The Online Photographer

Open Mike: We Live in a World Where...

Good Morning! Or is it afternoon already?

I promised the Dogs Baker's Dozen for this morning (cardinal blogging rule: never, ever make promises), but I still need a little more time to finish it. I know that's going to frustrate some people, so I'll say a little more about it at the end of this.

Meanwhile, a more conventional Off-Topic Open Mike—

Under the category of "Signs That It's the Future," it is now possible for humans to complain that a car gets "only" 47 miles per gallon (5l/100km). Which made my small old-fashioned mind do a shock-jump.

I have a whole bunch of big purchases coming due, and I've been investigating how best to negotiate them. For one thing, the people who renovated this house didn't see fit to replace the furnace, air conditioner, or roof—I wish they had done all three—so those are going to fall in on me soon (not literally in the case of the roof, I hope). I just learned that my furnace and air conditioner are coming up on 30 years old! That's not good. Meanwhile, faithful chariot is at 11 years and 147,000 miles. I don't need a new car yet, or a new-to-me car—financial guru Dave Ramsey says no one should buy a new car unless and until they have a net worth of $1 million or more, and I already have a used car that I like—but I figured I'd better get started getting the lay of the land. So I've been watching a few videos. And I took a few test drives.

In one video, someone was complaining that they only get 47 MPG in a '25 Honda Civic Hybrid.

Well, I got my driver's license way back in the 1970s....

My father's 4th-gen (1971–1976) Buick Electra 225 could get below 10 MPG. That's 10 as in TEN. Thirteen was good. I never saw 16 when I drove it. Granted I never took long highway trips.

And not only that. My father's friend would give me the keys to his Porsche 911 Targa whenever they went on vacation. I did their yardwork. The guy's wife got the car for him for his birthday. I was 16! Damn near killed myself in that evil Porsche, which was wickedly tail-happy. You had to power through curves as if your life depended on it, because it did. Lay off the gas mid-curve and you were gonna get dizzy right quick, because the car would snap off a few high-G 360-degree spins. I speak from experience. When it happened I thought my heart was going to thump right out of my body through my mouth.

Scarred by youthful experience, I have never coveted Porsches!

However, there's this. In 1972–73, the Porsche 911 got a new, larger engine (the 2.4L, which despite its designation was 2.3 liters) and a beefed-up transmission derived from the one in the 908 race car. That vintage of 911 was called the E-series. The point I am trying to get to here is that the 2025 Honda Civic Hybrid has a significantly lower 0–60 time than that 1973 Porsche 911E (6.2 sec. vs. 7.5 sec., 1.3 seconds faster).

Just sayin'. For some more perspective.

AI Overview says that Porsche got 15–18 MPG. 

Our Volvo 145 station wagon daily driver back then, nominally my mother's car except that I happily did all her driving chores for her, had a 0–60 time of 13 seconds, and that was not considered slow for a family car at the time. The Honda Accord automatic my mother got in 1981 (the Accord's fourth model year in the U.S.) went from 0–60 in 13.1 seconds. My brother Scott and I dubbed it "Phred" and put a lot of miles on it. We remained a Honda family for some time thereafter. At least, my mother's side of our family did, although she briefly had a Peugeot 604 that my brother Charlie wrecked. My father had a Gremlin, an AMC Eagle, and a Checker among other quirky choices. He marched to the beat, as they say. You know the cliché.

Duke of Oil*
Another thing I just learned: oil change intervals are a hot topic online, much discussed and disputed. It turns out that by recommending long intervals, car manufacturers reap a side benefit in terms of carbon credits or something. So if you see a manufacturer-recommended interval of more than maybe 9,000 miles at the outside, it only means they're being nefarious scoundrels and lying to you. Next, the interval depends on the kind of driving you do—something I never knew. Lots of lazy highway miles and you can change the oil as infrequently as every 7,500 miles. Starts-and-stops as well as idling is harder on an IC engine, so if you do a lot of that you should use the classical recommendation to change the oil every 3,000 miles. Various people make various compromises to be safe but also economical: whether 4,000, 5,000, or 6,000 mile intervals is best is a subject hotly debated.

And, full synthetic motor oil and high-quality oil filters are best. Some of you already knew all this and more, some of you didn't. I didn't. Thought I'd pass it along. So there's that then.

Perfect car but with an Achilles' Heel
The 2025 Honda Civic Hybrid is the perfect car. The ride is wonderful, the steering smooth and precise (steering, above all else, sets the personality of a car), and as a hybrid it's nicely responsive to the throttle since the slower speeds are powered by the electric motor(s). And Sarah 'n' Tuned (now she's a hybrid for ya—[example]—supermodel looks coupled with the wrenching skills of a veteran grease monkey) says she got nearly 60 MPG over a 100-mile test period. Yes, as a hybrid it does have a non-manual transmission, but here we are: it is the future, after all, and we have to live in it. The interior is sumptuous and high quality (much better than Corolla or even Camry, although Toyotas have stronger warranty coverage and it has to come from somewhere).

And it fits me just right...with one major problem. The center stack jabs me in the right knee in just the wrong spot. All three of Honda's sedans that I might be interested in do the same: Civic, Accord, and Acura Integra. It set me to wondering if I could get some hot-rodder around here (I go to all the local shows, where I meet those guys) to rig up a flat pad that projects further out and meets my leg further down. But that's academic, as I do not have a net worth of $1 million.

However if you are thinking of a Honda sedan, go sit in one before you get too far down the rabbit hole. Honda made a stupid mistake with that center stack, at least for some people.

To the dogs
The Dogs Baker's Dozen has proven to be the toughest one yet. There were more than 200 submissions, and two of the best ones came in too late (one was Chris Skarbon's, which I used in the Love of Dogs post). And as many as 90% of them concern subjects deeply personal to the person who sent it. How can I resist anyone's beloved dog, especially the ones now in the Great Dog Park in the clouds, where they happily congregate together? How can I get past my emotions, having recently had Butters ripped from my arms by death? How can I resist the adorable steeliness of the recently departed and deeply mourned Spike, for example, beloved of Nick and Christine? (He came to them with that name, and they didn't care for it, but I love it. Perfect name for a super-cute little tough guy if you ask me.) But I already had a head-and-shoulders dog portrait, Charlie Dunton's. I'll cheat just a little more:

Spike

Nick says, "This is one of my few pictures of Spike that convey the utter and effortless self-assurance of this 12-1/2-pound tyrant."

As an aside, I watched Nick, a good friend, search for years to find just the right outlet for his artistic creativity apart from photography, including a stint during which he attempted to learn to play classical piano. He finally landed: it's pottery. Once he found it he matured in the medium by leaps and bounds. I seriously and sincerely love his work, in which controlled and simple forms juxtapose against complex and free glazes which accept serendipity. The contrast really hits the spot for me, and I visit his work frequently, so I won't miss new stuff, yes, but mainly for pleasure if I'm honest. Some of it might be for sale—ask him. He doesn't do it for the money. Either way, I recommend a visit! There are more links at the link.

But I digress.

Over repeated passes I narrowed down the 200+ Dog picture submissions to only 48 selects, which didn't help very much. Then, I expected more time to help, which it didn't, this time. The truth is that I could make four portfolios of 13 pictures each, in each of four areas: dog portraits, like the one of Spike above; domestic scenes; dogs in action; and environments with dogs in them, not necessarily featured or rendered large. Merging all four broad areas into one set is not going to be as cohesive as any of those four would have been, but I reconciled to that, ginned up my fortitude, and forged ahead. I continue to think the "Yellow" Baker's Dozen is still the most coherent. 

I'll keep plugging. It should be the next thing you see here. (Mike! Don't make promises!)

Cheers, in the non-alcoholic sense,

Mike

*The name of an oil-change place in West Chicagoland near where my brother lives.

Original contents copyright 2025 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

JimR 'Longviewer': "I remember oil changes. I definitely don't miss them and won't argue about them. My Niro EV (55k) has like-new brake pads thanks to regenerative slowing, though it is now on its second set of tires. Fine driving."

Mike replies: I would love to have an EV. The luxury of having your own private "gas station" in your own garage sounds so appealing. I already have a 50-amp panel in the garage suitable for Level 2 charging. I'd also love to have solar panels on the roof of the garage to charge the car, and never pay for gas. It's all do-able; just not yet. 

Andreas: "In the UK, oil changes are generally at yearly intervals which equates to about 10,000 miles, give or take a couple of thousand each way. So the frequency of oil changes in the US seems absurdly high, especially given that engines can run for well over 200,000 miles when serviced at the 'UK frequency.' I wonder what the situation is in other parts of the world under non-extreme usage or environmental conditions?"

Robert Roaldi: "It would be useful to keep track of an engine's hours of operation, but miles is not a bad proxy. And yes, different operating conditions warrant different oil change intervals; stands to reason. Leaving oil in there for a long time might not make any sense unless you're changing the oil filters a few times in between oil changes. Synthetic oil can last a long time but if the filter is going to bypass because it's clogged, that's not a good thing. I've known people to leave synthetic oil in for a long time, 25,000 km or so, without it breaking down (as judged by chemical analysis) but that's only recommended if you're changing the filter every 5,000 km. Trouble is, that only works if you do it yourself. Might be difficult to find a commercial lube shop that will do that.

"As for the high cost of body work [see John Camp's comment in the full Comment Section —Ed.], yup, that's real. And that was true before they put all those gizmos into the bumpers and other bits that get hit. Doesn't help that parking lots are filled with oversized vehicles now; perfect storm you might say. Lots of people miss passenger trains now. I used to like cars and was involved in amateur motorsports for years. Now I hate everything about our car-based environment. It seems like freedom at first glance, but when there is no alternative, it's a prison."

Mike and Milly

Sean Geer, Mike and Milly

Sean Geer: "This is my dog Milly, a rescue dog from Romania. Like many rescue dogs, she arrived with a good variety of neuroses pre-installed, one of which is a general and almost total indifference towards people and other dogs. She makes some rare and apparently random exceptions, one of which is illustrated here. She absolutely loved my great friend Mike Hardaker, even though she saw him very infrequently on his visits from South Africa, and her adoration was joyous to observe.

"We lost Mike early in 2024, just shy of his 60th birthday, a tragic consequence of complications from treatment for long COVID. He was an accomplished photographer in his own right, and the creator of several very good and well-received iPhone photo apps—645 Pro and PureShot probably the best known examples. He was also a great dog lover, and I don’t think there was ever a time in the thirty-plus years that I knew him that he didn't own at least one. I took this picture the last time I saw him, on a cold day in London spent discussing favourite crop formats, among much else. His favourite was 6x7, and I present this photo in that format accordingly—a wonderful memory of two great friendships."

Sean Geer, London, UK

Mike adds: Since I published the "Love of Dogs" post I've been overwhelmed by many stories, some joyful, some very sad, and all of them much appreciated, about pet friends and pet owner friends. I thought I would break out this story-and-photo Baker's Dozen submission by Sean Geer, of London, UK, to stand as an emblem for all the rest. The words are very moving, and would stand alone; the picture's very special, and would stand alone. But the two obviously belong together. Many thanks to Sean, along with condolences for the loss of his friend.

Original contents copyright 2025 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

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James Meeks: "645 Pro was one of my favorite apps, and when I got a new phone I discovered it no longer worked and wasn’t being updated. Sorry to lose such a talented and dog-loved individual."

Call Off the Dogs!

The entries for the "Dogs" Baker's Dozen are now closed. There were 224 submissions, which I think is a record.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2025 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

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Dogs! Dogs! Dogs!

I said I'd announce it when the deadline approacheth, and here we go.

With 130 submissions so far—not as many as I thought we'd get but more than we usually get—I think I'll accept Johnny- and Jenny-come-lately submissions through Monday for our "Dogs" Baker's Dozen. I have absolutely loved seeing all the incoming submissions. I love dogs—I often joke that I knew I was growing old because, when I'd pass a beautiful woman walking a dog on the sidewalk, I'd check out the dog. I met a lovely little Dachshund mix named Winnie yesterday at the vet's. I've sometimes entertained the thought that when photographers love a subject too much, they lose a little bit of their objectivity about pictures of that subject—they're so into the subject that they're not picky. I've encountered this a number of times in specific individuals, with a variety of much-loved subjects. Still and all, it's been a pleasure to see everyone's dogs, hear the stories (some of them sad, of course, because no pets except parrots last long enough), and be wowed by your favorites. 

I can almost guarantee that many people are going to be amazed that their wonderful picture didn't made the final 13. Remember, as always, that it's not entirely the photograph, it's how it fits into and fills out the set. Often with these "contests that aren't contests" I could actually fill two or three sets of 13 without diluting the quality. But speaking of that, I might "cheat" a little bit in this case and carve out a few posts of three pictures each that embody some quality or characteristic in common. I've done that before.

As for my own dear dog, well, the news is not so good. Butters has lost five pounds since the last weigh-in a handful of weeks ago. When a friend arrived yesterday morning he bounded down the five front steps to greet her, as usual, and crashed-landed at the bottom, limbs akimbo, unable to hold himself up. More of his behaviors are changing, his energy is diminished, and his confusion seems to be increasing—the vet thinks he's showing signs of dementia and worsening eyesight. At his appointment yesterday she introduced the phrase "quality of life" and the idea that we should hope he survives the summer. I guess she wants me to let go of the idea that I might have him for two more years. Saddest of all is that his perpetually wagging or waving tail has been stilled. Butters has always been a tail-wagger, from the fateful moment I met him at HAWS, the Human Animal Welfare Shelter back in Waukesha. On the good side, I'm rising to the challenges—dutifully stuffing pills into segments of all-beef franks, getting used to the new schedule of nighttime awakenings, spending lots of time with him, appreciating the precious minutes.

In the circumstances, your pictures have been an especially welcome pleasure for me. I realize not everyone likes dogs, but those of you who do are going to enjoy this Baker's Dozen once it's done.

So, then, it's end of Monday for our deadline. If you haven't submitted yet, please consider it! The post with the instructions is here.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2025 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

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Baker's Dozen Call for Work: DOGS

When he was barely more than a pup, Butters
managed to chew off his own collar

Nothing against cats or their people, but our next theme for our lovely little readers' pictures portfolio is "Dogs." Any picture that has a dog in it in some way, shape, or form is eligible. It does not have to be your dog. You do not need a model release; you do not need the model's permission; dogs are chill. The prize is a copy of the new March 2025 Phaidon reprint of DogDogs by Elliott Erwitt, first published in 1998. As ever, the hope is we'll have some fun.

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

To submit, send me a picture in an email and use the subject line:

BDDog

Just like that...no spaces, spelled exactly like that, no variations. Case sensitive. Dog, singular. Capital "D" in "Dog." Two D's! 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. Each time, almost everyone does...and almost nothing gets lost. But there's always that guy. Don't be that guy.

But if you are that guy and have to resubmit, no worries. Just please include everything in the resubmission—generally, any submission sent in multiple different emails will confuse me too much, and I reserve the right to pretend I'm ignoring it when actually I lost it.

I'll announce the deadline when we get near it. I usually like to get at least 100 submissions. I'll leave it open for five days minimum, maybe longer. Oh, and this time I'll include a picture of my own, but probably in a separate post so it doesn't mess up the 12+1 pictures concept.

Email one JPEG*, 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 a paragraph containing 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:

"BDDog" 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.

And please put it all in one email, never two or more.

Hope you are up to the challenge! Have fun and don't be afraid to be creative. Remember that just because you love a dog doesn't necessarily mean it's a good picture, but photographs of loved dogs are certainly not discouraged. We're among friends.  :-)

Mike

*You might feel the impulse to "improve your chances" by submitting more than one, but I've been doing this for a while, and my observation has been that when people send, say, three submissions, usually all three of them are on the weak side. That is, they're making up in quantity what they lack in quality. That doesn't work. This has not always been the case with multiple submissions, though, so if you're tempted to take this judgement personally, please don't!

**I'd say the Yellow Portfolio is my personal favorite of the Baker's Dozens so far. 

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.)
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Dogs!

I.

The next "Baker's Dozen" theme will be "Dogs." So be thinking of that. The way our Baker's Dozen feature works is that readers submit pictures on a theme, from which Yr. Hmbl. Editor builds a small portfolio of a dozen pictures, with an extra one for good measure. These are usually fun. Especially for, um, Yr. Hmbl. Ed., because each morning I get to wake up to your pictures in my inbox.

Please don't submit anything until the formal "Call for Work," which I'll probably have ready tomorrow. (And now that I've said that, it will probably be Thursday.) I've gotten behind on comments again and need to catch up today.

II.

I went out photographing yesterday instead of working like I should. I couldn't resist. It was an absolutely gorgeous spring day: crisp, clean, fragrant air; 70°F (21°C); unusually bright sun and unusually deep blue sky; not a cloud anywhere; and windy. This is one of the best times of the year here, the week when the dandelions are yellow. My flowering trees are in full bloom. I cut the grass (well, some of it) for the first time yesterday and did yardwork for an hour, and enjoyed the day and the weather. All over, the trees are budding out, everything's turning green, and growing things are growing so fast it seems like you see them change in real time. The robins are definitely around—I've seen two pairs mating—but I only have one nesting female so far, in an old nest on a gutter. They seem to be staying away from the new birdhouses, called shelves, that I had made for them this year. It's quite possible they won't move into those until next year—this year they're too new, and robins seem to like nesting sites that are familiar.

One of the new robin shelves, made of cherry, no less. The old nest was on the light fixture—I called it "the high rise," because they had added more to it year on year until they barely had room to fly in under the eaves.

III.

Esther's sister contacted me in the Comments yesterday, saying, "Esther is trying to reach you!" I had inadvertently given Esther a card without my phone number on it. My new shirt is done already. Also, at the urging of a reader who used to work there, I ordered a shirt from L.L. Bean. I will of course find the perfect shirt and then lose a lot of weight so that none of the new shirts fit. That's the way of the Universe. But I'd take the weight loss. I need to get back to my WFPB diet.

IV.

...Speaking of which, I found all my notes from my WFPB experiment. I did two things: stuck to a strict WFPB diet, and practiced "intermittent fasting," also called "time-restricted eating," whereby I didn't eat after 3:00 p.m. every day. That took about three weeks to get used to. I generally ate two meals a day with a big salad in the middle. The day wasn't really long enough for three meals, because I often wasn't hungry when I woke up and didn't eat breakfast until late. I weighed myself twice a day, morning and evening, because, in a scientific trial reported by Dr. Gregor in his book, that's what the people who lost the most weight did. I meant to stick to the eating plan for six full weeks, but ended up staying on it for 18 months. My starting weight kinda depends on what I pick as a starting date, because I had been on a half-assed WFPB diet for a while at the time the strict trial started, but overall I lost about 60 lbs. (~4.3 stone), getting down to 194 lbs. 

Unfortunately then my brother died, I got depressed, and I went off the eating plan. My situation from there has been complicated by heart disease; I was in heart failure for the last five months of 2023 and got my pacemaker in January of 2024. Since then I've been as high as 269 lbs., which is not good for me or my heart, not to mention being perilously close to my all-time lifetime high of 273. I think it has something to do with the fact that my brother's BMI was around 14.4 when he died. He looked like a concentration camp victim or a prisoner from Andersonville, and he couldn't put on weight. But I can't psychoanalyze myself. Let's just say I'm working on getting back to a better lifestyle. My doctor thinks I'm actually an excellent candidate to be on semaglutide (Ozempic) or tirzepatide (Mounjaro) or something similar, for several reasons, but I can't afford it. It's been surprisingly difficult to simply get back to the plan I was on for those 18 months. I've tried multiple times, and keep failing. Very similar, actually, to when I was quitting drinking or smoking. Both of those things were a process that took a long period of many failures before I finally succeeded.

V.

To allow me to attend the Conference last weekend, I took Butters to Nancy's kennel on the hill. Nancy is nearing 80, but she's a dynamo—a year or two ago she went to Alaska and lived in the bush so she could learn to drive dogsleds. She came home with an adopted sled dog named Quartz to add to her own dog pack. She's tiny, has white hair she dyes purple or a rich, bright blue, and her beautiful house has the best view of the Lake I've seen yet. She lets her doggie boarders stay in the house with her and Steve, who is a photographer of local repute and renown. Each time I drive up there, I seem to see all kinds of wildlife. One evening I saw a single wild turkey pecking away in a field, not one but two herds of deer, something resembling a weasel in a ditch, and at one point the road was blocked by a bunch of light-gray, goose-sized birds who didn't seem to want to let me pass. I haven't been able to identify them. Maybe Esther will know. But, as has happened multiple times before, when I repeated the drive up there yesterday with the camera, hoping for luck, I didn't see a living thing. That's that trickster Universe again.

I'll try to process my new pictures today too. I have to wait till dark for that. I just have this sense that in this batch there are going to be a lot of near misses. I don't think I was quite "on." Probably because I haven't photographed in a while. It's like your pool stroke (I cleared all 15 balls this morning in one turn)—you have to keep your hand in! And you're only as good as your most recent day.

Back soon.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2025 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

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Film Friday: 'Film' Baker's Dozen

St. Patrick's Day Parade, New York City, 1974
by John Custodio, New York, New York, USA

-

Photo by Nick Depree,
Auckland, New Zealand

"This was one of the first pictures I took after getting back into shooting a lot more film in 2020. It's from Karekare beach, one of my favourite and most visited places. Something about the gentle colours and shape really grew on me, and it has been on my wall for a few years now."

Photo by Reg Feuz,
Wellington, New Zealand

"Thanks for the opportunity to re-visit an old favourite image from the wall: my Muddy Waters face shot from his Auckland, New Zealand concert, 19 May 1973.  Film loaded in my Nikon F2 Photomic was Kokak Tri-X rated at 400 ISO, and the lens used was the Nikkor 80–200 ƒ/4.5 zoom. Film developer was D-76.

"I developed the print shortly thereafter using Ilford bromide 10x12-inch double-weight paper in Dektol. It was the last sheet of paper in the pack, and the last print after a long night in the darkroom. And then I discovered that I had underexposed the print. Shucks! So, I did the only next best trick and flashed the paper under the enlarger light and ended up with this result. Never bothered making another print of that negative.

"Three years later, in 1976, I entered the print into The Dunedin Photographic Society's Autumn Print Exhibition, and much to my surprise, as well as to other longstanding club members, I was awarded The Pattillo Cup for best portrait by the club judge on the night.

"I haven't darkroom printed for two decades. Still got the gear though, and keep on threatening myself to mix up the chemicals and finish of those old unopened packs of paper."

Photo by William Barnett-Lewis,
Eau Claire, Wisconsin, USA

"This goes back to the fall of 2008 when my son was sitting in his first day of first grade at the neighborhood school in Madison. The bright Fall sun was pouring in through the east facing windows as he faced me so I'm sure I had the Summitar stopped a bit down on the Leica CL I think I was still using (may have been a IIIf by then), though the focus was still a bit muffed. I was a little bit close so that may have been the problem. Hard to remember after 16 years  ;-)  .

"I do know it would have been Fuji Reala 100 ISO film as it was one of the few color films that did justice to his looks. It is not the most technically perfect of images but it caught the feel of his excitement and the beginning of the new year so nearly perfectly that it still remains one of the handful of portraits I am pleased to have taken. I don't think I could duplicate this look with either my Leica M 240 or my Pentax K5 without insane amounts of luck and/or post-processing skills I don't possess. This, on the other hand, came from Walgreens' Fuji machines. That was, in the end, one of the great joys of the last days of the film hegemony...."

Photo by Pierre Charbonneau,
Montreal, Quebec, Canada

"Ancient car show, near a local airport in the suburbs of Montréal.

"This photo is from around 2004. Despite the fact that I had already started to shoot assignments with a digital camera, I have kept the habit of shooting film for personal pictures. The Canon 1Ds of yore was a marvel at the time, but heavy and less nimble than a Leica M6.

"The pattern did not change much in the last 20 years. If the pro Canon has been replaced by a current model, I still shoot 30 to 50 rolls a year with the old rangefinder camera.

"There is something in the highlight rendering and smoothness of film that is distinctive from digital. Hard to explain for me, actually. But very often, I prefer my film pictures over the digital ones."

Photo by Gordon Haddow,
San Carlos, California, USA

"This is a combination of two film images taken in the early '90s—one by me and one by my wife, Jane. The overall image was taken in Bodie, California with a Wisner 4x5 camera and 210mm Schneider lens on FP4 film, developed in D-76 at N+3. The image of the little girl was taken by Jane at a party where the child was longingly looking out of the window at the festivities.

"This image has always been special to me because of the emotional tones and the fact that it was a cooperative image with my wife."

Photo by Bob Keefer,
Creswell, Oregon, USA

"I took 'Pelican at Malheur'  of a pelican resting in a marsh at Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in eastern Oregon around 2005. [Ed. note: Bob now thinks the image was probably made on the Oregon Coast.] It's shot on Tri-X in my Canon EOS-3 with the old 100–400mm zoom, developed in Rodinal, and printed on good quality fiber-based, matte-surface paper in my late home darkroom (I succumbed to digital in 2007).

"After making the B&W print I used traditional Marshall's Oil Paints to hand color the image, giving it some quiet color and an early 20th-century vibe."

Photo by William Schneider,
Athens, Ohio, USA

"As one of a series made for my MFA degree, this print suggests how a person edits from space and time when photographing. It is a combination of two different prints—a smaller one inserted into a cutout made in the larger one. The surface of the two dry-mounted prints is flush except for a thin, X-acto-made cut line where they adjoin. The central print nestles into an opening cut in a 16x20 print, and they are dry mounted together to present a flush surface. (A close-up of this in glancing light may be seen here.)

"The center darkroom print, made on air-dried glossy Agfa Portriga paper, shows the photographer’s preferred cropping. Surrounding it is another print, made on Portriga matte paper that was pre-soaked in a contrast-reducing chemical (potassium ferricyanide solution) before developing. The surrounding print’s purpose is to show what the photographer chose to exclude from the scene. The two prints were made from two different negatives, with two different cameras (a Hasselblad and an 8x10 Deardorff), exposed days apart."

Photo by David Lobato,
Baltimore, Maryland, USA

"This is my Grandfather, feeding hay to livestock. Taken in 1979 on his farm in southwest Colorado. Camera was a Nikon F2S, probably on Tri-X film."

Lovers and Seagull, Portugal, 2022 by Soeren
Engelbrecht, Valby, Denmark

"Spending nine days of family vacation near/on a beach in Portugal, I decided to make a small photo project out of it. Apart from my Olympus OM-D for general photography, I also brought my OM-2n with a 50mm ƒ/1.8 Zuiko and one roll of Ilford XP2.

"Out of that project/roll came a small 'zine with 28 pictures, titled 'Between Estoril And Cascais—Holidays 2022' (I couldn't resist the acronym BEACH  :-). This by far my favourite—initially, I was planning to take a picture of the seagull, who was literally walking around at my feet, feeding off tourist scraps. As I followed it around with my camera, this scene appeared in the viewfinder, and I instinctively snapped the shot."

776 Nicola Street, by Francis Sullivan,
Daajing Giids, British Columbia, Canada

"Taken with my newly acquired Kodak Retina IIc with Kodak Plus-X film, 1974, in Kamloops, British Columbia.

"Pic of my partner having a break (back when we all smoked?) while young daughter naps in the baby carriage. In the foreground are ripe apricots. A very warm summer day."

Safety Pants by Darren Livingston,
Prescott, Arizona, USA

"My image was made using my first camera, the Diana all-plastic model, that I obtained in 1968 when I was 10 years old. The photo was taken on the streets of downtown Denver, Colorado, in 1978. I cross-processed the Ektachrome 200 film using Acufine film developer followed by the C-41 process.

"The camera still sits on a shelf in my office today."

-

And one more for good measure....

Upcoming Holiday Vacation (Blog Note)

I'll be taking four days off around Christmas this year. I think that's the max I can stand; anxiety and existential dread would overpower any sense of rest, recuperation, and recreation. I like to write. During those four days, however, I'm going to do my level best not to work on anything; just take the time off and relax and that's it. I did that once for two days this past Fall and it really was rejuvenating.

The other update is that the Baker's Dozen is coming along fine. I was hoping to have it done by today, but these things just need to percolate. The latest bread recipe I'm trying requires 17 hours of rising time, so that's a better metaphor, better than percolation: the point being, you can't rush it. Pictures need time to sink in. Spending time with pictures is never wasted.

Also better because what better metaphor for the Baker's Dozen than a baking metaphor?  ;-)

And that segues nicely to my last item for this update: thanks for all the wisdom, suggestions, and links about baking. I doubt I'll do a deep dive into bread baking, but it would be nice to learn how to make a good loaf. For most of the time I've lived here, the local grocery store made a nine-grain bread in its own bakery that was very nice, and it was my regular bread. But a year or two back they changed their formula and ruined a good thing. I've had to be a "bread nomad" ever since, unable to settle down on anything, any one brand or type. I keep looking. Don't ya hate that? Humans just do not like to leave well enough alone. I hope there are still traditional boulangeries in Paris, that make French bread the old way.

Please come back after my four days away! And forgive the interruption. All work and no play makes Mike a dull boy.

Mike

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Baker's Dozen Update No. 2

By exact count, there are 126 submissions for the Baker's Dozen (entries are closed as of yesterday afternoon). Here's an outline of the editing process:

• First I'll go through and flag what I think are the best prospects, maybe 25 to as many as 35. I've already looked through all the submissions three times and I'll probably make three more passes while doing this step. There are certainly some beautiful shots among those that are not flagged.
• Next I'll set aside the "must include" shots that absolutely have to be included in the final set. I'm guessing there might be four or five of those this time.
• Then I'll decide on the first and last shots in the set, a strong opener and a strong, or amusing, or appealing "thirteenth," with the other "musts" in the middle. But I'll remain flexible about where those go.
• From there I'll build the rest of the sequence from the remainder of the flagged pictures, which might be influenced by the stories and the meaning of the pictures and how they relate to the theme. I'll be looking for variety and balance in the set, which sometimes leaves out good pictures, and other times argues for inclusions. In this case a lot of people sent in pictures that specifically say "film"—for instance, people looking at strips of negatives or pictures with film cameras in them, pictures of contact sheets or with film edges showing—and I'll be looking to not overdo those kinds of pictures but also to include a fair number of more straightforward photographs that were simply made on film. I do look for for interesting techniques, though, and those have to be balanced as well—for instance, if there were three cyanotypes (there aren't!), I'd be likely to include no more than one.
• When I have a sequencing with the flow and variety that I'm provisionally happy with, I'll go back and take one last pass over all 126 submissions to see if there might be something I missed, or overlooked, or dismissed too hastily, or that has grown on me in the meantime, and see if there is something that might better fit the finished sequence as it has evolved.
• Finally, I'll add the captions and other verbal information. Then let it all sit overnight and come back fresh for one more proofreading, and post.

Mike

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Baker's Dozen Update: Deadline is Monday 2 p.m.

By a soft count, I've gotten about 99 submissions for the Baker's Dozen themed "Film" so far. That's accurate give or take about three. Here's the Call for Work post, which you should read before submitting. We're looking for photographs (still images, not motion pictures of any sort) that relate in some way to film.

I can tell you right now this is going to be an interesting one; in the submissions so far there is a wide variety of what you might call "meta" images that comment in some way on the film era and the specifics of its uses. Not that that's necessary—just pictures made on film are fine.

Thank you to everyone who has sent a picture so far. These are always fun times for me, as I get to see new pictures every morning (but no new ones this morning, boo hoo).

Anyway I'll keep the mailbox open through the weekend and at least half of Monday (Monday is a weak day for me on the site—I have another regular activity scheduled on the first half of the days on Mondays and don't have much time to write) then get down to work on the edit on Tuesday.

Mike

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DxO Is Sponsoring the Baker's Dozen

I'm happy to relate that DxO will be helping out with our "Film" Baker's Dozen by providing a prize. (One of the people who works there reads TOP.) We'll (somehow) choose one winner who gets a free copy of DxO's award-winning photo-editing and processing software, DxO PhotoLab 8 (currently $180 on seasonal sale). Or, the winner can choose several of the partial programs up to the same value. Their other applications include DxO FilmPack (currently $70 on sale), which supplies almost a hundred film simulations (full list here); DxO ViewPoint ($90 on sale), which allows control over geometry, shape, and perspective; DxO PureRaw ($90 on sale), a demosaicing and denoising application that provides powerful lens corrections—and which I believe is considered among the world leaders in that category, if not the leader. PureRaw can be used in conjunction with Adobe Lightroom. Finally, DxO still sells the famous Nik Collection of plugins for Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom and others ($110 at the moment). Here's a link to all of the above. I assume that if the eventual awardee already use DxO and wants to upgrade, they could accommodate that as well.

We'll figure out how to award this later. But of course the prize isn't the point of the group show, really; the purpose is to have fun with the theme and see what you and other people come up with. (These are a lot of fun for me too, by the way.)

As an aside, friend o' TOP Ned B., retired former president of Pentax USA, posted this on his Instagram the other day—a size comparison between a 4x5" transparency and his current "view" camera, one of his Ricoh GR's. (Currently all backordered on B&H, but Amazon has some.)

Maybe I'll just draw a name out of the hat from all of you who submit entries.

Mike

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Film Friday: A Film Baker's Dozen (Call for Work)

Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

By Eadweard Muybridge

 

[Entries are now closed. Thanks everyone!]

We've had many "Baker's Dozens" over the years. The idea is that I suggest a theme, you send in work, and I curate a small "juried show" from the offerings—a dozen pictures, with one extra for good measure.

This one is for still pictures, as always. Ignore the fact that the horsie above is moving.  :-)

These are always fun. We've had all kinds of themes and ideas in the past, from "Yellow" to "Grandkids" to "Leica Lenses" to "Blur." I racked my brain and searched the site, but I don't think we've ever done one called "Film." We did do "Sheet Film" once, but that was specific to large format work.

So this time, it's just...Film. The (still!) picture has to be your own work or a picture you are sure you own or control the rights to. New or old, it has to utilize film in one way or another, or reflect the theme in some detectable/explicable way. Special effects, interesting mistakes, unusual or ancient departed materials, all fine. Partly digital or digitized is fine; you can be creative. Or, not—a phone snap of an old print is OK too. It can be the straightest of the straight or the weirdest of the weird. It can be something that reflects your current work or something you dug out of the bottom of the archive. It's up to you. Technical details are usually something other readers like to see, but aren't required. If it isn't blatantly obvious, be sure to tell me how the "film" theme figures in.

Specs: Please send me, by email, one (1) JPEG, 800 pixels wide (n.b.: wide), saved as sRGB.

Please include:

—Your name and address including country
—Short description of the submission including title or caption if applicable
—Anything else you want to say

Incredibly important: the subject line MUST say:

BDfilm

Exactly just exactly like that, exactly. No space, lowercase f. The reason is that after a hundred or so submissions, I'll search ye olde Inbox for "BDfilm," and if you got the subject line wrong your picture won't come up and I won't see it. Be careful of this requirement, it's mandatory. (And, thank you.)

My address is: [Entries are now closed. Thanks everyone!]

I think that's everything. There might be a prize—I'll announce that in a few days.

Mike

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Gary Merken: "What is the submission deadline? How many entries can we submit?"

Mike replies: No deadline. Past experience shows that sometimes it needs a longer "soak" so to speak, and sometimes the 13 spaces fill up pretty quickly. I guess you might say the deadline is whenever I post the set. 

But if you'd like a deadline, call it the end of next weekend. I certainly won't close it before then.

And, one entry per person. Again, past experience...when I ask for three, for instance, I notice that those who submit three usually do so because all three pictures are a bit on the weaker side. I'd rather have people pick the one they think is best.

Bottom line, this isn't important. It's just for fun. So, you decide which one you think is best.

This might be a good place to remind everyone that a contest isn't a judgment. Lots of times, I'll have many more excellent pictures than I can use, so I might have picked one that I didn't. Sometimes it's dictated by the flow of the set. Sometimes it's a matter of what other people submit. For instance, I just received a very nice shot of a giant tree, backlit with sunlight. Now, if another person submitted a nice picture of a backlit tree, I'd only pick one of them. That doesn't mean the one I didn't pick isn't good; it's just that I don't need two. Or, it might even be something that can't be seen in the picture—maybe I don't want all 13 to be by women, or maybe I don't need four selections by readers from Morocco. Simple examples, but you get the point, which is: there's no reason at all to take it personally if yours doesn't get chosen.

And by the way, I don't have problems with that. TOP readers by and large are remarkably mature. No one complains. Fortunately, usually the sets are so strong that people who don't get picked can at least see why I went with the ones I did. The category is sort of amorphous this time, and doesn't give people a lot of guidance, so I'll be curious to see how that affects the submissions. I've gotten some good ones so far!

Baker's Dozen Deadline: Midnight Sunday

I'll email this to all my Patreon supporters, in case the problems continue and people can't access the site.

However: the deadline for the Baker's Dozen will be end of day on this coming Sunday. Midnight between Sunday and Monday, Eastern US Time. That's 5:00 a.m. Monday in London and 2:00 p.m. Monday in Sydney.

Here's the "call for work" post with all the details.

"House" hasn't been a popular subject, as these Baker's Dozens go, but many of the pictures I've received so far are excellent. Each time I see a new submission I think, "well, I can use that."  :-)

Mike

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Baker's Dozen Call for Work: House

Hills-DeCaro house, first floor. Initial
design by Frank Lloyd Wright.

For the next Baker's Dozen, let's try something I wrote about recently: houses. There's a long and interesting tradition of picturing houses, which we might talk about along the way.

Here's the game:

The subject should be a permanent freestanding built domicile (where people live, i.e., not a campsite, treehouse, cave, etc.). Mainly looking for a house you feel is particularly beautiful or harmonious, but it can be one that you feel makes an attractive picture (amazing light, elegaic ruin, lovely colors, etc.); that has special meaning to you; or one that you feel has any other specified kind of interest. Exteriors are generally what we're looking for, but interiors are fine if that's what you want to submit.

First prize (just for fun), with me as the sole judge (although I'll be influenced by readers' opinions and reactions): a mini-portfolio of your work posted here on TOP and a written introduction to you. (You can of course decline if you're Greta Garbo*.)

Anyone within reach of these words can play, amateur or professional. (We usually get about 100–200 submissions for 13 places in the portfolio, so your odds are pretty good. On the other hand, the standard is usually quite high.)

How to Submit

This is a call for your own work, and you must own the rights to it. TOP will make absolutely no claim to your rights now or ever; by submitting, you give me permission to publish your picture here at TOP, with credit, but not to make any other use of it.

To submit, please use the subject line:

BDhouse

Just like that...no spaces, spelled exactly like that, no variations. Lowercase "h" in house. The reason is that when I begin building the post, I will search my email stack (which is large and unruly) for that phrase as the subject, and if your email doesn't come up, then I won't see your picture. Pay attention to this, as each time I specify this I do get emails that don't have the proper subject line. Those inevitably either get lost or cause headaches.

I'll announce the deadline when we get near it, but it'll be more or less two weeks from now, so you have some time. As I did last time, I'll try my best to get the result posted reasonably promptly.

Email ONE (1) JPEG, 800 pixels wide, saved in sRGB. Make sure you don't have your email software set to reduce the size of attachments.

Include in the email a paragraph including your name, where you live (city or town and country), any technical details you care to share, your website URL if you'd like me to publish it, and whatever you'd like to tell other TOP readers about your picture.

Name
Location
Technical details
Story or description

My email address is [email protected].

Have fun!

Mike

*Swedish-American movie star active 1920–41 who famously retired saying "I want to be alone" and lived thereafter as a semi-recluse.

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Chris Kern: "Great subject idea, but unfortunately I will not be able to submit my favorite photograph of 'a permanent freestanding built domicile.' Not because I’m reluctant to share it, but because I didn't make it. It’s an 1895 picture of a stately home in Woodsfield, Ohio, that was shot by an unknown photographer, probably at the behest of my maternal great-grandfather, Wickliffe Ewing Mallory (he apparently always went by 'W.E.' and you can hardly blame him for that) to memorialize the house he had built two years earlier. It’s not the attractive structure that interests me so much as the remarkable tableau the photographer (or my great-grandfather) created of the extended family posed around it. The younger of the two little girls standing in front of the corner of the porch is my grandmother at the age of four. That’s W.E. himself watching the croquet game on the right side of the frame.

"My siblings and I knew nothing about the house until my brother discovered a scan of it on my father’s computer after my mother’s death; my father couldn’t recall why she had asked him to scan it or whose house it was. Years later, when we were clearing out their house following his death, we found an original print among a box of my mother’s memorabilia, which is the source of the scan in the link above."

Mike replies: That really is a wonderful picture. How great for you that it's in your family. By the way, you have quite a feel for architecture. You should give this Baker's Dozen a go.

Charles Rozier: "I thought Garbo said “I vant to be alone—."

Hans Muus: "Re the previous Baker’s Dozen: am I the only one who missed the 'honourable mentions'?"

Mike replies: Oh no, did I forget to add that? I'm sorry. I'll try to do better this time.

The 'Blur' Baker's Dozen Prizes

As announced, we're giving away three top prizes for the Blur Baker's Dozen, chosen by a guest judge, Hugh Crawford. (The full portfolio, if you missed it, is here.)

The prizes are:

$200 for First;
$125 for Second; and
$75 for Third.

Hugh mentioned to me that he wanted to wait a while after the contest ended and the thirteen pictures were presented, so that he could see which pictures he remembered the most after some time had passed. I'll turn it over to Hugh:

Photo by Alan Sailer

"Number one is the photograph by Alan Sailer. Not only is it a wonderful-looking photograph but it’s the one that I remember the most which counts for something. This photograph seems to be all about motion and light and presumably air; there’s a figure, there’s maybe a horizon so maybe it’s outside, but the light seems like it’s mixed; from there your mind fills in all the details. It sure seems like there’s some sort of a story going on, but it’s left to the viewer to just sort of make it up."

Photo by Francis Sullivan

"Number two is Francis Sullivan’s photo. There’s all sorts of formal stuff going on. First, there’s a lot of calligraphic paint stuff going on, two big gestures, the Pink Floyd text, and where somebody wiped the light-colored paint off their hands onto the wall. One of the things I always love about looking at Jackson Pollock's paintings is decoding the order in which they were painted, by what colors and drips overlap sequentially in a story of its creation. Here you can see that the sort of smeared area just above the running figure was probably painted first, along with the Pink Floyd, which seems to be very much aping the cover art for their album 'The Wall.' Of course Gerald Scarfe renders Pink Floyd in upper case and the anonymous graffitist presumably walked up to this wall and said, 'Oh look, it’s a wall. I think I’ll write Pink Floyd on it' without referring to the original artwork and chose mixed case which is absolutely fine. Later, somebody uses a brush to put up an arc of dark paint on the wall, it looks like it is just a pint or so of paint thrown against the wall, but you can see that there are brush marks in it, and paint is dripping from it, so it was fairly considered. Also, you get a sense of how tall the person was because it has the gesture of somebody extending their arm up as high as they can to paint with a little bit of an arc and walking simultaneously. Later after that dried and somebody did something similar with some light-colored paint and you can see where it is dripping down over the dried darker paint. Oh, and I can’t forget those light handprints up above Pink Floyd. Really this is more Shinichi Maruyama or Richard Hambleton than Jackson Pollock.

"So anyway, you’ve got this palimpsest of layered narrative and revisions that probably accreted over a few months. At this point, Francis Sullivan happens by, chooses a shutter speed appropriate for capturing masonry, and a kid with a bow runs through the frame—Time’s Arrow being too fleeting to be captured itself, but the hand of time is frozen. Pretty neat how random chance turns this into an allegory for the passage of time of both long and short duration. On a formal note, the arcs of the black and of the white paint are echoed by the curve of the bow. I would be remiss in not mentioning that this reminds me of William Klein’s work, which is a very good thing."

Photo by Kristine Hinrichs

"The third photograph is the one by Kristine Hinrichs. It reminds me of Robert Capa’s 11 D-Day photographs on Omaha Beach. There were lots of other photographs taken on Omaha Beach that don’t have the technical issues of Capa’s photographs and look like they were taken on a beach in June in nice weather. But which do we remember?"

I'll be contacting the winners to send them their prizes. Congratulations to Alan, Francis, and Kristine; grateful thanks to Hugh. Thanks to the generous donors of the prize money, and to the others photographers whose pictures were included in the portfolio. Last, but not least, thanks to the hundreds of readers who sent in submissions. This was a fun one, and I hope you enjoyed it. With any luck, the idea of "blur" stuck in your mind for a while as a possibility when you were out photographing.

Mike

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Methods of Creating Blur

At the stroke of midnight last night I counted 240 ±5 submissions for the 'Blur' call-for-work (it's tough and time-consuming to count the number more accurately, for any number of reasons), and so far I've whittled it down to about 60 ±3 finalists. My seat-o'-the-pants feeling about it is that both these numbers are about double the usual, or almost. So this one is going to be tough for me to edit. Well, I guess they all are.

Many people are competing against only a handful of others. For instance, the birdwing-blur people are going to be competing against each other, and the out-of-focus abstract entries will probably be vying for one place in the final 13, and all the bicycle-panning-shot people will be competing against each other as well, most likely. So it goes in contests or in juried shows. With a final set of thirteen, you can't give everyone their due.

In a quick survey, I notice all of the following methods of creating blur: subject motion and camera shake, obviously, including intentional camera shake using deliberate motions; bokeh; deliberate overall out-of-focus; long exposures; long lens scenes through shimmering heat, called refraction; panning shots; flare; the deliberate use of very poor or broken lenses; double or multiple exposures; diffraction; software computational effects such as the iPhone's "Portrait" setting; pictures through frosted, fogged, or wet glass; pictures through multiple windows or panes of glass; soft-focus filters; soft-focus lenses (see illustration below); changing lighting effects, as at a stage show; pinhole images; blur of various types added in Photoshop; multiple images added in layers in Photoshop; pictures taken through dense foliage; and an intriguing picture taken in near-darkness in order to excite extreme sensor noise. Of course, there are many pictures in which two or more of these techniques are combined. And I'm sure I've missed a few!

Bruce Hemingway, My Window. Photographed with the very rare
75mm ƒ/3 Pinkham & Smith Visual Quality Motion Picture lens.

One of the most unusual is a picture of a face seen through a translucent pancake of some sort being flipped in the air from a frying pan! Never seen that before. In fact that's one of a special little category of pictures that are very interesting because of the explanation of what they are or how they were made; I'm thinking of creating a separate post for those. My sense is that there are about five of them, maybe six. (Is it fair to add those to the running for the prizes? I think not, because that wasn't the deal that I announced. Contests are rough when you're not a rule-bound sort of person, as I am not. Because having rules and following them generally enhance fairness, whereas extemporizing can seem like changing the rules in mid-course.)

More soon,

Mike

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'Blur' Baker's Dozen Deadline is Tonight...

...at 11:59.

The entries have continued to pour in without stopping. I'm pretty sure this one has received more entries than any other we've ever done. And I'm actually now getting entries that people went out and shot this past week specifically for the Baker's Dozen. With a great many of them, my initial reaction is, "Wow—well, that one has to go in the final set." I've had that reaction with a lot more than 13 of them. Lots of great stuff.

Final dust-has-cleared numbers for the prizes:

• $200 for First prize,
• $125 for Second, and
• $75 for Third.

That's thanks to Mark Banas, Anonymous, Anonymous, Richard Parkin, Anonymous, John Gillooly, James Weekes, Bob Burnett, and Christopher May. And TOP. Thanks to all the GoFundMe contributors! I'll save the overage for the next one.

Should help pay for a lens. Or at least a dinner for you and one or two photographer friends.

As previously announced, I will pick the final 13 that will appear here and Hugh Crawford will pick the prize recipients from among the 13. 

I think that's everything you need to know, except I should mention that I'm grateful, because it's a lot of fun to hear from you and see your work. I will have some thoughts about the aesthetics of blurry pictures in due course.

If you have any questions email me at mcjohnston at mac dot com. I'll close the comments on this post.

Mike

'Blur' Update (There Are Now Three Prizes)

First: an excellent recent panning blur, complete with the backstory: Mathieu van der Poel on the Poggio by Simon Gill. The tip came in from a reader in Wales also called Simon. Cycling fans can even buy a print at Simon Gill's website, for reasonable prices. For those of you who don't shoot professionally, the text gives a good example of what's involved in getting a shot when you have to.

Next: The "Blur" Baker's Dozen is proving popular. Entries continue to come in. If I were Ctein, I would have all the data on past Baker's Dozens and I'd be able to tell you where this one ranks so far in terms of the number of entries. But, being me, all I can tell you is that...entries continue to come in.

Finally: Thanks to a number of generous donors, there are now THREE prizes:

• First Prize $192.40 (so far!)
• Second Prize $100
• Third Prize $50

Woo-hoo! Wealth. The weird number for first prize is donations minus fees. I've set a new GoFundMe goal as of Wednesday morning, and added a bit to cover the fees. I'm sure the prizes aren't the most important part to you, but it's kinda fun and it's interesting to see how it works.

You've still got plenty of time to play with blur. The entry period doesn't close until the end of next Monday.

Mike

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The Formerly Sticky Post

[Ed note: This post is no longer sticky.]

Sticky!
This post is a "Sticky" post and will appear at the top of the stack this week. New posts appear below it, so don't be fooled.

Blurry!
Our "Call for Work" for the Baker's Dozen "Blur" Reader Portfolio is still live, through next Monday. We've gotten some fantastic blur shots so far. This one is going to be fun.

Passing the hat!
Want to help sweeten the "pot"? I set up a GoFundMe Page in case you want to throw a few more bucks into the prize fund (several people have offered). If we raise enough, I'll use the extra dough to add prizes to the next Baker's Dozen too.

I (Mike) will be editing the portfolio; the prizes will be awarded by our friend the Polymath of All Things Photographique, Hugh Crawford. Based on this recent photo he is obviously also a wizard:

I had suggested that he ought to wear a wig to be The Judge, but as you can see he already has all the hair anyone needs. Although he reports that the beard is getting a severe trim soon, for an upcoming trip. I'll have him send us an "after" picture if he's willing. People keep mistaking him for Rick Rubin.

Mike

P.S. Despite the disembodied thumb, the picture is not AI! It was taken with an iPhone in Pano mode.

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

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Baker's Dozen Call for Work: 'Blur'

Vortograph of Ezra Pound by Alvin Langdon Coburn
(Study 2, 1917)

Our Baker's Dozens are simple: readers submit JPEGs of their own photos, and I curate a presentation of a dozen of them that seem to go together, plus an extra one for good measure.

There's a prize this time: a $100 B&H Photo gift card for first place and a $50 Amazon gift card for second place. Hugh Crawford will be the judge. (I haven't asked him yet, so that's provisional on his acceptance of the judge's robes and gavel*.) [UPDATE Saturday evening: Hugh has agreed to serve as the awarder of the prizes. No word on the wig yet.]

THEME

The only requirement this time is that the picture should use some sort of blur. It can be any kind of blur: motion blur, panning, camera shake, a pinhole image, a picture that is all or mostly bokeh or is deliberately defocused, a picture taken with a soft-focus lens or filter or a toy camera, or anything else you can think of. Blur can affect all or only part of the picture. I will tend not to pick pictures that happen to be blurred but that would probably have been as good or better had they been sharp. The only sharp picture admissible would be of the English band Blur.

Also new this time, you have to tell me whether your entry is an "old" picture (one that already existed before this notice was posted on Friday, April 28th, 2023), or "new" (created specially for this Baker's Dozen). On your honor. Prizewinners, however, will be selected from the "new" pictures. [UPDATE Saturday evening: on further reflection this seems unfair, so if it's all right with everyone I'm going to rescind this and let Hugh award the prizes to any of the pictures chosen. To be clear: I choose the shots for the portfolio, Hugh awards the prizes.]

TO ENTER

Email one picture per entrant to me at [email protected]. Note the "T" in JohnsTon; my name is not Johnson.

Very important: the subject line of your email must be:

BDblur

...just exactly like that. Uppercase-uppercase-lowercase, no space. The reason for this is that I will search my very considerable email stack for that exact term and if your email is not labeled correctly it will not come up and I will never see your picture.

The picture should be a JPEG, 800 pixels wide (yes, wide), saved as sRGB. Include it in the body of the email and please, make sure your email program is not set up to automatically reduce the size of inclusions or attachments.

Please include:

• Your name
• Your address (or where in the world you are, city or town and country)
• A short single paragraph describing the work. This will be published with your picture when you win. You can say whatever you want about it, but what makes it blurry might be a point to consider. Not required though.
• The word "New" or "Old" as explained above.

(Note: if you screw up and need to submit again, please make a whole new complete submission. Do not send additional information in a separate email and ask me to add it to an earlier email, because although that ought to be simple, experience predicts that it will not get done.)

The deadline is Monday, May 8th, at one minute to midnight in the Eastern U.S. Time Zone. I'll remind you.

Untitled Photo by Hugh Crawford

THE FINE PRINT

You must own all rights to the picture you submit and it must be entirely your own work. 

You retain all rights to your picture at all times, except that you grant me one-time permission to publish it on TOP if it's selected (as of course yours will be).

I cannot think of anything else offhand.

EXAMPLES...

...Of past Bakers Dozens:

Cameras

Objects of Affection

Grandkids

In the Museum

Yellow

"It Must Be Color" Part I, Part II, Part III

Black-and-White

Pictures Taken with Leica Lenses

Have fun, and have a nice weekend. Remember the subject line

BDblur

!!!

Mike

*And wig, because our judge will perforce be bewigged, as they are in Blighty. It's a great look.

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

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