao Yibai has made 10 of those sculptures titled 'fake Leica' at $1,000,000 apiece, and some smaller ones at $100,000. They combine a M4 and M7 design with the angled rewind. Unfortunately they have the back of one of the digital models, which makes it too fake to keep around my house. It’s stainless steel so the weather protection should be good."

Ken: "That house is probably a rundown dump—it just looks better than it is because of a realtor's clever 'staging.'"

Mark Kinsman: "Sorry, only 21 bathrooms is a deal-breaker for me."

Kenneth Tanaka (partial comment): " I very much liked David Aschkenas‘s 'bird' portfolio! Not knowing its background I’m guessing he curated it from his existing photos rather than shot it as a project? I know there must be quite a few TOP readers with large collections of images from their earlier days. Culling through them to curate such small thematic portfolios is a really terrific pastime! (Speaking from personal experience.)"

Bob Cook: "The New Yorker article is great. The Photographer should consider a flip phone next. A retro homage (is that redundant?) to the Holga."

Magnum's Magnificent Steve McCurry Sale

Steve McCurry, Young man walks behind elephant. Sri Lanka, 1995.

In honor of the publication of the retrospective Steve McCurry: A Life in Pictures in 2018, Magnum Photos is having a grand McCurry print sale.

The 2016 McCurry controversy might mean he's better thought of nowadays as a photo-illustrator than a straight journalist (as he was when his medium was Kodachrome—you recall he was chosen to shoot the ceremonial last-ever roll), but he's certainly a spectacularly brilliant one, working to an exceedingly high standard over many years. His pictures have the compositional sophistication and elegance of pre-1839 representational paintings of the sort favored by the salons, often paired with the rich and vibrant color palette of the Impressionists. That style, and his exotic subject matter, have made him hugely popular, and deservedly so.

The prints are priced at $4,000 to $35,000.

If that's on the steep side for you as a buyer, there's still fun to be had in the exercise of delectation: take an imaginary budget of an imaginary $10,000, and decide which print in the sale you'd have if you could have only one. Keeping in mind the prints are large, from 20x24 inches to 30x40 inches, I'd pick this one. I'd love to live with that, large—the rich detail, the small vignettes everywhere, and the great spatial depth. I don't think I'd tire of looking at it. As pretty as a painting.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2019 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.

(Not) everything must fade away

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JOHN WOLF: "If I had a spare $7K lying around, I think I'd rather plan a week or two photography trip to Rajasthan or Sri Lanka (or both) and see what I can come back with. The pictures might not be as good, but they'd be mine. If I planned carefully, I'd maybe even have enough for a Z7 to take along."

Xf Mj: "With my $10K I should think I could demand some sort of honest attempt at a 'raw' print just to know the basis for the illustration. For the two in the older post (the rickshaw one and the soccer one) I actually prefer the more cluttered, undoctored ones. It's a shame he feels the need to make those kinds of edits, beautiful though the results can be. But then I should confess I'm guilty of slider-based photo-illustration, and the more-than-occasional digital dodges and burns. I definitely crop and straighten, too. This post has reminded me to always go back and de-doctor my own images after letting them sit for a bit, post-edit. I find I get into polishing an image quite a bit and in such a fever that I start believing the polished one to be more the original than the original. It's fun, like painting can be, but it can sometimes be a problem. It's only when I return to an image a bit later that I see how overcooked it ended up."

Garry Winogrand on PBS

I'm sorry I had to take the past few days off...needed some mental health time (or maybe just plain health time...I slept 12 hours Thursday night! I didn't know I could still do that). But the comments are now all posted for the Ricoh GR III and the "Proper Attitude Toward Tech" posts.

I'm also desperately apologetic that I forgot to mention this in advance of Friday evening when it was broadcast...there's a new "American Masters" documentary about Garry Winogrand on PBS (Public Broadcasting Service). A kind reader even reminded me and I still forgot.  :-(

It's not great to look at his pictures within a video—not rich enough, tonally kind of leached out, a bit mushy—like coarse simulacra of the real thing. And although the makers of the show didn't zoom in and move around in the frames, which is a plus, it also wasn't so great that they felt they had to add soundtracks to several sequences. I don't need Dylan in order to look at Winogrand, thanks anyway. And I'm not too sure about those YouTubey infographic titling segments or whatever you'd call 'em. Overall I got the feeling they were casting about desperately to juice up the presentation so that it wasn't just plain old black and white still photographs and people speaking thoughtfully. You know what they say: oh well.

But still, there are some good interviews and insights, and the show pulled together relevant information from a lot of sources and different time periods. I do love hearing Winogrand talk about what he does. It reminds me of the American CIA agents in Steven Spielberg's Munich, all brash and business and no-BS. And it's interesting to see visuals of people like Geoff Dyer and Todd Papageorge. I've never known what either of those gentlemen look like. Kind of spooked me to hear Szarkowski's gravelly voice make some cryptic pronouncement from out of nowhere and then fall silent. I used to talk to him on the phone from time to time.

It's available to watch for free online until May 17th, though it might not be accessible from outside the USA. (For which I'm sorry, but please don't shoot the messenger, please. That goes both ways—US Americans can't watch the BBC's "The Genius of Photography" because it's not available here and even the DVDs are Europe-only).

Personally I admit that Winogrand is not a favorite photographer. I do acknowledge and appreciate his importance (PBS says, "his 'snapshot aesthetic' is now the universal language of contemporary image making"), and I love to hear his thoughts on photography—he's like a street-photography philosopher, is what he is. I've engaged with his work for what feels like my whole life. But he's never moved me. I do respect him, though.

By the way, if you're one of those who are skeptical of Winogrand, and I know you're out there, try this: look at his work carefully, really look at it, and try to mimic his style with just one shot. You'll probably fail, but it might change your life. It did for me when I did the same thing with Lee Friedlander. Who, by the way, would be my pick for "the central photographer of his generation*." That was Szarkowski's famous epigrammatic pronouncement about Lee's good friend Garry.

People treat it as a great mystery that Winogrand left 300,000 exposures incompletely dealt with when he died. The real reason isn't far to seek—he got struck down by gallbladder cancer at the age of 56, which, for a guy like him, was the prime of life. He had a span of barely seven weeks from diagnosis to death. Not much wonder he got caught mid-stride and still in the midst of life.

Oh and one more thing: Now that Cartier-Bresson's The Decisive Moment was finally reissued after decades out of print, the one photographic book most in need of of a reissue might be the chronicle of what is acknowledged to be the photographer's peak year, a stretch of sustained seminal brilliance and mastery that was radical in its time—Winogrand 1964. Until then, if you want a copy, you'd better have deep pockets, or great luck.

It's always good to revisit Garry. It could have been better, but I'm glad he has his first documentary now.

Mike
(Thanks to Zack Schindler and Jim Loudon.
Inset photo of Garry by Jonathon Brand. Thanks to Judi Lamb for the ID.)

*And what generation would that be? Well, Friedlander is 84 today, and Winogrand would have been 91 if he were still alive.

Original contents copyright 2019 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.

(Not) everything must fade away

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Zack Schindler: "Actually you can watch the BBC's 'The Genius of Photography' on YouTube."

John Krumm: "The YouTtube versions of 'The Genius of Photography' have messed up sound, but it's on Vimeo and the sound is fine."

Dogman: "Winogrand's type of photography is not my favorite. But Winogrand did this type of photography better than anyone else. I have the Winogrand 1964 book. It went out of print before I could buy it, but I eventually found a brand-new copy still in plastic wrap and unremaindered for the original list price. One of the few lucky finds I've ever had in photography. Looking back on the 'New Documents' photographers from the standpoint of the early 21st Century, many of the photos seem dated. But that may be due to years of familiarity. And maybe it's because Friedlander has outlived them and produced more work but I have always enjoyed his pictures more than those of both Winogrand and Diane Arbus."

John Krill (partial comment): "Re 'And although the makers of the show didn't zoom in and move around in the frames, which is a plus'—Back in '69 or '70, David Douglas Duncan went on the Michael Douglas show and was showing prints he had done from the '68 political conventions. On the very first picture the camera started to zoom in and pan around the photo when Duncan flatly refused to let them do that. He stated that the photos had been edited by him the way he wanted to show them and by zooming and panning they were changing his edit. They stopped doing it for the remainder of the show. I really never liked what TV always did with still photos, and to hear Duncan tell them NO was very refreshing.

"During the '68 conventions Duncan was working for one of the networks. He would take photos, process them, print them, and then have them put together with his narration for the evening news. I have no idea how he managed it. Also, I could never get any info from the networks and so I don't even know if these still photo videos still exists."

Judi Lamb: "Thanks for your posting, Mike. Well worth checking out! I noticed you used a rare photo of Garry photographed by his ‘side-click’ Jonathon Brand. They worked together at J. Walter Thompson ad agency in NYC. This photo was taken of him on their typical lunch time excursion on 5th Avenue. It’s Garry checking his answering machine in 1965. Very few photos were actually taken of Garry. This one’s a treasure."

Mike replies: Thanks for your help Judi! I couldn't discover the photographer's name. I added the credit below the byline.

There are also some great photos of Garry by Arnold Crane, the divorce lawyer who made an avocation of photographing other photographers. There's one of Garry jokingly shooting his Leica between his legs, one of Garry and Lee F. in Lee's garden, and others. They're not online and never will be, but some of them are in Arnold's book The Other Side of the Camera, published in Germany.

JOHN GILLOOLY: "Finally finished the two-night project of watching the Winogrand film. What I found myself most intrigued by was the arc of life as a photographer. How his path as a photographer was impacted by marriages, divorces, children, health, sickness and then an untimely death that left so much unfinished—unprocessed, uncontacted, unprinted, unedited.

"We have discussed the growing burden and importance of editing and redacting one's work. This film, and the story of Winogrand, really exemplifies the importance of that process. He was big enough that, while his later work might not be edited and presented as he might have wished, it at least has seen an audience. Most of us don't have that luxury.

"For the critics in the comments that sort of lessen his work by making the claim that 'if any decent photographer went out and shot that often, with that volume, they are bound to get some great stuff.' Well, I don't necessarily disagree, but having the love, will and tenacity to get out there and shoot on a daily basis is part of the skill. It's very easy for folks to say, 'well, if I shot that much on those streets, I'd have some great images too!' That actually may be true. But that is a huge if. To shoot so consistently even today, with the ease of digital capture, is very difficult. To do it in that era was much more laborious, time-consuming, and expensive.

"He is not my favorite photographer. Not even my favorite of that era of New York street photographers. But I love his total absorption in the process. I love that he just needed it even if he didn't really know why.

"I loved the video sequences with Jay Maisel and Garry conversing. Having spent some time with Jay in NY at his bank a few years back, I really would have loved if he were one of the people featured in the interviews.

"I love this genre of photography and TOP. I'm eager to pursue some of the links provided by the commenters."

A Few Links the Morning After

Hybrid laser-scan/panorama photographs may be used to help rebuild Notre-Dame: Vassar Professor Andrew Tallon uses laser scanners to make incredibly detailed 3-D maps of ancient structures such as Notre-Dame cathedral, accurate to half a centimeter, originally to try to understand the methods of ancient builders. But his scanning maps (which he merges with panoramic photographs) of Notre-Dame could well become invaluable in the rebuilding and reconstruction process.

Because Andrew clambers around on ledges far above the stone floors of cathedrals, he refers to himself as a "tacklehead" rather than a gearhead. But you'll recognize a kindred spirit, albeit one with a honed sense of specific mission in life. Fascinating stuff!

Notre-Dame from the air. A photograph from the National Geographic
archives taken by the U.S. Army Air Service (cropped).

Notre-Dame from the archives of National Geographic: In the same article is a link to a selection of archive photographs of Notre-Dame over the years. Not exhaustive, but nicely inclusive. A portfolio worth seeing.

Bad coverage and good: Foraging for information, I happened across an almost absurdly hackneyed "news" clip from CBS News that managed to make even yesterday's epic conflagration seem rote and dull. They interviewed a fire chief from Philly talking about the difficulties of battling church blazes. Original. Forgive the sarcasm; actually it was straight out of the "When You Can't Think of Anything Else to Do" playbook. You almost knew what the chief was going to say before he said it, and the interview could do double duty for any little church fire in any little town anywhere. Really? Can't even work up a little juice when it's looking like we're losing one of the great wonders of the world's heritage?

By contrast, Frida Ghitis on CNN, employing the recently outmoded written word, got closer to the core of the event in her article "Watching Notre Dame burn, the entire world was in pain." Describes how I felt. "The conflagration brought a feeling of helplessness and foreboding—reminiscent of the devastation on 9/11, in some ways, and perhaps that was part of the effect for some people: the sense—real or imagined—that we were watching a metaphor, a prelude, a warning." The feelings she's describing are essentially religious/superstitious, so it was good she didn't add to her litany, "...a judgement." 

Soaring buttresses: I'm not normally a fan of Ross Douthat, a conservative columnist at a liberal paper, but he was inspired to write a beautiful essay this morning (speaking of judgements). He had been in the middle of writing a column about the troubles of the Catholic Church and was forced to incorporate the news of the fire into his thoughts, and—whether out of necessity or out of courage—he let the bones of both influences show through. The result embodied the sense of interruption that public catastrophes impose on us. He was focusing on the schism inherent in Benedict vs. Francis, the conservative and liberal strains within Catholicism, but returned to the idealism of rebirth, apropos Easter: "The church has always depended on synthesis and integration. That has been part of its genius, a reason for all its unexpected resurrections and regenerations. Faith and reason, Athens and Jerusalem, the aesthetic and the ascetic, the mystical and the philosophical—even the crucifix itself, two infinite lines converging and combining."

David Aschkenas: Finally, TOP reader David Aschkenas has put together a small portfolio of his pictures from the interior of Notre-Dame, taken over the years.

Mike

[CORRECTION: According to The Washington Post, Andrew Tallon died last year, and should have been referred to in the past tense. It brings up another wrinkle, however—the Post also references the fact that no one knows exactly where the late Prof. Tallon's laser scans of Notre-Dame are. Thanks to Ken Berke for this. —Ed.]

P.S. Most of this comes via the New York Times, by the way, my morning read; I'm cribbing from David Leonhardt. (Other still-functioning, not-yet-compromised newspapers are The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times, and I routinely read The Atlantic and The New Yorker [on paper, which you must admit is quaint] and visit the BBC.) The Times, which I sometimes refer to as "the world's best photography magazine," has plentiful and robust photographic content, although it can sometimes be a challenge to corral it all. I officially recommend a subscription to the Times for the excellent photography articles. You can access ten articles per month for free. But subscribe. It's worth it.

Original contents copyright 2019 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.

(Not) everything must fade away

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Kenneth Tanaka: "Thanks to David Aschkenas for sharing his Notre-Dame images. Also, you have a delightful collection of very well-seen international street images, David. I plan to take a deeper your of your work later this week."

Moose: "Re '"the entire world was in pain." Describes how I felt. "The conflagration brought a feeling of helplessness and
foreboding—reminiscent of the devastation on 9/11, in some ways, and perhaps that was part of the effect for some people: the sense—real or imagined—that we were watching a metaphor, a prelude, a warning." The feelings she's describing are essentially religious/superstitious.'

"I don't get it. This hyperbole and these feelings are highly personal; she and you are treating them as universal. It's an old church, Catholic, in France. Churches have been burning since the first one was built. Old iconic structures have burned or been otherwise destroyed, intentionally or by accident forever. Yes, I've seen this one. No, I have no emotional attachment to it.

"We are in Bhutan at the moment, where the central temple of the iconic symbol of the country was was destroyed by fire in 1998 <i>". . . leaving the country in mourning for their holiest of spiritual places. But religious leaders and the King . . . Today, the magnificent temple is completely rebuilt to its original glory. Another monastery destroyed by fire has been rebuilt, all but the altar in a new style. It's glorious, literally awe inspiring, at least to us and our travel friends! Every old fortress, temple, monastery, etc. that one visits has a history of fire and rebuilding, it's only a question of how many times. Getting so worked up about this one, seems a bit like getting hysterical when the sun goes down. It's something that happens regularly, and won't stop. The sun will rise again, as will Notre-Dame."

Chris Fuller: "I was surprised by my response to the news about this tragic event: I mourned and I wept. I mourned for a building, a collection of stones and glass. But it is a collection of stones and glass arranged in patterns of inestimable and moving beauty. It is one of those special places where history, culture, religion, and personal aspiration intersect with one another in a way that is rare anywhere in the world. It's a place that feels still even as thousands of people traverse through it. It's the place that gave birth to the University of Paris, and, thus, it stands as a monument what is good about the Western tradition (without denying this same tradition's many problems). I'm Catholic, so maybe that's part of it. But my Protestant and atheist friends also mourned and wept. So, maybe there is also more to it."

Bruce Polin

Big congratulations to TOP reader Bruce Polin, whose work is being highlighted on the Lens blog of the New York Times.

Bruce Polin, Jay and Missy, Prospect Park, 2018

The work consists of traditional 8x10 film (FP4 and HP5) environmental portraits that are both meditative and collaborative. I really enjoyed the portfolio, which is called "What's the Opposite of a Cellphone Photo?"

Have a look at Bruce's work!

Mike
(Thanks to Bruce)

P.S. By the way, the mysterious "boxy, old-fashioned Japanese mechanism that shot on plates [sic] of film 8 inches by 10 inches" is a Toyo 810MII, and Bruce's whole rig, including the cart he wheels it all around on, does indeed weigh in excess of 100 lbs., as the article says.

Original contents copyright 2019 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.

Want to help?

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Featured Comments from:

David Comdico: "Beautiful portraits. The intense regard of both the sitter and the photographer creates a forceful moment. What is often missing in photographs made today is this level of commitment, given how easy it is to make a (thoughtless) picture with our (smart) phones and cameras."

Bruce Alan Greene: "It seems to me here, that the great advantage of the large format, besides its awesome image quality, is...its very bulk and slow process. What better 'ice breaker' to connect with strangers in a park than a wagon full of old fashioned and fascinating photographic machinery! And I'm sure that many new friendships were made here as well. Bravo Bruce Polin!"

Two Catalogs

For those of you who are into film and darkroom, Freestyle's new catalog is out. It's very splashy.

For those of you who are into Micro 4/3, the new Micro Four Thirds Joint Lens Catalog is out. The catalog is limited to products offered by companies that formally participate in the 4/3 consortium. There are other lenses available from companies that don't participate but just copy the mount. Leica has more expensive lenses, Canon and Nikon have useful if somewhat scattershot lines, Sony furiously produces lenses with planning that appears to constantly change, Fuji's lineup is the most sensible and well-considered (and my personal favorite), but for variety and pure photogeek fun I don't think anything out there beats Micro 4/3.

Mike
(Thanks to Oren Grad)

Original contents copyright 2019 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.

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Open Mike: Kirk Tuck Takes a Break

I would usually make jokes about "Open Mike" ("the often off-topic Editorial page of TOP") being a day late, but this is no time for cracking wise. Yesterday I didn't feel like writing this. I was feeling a curious species of grief. I got an email yesterday from my Texan colleague-in-arms and e-friend-I've-never-met, Kirk Tuck, who told me that he is hanging up his spurs for a while and stabling his blog, The Visual Science Lab. 

Kirk

No problem
He assured me that nothing's wrong. He hasn’t been injured, he's not sick, not broke, and he's not miffed or having a spat with anyone. (Kirk is an uncommonly good-natured guy, as you might guess). Still, the news is bittersweet.

He's leaving the site up and not officially calling it quits—he's leaving the door open for a return one day. That's the sweet part. The bitter part was Kirk's characteristic straight, unadorned honesty about what it's like to toil in a declining field. (That the field—writing about photography online—also happens to be my own doesn't help soothe the sting.) In the public announcement he made yesterday, he said things like: "Photography has changed profoundly since the inception of this blog in 2009," and "I sometimes feel as though I'm showcasing a style of lighting (and portrait engagement) that's become more of a temporal sign post of past practices than any good learning curriculum about current styles and trends," and "[I] can hardly shake the feeling that photography as we knew it and practiced it has changed so profoundly that the Visual Science Lab is now, more or less, irrelevant."

Sad to hear him say that.

Doesn't matter if any of us agree with that assessment (I don't, and maybe you don't either). It's the way Kirk feels. I get that, because I feel mournful over a lot of things these days. Not just things in my personal life, but the "drifting away" of things like prints as the end-product of photography; books on paper as the way to read long-form writing; principled, orderly government in my native country; and even...email. Commercialism has more or less ruined email as a means of convenient private communication among citizens, and our methods of staying in touch have begun to fragment into different walled-off corners of a Babel called "social media." I think that's a shame culturally and socially. An opportunity missed.

Imagine, mourning for email.

There's a (German) word for that
Maybe it's just the Weltschmerz* of a good guy getting on in years. And if so we might find that fact hard to stomach because, frankly, we just like Kirk, that's all. He can write about swimming or whatever else he cares about, like I can write about things like pool and stereos and George Kittredge and the meaning of words, in his usual voluble, articulate, friend-over-the-fence way, and we're pleased to spend time in his company. That doesn't seem to require "relevance" to continue. But on the other hand, all good things must come to an end; things rise, things fall. Where the truth of that is concerned, there's nothing new under the sun.

Kirk has other ways to make a living and lots of other things to do, at least. He is an accomplished and energetic professional with a mutifaceted business. He has five times the energy and business ability I do. If I were faced with the task of supporting myself with my photography, hoo law, in no time at all I'd be a shivering little girl in a ragged shawl selling pencils out of a tin cup in Dickensian London! They'd cart me off to the grim 'n' grimy workhouse instanter. Kirk also decided early on not to monetize his blog, and he notes that "last month was the first month that the blog logged a negative fifty six cents for affiliate earnings." I'm loathe to make this post about me (in my 12-step program we chide each other for egocentrism with the phrase "it's all about me/you," which can be topped with a question mark or an exclamation point, can fire in any direction, and can be a reminder, a note of caution, or a zinger), but TOP is being preserved—saved!—by the 682 "core readers" who are sending along a few bucks every month via Patreon. It's a neat solution, if you ask me...it's like switching to a subscription-only model but without closing the doors to the public. I still need about 200 more supporters, or 300 if Providence is kind. But currently one or two more trickle in every day, so by Summer maybe we'll have made that mark.

But I digress. (Can we be generous and say that digression is part of my charm?) Anyway, I've offered Kirk carte-blanche** to pen guest posts here on TOP any time he wants to, about any subject he's moved to unspool his thoughts about. We have a fair amount of overlap in our readerships, so I figured it could be a nice way for him to occasionally connect with part of his old audience. Don't know if he will take me up on that, but I shall renew the invitation from time to time. It's the most I can do, but it's also the least I can do.

New chapter
Bottom line: New chapter for our friend. Let's try not to be sad.

Wishing Kirk the best.

Mike
(Thanks to John Camp and several other readers)

*A German word with a fascinating history. Literally "world pain," it's defined as "a feeling of melancholy and world-weariness."

**Literally "blank document" in French, it means "to give full discretionary power."

Original contents copyright 2019 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.

Here’s the situation

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Martin D: "Weltschmerz is a fine and essentially critical word describing a slightly over-the-top mental state that is, I think, particular to German-language culture and quite different from the kind of sadness you are reporting on. Your sadness relates to a feeling where someone who has experienced a certain richness in some aspects of social life now sees this social richness diminishing. The loss is real; the diminished reality is felt against the contrast of a richer one that was part of the sad person's actual experience.

"Weltschmerz I think is different, the image to have before you is 'young man who regrets all the things he could have done.' A young person who feels a kind of pre-emptive feeling of nostalgia and loss. Having had a small number of deeply-felt actual experiences, and a large number of imagined ones, the young man regrets the way the world is going, having barely done any real living yet. I cannot prove it but I am quite sure that this is what we refer to when we talk of Weltschmerz. I will think some more on whether we have a German-culture term for the kind of real loss of environmental richness and authenticity that you describe; many of us no doubt feel similarly."

Paul Richardson: "On a related note, just yesterday I was perusing a list of recommended photography blogs that I was unfamiliar with, for the most part. The list, as far as I could tell, was about four years old. Anyway, I checked the sites out, and sad to say, almost all of them had been inactive for at least a couple of years, some longer. I think this speaks to how exhausting it must be to stay at it over time, no matter how passionate you are—and I’m assuming you’d have to be pretty passionate about your subject to start a blog in the first place. I tried blogging for a while about ten years ago, and after a few months I started feeling like I was talking to myself. I got discouraged and gave up. So I congratulate anyone who stays with it for years. I don’t know how you do it, but I’m glad that you do."

John: "I’ve not been reading Kirk’s blog for that long, but I do recall this is the second time since I started that he said he would stop blogging. I’ll expect him back soon, expect and hope, because he and you are my only daily blog reads."

Bruce: "I, too, lament Kirk's 'slowing down'...my top three 'favourites' on my feed are TOP, Kirk Tuck, and LuLa...(loved, then left, revisited, and it's sort of growing back). Beautiful writing from you both; I can't begin to admire the output of both of you both—and, yes, I make a very small contribution through Patreon to you, Mike. Kirk's contribution to the business of photography reinforced what a huge job it is to make a living in this fickle world. Without any obvious monetisation from his site. Who could have predicted this conversation even fifteen years ago, let alone thirty (only 1989!!) The speed of change is only mirrored by the slowdown of us 'oldies' (I'm 70, and still active in a fairly diverse area of corporate photography) trying to keep up with the world. Fortunately, I'm still relatively fit, but can't hold a candle to Kirk and his swimming! But I still get gigs as a wedding photographer, 'cos I can interact with people and make them laugh.... What else do you need???"

Paul: "I’m a regular VSL reader and will miss his posts. I don’t know how he’s managed running a photography business, family commitments, taking photos for fun, swimming and blogging. Just writing this makes me feel tired. I wish him all the best at what ever he chooses to do."

Dire Predictions

• I don't subscribe to the Nikkei (the Nihon Keizai Shinbun, the world's largest financial newspaper) and I don't speak or read Japanese, but according to the Google-translated intro to this interview with Canon President Fujio Mitarai, Canon fears that that market for digital cameras could shrink by "about half" in the next two years.

The estimate is a likely a worst-case scenario and the culprit is most likely the rapid improvement of smartphone cameras. The market in higher-end stand-alone ILC cameras will remain sizeable. However, the coming years may in some ways be just as volatile and uncertain for the industry as the early years of the digital transition.

This doesn't have to affect photographers, who will continue to be able to get what they need for their work. And it may just be that photography is changing into something different than we once conceived it to be, something we can't quite envisage yet. One thing's for sure though: the years of vigorous growth in the camera industry as we've known it appear to be ending.

• Meanwhile, according to an article in Witness ("a magazine for new thinking and new talent in visual journalism and storytelling" published by the World Press Photo Foundation) by Lewis Bush, photojournalism itself might be in jeopardy. He begins by assigning an approximate centenary (now) to photojournalism itself, and, wondering whether it will survive another century, poses what he considers three key questions: "who are we photographing, and why?", "how are we photographing these things, and why?", and "who are we photographing for?"

He ends on an up note, but it sounds a tad forced. There are many reasons why the relationship between democracy and the press is less stable now, and not all of them relate to the upheaval in technologies and established business models.

An interesting read for photographers and other citizens.

Mike
(Thanks to several readers)

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Harsh reality

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D. Hufford: "May I be a selfish SOB and say 'who cares?' If the market for digital cameras falls by 50%, why should I care? I have the cameras I need and can get nearly any camera that I imagine that I would want. Should the market actually shrink by that much, I think I will be just fine. My problems with my photography have little to nothing to do with cameras or the market for them.

"Of course you already more or less wrote that. No doubt photography is changing into something new and different than it was. It has to. It cannot continue being more or less a rehash of past photography only with more megapixels and sharpness. Technology has advanced much further than photography."

Glenn Brown: "It is dire right now for me as a pro business photographer in Toronto. Firms have found someone in their staff that is 'good' at taking photos: and they now do the internal photos. I still am hired for the executives and that means about 30 people a year and not over 100 as before. Other run of the mill jobs for cheque presentations etc. do not exist. I used to earn $160 to $180k per year; now that is $80k. Luckily I will retire in May and always planned to have a few clients to 'keep my hand in' so I will be OK. I worry for young people just starting in the profession.

"P.S., Glad you settled into the tea world. My wife was pleased for you."

Thom Hogan: "I'll much more to say about this soon (I've already written one article on Mitarai-san's comment). It's not as dire as he made it sound, but it's real. The compact camera market continues to collapse, which is what really drives the numbers most. Interchangeable-lens cameras (ILC's) are on a long glide slope down. The two together make for a real problem if your business is based upon number of cameras of all types you sell, which is sort of where Canon Imaging was. Sony announced their numbers this week, too, and their unit volume is down significantly, and it's all again in compacts. Almost 20 million camera units were shipped in 2018. So 50% is 10m units. That very well could end up as 8m ILC and 2m compacts in a couple of years. Indeed, based upon the other things Canon said at their financials, I believe that to be Mitarai-san's thesis."

Benjamin Marks: "For those who ask, 'why should I care?' the answer is simple. Supply and demand. As the demand shrinks, the supply will too, and then prices will rise because the cost of making a new camera will have to be spread over a smaller number of units. Also, innovation will slow, because there will be fewer engineers working on advancing the tech, because the profits won't support a larger number of problem solvers, whose salaries also come from the sale of a smaller number of units. Finally, smaller brands, like Pentax, may not be able to compete and will go the way of Konica, Contax, and so on. In a general sense, we (photographers) have been very lucky over the last decade or so. Many choices, many price points, quite low price-per-shutter actuation compared to the days of film only. So maybe that will be changing."

Cameras Can Be Dangerous

There's a new peril that art museums, curators, and guard staff have to worry about now—people destroying art while attempting to take selfies of themselves with it.

...That being, of course, what art is there for.

We already know that people get run over by trains while making portraits and fall off cliffs while taking selfies. Not to mention the tragically dangerous and sometimes fatal things daredevils do in order to get themselves noticed on social media. But now people are inadvertently acting like tiny-brained Taliban in art galleries, toppling statues and, in one startling video at the link, tipping over a row of museum pedestals like dominoes.

The next trend? Selfie-safe art, maybe? Sort of an adult-toddler version of what parents do to protect literal toddlers from household mishaps, like putting padding on the sharp corners of coffee tables. Maybe there should be an app that automatically texts all phones within a 30-foot radius of unprotected art, warning that ART BREAKS! Or brakes, for those confused by vowel combinations.

(By the way, there are no more adults. That's the problem. They all died, and no one came along to replace them. That's my General Theory of the Contemporary World. I don't let myself off the hook, either.)

Cameras can be dangerous in the wrong hands. Just a public service reminder from your friends at TOP, in support of art.

—A Grumpy Old Beardy Guy

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Benjamin Marks: "The Metropolitan Museum of Art will not let you in wearing a photo-backpack (wearing any backpack really). Your choices are to wear it on your front like a baby-Bjorn, check the bag, or return another day. Over-the-shoulder camera bags are OK, though. I assume that the rule went into effect after one or more near disasters."

Sal Santamaura: "Re 'there are no more adults'.... Yes there are. I am one. It's very lonely, and all the children mock adults' maturity. Oh, well, I yam what I yam.  :-)  "

Mike replies: I'm not certain adults use smileys. Or quote Popeye. Nyuk nuk-nuk-nuk.  :-)

Yonatan K: "Regarding your comment that all the adults have died, I have a different theory—conservation of intelligence. There is a constant amount of intelligence in the world, but the population is growing.

"Happy New Year!"

Richard Parkin: "Perfect! Take a selfie with (insert famous art object here) then destroy it and no one can copy you. Video the whole process and that will be a piece of performance art that galleries will bid for to replace the art you destroyed. A win all round, I think...."

Paul Mcevoy: "One of the most amazing things I ever saw was a tourist who kept backing up near a Warhol at MoMA until her butt actually touched it and you could see the fabric tighten a little bit. The guards almost tackled her. I find MoMA visitors dumber than the average visitor and the guards look extremely anxious at all times. Like that might not have been the only butt they pulled off that Warhol that day."

Mike replies: On the plus side, "pulling butts off Warhols" gets high marks as a job description for cocktail parties.

Ron Hampel: "This reminds me of a visit this past summer to the Belvedere museum in Vienna. A large group of patrons were gathered around GustavKlimt’s 'The Kiss.' Several among them were taking selfies; some doing so while acrobatically trying to mimic the couple’s pose in the painting. This display of self-absorption took place despite a large sign recommending people take selfies in front of the copy of the painting in the next room designed for this purpose. This caused so much traffic in front of the genuine painting so as to make it nearly impossible to see it and enjoy it. To say that this was aggravating is an understatement."

tex andrews: "I work in one of the museums in the linked article (and there was way more damage than was stated...). I actually feel like it's not just the selfie phenomenon. People just don't understand how to behave anymore. From people walking around in their pajamas, to laissez-faire parents, to cluelessness in museums, to loudness on public transport, and on and on. People no longer seem to understand that there's a difference between your own living room or bedroom, and space that is public and must be shared with everyone else. In the case of museums, if I were a museum director, I'd institute restrictions on entry and requirements to watch an orientation video that had stern warnings on how to behave. I'd also make those responsible for damage liable for the conservation costs—and let people know in advance just how high those costs might be."

Just Because Russell A. Kirsch Has Forgotten Who He Is, Doesn't Mean We Have To

Scanned photo of his young son Walden by Russell A. Kirsch,
considered by common consent the first digitally scanned image

Decline and death are an indivisible part of living. We're like flowers, which unfurl from a seed, grow, thrive, and bloom—then drop their petals, wither, perish and become one again with the soil in which they grew. In a way, finding it sad is...I don't know, indulgent? Some word like that. It's really only...natural. (The cycle of birth and death grows more profound to us as we age.)

This short article at Oregon Live about Russell A. Kirsch strikes me as sad even though maybe it's not. It's a brief glimpse into his life now, near the end of his decline.

Kirsch was one of the digital pioneers. He was the leader of the team at the National Institute of Standards and Technology that developed the first digital scanner in 1957. I've been reading Steven Pinker's Enlightenment Now recently, and finding it very thought-provoking (that term isn't just book-blurb boilerplate; it means what it says, i.e. a book that often sends you off on trails of thought of your own), and I can't help but view Russell Kirsch through the prism of the values the book defends.

Kirsch's has been a useful life, and by several accounts a happy one. His wife is still taking care of him. For the time it takes you to scan this one article, I thought you might want to acquaint with him, if you never have previously.

I look forward to the time when a standard scholarly work about the digital pioneers will illumine all of their biographies, after the fashion of Vasari, Plutarch, or Johnson. (Or Harold C. Schonberg, whose Lives of the Great Composers I enjoyed.) Hope I'm around to read it.

Mike
(Thanks to JG)

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Jim Fix: "Thank you for that article. I met Russell at the start of my computer science teaching gig at Reed in Portland, must've been 2001 or so, probably before his condition had really taken root. I worked semi-regularly at the bakery they mention in that article, Ken's. One day there I was grading papers with 'automata diagrams' on them. There was this dapper, smiling fellow across the table from me, and he struck up a conversation about those diagrams. He was full of energy and curiosity, and natural charm, and he slowly revealed to me the details of his pioneering work, including the scanner prototype he had built, and the National Standards computer he had helped invent. Quite a resumé.

"He apparently was quite fond of images and art, definitely influenced by the life he had with his art historian wife. If I remember correctly, in retirement he was collaborating with her on ways that technology could be meaningfully used to analyze and preserve works of art, especially if it allowed others to share in his wonder about the artistic impulse. I think they had just returned from a visit to a major cave painting site in France, and he was full of ideas about that.

"I was grateful for the conversation, and my own luck, and was happy to learn that he had taken on teaching the same kind of automata material to his group of retired friends, ones that wanted to stay fascinated and engaged with the world around them, even the digital one. Despite his stature, his generosity during our chat left me feeling validated, and with an extra energy that I carried back to my own work.

"Funny how a shared love of a good cup of coffee and a Ken's 'morning bun' can lead to all sorts of other connection. You never know who your neighbor is and what they've been part of, and it's often good to put in a little work to find out.

"I am sorry to learn about his condition and its effect on his loving family. I got to witness a man who seemed filled to the brim with riches."

Mike replies: What a great memory. Thanks for sharing it, Jim.

Lowest Prices Ever

...Should there be eight exclamation points at the end of that title?

But my contacts at B&H Photo tell me these actually are the lowest prices on these items they've ever offered. (It's possible you might be able to find them advertised for even less, but then you wouldn't be dealing with B&H Photo. They clearly label anything that's gray market ("Imported"), they never bait-and-switch, they never sell open-box as new, their delivery is quick and efficient, and they offer generous, no-hassle returns. Dealing with B&H is as safe as mail-order gets.)

I think these deals are just for today? Not sure. On to the news:

Sony A9 body, ONE THOUSAND DOLLARS OFF (lowest price ever)

Canon 6D Mark II, $500 off and a grip for free (lowest price ever)

Canon EF 16–35mm ƒ/2.8 III wide angle zoom, $300 off. This deal ends at the end of the day (11:59 p.m. EST) on Wednesday.

Canon EOS 5D Mark IV, $500 off (lowest price ever)

Sony A7RIII, $400 off (lowest price ever)

Older Sony A7RII, only $1,598, (lowest price ever) (42 MP and IBIS...no, Mike. Down boy.)

Canon 24–70mm ƒ/2.8 II normal zoom (if you haven't seen Roger's teardown of this lens, check it out. He concluded, "Would I get one? Of course—I’m a resolution freak, a gear-head, and I don’t have a 24–70. I’ve just examined the highest resolving zoom lens I’ve ever tested and found it’s also built and designed superbly. I can’t walk away from that combination.")

Canon 100–400mm ƒ/4.5–5.6 IS II, $400 off

Canon EOS 5D Mark IV with 24–70mm ƒ/4, $650 off (lowest price ever. Also comes with an extra battery, the BG-E20 battery grip, a SanDisk 64 GB Extreme Pro memory card, and a shoulder bag, all thrown in to sweeten the deal.)

A few other things are on sale, but those are the big deals. Go nuts! (But careful, don't spend the rent money.)

Mike

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Geoff Wittig: "If you've ever lusted after Canon's 16–35mm ƒ/2.8L III, just buy it. I can't praise it highly enough. I wasn't much of a wide angle user previously, tending to favor ~70–120 mm equivalent or so, but this lens has changed the way I see. Build quality is fabulous, handling is impeccable, and it's sharp edge to edge even wide open. Distortion is trivial, especially for this focal length range. It's much, much better than versions I and II."

Michael Perini: "I would second Geoff's comment about Canon's 16–35mm ƒ/2.8 III. I bought it and the new 24–70 ƒ/2.8—they are about as good as lenses get. Not only are they dead sharp, they both focus nearly instantly. But more than that, they create images that have a 'rightness' and depth about them. They are both better than most primes. I also own the 17mm T/S which I thought was in a league of its own—it now has company."

Oskar Ojala: "I paid nearly a grand more for my Sony A7RII when I bought it. Tells a lot about the camera market today. I still use it as my main camera, several times a week, and it was the mirrorless that made me completely give up on DSLRs. Yes, it has some quirks, but so do all cameras, and I get results consistently, so I'm not looking for a new camera right now (although the raw speed of the A9 is tempting...). And 42 megapixels might be too much, but it still looks stunning even if I need to crop."

Everything Went WHAT For a Minute?!

All right, all right, settle down, Doonesbury.

Slaggin' my beloved B&W!

Mike
(Thanks to Scott Kirkpatrick)

P.S. My iPhone now tells me how many minutes I used it the day before. Twenty-seven minutes yesterday, probably because I used the GPS to find my way from Geneva to Dundee....

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SteveW: "No comment."

Essays Odd Wondrous and Strange

Universal Newsreel from 1933 showing Cecil H. Dill, a farmer from Traverse City, Michigan, demonstrating his ability to render popular melodies by pressing his hands together. After the performance, which seems to be of Yankee Doodle, Dill, while staring rather intensely into the camera, modestly tells how he discovered his unusual talent.

This is by way of noting that today is the last day to order The Public Domain Review: Selected Essays, Vol. V for the introductory price and with delivery before Christmas. I have no affiliation! PDR is one of the sites I visit occasionally because they post essays about photography like this one about the blinds and camouflages used by early nature photographers the Kearton brothers.

—Yr. Hmbl. Ed.,
Like Cecil H. Dill A Man of Peculiar Talents
(First para from PDR, mod. auct.)

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FraserGJB: "Are you sure this isn't a short film David Lynch made in art school? Wonderfully weird."

Having a Bad Monday? (OT)

Cheer up! You could be this guy. (He's getting a ticket, too.)

Have an ordinary blah Monday!

Mike

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Steve Weeks: "Having dealt with trucking on a somewhat limited basis during my working years, this person had not only a blah Monday, but also probably a life-changing Monday. It has been my experience that trucking companies and their insurers take a dim view when this happens. Most likely he will lose his job and not be employable in their trade in the future. The citation is just minor for the driver. Let's hope everyone reading just had a Blah Monday."

Chris S: "Puts my Monday morning blown tire into the proper perspective."

Using Photographs Differently

A "fan map" for Justin Timberlake shows strength in Utah and New
Jersey but a marked lack of interest in the Southern states

Many news websites have been experimenting with infographics lately, and a number of them have been really innovative...I remember a great chart at NYT.com showing just how few people had chosen our last two Presidential nominees (can't find it now—it might have been taken down), "fan maps" showing where music stars are popular like the one above, and the recent feature on land use in the USA from Bloomberg, which I found absolutely fascinating—for example, more land is devoted to cows than any other purpose in the US, whether to pasture them or grow food for them. I've revisited this article three times.

Some of the infographics use photographs. An example today at NYT.com is "Hurricane Michael: One Mile of Devastation in Florida," which tries to solve the "specificity" problem of photographs (they have trouble showing the extent of all-encompassing events such as hurricane devastation) by stringing frames together and combining the visuals with data. (Hint: to move sideways, scroll down.)

The ways in which information can be conveyed go far beyond words and single, static pictures. I'm sure a great deal of work goes into such features so that we can work less to extract the information. Credited in this case are Anjali Singhvi, Derek Watkins, K.K. Rebecca Lai, Troy Griggs and Karen Yourish.

Mike

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John Nollendorfs: "You sure can see which buildings were built to hurricane code!"

People News II: Ming Thein

Ming Thein, from his website

Ming Thein, one of the very best photography bloggers on the Internet, has decided to bring his nearly three-year relationship with Hasselblad to a close. Noting that "it isn't worth my time or stress levels anymore," Ming announced that "I have elected not to renew my contract with Hasselblad/ DJI, which ended on 30 September 2018."

That's the short take; see his website for the longer version.

"I continue to remain in the Hasselblad family as an owner and user," he added, "as I believe the product still delivers the best image quality I’ve seen to date."

Mike
(Thanks to Oren Grad)

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Michael Perini: "I have great respect for him, and I think he did some good for Hasselblad, but moving into a corporate culture as an advisor without direct authority is a very difficult position to be in. Plus he lost the person who recruited him. Never a good sign. I think he did the right thing, he was 'pushing water uphill.' Life is too short for that. I wish him the best. DJI will miss him more than they think."

Stephen Scharf: "One of the biggest challenges someone in Ming's role has is getting the execs who hired him to actually listen to, and act on, the input obtained from customers. I've taught and led a lot of 'Voice of the Customer' product development teams in my time. One challenge is getting those team members to keep their biases of what the product must do or be to themselves, and actually listen to what the customer says. Most times, what the product development team member thinks is important and what the customer actually thinks is important (and why) are 180° apart. Academic studies have confirmed this. Then, of course, the biggest risk are business executives, who always have their own biases, may not listen to the VOC and just do what they originally wanted to do anyway. This usually results in a catastrophe with respect to successful product development, because most executives make teams rush, don't provide them with the time to think things through thoroughly, and everyone gets caught out with surprises. Happens all the time.... I used to call this behavior 'executive arson.' Seen tens of millions of dollars wasted because of it, also."

Two Excellent Portfolios from The Atlantic

Two portfolios well worth looking at:

Photos of Abandoned Russia, mostly by Russian photographers.

and

Dramatic Photos of the California Wildfires.

More less as an aside, another thing I found at the Atlantic site that I loved is "Your Lying Mind: The Cognitive Biases Tricking Your Brain," which mentions an economist who uses constructed photographs to modify cognitive behavior:

"[Present bias] led a scholar named Hal Hershfield to play around with photographs. Hershfield is a marketing professor at UCLA whose research starts from the idea that people are 'estranged' from their future self. As a result, he explained in a 2011 paper, 'saving is like a choice between spending money today or giving it to a stranger years from now.' The paper described an attempt by Hershfield and several colleagues to modify that state of mind in their students. They had the students observe, for a minute or so, virtual-reality avatars showing what they would look like at age 70. Then they asked the students what they would do if they unexpectedly came into $1,000. The students who had looked their older self in the eye said they would put an average of $172 into a retirement account. That’s more than double the amount that would have been invested by members of the control group, who were willing to sock away an average of only $80."

Another bit that from the article that made me laugh: economists will routinely walk out of bad movies and stop eating bad meals in restaurants.

Why? Because they've internalized the sunk-cost fallacy. "Sunk-cost thinking," as you probably know, "tells us to stick with a bad investment because of the money we have already lost on it; to finish an unappetizing restaurant meal because, after all, we’re paying for it; to prosecute an unwinnable war because of the investment of blood and treasure." The article makes no bones about it: "In all cases, this way of thinking is rubbish."

The "Lying Mind" has little to do with photography (except that it tells you not to believe your eyes), but I couldn't help thinking of a cognitive bias called "base-rate neglect" when I was looking at the pictures of the California wildfires. Base-rate neglect is defined as people's "disinclination to believe statistical and other general evidence, basing their judgments instead on individual examples and vivid anecdotes." "Individual examples and vivid anecdotes" describes the reason why photographs so often bring distant events and dull statistics to life for us—they personalize abstractions and make news more real. Bet you can't look at the photograph of the beaming policeman and the orphaned fawn without feeling some sort of emotion.

But it occurred to me that base-rate neglect is exactly why honest journalism and objective editing is so crucial, and why it can't be replaced by random and relativistic crowd-sourcing, marketing, and propaganda: because when something is well-edited, we can more readily believe that the journalists are showing us "individual examples and vivid anecdotes" that accord accurately with their honest perception of "statistical and other general evidence." In other words, we trust that an edited set of photographs of the California wildfires give us a broader "picture" of the event that's in line with everything else the photographers and photo-editors know about the situation. They're anecdotal, all right, but they're accurate anecdotes.

Cynics will say that's just the ideal of journalism, not something journalism always actually achieves. Which is probably true. But since when it is no longer worth striving for ideals?

P.S. In the Wildfire portfolio, note especially photo #11. That's the overpass from which Ansel Adams took his famous picture "Clearing Winter Storm, 1935."

Mike
(Thanks to Jim Hayes and Scott Kirkpatrick)

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Greg Mironchuk: "I know that this is a personal bias...but...I can't get past the observation that all the photos in the Abandoned Russia piece were sourced from Wikipedia and Shutterstock...either free, or 50 cents per photo. They must have invested a whole $12.00 on this, including a pro-rata on their Web Guy's time. As a person who spent most of his adult life being paid to make photos (and watching that all dry up, and go away), I can't help but feel hurt about this. Even if the genesis of the piece's fundamental idea was to use Russian photographers/photographs, they could have invested twenty minutes, and a few dollars, on Russian Pro Photographers, and Russian Professional stock photos...if, for nothing else, because we all ought to be watching each others' backs, in bad times...not exploiting anything that we can get away with not paying for. Shame on The Atlantic."

Mike replies: Reminds me of this cover. By the way, the Harlan Ellison [R.I.P.] video in that post still makes me laugh.

And if you go see that video on that post, be sure to see this followup. But be sure to watch the video first.

Chris Kern: "Photographers, of course, are notoriously subject to incremental lens bias, the persistent fallacious belief that adding just one more lens to their inventory will significantly improve their work."

Peter Wright: "Both of these excellent portfolios show pictures that are surrealist and apocalyptic. Both show subject matter that is in the process of change: one very rapid and one relatively slow, but neither set would be possible at some not-too-distant time in the future. They really show photography's strength and counteract the 'It's all been shot already' type of thinking. Thanks for drawing our attention."

Oskar Ojala: "Have to agree with Greg about the photos of the abandoned places in Russia. And the overall quality shows: the photos are not stylistically similar at all and practically no effort has been spent into tying these photos into some sort of narrative, explaining how they relate to history and geography. This would have been important due to the vast areas and multiple key events in history involved. Sadly, it's more reminiscent of one of those 'Top 21' lists on the Internet rather than a proper piece."

Bahi: "Last night, I heard two long audio interviews (part 1 and part 2) with Spencer Greenberg, touching on cognitive biases among other things. Mike, I know you're not a fan of long audio interviews but I found them interesting enough that I ended up visiting one of Greenberg's own sites, Clearer Thinking, which I think you'd like. It provides tests and articles to try to help us deal with our own misconceptions and biases. I tried some of the tests and found them useful and interesting."

Igor: "Ha! For abandoned as well as modern Russia you should go here. There are orders of magnitude more interesting photos with meaningful text on that site. The Atlantic pales in comparison."

Steve Rosenblum (partial comment): "Yes, the field documenting cognitive biases was pretty much started in the 1970s by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, and Kahneman later won the Nobel Prize in Economics for their work despite being a psychologist (Twersky had died earlier and Nobels only go to the living). Danny Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow is a fascinating account of their work if you want the technical detail, and Michael Lewis's book The Undoing Project explains the work within the context of their long friendship and working relationship. The tendency of our minds to play cognitive tricks on us should concern pretty much anyone involved in important decision making. I know that it gave me great pause during the years of my medical practice. There is no doubt that we doctors frequently make poor decisions due to these sorts of biases."

Flat Earth!

Some people are attracted to conspiracy theories. I, on the other hand, admit that I kinda like cranks. I'm pretty entranced by this whole recent flat-Earther thing, for instance. I can't help myself. I like those nuts.

For most of my life, "people who believe the Earth is flat" was pretty much a synonym for terms like ignoramus and dunderhead. Recently, however, thanks to our dubious friend the Internet, the belief that the Earth is flat has become a thing. So recently I got treated to something I'm glad I didn't have to miss: the sight of a man known as the "father of the flat-Earthers" being modest about his contributions to the growing movement. Here's the aww-shucks moment, on ABC Nightline.

Priceless. It's undignified, but that moment in the program made me giggle uncontrollably.

I might just gently point out that one facet of what we call "intelligence" is the ability to evaluate competing claims. I heard something the other day that I also thought was priceless: a guy was explaining that apple seeds have a special cancer-fighting ingredient, so you should chew them up (actually they have cyanide in them, from which you are normally protected because the seeds pass through your digestive tract intact, so you should not chew them up), but here's what he said: "Science and medicine are all against the idea, but I saw this video on YouTube...."

'Kay. Blind lady holding balance scales: Science and medicine on one side of the scale, this video I saw on YouTube on the other side. Who you gonna trust? Competing claims....

Proof
But here's something kinda great. If people believe the Earth is flat, and you believe the Earth is roughly spherical, well then you have to prove your point, right? So the Discovery Channel did just that:

Granted, this is something that shouldn't have to be proven. But when that helicopter disappears below the horizon I kinda got a lump in my throat. Because it was a beautiful thing.

Sometimes it's pretty elegant to have to prove even the established truth. So thanks for that, flat-Earth fans.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2018 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.

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Andrew Molitor: "The ease of doing this kind of measurement, has convinced me that Columbus knew perfectly well how big around the world was (everyone else did, the legend is that Christopher thought it was a lot smaller). When a ship, like for instance one of his ships, sails any appreciable distance away, the hull drops below the horizon. Then the lower masts, and finally the masts. The mathematics required to turn that into a rough estimate of the diameter of the earth is trivial. Draw a couple pictures, and some triangles turn up, and then it's just trigonometry. Which, I admit, isn't trivial for everyone. But for a ship's captain in 1492, it should have been pretty easy. Columbus was sandbagging. He was pretty sure there was something out there, but he knew it wasn't The East. He made up his theory of the much smaller planet to get funding for his expedition."

Dog Photographers of the Year

Katarzyna Siminiak, Waiting Beauty (Thalia, Nova Scotia duck tolling retriever,
Poland). Katarzyna won second prize in the "Dog Portrait" category.

With the dog days of Summer coming up fast—it was so humid here yesterday the air was practically dripping—it's fitting that the prizes for Dog Photographer of the Year have been announced. Huffington Post has a nice and fairly extensive portfolio that is worth a visit if you like dogs.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2018 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.

B&H Photo • Amazon US • Amazon UK
Amazon Germany • Amazon Canada • Adorama

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YB Hudson III (partial comment): "Sorry, but I need a cat nap after viewing that portfolio."

Mike replies: That's a rather catty thing to say.