The Online Photographer

Baker's Dozen Deadline

Happy to say that I'm getting some excellent submissions for the "Camera" Baker's Dozen already.

The deadline will be next Saturday, May 21, at noon Eastern U.S. Time, because Saturdays are the slowest days of the week around here and it will be fun to be able to do the first pass through these on Saturday afternoon. I will accept late submissions, but not too late.

I'm certainly seeing some very interesting cameras already. This is going to be a fun one for sure. Here's the information again.

Mike

This is Actually a Different Book o' the Week

It's Not About the F-Stop by Jay Maisel. Jay was suggested by Moose and this book was suggested by Albert Smith. I got to meet Jay Maisel once. Everybody should meet him in his books, if they haven't already. Might help; cannot hurt. Jay's is some of the most positive, hopeful, and generous picture-taking advice you'll find.

This book link is a portal to Amazon.

B&H walks the walk.

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:

New Baker's Dozen Call for Work: 'Camera'

This is either going to be wildly popular or be a total flop, or something in the middle.

(Sorry, it's an old Mitch Hedberg joke.)

Our next theme for our lovely little readers' pictures portfolio is: "Camera." Any picture that has anything to do with a camera is fair game. Hopefully we will have some fun here.

How to Submit

This is a call for your own work, and you must own the rights to it, so please don't send me anything but that.

By submitting, you give me permission to reproduce the small JPEG of your picture on TOP and that's it. Your copyright remains yours.

To submit, use the subject line:

BDCamera

Just like that...no spaces, spelled exactly like that, no variations. Capital "C" in "Camera." The reason is that when I begin building the post, I will search my large email stack for that phrase as the subject, and if your email doesn't come up, then I won't see your picture.

Please pay attention to that. Last time, people really did...almost nothing got lost. Which I appreciated.

A dog does not have to appear in your picture. Although my philosophy is, it never hurts.

I'll announce the deadline when we get near it. No promises when the results will appear...I've learned from experience that these features just take time to build, so it'll get done when it gets done. There's only one little man behind the curtain pulling all the levers.

Email one or two JPEGs, 800 pixels wide, saved in sRGB. Include in the email your name, where you live, any technical details you care to share, your website URL if you want me to publish it, and whatever you want to tell other TOP readers about your picture.

Lots of people write a paragraph explaining their picture (see the "Yellow" portfolio for examples), so if you don't, just be aware that your picture might seem a little "naked" after it gets picked. (Because of course yours will get picked.)

My email address is mcjohnston at mac dot com. Replace the "at" and the "dot" with the proper symbols and get rid of the spaces. This modest attempt at disguising my address will not fool the web-crawling bots, but oh well.

So, five components:

"BDCamera" in the SUBJECT LINE;
PICTURE (must be your own!), 800 pixels wide in sRGB;
NAME;
WHERE YOU LIVE;
Any COMMENTS you care to make about the shot.

Hope you are up to the challenge! Have fun and don't be afraid to be creative. Total dweeby gearhead geekishness is not required but is certainly not discouraged. You're among friends.  :-)

Mike

Book o' the Week

Jay Maisel: Light, Color, Gesture. This was suggested by Moose. I got to meet Jay Maisel once. Everybody should meet him in his books, if they haven't already. Might help; cannot hurt. Jay's is some of the most positive, hopeful, and generous picture-taking advice you'll find.

This book link is a portal to Amazon.

B&H Photo

Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

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

Baker's Dozen: Objects of Affection

Stephanie Luke
Cottonwood, California, USA

"This image is part of a series I'm currently working on called 'Asphalt Beaches.' It consists of random things I've discovered on the sides of the streets where I live. Generally, I find a lot of debris and trash, but once in a while there is something new and pristine. This balloon drifted by as I was taking my daily walk, so I grabbed it and then destroyed it, in the name of art of course! All pictures are taken outside in the immediate surroundings with my iPhone 13 Pro Max, using a Lightroom app and post-processed with Photoshop."

Wolfgang Gressmann
Germany

"Internally displaced boy with tire in Amran, Yemen, 2011. Leica M6, 28mm, Tri-X @ 200; here's my website."

Douglas Martin
Santa Rosa, California, USA

"This object is my wife’s hiking hat. Of course, she is under it, but I think of this as a photo of a hat, with a few clues to let you know something about the hat."

Ken Ginn
Wakefield, Quebec, Canada

"Found object. Mourning dove feathers. I noticed a flash out of the corner of my eye one day while working at the kitchen sink. When I went out to see what might have happened, I found what remained of the dove after a hawk swooped in for its dinner. I simply placed these on my flatbed scanner to make this image. I've scanned and continue to scan found objects. Not every camera is held in hand."

David Kee
Westmont, Illinois, USA

"I was recently diagnosed with leukemia (the good kind, my oncologist tells me, that won't affect me for a while). Coincidentally, I then read an article about the ancient phrase memento mori ('remember that you will die'). Although I didn't need reminding, I Googled the concept which, in brief, is that thinking about the inevitability of your death forces you to savor each of your days and thus enjoy the time you have left. The search results included an ad for a skull ring that I thought would give me a constant prod to do exactly that. This is my macro shot of my ring that for as many days as I have will reside on my left index finger."

Satyan Devadoss
San Diego, California, USA

"This object is a polyhedron lamp, shown during sunset, that I randomly came across a few months ago. It's now sitting in my office. Remarkably, this polyhedron was the basis of my math Ph.D. dissertation more than 20 years ago. The small wooden block is also the same polyhedron as well, crafted by a student of mine 15 years ago while in Massachusetts. (This student went on to become a drummer for the remarkable band Darlingside, then a carpenter, and finally a photographer.) Pixel 3a."

Peter Van Dyken
Duluth, Minnesota, USA

"The John Boland ore carrier which I sailed on as a deckhand in the 1970s showed up at dusk as a discreet object in the fog in my front yard this past shipping season. Taken with a Fuji X-H1 and the 55–200mm."

Mark Gregg
Michigan, USA

"This small sculpture was a gift from my wife and has become a real keepsake. My whole life has been involved in photography, first as a hobby and then as a vocation, and this little guy reminds me of all the wonderful times I have had in my career. The sculpture is less than six inches in height and made of wire."

Jim Simmons
Masterton, New Zealand

"This is called 'Tomato Figure.' To photograph a misshapen vegetable is to work beneath the immense shadow of Edward Weston. 'Nothing new here.' But I'd like to think I'm expressing the joy that he'd find in colour, not to mention the forms as shaped by the light."

Michael Ryan
Shanghai, China

"I had a nice opportunity to do some personal style photos with my middle daughter last week. Pandora just started learning the cello.

"We originally chose the violin but each school we went to for a trial lesson suggested the cello. I was pleased, as I love and prefer the sound and look of the cello, but after the same thing happened at four different schools, I had to ask why everyone was pointing us to the cello. They told us that it's because she's six. She's too old to start learning the violin—she should've started when she was four! That’s living in China."

Daniel Speyer
New York, New York, USA

"Photo of a canoe I had from age 14 to age 70+ (lost in a fire then). It is a rather uncommon ultralight aluminum canoe (a 13-foot tandem canoe weighing only 44 lbs.). A real 'friend' that I normally paddled solo—with it I had weathered wind and waves and it never let me down. The picture was taken in the Adirondack Park, Whitney Wilderness Area, where I canoe extensively. The photo was taken with a Pentax Q and the 35mm-equivalent (so-called 'toy') lens."

Len Salem
England, United Kingdom

"My seaside bucket.

"I was born in London in February 1939, a few months before the outbreak of a World War which continued for six years. For 24 hours a day, factories produced nothing but munitions and other essentials for the country's war effort. For most, it was a time of great austerity. Knowing no better, I did not feel deprived, but new toys did not exist then and, even on birthdays, I received only hand-me-downs or other second-hand things. Until the end of the war I had never tasted a banana, or any other fruit not grown within our own shores. I had never been on holiday.

"In 1946, the year following the ending of the conflict, my parents took me with them to the seaside for their first holiday for very many years. It was of course my first-ever holiday and at that point probably the biggest event of my life.

"I remember the feeling of great excitement when I became the proud possessor of my very own new bucket and spade. I made endless sandcastles and watched, fascinated, as they afterwards vanished with the incoming tide.

"I remember the spade had an unvarnished wooden shaft and a bright red handle. Maybe I'm imagining the red handle, for it was lost many years ago. But the bucket, a drab grey galvanised steel pail about the size of a small flowerpot, somehow survived.

"I look at it now and see myself as a child at the beginning of his life. It is my oldest possession."

And one more for good measure:

New Baker's Dozen Call for Work: Object of Affection

[TOP publishes on Mon./Wed./Fri.]

The next Baker's Dozen, with the title "Object of Affection," will be of pictures of objects. Inanimate ones.

Object, noun,

/ˈäbjekt/

A material thing that can be seen and touched.
   "She appeared to be holding a small object"

It can be any kind of object. Perhaps of a sort you have some kind of affection for. I'm loath to give examples, even verbally, because I don't want to risk directing your creativity. Points given, however, for being mindful of the inherent descriptive power of photography.

I'll pick a dozen of the most interesting ones to post, with one extra for good measure. Search the site for "Baker's Dozen" if you want to see past examples.

If you'd like to play, click past the break for instructions.

Pictures Taken With Leica Lenses

[Comments have been added.]

I can't believe it's been more than four years since I first posted the Leica lenses Baker's Dozen.

That one just soaked up work. I feel like it took me a week to get it right. But it was worth it—there's a lot to interest both the eye and mind in that post. Thanks again to all the wonderful readers whose work is featured, and all those who sent pictures I wasn't able to include. 

Mike

Book o' the Week

Eyes Wide Open! 100 Years of Leica Photography Edited by Hans-Michael Koetzle

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:

Albert Smith: "Thanks for reposting this. Never would have accidentally stumbled across it in the archives."

Herman Krieger: "With my new Leica—"

Rob Spring's Picture: Childhood Revisited

Rob Spring of Barre, Vermont said of his picture from the Baker's Dozen mini-portfolio, "Here is a photo of my grandson, Waylon, with his dad, my son-in-law. This was the last ride on the swing that my kids used more than 30 years ago. The swing was attached to a limb of an ancient but dying Vermont sugar maple which was cut down the next day after standing in what is now our front yard for over 155 years."

This looks so much like one of my own pictures that I don't have to wonder why I like it. We don't even really need to know that this commemorates the last day of a long-standing tree, although it's a bonus. What it made me think of when I saw it was that there's a relatively short window for us, as children, during which a swing is good for playing on. How long it is, really? Six or seven years maybe, maybe less. But with most childish things that pleased you when you were young yourself, you get a chance to revisit them again when they make your children happy. It's really tough to say who's happier here, the child or the man; they both appear to be enjoying themselves equally. And I'm glad I wasn't imagining the resemblance between them. Their expressions are the same.

I just love pictures like this when they're my own—straightforward documents of people, places and times that were important to me. I would have loved to have taken this, if these were my family members. And it's a charming shot even though they're strangers to me. Great job, Rob.

Mike

Book o' the Week

The Atlas of Beauty: Women of the World in 500 Portraits. "Since 2013 photographer Mihaela Noroc has traveled the world with her backpack and camera taking photos of everyday women to showcase the diversity of beauty all around us. The Atlas of Beauty is a collection of her photographs celebrating women from all corners of the world, revealing that beauty is everywhere, and that it comes in many different sizes and colors."

This is a link to Amazon from TOP. The following logo is also a link:

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:

Jerker Andersson's Picture: Composition, Colors, Lighting, Love

Jerker Andersson of Lund, Sweden, wrote of his submission: "Early Fall, 2004. My father-in-law, Håkan, and his first grandchild Elsa have a conversation in the dining room. Over the years since then, my wife Åsa and I have had two more kids, a girl and a boy, and my wife’s father has five grandchildren in all. But this was in the beginning. Sometimes I find it hard to remember what life was like without the kids. Lots of time to spend, I suppose."

Formally this is a great candid—it uses a lighting strategy I've seen before but have never heard a name for. If you have two faces looking at each other, and the main light source is coming from behind one of the people and hence directed at the front of the other face, you can split the background and contrast the lit face with a darker background and the darker face with a lighter background. I know I've seen pros do it on purpose; I imagine Jerker recognized it rather than set it up, but it's marvelously effective here.

I suppose we can't help our personal responses to photographs. I've always been interested in what you might call "the ages of Man"—capital M, meaning humankind. This is a quirky thought, but in some ways I wonder if we sometimes aren't programmed to see people of much different ages as being a little like a different species, slightly alien almost, as a way of protecting ourselves. I've noticed that young, healthy people sometimes treat infirm and decrepit old people a bit like they are something "other"—not people who were once just like them. You can't quite get them to say they'll never be like that, but being honest, aging is alarming, so why think it if you don't have to? In our youth, we're somewhat blind to the inevitability of our aging. Conversely, I've sometimes observed that people have a way to talking about babies as not quite being us yet. Children, too, sometimes.

This is probably the most amateur sort of sociobiology. But it creates the wonderful tension for me here: an infant looking at an adult like she will one day be; a grandparent looking at an infant like he himself once was. And their obvious pleasure and contentment in regarding each other. They recognize each other. And yet I sense a touch of wonder, too, on both sides! Makes me smile.

This rises well above the usual family snapshot. Everything's in perfect balance here, composition, colors, lighting, love. Don't you wish all your family photographs could be this good?

Mike

Book o' the Week

The Atlas of Beauty: Women of the World in 500 Portraits. "Since 2013 photographer Mihaela Noroc has traveled the world with her backpack and camera taking photos of everyday women to showcase the diversity of beauty all around us. The Atlas of Beauty is a collection of her photographs celebrating women from all corners of the world, revealing that beauty is everywhere, and that it comes in many different sizes and colors."

This is a link to Amazon from TOP. The following logo is also a link:

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:

Jerker Andersson: "Thank you for those kind words! From August 1996 to June of '99 I studied photography as art, full time, at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. For a few years after that, I made a modest living as a photographer. But I grew tired of having to hunt for every assignment and then hunt the clients to get my money. I studied to become a teacher of the Swedish language for immigrants instead, and I've been working like that on different levels since 2005. Anyway; if I couldn't take decent family pictures, it would be quite embarrassing! Again—thank you!"

Monika Göhmann's Picture: Character Study

Monika Göhmann of Darmstadt, Germany writes, "In the image you see my parents with my daughter. My mother hated to have her photograph taken, but my daughter convinced her to sit down with her on this day, because we didn’t have any photo of the three of them together. My parents were 95 (father) and 93 (mother) years old at the time. Only four months later, they had to leave their house to live in an old peoples home; in 2020 they both died. So this image is a true treasure for my family!"

At first pass this seemed too plain, and I flipped past it pretty quickly. But it grew on me with repeated visits, and I long ago learned to appreciate it when a photograph has "legs"—staying power—for me. The more I looked at it, the more I liked it. First of all, I just love those wonderful faces—all three of them strong, interesting, personable, and (excuse me sir), beautiful. Then I noticed a certain consonance between the two women—notice how the colors of their clothing echo back and forth. Then the hands. Hands can reveal as much as facial expressions about feelings, and I love how the six hands are arrayed across the picture. Again the women echo. Notice how the man draws the group together, and also how different his hold is on each woman. The two older people are turned toward each other, almost folded into each other—you would guess they are long married even if you didn't know, I think. Neither looks at anything in particular, as if they are content and secure to be together. But the most marvelous thing is how the face of the daughter brings the photographer, her mother, into the picture. Her expression says a lot about their relationship, as well as how happy she is about the occasion. The picture is a character study even to someone who doesn't know the people; knowing the story enhances it. In a world that clamors for attention, there's still a lot of reward to be found in quiet, subtle pictures. I think Monika really got the moment. Sehr gut gemacht!

Mike

Book o' the Week

The Atlas of Beauty: Women of the World in 500 Portraits. "Since 2013 photographer Mihaela Noroc has traveled the world with her backpack and camera taking photos of everyday women to showcase the diversity of beauty all around us. The Atlas of Beauty is a collection of her photographs celebrating women from all corners of the world, revealing that beauty is everywhere, and that it comes in many different sizes and colors."

This is a link to Amazon from TOP. The following logo is also a link:

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:

Jens Ronneberger: "Ein schönes bild von zwei generationen." (A beautiful picture of two generations.)

Ernest Zarate: "Re 'At first pass this (photograph) seemed too plain, and I flipped past it pretty quickly. But it grew on me with repeated visits….' I don’t think I could have written a better response to the whole 'shoulder tapping' criteria as, at best, a limited (and limiting) metric for judging a photograph’s success. Any creative work (movie, music, painting, architecture, etc…) may seem too (plain, outrageous, etc…) at first pass. That’s the 'tapping' phase, which with this photo ended up with a 'meh.' I think as creators of works, we need to not insult those who view our work by making it so simplistic that a three second glance gives it all away. 'Nothing more to see here. Next!' We must not hesitate to demand a bit of effort from those viewers, provided we reward them with a pay-off for their efforts. I’m glad you gave this photo more than a passing glance."

Charlie Dunton's Picture: Seize the Day

Here's what Charlie Dunton of Yorktown, Virginia, had to say about his submission for the "Grandkids" Baker's Dozen portfolio:

"I took this photo of my granddaughter during a visit to a local Five Guys restaurant for lunch. I spent the entire time photographing her, ending up with over 200 images. This [picture shows] one of the few times she gave any indication I was even there.

"Once home, I imported all the photos into Lightroom and discovered I had a nice story board of our lunch together. I selected 35 images that best told the story and added captions to each from her perspective. The caption for this one is, 'Oh, hi, Dadada, you are getting this aren’t you?'

"The story in brief: dip your french fry in a small cup of ketchup and lick the ketchup off the fry; try the same with the end of a crayon from the restaurant followed by a big yuck face; Dad notices ketchup on your chin and brings out a towelette resulting in strong objections; notices she has dried ketchup on her fingers that’s hard to get off so sticks fingers in ketchup cup for a bit, then finds to her amazement that the ketchup now wipes off easily; decides it’s time to change her dress which immediately brings out the finger of doom from Dad followed by a terrible pout face; lays head on table dejected at how long grownups take; new idea, draw Mommy a picture with the crayon; then sing Mommy a song they just learned, 'The Itsy Bitsy Spider,' complete with hand gestures and facial expressions followed by a big high-five from Dad.

"I saved everything in a Lightroom collection and didn’t share it with anyone for over 13 years. Then I had them made into a hardcover book and gave it to her on her 16th birthday. I think she liked it almost as much as I because the first thing she did when she got home was call her best friend and share it with her.

"We still have lunch together on occasion, but I don’t bring my camera any more. She wouldn’t stand for it. But what if I pull out my iPhone and pretend to be playing with it like all the kids do? There’s an idea.

"Sorry for all the words, but how else could I share 35 images when only one was allowed?"

Having not seen the other 34, I'll venture to say that one seems to do nicely!

I have only a couple of comments: first, that photographing active children in motion is actually a pretty good exercise of shooting skills. I was once asked to photograph four small but highly energetic brothers playing in their enclosed but well-outfitted back yard, and since I wasn't being paid I decided to try to do it on the fly, without asking the kids to hold still or pose or otherwise help to make my job easier. It was surprisingly challenging—getting coherent pictures was like trying to swat flies. They were in continual motion and seemed to never pause for long. Pointing the camera seemed a signal to move away. I shot three rolls of 135, which was 105 exposures, and had to settle for a couple of dozen competent shots, five or six to please the parents, and one photograph I thought was really good. Lots of blurs and shots just after the visual peak of the action.

I do like the relaxed, candid quality of this shot; it's clear it's not formally posed and that Charlie wasn't going for formal perfection. I think that makes the picture stronger. Despite the natural, candid feel it's still formally beautiful. The cropping, which would be too tight for some pictures, works with rather than against the gesture of the body and cock of the head, which in turn works with the expression of the mouth; the light is lovely, and the colors are harmonious and complement the lighting in turn. But nothing's excessive or overdone. A nice shot of a happy child mid-flight.

Taking 200 shots of one subject is what I'd call "working a subject." It's quite possible to get a shot this good with one lucky shot with a smartphone, but it will happen only occasionally. If you want to do it on purpose you usually have to work for it, like Charlie Dunton did. As a big-name photographer once said to me, "nobody sees how many shots you throw away."

Children disappear quickly—I still find it hard to believe that Sally Mann's son Emmett, memorialized as a boy in a number of his mother's famous pictures, has lived his whole life and is dead and gone now. Seize the day, they say. While that might be literally impossible, every now and then you can seize a good picture, which, although also impermanent in the long run, will at least outlast the moment.

Mike

Product o' the Week:

The brand new 2021 Apple 10.2-inch iPad (Wi-Fi, 64GB) in Space Gray. My iPad is my least necessary but most-loved Apple device. I could get by with my phone and a desktop computer, but I use this constantly and I like it best. Check out that price.

The above is a link to Amazon from TOP—anything you buy while you're there benefits TOP. B&H Photo is closed for the rest of September for Succos.

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:

Sharon: "What an adorable child! Well done."

Charlie Dunton: "Mike, Thanks for the kind words. I must confess, this photo of my granddaughter was originally going to be the 'Oh, hi Grandada...' shot, but I had another that worked as well for that purpose and I decided the one I submitted made a much better final photo in the series. The caption for it is actually, 'Well, that's all from adorable moi. We had a lot of fun at Five Guys. TTFN. That's Ta Ta For Now, in case you didn't know.' If you would like to see the other 34, the full series with captions is here. Click the upper left image and then use the 'next' button on the site, or the right arrow key on your keyboard. Thanks again, Charlie Dunton."

Baker's Dozen: Grandkids

(Charlie Dunton)

(Rob Spring)

(Jerker Andersson)

(Monika Göhmann)

(Marc Vayssières)

(Kent McColl Wiley)

(Jeremy Fagan)

(Paul Martini)

(John Gordon)

(Chris Kern)

(Michael Gay)

(Craig P. Beyers)

And for good measure....

(William Schneider)

Honorable mentions (the other finalists, from the group I used to build this final set): Roger Bartlett, Lara Arnold, Jim Arthur, Terry Burnes, Roger Bradbury, Eric Peterson, Nick Cutler, Patrick Murphy, Rodolfo Canet-Castelló, and Marty Knapp. If you don't see yours or find your name above, no need to despair, as I have several other sets planned.

Details:

1. Submitted by Charlie Dunton of Yorktown, Virginia, USA. "I took this photo of my granddaughter during a visit to a local Five Guys restaurant for lunch. I spent the entire time photographing her, ending up with over 200 images. This was one of the few times she gave any indication I was even there." There's much more to Charlie's story, and it's pretty sweet, but I'll save it for when I do individual posts about the pictures.
2. Submitted by Rob Spring of Barre, Vermont, USA. "Here is a photo of my grandson, Waylon, with his dad, my son-in-law. This was the last ride on the swing that my kids used more than 30 years ago. The swing was attached to a limb of an ancient but dying Vermont sugar maple which was cut down the next day after standing in what is now our front yard for over 155 years."
3. Submitted by Jerker Andersson of Lund, Sweden. "Early Fall, 2004. My father in law, Håkan, and his first grandchild Elsa have a conversation in the dining room. Over the years since then, my wife Åsa and I have had two more kids, a girl and a boy, and my wife’s father has five grandchildren in all. But this was in the beginning. Sometimes I find it hard to remember what life was like without the kids. Lots of time to spend, I suppose."
4. Submitted by Monika Göhmann of Darmstadt, Germany. "In the image you see my parents with my daughter. My mother hated to have her photograph taken, but my daughter convinced her to sit down with her on this day, because we didn’t have any photo of the three of them together. My parents were 95 (father) and 93 (mother) years old at the time. Only four months later, they had to leave their house to live in an old peoples home; in 2020 they both died. So this image is a true treasure for my family!"
5. Submitted by Marc Vayssières of Davis, California, USA. "When my wife was dying of cancer a visit by our granddaughter was the only thing that could still cheer her up. Completely oblivious of the tubes and other medical devices Aveline would climb in the bed and cuddle with her Nana for a little book reading."
6. Submitted by Kent McColl Wiley of Earlysville, Virginia, USA. "A photo circa 1900 that contains many relatives on my mother's side of the family, by the Wadd Brothers. My grandmother, Jessie McColl Sclater, is the young girl with a lace collar on the front left. She is in front of her grandfather, John Cunningham MaClure, of the Royal Engineers who established the white settlement of Abbotsford, BC. His wife, my grandmother's grandmother, Martha MacEntyre MaClure, is to his left, and to her left is my great grandmother Susan MaClure McColl. Photo courtesy of Vancouver Archives."
7. Submitted by Jeremy Fagan of Liverpool, UK. "My Dad died about five years ago, in the early hours of a Sunday morning. We drove down to see my Mum, and by the time we got there, there wasn’t anything practical to do, so we went to Rockingham Castle, and my daughters played with their Grandma. Memory is a funny thing—I could have sworn that I took this picture that day, but when I looked for this picture for the Baker’s Dozen, I see that it was actually at the same place about six weeks later when we’d gone down again to help sort out Dad’s books and CDs. My Mum had cared for Dad for nearly a decade, and this picture shows her now being able to give them all of her attention, on a beautiful Spring day. She’s just been with us for a week this summer, and the three of them are still this close."
8. Submitted by Paul Martini of Bluff, Utah, USA. "My granddaughter Blaire in an approximately 800–1,000-year-old Anasazi/ancestral Puebloan kiva."
9. Submitted by John Gordon of Kalamunda, Western Australia. "Tabitha and Angus, my grandchildren, fooling around on the front deck at a beach cottage we rented at a small Indian Ocean coastal town several hours north of Perth, Western Australia, in 2008. They were both natural models and I was fortunate to get this with my then new-to-me digital camera, a tiny Nikon P5100 point-and-shoot. I love the pose and the colours. Tabitha later was in high demand as a model for several years and Angus was head-hunted for the junior squad of a professional UK soccer team. Today, she is applying to do her PhD at one of Australia’s most prestigious Universities and Angus is enrolled in an environmental science degree. Tempus fugit!"
10. Submitted by Chris Kern of Rockville, Maryland, USA. "This photograph was made in the backyard of our family home in Leonia, New Jersey, sometime during the summer of 1951 by my father, Gene Kern (1914–2010). The subjects are his father, Robert (1886–1963), and my sister, Robin (b. 1949). It was shot with one of the best film cameras I've ever used, a prewar Zeiss Contax II with a collapsible 50mm Sonnar lens, which my grandfather purchased in New York from a German-Jewish refugee—reportedly for an exorbitant price because he wanted to help the fellow out without embarrassing him by appearing to offer charity—and which I inherited many years later as a teenager."
11. Submitted by Michael Gay of Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA. "While visiting our local botanical garden, my 'wood nymph' granddaughter exclaimed, 'Hey, Granddaddy, check this out.' She picked the setting, struck the pose, then BAM, I took the shot."
12. Submitted by Craig P. Beyers of Ashburn, Virginia, USA. "A picture of my grandson, taken with my iPhone on a Disney cruise with my daughter and family. Benjamin was impatient as we waited for lunch on the ship and was unable to stay still. His father placed him on the window sill (Porthole sill? Porthole surround?) where he stood, sat, and finally—at my urging as I visualized this photo—lay down and stayed still for less than a minute. This was the best of the multiple photos I took. I like it because of his look, the lovely clouds in the background, and the way the porthole and surround acts like a leading line to bring your eye into the photo. While the clouds are the whitest and brightest part of the image, the slight glow on Benjamin’s face also draws your eye. His curved body laying on the porthole surround complements the surround and the porthole. I printed this and a picture of his sister as gifts for my daughter, which she’s framed and has in her house. I’ve done the same and have both pictures in our apartment."
13. Submitted by William Schneider of Athens, Ohio, USA. "Not having any children or grandchildren myself, I'm glad that you offered other options for entry. This is a photograph of me in 1950 with my maternal grandmother. Readily apparent from my father's photo, he and my grandmother had a wicked sense of humor when they got together. Their personalities still live for me in this photo. When he died, I inherited his collection of Kodachrome slides and the 35mm Kodak Retina camera that he used. I spent about half a year working part-time to clean away mold and digitize the slides. It was a lot of work, but there are so many treasured memories in the pictures."

Thanks to everyone who participated! This was a lot of fun.

Mike

Camera of the Week:
The full-frame mirrorless Canon EOS R6 features the same 20-MP CMOS image sensor and image processor as the EOS-1D X Mark III, and most of the up-to-the-minute features that anyone but a dedicated specialist could want. Plus native access to Canon's latest R lenses.

The above is a link to Amazon from TOP. Here's the new edition of our most recent Book of the Week, Bystander, as a link to The Book Depository. The following logo is also a link:

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:

James: "I am guessing that anyone with grandchildren would pick the same number 1. Well done Charlie Dunton! And one out of two hundred is not a bad keeper rate.  ;-)  "

Mike replies: Oops. With all the care I took in editing and formatting this, I still kinda messed up. Originally I had numbered the pictures 1 through 13 just as a key to connect them with the corresponding verbal matter below. But then I got the idea of putting a thumbnail next to the writeups, which obviated the need for the numbers. Then a few comments and emails made me realize that it was too easy to associate the numbers under the pictures with a ranking, i.e., best to worst. That's not what I intended. They're in a visual order I thought was effective, but it's not a ranking. So now I've put the name of the person who sent the picture in parentheses below each picture...but it's too complicated to remove the numbers from the formatting below (in the TypePad compositor, once you start a number series it becomes automatic), so I've left those in. I'll learn to do this blogging thing someday.

JOHN B GILLOOLY: "I really enjoyed this process and then seeing the final images. I also find it fascinating and instructive that on first pass through the images, some seem quite 'regular.' Nice photos but not necessarily photos that might rise to the top. But in context, with the small anecdote that accompanies each image, it all comes together. It pushes me again to remember that doing more with fewer images is crucial. Thanks for this BD—looking forward to additional iterations of this set and the next BD."

Mike replies: This is one of the things I'll talk about when I write about some of the individual pictures.

Martin Doonan: "As an outside observer, number 5 really struck me the most—it is the one picture here that told the full story by itself without me needing the accompanying text."

Stipulated!

Sent in by Roger Bradbury. Read more below.

Final 21: I'm down to 21 in the Baker's Dozen selection, and it wasn't easy. Should have it finished up today or tomorrow. For some reason I'm afflicted with heavy procrastination with these things. Maybe I just don't like being judgmental.

A pleasure: This has been the most fun for me of any of these so far. I like families, I like kids, I like pictures that show relationships, and I like pictures that show emotions. And I like pictures that respect photography's relationship with both time and the vagaries of access (more about that below). I feel privileged that people are willing to share some of their favorite family pictures with me. So as you might imagine, it's been a lot of fun to engage with these 112 submissions.

99 nos: I've been worried, however, about what I might inadvertently have done to my own poor blog! Only dedicated participants in the "life of this site," if you will, would submit their pictures for a Baker's Dozen—and what I've done is to ask them for deeply personal and meaningful pictures that involve some of the most precious people in their whole lives. And then I'm going to reject 99 out of the 112 submissions, and leave 99 readers smarting? Is that smart?

No losers: If the screenwriters whose TV shows and movies I've been watching all my life have it right, then "stipulated" is a legal term for something that's going to be accepted without argument—"an agreement that a certain fact is true or uncontested," according to upcounsel.com, a legal site. So let's just stipulate this: all of the pictures submitted are pretty darn wonderful, and, in almost every case, I can see why you treasure them. So, no losers. If yours isn't chosen, no hard feelings, please? It doesn't mean it's not wonderful. It's just that 112 doesn't fit into 13.

Subsets: I've been toying with another idea...that I might present first the Baker's Dozen, but then also a couple of other groupings. For instance, the black-and-white submissions could make a strong subgroup...I'd even be leaving good ones out of that. And individual portraits of kids could make another subset. One or two of those will make the top 13, but there are more good ones than that, for sure.

Discussion: I'm also going to do a few posts talking about a few of the pictures I'm choosing and why I think they succeed as photographs, technically and aesthetically. I'm finding I have a lot to say, which is ground zero for any writer.

About the illustration: See what I mean? Anyone but a sociopath can see why this family loves this lovely shot. Sent in by longtime reader Roger Bradbury of Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire, England (I forgot to ask people to indicate whether it's their own picture or not. Some of them obviously aren't). "Brothers Conal and Edan with their Grannie Vera at a family gathering, twelve years ago," Roger writes. "The boys are my nephews, and Vera was my mum; she passed away three years ago."

...And Yr. Hmbl. Ed. sneaks another extra in (this Baker is being especially generous). And now I'll say what I meant by "the vagaries of access" and its relationship to time: no one on Earth can take that picture of Conal and Edan and Grannie Vera now; nor will they ever be able to again. That's part of what makes the 112 submissions I've been looking at so special.

Back to work on it, and more soon.

Mike

Roger Bradbury replies: "It was a nice surprise to see the photo of my mum and nephews when I came to TOP and yes, I did take this photo. When Mum passed away I became the keeper of the family photos. She had sorted the photos into albums and captioned them with names and dating information. The largest album is 'Photographs From 1959.' I was born early that year, and some of the pictures on the first page are 'Roger 10 weeks, me and Whisky' (our dog). That would be March '59. The last photo in the album is of my brother Alan (with a beard!) in October 1985. Without Mum's captions we would be guessing about dates and who some of the subjects were, and I think she was looking ahead; one day it would be too late to ask her. I now realise that I haven't shown the photo above to anybody else! There's a family gathering coming up so I'll make some copies and give them out. I'll make sure there's a caption to go with it."

Camera of the Week:
The full-frame mirrorless Canon EOS R6 features the same 20-MP CMOS image sensor and image processor as the EOS-1D X Mark III, and most of the up-to-the-minute features that anyone but a dedicated specialist could want. Plus native access to Canon's latest R lenses.

The above is a link to Amazon from TOP. Here's the new edition of our most recent Book of the Week, Bystander, as a link to The Book Depository. The following logo is also a link:

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:

Sunday Support Group: Pictures with Heart (and the Baker's Dozen Deadline)

Photo by John Gillooly Sr.

I mentioned earlier that I'd announce the deadline for the current Baker's Dozen (here's the link) as we got closer to it, and it's time: I think the deadline should be a week from now, next Sunday, the 15th, end of day.

I've enjoyed this past week a whole lot, and I feel honored. (I sometimes think I do these baker's dozens simply for my own pleasure.) It's been a privilege to see so many personal pictures, mostly of people who are precious to you. So much warmth and love and affection. It shakes me to think that I'm going to have to pick thirteen; how do you tell someone that his or her favorite picture of one or more of his or her favorite people isn't going to make the cut? I think I need to stipulate that ALL of the photographs I'm seeing are each wonderful in their way, and that the finished dozen+1 is only a sampling of the submissions as a whole. We'll kick questions of good/better/best to the curb.

Take this photograph by John Hunter:

I live in the beautiful rolling hills of Northumberland county, just north of Lake Ontario, a stone's (vigorous) throw from Keuka Lake. My grandson, Hikaru, is seen here celebrating his seventh birthday at Grandma and Grandpa's house in the country. Though his legs were too short to reach the pedals, he insisted on trying to drive the lawnmower and then, once he got the hang of it, he just took off over the field at full speed, laughing uproariously. I like that it so clearly shows the wonderful exuberance of being so young and happy. What a great joy it is for grandparents to be a part of that experience.

It's not by most measures a great or even a good photograph, and it's not going to win any prizes, figuratively or, in the present case, literally—this won't be one of the final 13. It's blurry, indifferently composed, a little too dark, and Hikaru's face is almost turned too much away from the camera. Yet how can you not like it? I can see easily why John loves it. It's got important things going for it that so many "better" pictures don't: it's got heart, and meaning. John has described what it means to him perfectly well, so I need add nothing. What Hikaru is feeling is there to see. It's an authentic moment. Add in that it's a grandfather's-eye view and the element of affection comes into stronger focus too.

We're seeing Hikaru's mastery of the machine as well—although he can't reach the pedals from the seat, he's got it down. I like that element. I was struck recently to learn that the late Prince Philip said the purpose of the Duke of Edinburgh's Award, conceived by himself and his former headmaster Karl Hahn—I had never heard of it till he died—is to enable young people to experience the feeling of success. "If you can get a young person to succeed in any one activity," HRH said, "then that feeling of success will spread over into many others." What a compassionate and flexible goal: simply to help another person experience success, no matter the way. It's essentially for young people to experience failure, because the earlier and more often they have to deal with failure the better they'll learn to cope with it, but we shouldn't forget that it's equally important to let them feel the good feelings of success, mastery, and agency too.

Jamaica Plain
So let's turn to the old snapshot by John Gillooly Sr. at the top of the post. It's another photo that's not going to get past the final cut for whatever that's worth. But now read what his son, also named John (a frequent and good commenter here), tells us about it:

The Gillooly grandchildren in a running race in front of 20 Edge Hill Street in the Jamaica Plain neighborhood of Boston in August 1973. The photograph was taken by my father, John Gillooly, Sr., when he was 26 years old. He was the ninth of the 11 kids that grew up in the three bedroom house on the far left. His father died when he was 10 in 1957.

The organizer of this "race" is the oldest brother, Ed Gillooly, Jr. who was a prominent sports writer for the Boston Record American and Boston Herald. He was at least the third generation of sportwriters in the Gillooly line and one of the first to travel full time with the Celtics and Red Sox in the 1950s and 1960s.

The participants in the race were all born in the 1960s. (I was born in 1971 and was probably on someone's lap with a bottle during this race!) This image, like most of its kind, has taken on new meaning throughout the years. Uncle Ed, the eldest, was the first to go. Aunt Honey on the stoop and her baby sister Susan, seated, both passed away at relatively normal ages. But in recent years we have lost three of the runners quite prematurely.

We lost Joanne, the redhead in the middle, with outfit to match her hair, in her 50s almost a decade ago.

We lost Jim, far right in the green, two years ago at the age of 53. And the birthday boy on this day, Mark, in the brown pants and vest, passed away at just shy of 50 about three years ago. I was an only child until the age of nine and we were all very close growing up.

This has long been one of my favorite images. Such a genuine record of a very specific moment in time. So many stories rest within this photo. Some very difficult lives captured in this fleeting instant. Like most big families, the trajectories of the kids vary widely and that trajectory greatly impacts the generations that follow. For all of the trials of the decades, those 11 siblings remained very close for their entire lives and produced dozens of grandchildren.

Through my eyes, this will always be a photograph of the "grandkids." At this point in 2021, four of those grandkids in the photo have grandchildren of their own. I've thought about re-enacting this image many times!

Thanks for the prompt Mike!

See what I mean? A description that's full of heart. It lets us see and feel what the photo means to John and his family.

Anyway, these are good examples of why all the pictures I'm seeing this week are good even when they're not fated for the final dozen+1. And why nobody should feel dismissed or disrespected even if they don't get chosen. Because I do respect and accept the love and affection in them, the life, the heart, and what they mean to you.

Pixels on the head of a pin
Years ago there was a large-format guru (long dead now) who had strong opinions and intolerant demands about tolerances. Such-and-such a film and developer were best, 8x10 was better than 120, stout tripods were needed, everything had to be just so. He himself took only pictures under conditions strictly controlled to be optimal; never of people unless they could stand stock still and be described by the tested-and-approved lens as exactly as statues. Yet when he held a contest once, the winner he picked was a 35mm shot of a few kids in the back of a pickup truck. I guess it had some elusive quality, some elusive feeling. Of life, maybe.

Today all the specifics are different, but we still want to argue good/better/best in terms of all sorts of things that just aren't the most important things. Corner sharpness, fractions of an f-stop, how many pixels on the head of a pin. The pictures I'm seeing this week matter to people, and have meaning to people. I'd rather aspire to pictures that have heart first and foremost, and let all those other things follow if I can manage them, than the other way around.

Here's the link to the Baker's Dozen again. Send yours!

Mike
(Thanks to John Hunter and John Gillooly)

Book of the Week

The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk M.D. "Trauma is a fact of life. Veterans and their families deal with the painful aftermath of combat; one in five Americans has been molested; one in four grew up with alcoholics; one in three couples have engaged in physical violence." A tough slog of a read, but full of revelations. And it reviews many strategies, both conventional and alternative, toward relief and healing.

This is a link to Amazon from TOP. The following logo is also a link:

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:

David Dyer-Bennet: "One of the good things, socially, about how heavily people submit to these Baker's Dozen 'contests' is that, with such a low acceptance rate, it's easier not to take being left out as a total slam. It merely means some others of the hundreds of photos submitted were at least a hair better."

Mike replies: And often it just means I chose one picture rather than another one I might also have chosen just as easily. Which should provide further comfort....

John Hunter: "Thanks for your kind remarks for a picture I knew was not even sort of good, but sent anyway. You've caught the idea behind the thing, and I'm glad more people now have had the opportunity to see this hilarious and dear moment. Shot while running downhill through the hay at dusk with my venerable Fuji X10, it had no hope of having any compositional or technical quality. And yet...."

Kye Wood: "I think the photo of the footrace is fabulous. How is it an automatic cull?

Mike the sly Ed. replies: Well, you'll notice it did kinda get featured. It's a trick I have of adding a few more than just the "one extra for good measure."

JOHN B GILLOOLY: "Always a thrill to open up TOP and see a submission featured. Thanks for sharing that image that my father shot and the story with it."

New Baker's Dozen Call for Work: 'Grandkids'

Me and my beloved grandmother, ages 71 and 15. This picture would not make the cut even though I love it.

A "Baker's Dozen" is a portfolio of a dozen pictures by readers, with one extra for good measure, juried from your submissions by Yr. Hmbl. Ed.

Each time we do this we have fun and create a nice little virtual group show. If you'd like to see older ones, click on the "Baker's Dozen" category in the right-hand sidebar.

I promised we'd do 'grandchildren' as the next subject, and here we are.

Your submission (please, only one) may be taken with any camera and may be of any vintage, as long as you either took the picture yourself or it is a family picture belonging to your family. Anything relating to the theme is potentially fair game, as long as you know the relationship for certain.

How to Submit

This is a call for work. By submitting, you give me permission to reproduce the small JPEG of your picture on TOP and that's it. Any and all rights remain where they are.

To submit, use the subject line:

BDGrandkids

Just like that...no spaces, spelled exactly like that, no variations. Capital "G" in "Grandkids." The reason is that when I begin building the post, I will search my large email stack for that phrase as the subject, and if your email doesn't come up, then I won't see your picture.

Deadline to be announced when we get close to it. The results will appear in (ahem!) less than 856 days (I'll get this here egg off my face real soon now).

Email ONE (1) JPEG, 800 pixels wide, saved in sRGB. Include in the email your name, where you live (don't forget that), and, briefly, what you want to tell other TOP readers about your picture. Technical details aren't needed unless they're especially interesting.

Lots of people write a short paragraph explaining their picture (see the "Yellow" portfolio for examples), so if you don't, just be aware that your picture might seem a little "naked" if it gets picked.

My email address is mcjohnston at mac dot com. Replace the "at" and the "dot" with the proper symbols and get rid of the spaces.

So, five components:

"BDGrandkids" in the SUBJECT LINE;
PICTURE, 800 pixels wide in sRGB;
NAME;
WHERE YOU LIVE;
Your brief COMMENTS about the shot.

And please, put everything in one email. If you forget anything, start over...don't send anything in a separate email please. Also: check that your email client is not reducing inclusions to thumbnail size. I need to see a full 800-pixel-wide JPEG.

Have fun picking! I know it could be tough.  :-)

Mike

Book of Interest:

Photographs Not Taken: a collection of photographers' essays, edited by Will Steacy (Daylight Books; Second Revised ed. edition, 2012). Recommended by Mike Chisholm, who has good taste. This is a link to Amazon from TOP.

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:

Gordon Lewis: "Not to pick nits or split hairs here, but aren't any children someone's grandchildren, even if said grandparent is no longer among the living? That being the case, this seems to me to be a distinction without a real difference. Does a grandparent therefore need to be visible in the photo? Your example would seem to imply that but your stated requirements aren't clear. I suggest you do yourself and potential entrants a favor by being more explicit about what you are and are not looking for.

Mike replies: If a TOP reader tells me it's his or her grandchild, I'll believe it. 

In light of the previous post, however, I'd want to give readers the latitude to be inventive with the theme if they want to be. I assume most submissions would be of the reader's own grandchild(ren), although that's not required.

I'm not conceited enough to think I can know all of the ways somebody else might interpret the theme. For instance, one thing that popped into my mind as I was mulling over the concept is a picture I think I saw in LIFE magazine many decades ago, showing the man who would have been King of America at that time if George Washington had decided to become King. The guy was a farmer in some Midwestern state and was pictured standing out in the middle of a field. Does that meet the theme? I think it does, but it's a matter of interpretation.

In a contest like this, one way to approach it is to make the best picture you can of a grandchild. Another way entirely is to see how creative you can be with the concept of the designated theme. My guess is that most submissions will be the former, but I'm interested in seeing the latter too, if anyone cares to go that way.

As far as your counterexample of any picture of any child (actually any person of any age would do just as well), the problem is that nothing in the picture would indicate a grandparent-grandchild relationship, so I would think that all such entries would fail at the theme, unless there was some pertinent explanation.

Phil Thomas: "Mike, your post has done two things, both of which were very valuable. Firstly it made me look back over old pictures of my children with their grandparents when my children were much younger (they are now both teenagers). Secondly it made me realise that I haven't taken any photos of the kids and grandparents together recently, and this needs to be redressed. So thanks, on both counts."

Baker's Dozen: In the Museum (Complete)

Photo by Benjamin Kelley, Boston, Massachusetts, USA. "I’ve been photographing my daughter looking at art for a number of years now. She was newly four here, in 2015. This was taken at our local museum, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, with John White Alexander’s Isabella and the Pot of Basil."

Photo by Rich Barbara, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA. "I had to set the camera down on a bench to keep the ISO fairly low. Was afraid they’d move before I got the shot but I figured when the man sat down on the floor I had a bit of time. Taken at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh with an Olympus E-M10 and a 25mm ƒ/1.8 lens."

Photo by Albano García, Buenos Aires, Argentina. "I took this photo a couple of months before your call for work at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes here in Buenos Aires. My daugher Margarita loves museums, but that day she'd had enough.  :-)  Shot with a Sony a6000 with 16–50mm kit zoom I bought from my dear friend Juan Buhler."

Photo by David Mackenzie, Bedford, New Hampshire, USA. "We were running late one day in Paris and decided to visit the Louvre about half an hour before closing. Given the short amount of time we had we headed directly for the Mona Lisa. When we turned the corner into the exhibit space we were met by this. A docent told me were lucky to arrive so late so that the crowd was much thinner than normal. At least nobody was taking a selfie."

...Except the guy in front just to the left of the painting. And maybe one guy on the opposite side, just to the left of the end of the DSLR lens. Hard to tell. —MJ.

Photo by Stelios Karouzakis, London, United Kingdom. "This is a picture I took in 2015 outside the British Museum in London, with my new to me then (secondhand) DSLR. I'd been shooting for years with nothing but a rangefinder and a 35mm so that was an all-new setup for me. I remember I was determined to get a picture I liked that day for no particular reason, just to please myself. I was paying particular attention to the sun. I like the soft light and the gestures of the children. I have it printed and framed in my living room."

This is a particular favorite of mine Stelios. —MJ

Photo by Leon Droby, Uxbridge, Massachusetts, USA. "Being a local, I usually go to this museum a couple of times a month. And no matter how many times I go, there’s always something interesting there. Taken at the Worcester Art Museum in Worcester, Massachusetts, with a Fujifilm X100F."

Photo by John Denniston, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. November 16th, 2018—A wall being painted in readiness for a new exhibition at the Equinox Gallery in Vancouver, B.C.

Why I liked this... —MJ

Photo by Sergio Bartelsman, Bogotá, Distrito Capital, Colombia.

Photo by Nick Van Zanten, Grand Haven, Michigan, USA. Shot with a Nikon D700, 1/250 at ƒ/4. "Two of the potential voters in Art Prize 2010. Launched in 2009 as an experiment, Art Prize was designed to be a bottom-up rather than top-down art contest. Offering the largest cash prize in the art world, the venue, downtown Grand Rapids, Michigan, was open to any artist. Any visitor could vote via the internet for their favorite piece. The experiment worked. ArtPrize has continued to grow and evolve."

Photo by Maggie Osterberg, Lincoln, Nebraska, USA. "This is in the pelagic pool viewing area at The Monterey Bay Aquarium and the odd fish you see is an Ocean Sunfish, or Mola Mola. The giant tank held a variety of fish and mid-sea invertebrates, including a young Great White Shark. What I love about this shot is that it reminds me of 'Mystery Science Theater 3000,' with phone-toting tourists standing in for Joel, Crow, and Tom Servo. The kids in the lower left, putting their hands on the glass are endearing and, if I’m honest, a little bit creepy."

In the submissions there were a number of creative departures from the conventional idea of a museum—an "old village" museum of historical structures (Ronny Nilsen), a permanently docked warship (Kristoffer Tripplaar), the exterior of an alternative museum on the streets of an old town (Ray Maines), even the interior of a huge freight elevator at SFMoMA (Saul Rosenfield).

Photo by Markus Fischer, Germany. "This is entitled 'Inside the Camera'—which is where it was created, inside the room-size camera obscura located in The Photographers' Gallery in Central London. Hope that passes for a museum…great place by the way."

Photo by Mark Hobson, Adirondack Mountains near Lake Placid, New York USA. "My grandson in the Canadian War Museum, Ottawa, Canada. Over the past year I have been 'converting' hundreds of my pictures into an 'old' snapshot format/look. The purpose is to amass a large body of 'snapshots' which I then place in POD (print on demand) photo books. My intent is to create legacy books which have the look and feel of the traditional/classic family photo album. Enough copies of each album/photo book are printed to distribute to immediate family members. In addition, I put 20–15 individual 5x5" prints into boxes and leave them around my house so family and visitors can handle and look at them."

As for the "good measure" 13th picture, it's humorous, but a little risqué too. I don't think it will offend anyone, but perhaps you should consider it NSFW. Therefore I'm hiding it behind this page break. Proceed if appropriate.

Baker's Dozen: At the Museum (Part I)

Photo by Benjamin Kelley, Boston, Massachusetts, USA

Photo by Rich Barbara, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA

Photo by Albano García, Buenos Aires, Argentina

Tired
I'll say a few words about each of the above pictures, but out of order. Last first.

The third picture here was hard to pick. Probably a dozen people sent pictures on the theme of museumgoers resting, from a variety of viewpoints, and I could easily have picked four or five others as great representatives of the submissions. All had their charms and points of view, none were poor.

I do recall reading that people in general (not just kids!) have a tendency to overdo it when visiting museums. There's a strong tendency to want to see everything or cover it all. We've set aside the day, we've made the trip, and most especially we've paid our admission fee, and we've got to get our money's worth! So we trudge around the museum until we've had enough, then we trudge some more because we haven't seen this section or that room. (This is an example of the Sunk Cost Fallacy according to Richard Thaler). So we typically wear ourselves out and make ourselves cross. I have vivid memories of time moving with glacial slowness when I was a kid. No memories of being bored in museums, but I do have a distinct memory of being stuck at the Milwaukee Symphony while the orchestra sawed and moaned on and on and on and on while I squirmed in my skin. I sympathize with this little girl (her eyes are open, you'll notice—she's not sleeping).

In picking this from the others I do think I was influenced by the fact that I'm familiar with a lot of Albano's work. He took this one [a year and] a couple of months ago at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, in Buenos Aires. "My daugher Margarita loves museums, but that day she'd had enough.  :-)  Shot on a Sony a6000 with 16–50mm kit zoom I bought from my dear friend Juan Buhler."

Essential transaction
When I saw the top picture I reacted as a photographer, not a viewer, which is a common mistake of mine. Having spent so many years as a photographer I became sensitive to what are called tonal mergers, where two parts of the picture that should be separated are the same tone and blend too much. An example of the problem I usually turn to is Portugal 1976 by Josef Koudelka...(click on the image at the link to see the larger version). I've seen prints of this where there's just the barest highlight between the nun's head and the man's jacket—crucial, in my judgement—and prints where there isn't. The latter would be a tonal merger. So if I were Benjamin Kelley I would have just moved to the side a bit to set his daughter's whole head against the lighter background of the wall.

But I didn't take the picture, and yes, there's a rim of highlight there, and no, it doesn't ruin the picture in any way, so...here's an example of where I shouldn't look at the picture like I had been the photographer, but rather just put my "viewer's hat" on and appreciate the picture that's being shown to me. You shouldn't react to a finished picture by thinking of how you might have framed it differently if you were the one taking it! That's not fair. One might as sensibly react that museums shouldn't hang paintings where they're struck by direct sunlight. That would be another first response to the photo that would interfere with seeing it for what it is. Anyway, once I let go of my first reaction, the photo grew on me more, and I found myself liking the obvious implication of childlike wonder and the contrast between the real sunlight in the room and the mysterious glow of the light depicted in the painting. And it's beautiful, and I'm just old-fashioned enough to believe that that never hurts.

It sums up the basic, essential transaction of museums. They display wondrous things, we look and wonder. Benjamin writes, "I’ve been photographing my daughter looking at art for a number of years now. She was newly four here, in 2015. This was taken at our local museum, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, with John White Alexander’s Isabella and the Pot of Basil."

Punctum

Punctum: A concept from Roland Barthes' book Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography.

1. To wound.
2. Denoting the wounding, personally touching detail [of a photograph] which establishes [for the viewer] a direct relationship with the object or person within it.

—Urban Dictionary

As for the middle picture, it's perfectly nice as a set piece, but then I noticed that whitish streak in front of the seated man. After a flash of puzzlement, I realized it's his other hand. That's something that would be considered an "imperfection" by some, but to me it's the punctum, the peculiar little odd detail that brings the rest of the picture alive. I realized the seated man is energetically gesticulating at one of the paintings, and from there I imagine his energized voice as he expounds on (enthuses over? Dismisses?) whichever of the paintings he's gesturing at, and from there I go to his rather mysteriously robed and apparently somewhat hunched hearer, and from there to their relationship and their possible history together as—what? Spouses, friends, student and teacher? Those thoughts brings the picture alive for me and draws me into its aliveness. From there I can appreciate the set piece, the nice formal qualities of the picture.

Rich took the picture at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, a with an Olympus E-M10 and a 25mm ƒ/1.8 lens.

Photo by David Mackenzie, Bedford, New Hampshire, USA

Last in this first installment is this happy shot from Dave Mackenzie. I read a book about the Mona Lisa once...it's curious how the painting got the status it has. Dave relates: "We were running late one day in Paris and decided to visit the Louvre about half an hour before closing. Given the short amount of time we had we headed directly for the Mona Lisa. When we turned the corner into the exhibit space we were met by this. A docent told me were lucky to arrive so late so that the crowd was much thinner than normal. At least nobody was taking a 'selfie.'"

...Except I do see at least one person taking a selfie! At the top of the crowd above the striped hat. I imagine many people have taken pictures of this scene, but Dave's is a good one. I like it.

[Part II will appear on March 28th, 2021*.]

Mike

*Just kidding. Sorry I lost the thread on this. It got engulfed in my unmanageability and the oceanic disorganization of all the raw material (inside and outside of my head) that I trawl through to make TOP. I shouldn't say when I'll get to the other nine, but hopefully it won't take a year for Part II...though I never know...sigh.....

If you need a reminder (and why would you not?), I made a call for work on the theme of "At the Museum" an entire year ago (I think exactly, though I haven't checked) and then I very badly dropped the ball and just didn't come through with the edited picks. Now with more time at home, I decided to address the problem by chipping away at it a few pictures at a time. I apologize for the delay—the long delay—but if I'm honest there's really no excuse. I'm sorry. Mea culpa.

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.

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

Dogman: "Excellent choices to start off a new Baker's Dozen! Reading the article, I'm reminded how I no longer look at photos as a photographer but as a viewer. A 'consumer,' if you will, of photographs and images. When I looked at photos with the photographer's eye, I looked for errors and flaws. Then I came to grips with the fact that the photographs I like the best are candid moments and found objects, none of which are ever perfectly arranged subjects. I like the imperfect elements that make their way into photographs. They become Barthes' punctum for me."

Benjamin Polidario: "The photographer's/viewer's dilemma: is it similar to a preacher's dilemma when he listens to another preach? I often critique instead of just basking in the message. Bad, Bad, Bad."

David Lee (edited comment): "Nice post. Your comments about people trying to get the most of their very expensive museum tickets are spot on. I was talking about this with my son not long ago. The Met used to have a policy that the price was 'suggested,' so you could either pay full price or whatever you could pay. Now that policy changed and you are charged full price. Not sure I agree with it. The Met has a lot of works that were given to them for free in order to give all the people a chance to enjoy them. The Gelman Collection comes to mind, for example. I think that people should be charged as in a parking lot, full first hour and then on 15 minute increments. A lot of people go the museum to get the selfie and buy a souvenir in the shop.

"I used to have a layover in Chicago. We used to stay in The Palmer House, not far from The Art Institute. They had the same policy as The Met and I took full advantage of it. Paying maybe a third of the suggested price and then going to see the four or five paintings I loved. In and out in about one hour. A visit to Central Camera in Wabash Avenue was also a required stop."

Mike replies: It was one of the great things about going to art school in downtown Washington, D.C.: a lot of museums are open to the public, so you can pop in and out. I would often do what you describe, just kill some time by "visiting" a favorite artwork for a few minutes, or find a peaceful corner as a place to read.

MHMG: "I do admire the first photograph in this Part I series. Great for the photo opportunity, but shame on the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston for allowing direct sunlight to strike the painting. We're talking 40,000+ lux illumination levels on the lower half of that painting, and yah, the museum conservators could have filtered the UV radiation at the skylight/window source, but they will find out in just a few years how much fading can occur with blue wavelength radiation at such high intensity levels. Just sayin'...epic fail for museum staff, great shot by the photographer!"

[MHMG is an expert on light fading and image permanence—Ed.]

Rod S.: "The top picture by Benjamin Kelley is really quite lovely. My initial thoughts were surprise that direct sunlight was being allowed to strike the painting, but simultaneously 'wow, isn’t it beautiful.' I understand your point about the tonal convergence, but in this instance it is very slight. Benjamin has chosen to follow the more important principle of keeping his perspective true. If he had done as you suggested and stepped to his left, both the verticals and horizontals of the painting and floor would have been skewed out of their true relationship. The result would be ugly and 'unworthy.'

"Part of the success of this photograph comes from the gaze of the child, while another, perhaps under-appreciated, contribution comes from the inclusion of a child, with her expected animated manner, injecting an informal point of contrast into a structured and formal setting. Bravo, Benjamin."

Ben: "What a pleasant surprise it was to open TOP this weekend to find my photograph there—right after putting the subject to bed, in fact!

"Thanks to everyone for the kind words, and thanks to Mike for featuring the photo. It's a favorite of mine; obviously it carries personal meaning for me, so it's nice to read positive comments from others. Chris's comment echoes my own feeling about the composition, that I like how the top of her head continues the line of the shadow. Maybe I'll try to print it sometime, see how it turns out. And yes, the strong light on the painting is concerning. Perhaps they've corrected it...maybe once the museum opens again I'll go have a look! Thanks again, I'm quite flattered. Hope everyone is staying healthy and keeping up positive energies!

"P.S. Regarding Moose's comment and photo, my wife and I got married at the Worcester Art Museum.  :-)  Funny, the little coincidences...."

Editing the Baker's Dozen

I now have about 300 submissions for the Baker's Dozen, so it's off to work on that.

Here's my process:

• First I search for "BDMuseum" in Mail, which brings up all the submissions.
• I've looked at most already when they came in, but I'll go through them again slowly and look again.
• After waiting at least a few hours and maybe till tomorrow, I'll go through and flag all the ones I think are prospects. With that many submissions, there will probably be 30–60 that I'll flag.
• Then I'll go through the flagged ones again. At this point the pictures are already familiar to me, so I'm looking for which ones seem to have "legs," staying power. I'll be pretty aware of which ones I like more than when I first saw them, and which ones less.
• Then I'll pick the ones I think have to be included no matter what the final set looks like...the "shoo-ins," to use an old expression. I might have to choose between repeated subjects. For instance, in this batch I got a number of pictures of museumgoers sleeping or resting, at least three of which I already know I like, and a number of "abstracts" of architectural details. I probably wouldn't include more than one of each in the final set (if that).
• At that point I'll have a nucleus, so the task becomes to fill in around the main picks to make a coherent, balanced set and a pleasing sequence. I can't tell you how I do this or what I look for; it's mainly done by "feel" you might say. Does anything look out of place? Do two pictures have echoes of each other and need some space between them in the sequence? This is the stage that I'll also check for unintended related elements...for example, do multiple pictures feature strollers, or one particular dominant color? I might choose to mitigate that, but maybe not. On the flip side, there may be something I need to balance out some choices I've already made. One thing I don't consider is the sex of the photographer or where they come from. If three pictures in a row are by women or there turn out to be four pictures by photographers from Italy, that won't bother me. I also don't play favorites with readers who comment a lot, or who I've met, or who might be friends. Well, friends might have a little higher bar than the rest of you. Otherwise it's a pretty level playing field.
• In sequencing I like to start and finish strong, with a strong picture in the middle. But that's not written in stone; maybe there could be some other path, like distant views moving slowly to intimate ones. The pictures sort of tell you what sort of sequence they need. Also, it's not absolutely critical, so there's no sense getting crazy about it. Sometimes one ordering works as well as another.
• Once I have a pretty good fix on the choices and the sequence, I'll review what I have for written material and consider how to present it. For example, in the "Yellow" portfolio I wanted all the pictures close to each other, so I put the written material at the end.

How long will this all take? Well, until I'm satisfied with it—until I feel like I've made the most enjoyable post I can out of the material I have to work with. If that takes four hours total or fourteen, I don't really care. Nobody cares how hard you worked. :-)

Have a nice weekend!

Mike
(Thanks to everyone who submitted)

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

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

No featured comments yet—please check back soon!

'At the Museum' Update

I've gotten about 230 submissions for the Baker's Dozen portfolio. I'll be doing the initial edits no later than this weekend, so if you still want to submit something, plan on doing it before the weekend.

Lots of great stuff so far. This is going to be another tough one to edit.

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.

Everything must fade away

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

No featured comments yet—please check back soon!

New Baker's Dozen Call For Work: 'In the Museum'

Xander at the Corning Museum of Glass. iPhone snap by Mike.

It's been a while since we had a "Baker's Dozen"—a dozen JPEGs of readers' pictures, with one extra for good measure, curated by moi, AKA Yr. Hmbl. Ed.

Each time we do this we have fun and create a lovely little virtual group show. If you'd like to see older ones, click on the "Baker's Dozen" category in the right-hand sidebar.

I promised we'd do "grandchildren" as the next subject, and we'll get to that someday. But now, inspired by the lovely lead picture in Mark Power's post and the dueling frames in Moose's, I thought we'd try JamesM's idea of "In the Museum."

Any picture taken in, of, or about a museum or art gallery (or anywhere you go to look at art) is fair game.

How to Submit

This is a call for your own work, and you must own the rights to it, so please don't send me anything but that.

By submitting, you give me permission to reproduce the small JPEG of your picture on TOP and that's it. Your copyright remains yours.

To submit, use the subject line:

BDMuseum

Just like that...no spaces, spelled exactly like that, no variations. Capital "M" in "museum." The reason is that when I begin building the post, I will search my large email stack for that phrase as the subject, and if your email doesn't come up, then I won't see your picture.

Please pay attention to that, as each time I specify this I do get submissions that don't have the proper header. Those inevitably get lost.

I'll announce the deadline when we get near it. No promises when the results will appear...I've learned from experience that these features just take time to build, so it'll get done when it gets done. There's only one little man behind the curtain.

Email ONE (1) JPEG, 800 pixels wide, saved in sRGB. Include in the email your name, where you live (people keep forgetting that), any technical details you care to share, your website URL if you want me to publish it, and whatever you want to tell other TOP readers about your picture.

Lots of people write a paragraph explaining their picture (see the "Yellow" portfolio for examples), so if you don't, just be aware that your picture might seem a little "naked" after it gets picked. (Because of course yours will get picked.)

My email address is mcjohnston at mac dot com. Replace the "at" and the "dot" with the proper symbols and get rid of the spaces. This modest attempt at disguising my address will not fool the steenkin' web-crawling bots, but I hafta try.

So, five components:

"BDMuseum" in the SUBJECT LINE;
PICTURE (must be your own!), 800 pixels wide in sRGB;
NAME;
WHERE YOU LIVE;
Any COMMENTS you care to make about the shot.

Hope you are up to the challenge! Have fun and don't get arrested by a museum guard. They're really bored.  :-)

Mike
(Thanks to JamesM)

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?

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

Lynn: "Nice to see the return of the Baker's Dozen! One quick question—does an art gallery qualify as a museum? Methinks it does, as its function is to collect, preserve, curate and display objects of cultural significance; and to educate."

Mike replies: Sure. Feel free to be creative with the idea. One reader submitted a picture taken on a museum ship—an old ship in drydock open to tourists.

Robert Roaldi: "Be fun if there were a bakery museum somewhere."

The End of Yellow

Richard Gonet wrote,

"I really enjoyed viewing this collection. Thank you for initiating this project and curating it. Since we all have different tastes in art, I suspect there are some hidden gems in the ones that were not selected. Is there a way to present the 'runners up' so we can see more of the entries? Even a collection of stripes and rubber duckies would be fun to see."

Do people want to see the "yellow" pictures from the "It Must Be Color" entries? Those are what inspired the yellow idea, and I ended up using none of them in the Yellow post. After that we must move off of yellow, though, because I'm getting a reputation. (For being yellow.)

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

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

No featured comments yet—please check back soon!

Comments About the 'Yellow' Pictures

Photo by David Stock

I want to thank everybody who participated in the latest "Baker's Dozen" call for work—we received a large-ish number of submissions (about a hundred and sixty) and there were a lot more good ones than were included in the final set.

As usual I could have gone any number of ways with the edit. For example, the three most common subjects among the submissions were road stripes and markings (a number of great ones, but David Stock's simple and whimsical design above won by a whisker for me), flowers, and...little yellow rubber duckie bath toys. At first I thought I would pick a "winner" in all three of those subject-matter categories, but ended up jettisoning that idea in the end as being too programmatic.

The reason was that I was paying attention to sequence. To my mind, the yellows either needed to harmonize or contrast from image to image as you scroll down. The Pressman-Vincent-Poole-Smith sequence (3–6) was decided on pretty early on because they make such a nice progression to the eye, and they're all such super examples of mainstream strategies* that I thought people would identify with. From there we segue to Rich Reusser's picture of daughter Molly—she was a beautiful child and you can almost feel the fatherly adoration emanating from Rich behind the camera, but to me the punctum of that picture is the alarming whatever-you'd-call-it blue of those garish clashing gloves—it took me a long time to acclimate to that! (Additive secondary cyan or aqua is as close as I can come to naming it; the color manages to clash with both Molly's raincoat and Molly.) In Kurt's bathroom picture below Molly, there's a subtle echo of the blue gloves in the not-quite-matching blue of the towel on the rack. I don't think you see that consciously, but try to unsee it now that I've mentioned it.  :-)

As always in editing a set, the problem is flow vs. variety. The cop-out temptation is to pick a set of pictures that are all stylistically similar, but that's almost an affront to the great variety of approaches and subjects you get in any randomly-gathered "group show" (which is really what this amounts to).

And related to that heading, just so you know how much I care about your experience (and my responsibilities), let me just mention as an aside that I received exactly 13 of the aforementioned rubber ducky pictures. [Inset photo by James Hengst.] Do you even know how tempted I was to present all 13 rubber ducky pictures as the entirety of the final 'Yellow' set—as a joke? A joke that would have appealed greatly to the devilish part of my subversive B&W-maven heart. I thought about that idea for three days before I was able to get rid of it. Still kinda makes me chuckle.

Anyway, sequence, and the eye's pleasure in going from one picture to the next with minimal interruption, is why I put the emailed comments from the photographers (if there were any) at the end. I like looking at pictures next to each other, seeing how they play off their neighbors, and to me that's worth the modest inconvenience of separating the texts from the pictures.

Thanks again to everyone who sent work. Honorable mentions include, but are not limited to, Larry Angler, Mike Peters, Bob Gary, Craig Stocks, Marcelo Guarini (loved that one), Scott Campbell, Steve Goldenberg, Cathal Gantly (liked that too), Ricardo Cordeiro, Rod Locket, John Tellaisha, Al DaValle, Douglas Houk, Collin Orthner, Mark E. Johnson, Chris Kern, Ron Mayhew (don't think bringing Ernest Withers into it didn't catch my attention, Ron), Anurag Agnihotri, Animesh Ray, B.D. Parks, Terry Burnes, Randall Teasley, Richard Fox, and Harry Weide. All of their pictures were in the running to the end. There were many more nice ones than that, too.

All much fun for me, so thank you for that.

Finally, in David Stock's picture at the top of this page, do you see the faint faded remnant of an earlier yellow line on the manhole cover? Photographs often show us details we would not have thought to invent.

Mike

* Faux abstract, centered subject, woodsy landscape, critter pic

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

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

Lois Elling: "I was a kid when I saw my first manhole cover with the painted stripe in the wrong position and got such a kick out of it. I still do!"

Matthew O'Brien: "First of all I am not a pixel peeper. I like the Bakers Dozen concept…other than I lose interest between its inception and realisation.

"Aside from that I am curious. I was about to admire the subtle extra line (1<–>1) when I suddenly noticed. The main yellow paint on the manhole cover has a remarkable physical property. It is capable of painting the empty spaces within the grating as well as the cast iron structure. The only elements which should be yellow in the white box below should be cast iron. The gaps should be dark and may contain a few splashes, but should not be the full colour. Maybe there is an interesting explanation. I never would have noticed this if I had not first spotted the 1<–>1 diagonal."

Mike replies: I thought about that too at first (wondering with my reflexive suspicion if there might have been a little Photoshop going on there) but I've observed a road-striping machine in action, and the line, which according to Wikipedia is a sort of thermoplastic resin that has to be pre-heated, goes down onto the road in a thick sort of ribbon, sort of like wet tape. Having seen it, it makes sense to me that it might have enough body when it's new to span small gaps in a grate. If the manhole cover actually is a grate, which I suppose the photo doesn't actually prove. We're getting very geeky here!

Another phil: "Re the manhole, it is unlikely to be a grate, more likely to be indentations to provide a bit of grip for tyres, rather than flat metal which is very slippery when wet. The yellow paint is (as you say) a resin which arrives in blocks and is melted, poured into a 'box' on wheels with a slot on the underside through which the resin flows.(I was a highways civil engineering tech). Longer lines are normally nowadays done with a vehicle which does all the above in one operation. That's also why the original paint still shows in the indentations."

Richard Gonet: "I really enjoyed viewing this collection. Thank you for initiating this project and curating it. Since we all have different tastes in art, I suspect there are some hidden gems in the ones that were not selected. Is there a way to present the 'runners up' so we can see more of the entries? Even a collection of stripes and rubber duckies would be fun to see."

Mike replies: Here are the submissions by Marcelo and Cathal that I mentioned above.

By Marcelo Guarini

By Cathal Gantly

Philomaphos: "Thank you, Mike, for the Baker's Dozen and for your commentary on how you arranged your final choices. I now can't unsee the blue gloves in Richard Reusser's photograph, and I agree with the comments praising Melissa O'Shaughnessy's photograph. I really like the bonus picture by Marcelo Guarini for its quiet, contemplative colour and the mystery it suggests. I agree with Dave Jenkins' comment regarding the photograph by Darren Livingston—it is a striking, unsettling picture. It's been a pleasure to see them all."