The Online Photographer

Back to the Bag

I didn't mean to take the whole weekend off, but on Saturday my big trip to the Midwest caught up to me. Although I got a lot of work done in the morning, including getting back on the yard and cutting a section of it, later I was so weary I took not one but two catnaps and then slept the whole night through. Then, yesterday morning, over my white tea with lemon juice, I spent the morning happily writing away at a meandering post that went everywhere and nowhere. I had great fun writing it, hopping from one half-formed thought to another. Before I posted it, fortunately, I realized that it had some problems and needed to be edited. So I decided what the main theme should be and cut out everything else. After which there were only a couple of little stubby paragraphs left! That didn't work. So I put the banished parts back in and resolved to shape it up. I worked on it for a while, then went away, then came back and worked on it some more. Late in the day the truth began to glimmer at the edges of my brain, and I realized that I had created possibly the worst post I have ever written. By the time darkness fell I had decided not to inflict it on you. I put the poor thing out of our misery.

When my son was a very little baby—I raised him myself, without experience or knowledge—his daycare provider, Pam Goebbels, a mother of many kids herself, realized I didn't have a lot of baby clothes, and took up a collection at her church. She presented me with a great big plastic leaf-bag full of old baby clothes donated by all the kindly Seventh-Day Adventists. Dressing the baby every day, I would fish around in the bag to find whatever we needed—pants, a shirt, socks, what have you. And mostly I did pretty well making one thing match with another; not as well as an experienced mother might do, but something passable. And of course he was too little to care about style or appearance. But occasionally, just occasionally, I would look down at my adorable baby looking back up at me in a ridiculous ill-fitting outfit that made him look like a miniature demented clown and think, naw, I can't do that to the kid. Back to the bag. Try again, Dad.

It's pool day here at TOP World Headquarters, but I'll get back to the bag later today. Happy Memorial Day, to those of you who celebrate it. The lakeshore is crawling with people, and fortunately for all of them the weather is idyllic, cool and sunny. All's well here, except perhaps for my pride, which might be a touch sore.

Mike

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.)

Featured Comments from:

Grant: "You would make a great politician. You manage to cover up your mistake, make a weak apology and then distract us with a cute baby story. Foolishly we fall for it. Are you running for Congress, or the Senate?"

Mike replies: We will constantly strive to research worldwide eTraining portals for today’s Fortune 500 eBusinesses. Unlike my opponent, I have faith in our delicious apple pies, our love for the Bible and our hard-working neighborhoods. (This response courtesy of the Corporate Slogan Generator and the Political Rhetoric Generator.)

Blog Note

I'm back! 1,725 miles in the car, five States, 34 MPG, three hotels and one guest room. Old pet peeve: one semi trying to pass another while going the exact same speed. New pet peeve: I'll tell you tomorrow.

Mike

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.)

Featured Comments from:

Sebastian Broll: "Question from a non-native speaker. What is a 'semi'? 'Hemi' I would have understood, but those I'd not expect to perform endless overtaking moves.  ;-)  Cheers, Sebastian (waiting for an X-Pro3 to be delivered)."

Mike replies: Sorry. What I meant is a tractor-trailer. A semi-trailer is a trailer that bears its own weight only on the back end; the front end is supported by the rear wheels of the tractor, which is the part with the engine and the cabin where the driver sits. A tractor can drive without a trailer, but a trailer can't roll without a tractor. You can see a diagram with the parts labeled here. And congratulations on the b*tchin' new Fuji!

Sean: "Re 'New pet peeve: I'll tell you tomorrow.' Is it cliffhangers?"

Blog Note

At least a few people are having trouble seeing some of the Blur images, for which I’m very sorry. I had trouble with the images in the post, but I loaded them again and again and tested the post three times over a two-hour period before leaving. Unfortunately there’s nothing I can do about it now except apologize. I’ll definitely look into it as soon as I get home. Very sorry to the readers whose pictures are affected, too. I hope not everybody is seeing problems. [UPDATE: It looks like the problem is with TypePad. The image caching on one of their servers is faulty. It affects about one in four viewers. They’re working on a permanent fix, but this has been going on for a while now. Thanks to Roger Bradbury for bringing me up to speed with this.]

I had a lovely drive through the Indiana countryside this evening, passing Amish buggies and watching the red ball of the sun descend out of the haze and touch the treelines. I was in the car for 10 hours and 10 minutes, drove 505.5 miles, and got 35.4 miles to the gallon—not bad for a nearly 10-year-old car. I can tell you the worst speeders I’ve seen are Ohioans! New Yorkers are law-abiding by comparison (well, at least Western New Yorkers, that’s all I can say.) In Ohio I decided to drive exactly at the speed limit of 70 miles per hour, and many, many cars passed me very quickly and disappeared into the distance. A lot of semis passed me too, but more slowly. Doesn’t Ohio have a State Patrol? I finally got curious and paced one of the speeding SUVs, accelerating behind him to see how fast he was really going. Right about 100 MPH! That’s impressive on an American public highway. Takes some chutzpah, I think would be the proper Yiddish. It must have been an off-duty cop. Only a cop would have the nerve to speed like that. Although other cars that passed me seemed to be going just as fast.

Every day I get a gift whether I take it or not. Today it was an old country church, after dusk, with a graveyard next to it, and a sign out from that said “He Is Risen.” The composition was right there for the taking, but it was late—dusk—and I didn’t stop. Forgot the tripod, anyway! I always forget something. Long day, and my reward is a pretty marginal motel room that smells like somebody got sick in it a few nights ago. Oh well, I will never pass this way again. Tomorrow I will reach my destination.

Mike

Lee Friedlander Books (Correction)

I heard from our friend Q.T. (Tuan) Luong, the French-American photographer of our National Parks, who created the massive and impressive American landscape projects Treasured Lands and Our National Monuments. (He is also the founder of the Large Format Photography Forum.) Tuan corrected me: it's not Lee and Maria Friedlander's son Erik who is helping Lee sell his vast stock of his old books, but their daughter Anna's son Giancarlo Roma, Lee and Maria's grandson. The set of all the books is available for $20,000, but many of the books—signed—are also available individually, all from Haywire Press. I would definitely buy a signed hardcover of Like a One-Eyed Cat if I had $200 lying around. That was an important book for me and my copy somehow got pretty trashed, although I can't recall how.

There's a nice interview with Tuan Luong by Kevin Raber of PhotoPXL on YouTube.

Reader Jeff also called me on my characterization of the Howard Stern incident I referenced in the "time capsule" paragraph of the Contax RTS II Part II post, citing this link. I did not research or fact-check that paragraph extensively. However, I don't know Inside Radio, the source of the link Jeff suggested, and I encountered various conflicting accounts online, for example this one, from a much better-known source that I consider more trustworthy on its face. The Washington Post link and the Inside Radio link don't agree with each other entirely. I went with my memory; I heard the original comment on the air. It might not be right—memory is fallible, and subject to suggestibility and later revisionism—but I'm not convinced Jeff's link is the final authority either, although maybe it is.

It doesn't look like I'm going to get the Blur post done this weekend. Unfortunately, sometimes these things just need percolation time, and can't be rushed. That's art for ya. There's a lot of material to process. Hope you'll please stay tuned!

Mike

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.)

Featured Comments from:

Nikhil Ramkarran: "I got the Friedlander/Coen book a few days ago. I have been going through it slowly ever since. Somehow, although I have seen his images before, I never had one of his books. Honestly, this is the first book of photography that I have taken this much pleasure from in years. He sees as I do, but articulates so much better."

Slow as H*ll (A Confession) (Blog Note)

I've got a confession to make: I'm getting really sloooooow. I used to be fast. Fastest gun in the West. I could whack a post together in two hours, and then do it one more time the same day. But it took me two days to write that last post—knead it into shape, rewrites, percolation time, find a place for it to end up (old white folks' early-'90s hip-hop starter kit!), add a little spice to make it personable ("Pirate" as a baby girl name?!), find quotes, more rewrites, choose and add links, go hunt down a rights-free illo...slow as the proverbial molasses in January. Last night, late, I was like, finally! I'm going to get this up, took me the whole day!...and then it soaked up two more hours this morning. Two hours that just walk on by.

I'm doing the best I can. I'm just plain slowing down. It takes me longer to think of words now (memorize analyze internalize). It takes me longer to think of names that used to just flash into my brain-pan if I bid them to (Method Man; what can be so elusive about the word "method"?). Takes me longer to proofread. I type slower now. Takes me longer to do anything. I'm slower at everything. It's not that I have more to do, it's that it feels that way. Because what I have to do fills up more of the time I have available to do it. Feels like time is speeding up, but it's not. I'm just slowing down.

Just keeping you apprised of conditions! And I appreciate your patience.

That is all,

—Head Writer Mike

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.)

Featured Comments from:

Al in Vancouver: "I feel your frustration. I turned 70 this year, and this is my single greatest challenge: progressive loss of both long-term, but more importantly, short-term memory. I began to notice this in my early 60s and found over the years since then that it made me increasingly less productive, i.e., it took longer and longer to accomplish less and less. When I was younger, I dreamed about all the things I would do in retirement. Now that I am “there,” I’m beginning to realize how little of that I will be able to do.

"Thankfully, like you, I am articulate and still have a lot to offer to the communities I am involved with. But oh, what a struggle to analyze, remember, compose, and make important decisions. Thankfully, one area this does not affect as much is photography: I still enjoy making and editing images, and is the one area in my life, where I still feel I am improving!"

Geoff Wittig: "Just a bit of cheerful contrarianism here...

"People do age, and our brains do change. Brute force short-term memory (for example, the phone numbers or lines of code you can keep in your head simultaneously) declines after age ~30, and it falls off a cliff after 60. But our capacity to recognize patterns, to integrate knowledge and draw accurate conclusions from observation, continues to improve. That's why scientists can still be highly productive into their 80s and beyond. And when it comes to artists, many create their finest work in old age. I'm currently reading Last Light: How Six Great Artists Made Old Age a Time of Triumph. This very engaging book demonstrates how artists from Titian to Hopper created their strongest work when they were...well, old.

"I take great comfort from that. I can't work all through the night and cheerfully continue working the next day like I could in my 30s and 40s. But I can figure out a difficult or obscure diagnosis better than I could back then. And my paintings keep getting better.

"I too have noted that my writing pace is slower than it used to be. But I like to think it's because my standards are higher; stuff I blithely sent out 30 years back I wouldn't dare loose on the world now.

"So don't sell yourself short, Mike. Your pungent observations and polished prose remain something we all keep coming back for."

[Geoff is a small-town doctor who has delivered the grandchildren of babies he delivered. —Ed.]

How Is TOP Doing? (Blog Note)

Kye Wood asked yesterday, in a comment to the spoof post: "I would like to turn this on its head. In all seriousness, I'm asking how much would it take for you to sell control and ownership of this blog, while remaining on staff? Seriously. Might you indulge me?"

The marker I used for many years to measure myself against was my last corporate salary, which was $55k in the year 2000. I figured out how much that was per day, and celebrated when TOP earned that much for just one day. Eventually I achieved it for a whole week, then across an entire month, then a whole year. Eventually I was making double that. I will say that it's awfully nice to earn enough money, and do it on your own bootstrappery. That's been a good life lesson of TOP, and I'm grateful I had that experience. I do wish I had planned better, though, and saved more when times were good. But you have to live sometime.

However, the blog is worth nothing. Because it's just me. My cousin Liz—who, last I knew, works for Intuit—owned a successful bakery in Lexington, Kentucky, for a number of years, and despite being a thriving business she could not sell it, for one simple reason. She wanted to sell so she didn't have to get up at two o'clock in the morning six days a week to bake the day's product any more—it was ruining her social life, and she was approaching 40 and wanted a family. But without her as the baker, the business wasn't one. Same here.

I started the blog in 2005; in 2009, I was able to leave my last outside job (columnist for the British Black & White Photography magazine) behind, and make my entire living from TOP. My two NewYorker.com articles last summer were the first outside jobs I've taken since 2009, and I'll have to be doing more outside work again in the future.

The unadorned reality is that TOP is in the process of failing, following the same larger trends that forced Olympus to sell its camera division and DPReview to shut down, etc., etc. My audience today is one-third of what it was at its peak. Jeff Keller owned a digicam website years ago called Digital Camera Resource. If my memory is correct, at some point he published a very honest post, which I wish I still had, charting the bell curve of his site's fortunes. He was forthright about the fact that it was on the downward slope, and that the handwriting was therefore on the wall, and that he had to start looking for his next job. I remember thinking at the time, whew, sure glad that isn't me. Well, now it is. The amount I earned from my various affiliations  in all of 2022 was less than what I used to earn (sometimes) in one month! The reality is that now, I need help to keep TOP going.

...But, amazingly, I'm getting it. Patreon donations and a small cadre of voluntary contributors have moved the "Point of Failure" much further down on the down-slope of the bell curve. So I've survived the Pandemic, when otherwise I would not have. Even so, I'm making less than my old baseline now. I start taking Social Security this August, which will help.

Times are getting harder for a lot of people, not just me. I'm very grateful, and feel very complimented, that many Patreon supporters who need to tighten their own belts haven't simply cut me off, but, rather, have only reduced their contributions instead. That's incredibly nice of them, and I take it as a big compliment. However, many people have reduced their contributions, and from a high of 835 Patreon patrons, right now I have 707. So the trend is playing out there as well.

The axe—er, tax—lady
Wednesday was Taxageddon, the day I don all black and force myself to trudge down Dickensian alleyways, past the haunts of thieves, cutpurses, mountebanks and beggars, and wend my way to the lair of the tax preparer. She is cheerful and interesting but formidable and ruthless. She takes a double-bladed axe to my bank account and whacks away at it until a torrent of money that used to be mine comes gushing out and into the waiting maw of the Gub'mint. I paid 29.5% of my income in taxes last year. Here's a number that pertains: a whopping 57% of my income last year came from Patreon and direct support from kindly readers. Even so, it's less than that Y2K salary. Were it not for Patreon supporters and that small cadre of well-wishers who contribute cash from time to time, TOP would already not exist, and I would be off by a roadside somewhere, shivering in the whispering cold and selling pencils from a tin cup.

Perhaps I overdramatize.  :-)

So the answer to your question: $55k in 2000 is a cool $98k now, adjusted for inflation. How much capital would yield that much income? Knowing nothing about finance, I don't know what that number might be. But I doubt there's much point in doing the research.

I am mulling over other moves (several posts in recent weeks have concerned my ponderings about what kind of writer I hope to be when I grow up, as you might have noticed), and hope I can come to clarity before my hand is forced. My main goal is to continue to be a writer, somehow, merely because that's what I like to do. Other options are to teach or tutor, among other things, and I'm looking into it. I'm taking a (10-hour!) test this week to become a literacy volunteer, to get a little experience tutoring. Whatever my next move turns out to be, it comes down to a favorite old joke, which might be funnier if it weren't so true: "my retirement plan is to keep working."

Mike

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.)

Featured Comments from:

darlene: "The check is in the mail. I hope everyone who can help Mike will. Let's keep the ink for his pen flowing and Butters' dish full. I appreciate Mike's writings greatly and always look forward to this site's classy, witty, and enlightening comments."

Simon: "I can't even dream of earning £55k. That is rather more than 2.5 times my current salary and nearly 4x what I was earning in IT back in 2000. I'm pretty sure that it's more than the CEO of our small company will be paid too, though he does get a car and other perks. Despite a very modest lifestyle, the UK cost of living hike is starting to bite.  :-/  "

Mike replies: Yes, of course money is always relative, and I've generally been very fortunate with TOP, in many ways. Do note however that a pound in 2000 was exchanged at $1.52 on yearly average, so my chosen baseline was ~£36,200 in 2000. Of course, that is £63,700 now, adjusted for inflation according to the Bank of England.

The relative nature of money has always fascinated me. The site has readers who range from multimillionaires to retirees (pensioners) who have to think carefully about buying a new lens. One interesting thing I experienced was moving from an area in a big city where my salary was 3/5ths of the average household income, to a small rural town where I earned 1.5X the average. I went from being slightly poor-ish to mildly but distinctly prosperous, on the exact same paycheck. Learned a lesson there.

A friend of mine was a member of the retinue of a Saudi Prince years ago, for a period that lasted about three months, and he related this story: the Prince's father, the King, paid all of the Prince's expenses, down to food for him and his retinue. In addition to that, the Price had an American Express card for incidental personal expenses. My friend said that everyone in his retinue knew that the Prince would be a foul mood during the last few days of every month. The reason was that his father had tried to put a limit on his spending, and had capped his American Express card at the equivalent of US$1 million per month. And near the end of every month the Prince would suffer the indignity of having his card refused.

It would put anyone in a bad mood, right?  ;-)

Ed Hawco: "Is this the Jeff Keller article you’re referring to Mike? One key difference between his blog and yours is that his was very specifically focused on camera reviews, whereas yours is more about photography in general (and life in general). The former can easily be usurped by an Amazon-like big gun (as was Keller’s) but the latter has more resilience and is harder to squash. Keeping it fed is still a challenge, of course."

Dan: "Video killed the radio star and it's doing the same for written content. YouTube, TikTok etc. are the mediums with growth potential. Are you ready for your closeup?"

Mike replies: I'm ready, Mr. DeMille.

Blog Note

I've been distracted of late—caught up in the medical churn. Today is my last (I hope) big appointment, an hour and a half away at the "big hospital" in Rochester. (No pool today.) We have LOTS of good comments awaiting publication from the "Photographs Are Beautiful" post still awaiting publication, some of them quite long. I had hoped to get those done this morning but, alas, more distraction, and now the time is gone and the window is closed again. They will be top on the TOP agenda once I put this appointment in the rearview mirror. I might even figure out a way to make new posts out of several of them. Keep yer fingers crossed for me this morning! Really hoping for a clean bill of health and the go-ahead to exercise.

[UPDATE seven hours later: Thumbs up. No pacemaker needed, no followup necessary, [further boring details redacted]. And the green light to exercise.  ::big smile::]

—Mike

Blog Note

We're preparing for severe winds tonight and tomorrow, which usually means power outages in our area, and I no longer have a backup generator. So I could be down for a little while.  The winds haven't started yet. If I go quiet, I'll be back when I can.

And for the good news: I just became a grandfather for the first time! I can only describe the feeling as joy. Kate sent out a video of Xander holding his son for the first time, and what a feeling. Wow.

—Mike

Blog Note

Small announcement: Mike has been semi-sick recently, nothing too bad. But if I'm a straight-six normally, I'm running on three cylinders temporarily. (Kirk and Thom are V-12s, maybe you could visit them.)

I just posted Featured Comments to the last two posts. Sorry to be so late. But they're good, as always.

Hopefully will finish another post today, but maybe not. Got my foot on the gas, but the engine ain't pulling like it's supposed to!

—Mike the majordomo and one-man band

P.S. The diagnosis was that my heart problems are probably caused by sleep apnea (tests are ongoing). So I dusted off the consarned CPAP contraption and resigned myself to that fate. Fella's gotta do what a fella's gotta do.  :-)

UPDATE: I used the old CPAP (I used it for as much as a year previously) for the last two nights, and, while night one was miserable, I have to admit I felt more rested yesterday and didn't feel the need to take a nap. Last night went better. I feel like normal energy is returning.

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.)

Featured Comments from:

Thom Hogan: "No, I'm a turbocharged 4. I make very loud noises and run hot when I'm active and on the accelerator, but am not all that impressive otherwise."

Wayne: "Maybe it would help if you just think of the CPAP machine as a supercharger—Weber carbs on top, gear driven from the crank, the whole works. Anyway, best wishes. I bet things will improve quickly."

John Hunter: "Re 'consarned': Love that. I thought I was the only one around who remembers that word. Thanks for that. Be well, Mike. We're all rooting for you. "Never mind the [troubles: atom bombs, etc.]. Let's put on the kettle and have a nice cup of tea.'"

Mike replies: I was drinking my morning tea when I read that!

Landmark: Ten Thousand Posts

Hey, this site, The Online Photographer (TOP), the biggest little site on the Web, just passed 10,000 posts. Counting the ones at the original Blogspot site, which is no longer on the Web.

The 10,000th post was "A Book Is An Event" from last Friday. I didn't realize it at the time.

Coincidentally, we also just passed TOP's 17th birthday, last Monday. To call this extraordinary is an understatement. I'm used to it now, but it's still hard to believe.

Yesterday's post got 13,317 views, and 108 comments so far, all of which are posted. We are now supported mainly by direct donations from readers via Patreon and a few dozen other loyal contributors—you know who you are. To all of whom, grateful thanks.

What do you say—shall we soldier on another year?

—Mike, chief procrastinator and factotum ordinaire

Metrics

I just did some delving into the site stats for all of our history since 2007. TOP exceeded 30,000 pageviews 49 times; but the post I've always named as being our all-time record, "Sony vs. Nikon vs. Canon," from Wednesday, 17 December 2008, which attracted 54,575 pageviews, is actually only in 7th place all-time. The runner-up post by the actual numbers, which attracted 86,517 pageviews, was "Are UHS-II Cards Worth It?" published on Friday, 16 January 2015. The all-time draw unfortunately concerned a scandal: "The Sad Fall from Grace of Nicholas Nixon" drew 103,723 pageviews on the day of publication, Thursday, 05 April 2018, and a whopping 210,993 views the following day. At least I assume that must have been the attraction; the next day's post was about a tree that fell in my backyard, which I can't see being of interest to 210k people even though the picture was kinda nifty. Often, with a really heavily looked-at post ["popular" didn't seem quite the right word here], especially one for which the traffic is driven by referrals, the biggest traffic happens the day after.

The only way we could have gotten such an overwhelming number of visits on one day is for one or more much larger sites to link to our post, but I wasn't aware of what was happening at the time. Anyway, it's nice to know what the all-time record was, although I could wish that our most-viewed post was about something more...positive. I'm surprised it came so late in the arc of TOP's lifetime.

Yesterday's count was 13,566 pageviews. That's about two-thirds of the average daily traffic TOP got during the "glory years" of roughly 2011–2015, but I'm happy with it. [UPDATE: I forgot that there are also 9,275 people signed up to receive the feed, although it's more difficult to know how many of those read any particular post. I suppose a lot of people look at the title and don't read it? Like any newspaper.]

Another Nixon
And speaking of Nick Nixon, in looking into his current status I came across a recent annual installment of his series "The Brown Sisters"—as you no doubt know, Nick took large-format portraits of his wife and her three sisters annually beginning in 1975. He did one in 1974, but it was in 35mm and he threw it away because he didn't like it as a picture. Well, here's the one from 2020, the first year of the pandemic, taken "socially distanced":

Everybody's had to adapt.

I also ran across the following, which I thought was interesting, in a LensCulture interview, a description of how he became a photographer:

When I was in college, I had a bunch of jobs, and one of them was in a bookstore—a big, fancy art bookstore. In my spare time, I started to look at photography books and art books. I saw that Ann Arbor offered a summer course in photography for people who weren’t in the art school. Because I had seen Cartier-Bresson and I had looked at some of the books, I thought, “Oh, wow. I should do that.”

I signed up, and on the first day, that was it. The first day, I thought, “This is what I’m going to do.” All of a sudden I wasn’t a coach anymore—I was a player. Even if I was going to be a bad player, I’m a player. The future was uncertain, but it was instinctual. I thought, “I don’t care, I want to do this. I love it.” I was just smitten. I went down to the local drugstore, which was also the camera store. They had a Leica M3 in the window, a used one. I loved Cartier-Bresson already, but I didn’t know anything about him. I didn’t know this was his camera. I saw that thing and I thought, “Boy, that looks like a way to make pictures.” I went right in and I put $270 out of $300 I had in the world right down on the counter.

Whether he knows it or not, or accepts it or not, he will never outrun his disgrace, and the meaning of his life's work will forever be touched with it. A shame.

Mike

Update: RSS Feed

I don't know much about how this works, but I think the new feed is working already—several readers have told me so. There are new link addresses, inactive first to avoid any mixup (I'm still having problems loading content):

Feed URL:	https://feeds.feedblitz.com/theonlinephotographer
XML URL:	https://feeds.feedblitz.com/theonlinephotographer&x=1
Mobile Friendly:	https://feeds.feedblitz.com/theonlinephotographer&m=1

And you can see the feed, and subscribe, by using the new module at the top of the left-hand sidebar on the site. As I mentioned before it might take overnight for it to propagate. On the good side, Feedblitz lets you subscribe to specific comment threads.

Hope this solves the problem.

Mike

Featured Commments from:

Thomas Mc Cann: "I use Netvibes as a desktop. Lack of posts from TOP led me to believe you were sick. To my surprise, up popped 14 unread items on your feed today. I read your blog every day and have done so for years, so the absence of posts had been a real disappointment. Glad you weren't ill."

Dave Pawson: "Please add the links as clickable, rather than images, Mike?"

Mike replies: Added. Thanks.

RSS Feed (Blog Note)

UPDATE Monday evening: It turns out that the old feedreader was no longer operating. I set up a new one, but the metrics update overnight, so the new feed won't be working until tomorrow. I'll let you know the new link tomorrow.

To say I don't understand feeds is an understatement. But by following instructions, hopefully I set it up so that it will work.

A lot of readers have contacted me asking when the RSS feed is going to be fixed. I just reset the RSS feed settings—can someone please try it and tell me if it's working now?

If it still isn't, I will look into that this afternoon, and, if I can't figure it out myself (likely), I'll enter a Help Ticket about it.

Mike

Question for You (Blog Notes again)

Well...I need to vent a little...I worked all day yesterday until three in the morning (actually a little after) and broke Blogger. Seriously. Took me six hours to build a beautiful new site and then six hours trying to fix it after it broke—which was, admittedly, roughly analogous to forcing an elephant to thread a needle. I've always known I'm bad with computers, "but this is ridiculous." (A tagline made famous by Fred Flintstone, a fellow caveman whose computer skills mine would rival, but never mind.) It's broken. I have to start over.

I don't know how I do it.

Anyway: TOP is going to relaunch. I don't know when, I don't know how, and I don't know where. But one foot in front of the other. One day at a time. We'll get there.

Thanks, I needed to get that off my chest. Me building a website is like a fish knitting a sock.

It's possible it might kill me (murder was attempted last night at two in the morning, I'll just say that), but the new site is intended: 1.) to show photographs to best advantage, big and beautiful; 2.) to be free, not subscription-based or tied to any payment system (I depend on my Patreon supporters, but they pay if they want to, not because they have to); 3.) to be on the Web, not delivered by email (which would make it a newsletter); and 4.) to be responsive, for convenient and pleasant access on phones and tablets. Finally, 5.), free of irritations will be given a higher value than slick, hip 'n' pretty. All five of those are the priorities. Not necessarily in that order.

Which brings me to my question: what might you like to see on a new, revamped, modernized, you-friendly TOP of the mid-'20s?

Mike

P.S. Never fear, I saw the new Fuji. Next up.

Featured Comments:

Bob Keefer: "Thank you for pledging that TOP will be 'free of irritations.' These days almost all of the web—even many sites that should know better—is plagued with incessant pop-ups and cheap, sleazy clickbait. I appreciate you standing your ground with TOP."

Hang In There!

Typepad's Engineering team is continuing to work on restoring all the features of their blogs, including this one. I know a lot of you are experiencing a variety of issues; I am too. This all stems from an unsuccessful attempt starting on Saturday night to migrate Typepad's blogs to a new data center. The attempt had to be called off. I guess the best counsel for now is patience—

But I'm sorry for all the folderol and botheration!

Mike

Featured Comments:

Greg: "An IT person once told me that 99% of his job was to fix unsuccessful migrations and unsuccessful fixes."

Kye Wood: "Long time IT professional here. People are always amazed and shocked and disappointed when computer software crashes out. Programmers are always amazed and surprised and thrilled when their code not only runs, but actually appears to work!"

Geoff Wittig: "My son is a software developer. He has worked for a big name as well as smaller firms. I asked him why (for example) medical record software sucked so badly. My practice's electronic record system has multiple frustrating bugs and has periodic 'upgrades' that invariably involve a week or more of crashes and new bugs.

"He noted the fundamental conflict between software quality and corporate profits. Reliable, effective, bullet-proof software takes time, skill and effort to create. It takes more time to de-bug it and make sure it's amenable to updates and extension. 'Good enough' software can be cobbled together from existing code and output from low-cost overseas programmers. Good enough to run a demo that looks impressive and to sell the product, but not good enough to be a solid, reliable platform. Once customers buy the product, the sunk cost of purchasing it and training employees to use it are the velvet handcuffs preventing a switch to something better. So software companies have a powerful incentive to cheaply create a product that's good enough to win sales, and much less incentive to produce rock-solid code that costs a bit more to develop."

We're Back (9:25 p.m. Monday) (Blog Notes)

Very sorry for the interruption in service! And, Happy Halloween.

Typepad had planned on a 12-hour outage for maintenance. Obviously something went wrong, and the outage approached 48 hours. Evidently the planned maintenance project had to be abandoned. And then, this afternoon, after the blog went back up, I wasn't able to add new posts right away. TOP still isn't loading some images and some links don't work, but we've been told those will be restored in due course.

I'll resume posting new content tomorrow morning as usual (including a funny image I had been saving for Halloween). Later in the month that starts tomorrow TOP will celebrate 17 years of existence, 15 of those on Typepad; it's been our happy home for a long time. They have great customer service for us bloggers and have always addressed questions and difficulties with dispatch. This outage was a bit nerve-wracking for Yr. Hmbl. Ed., but "this too shall pass," in the famous words of the medieval Sufi poets, and we'll be back to normal. The eternal promise of the weblog, a word that made its first appearance in the language in 1997: "More soon!"

Thanks for your patience.

—Mike

P.S. And I hope the Comments work too, but I don't know if they do! If not, they should be working again soon. Would someone please leave a comment as a test? UPDATE: Comments are working.

Scheduled Maintenance Planned For Saturday Night, All Night (Blog Notes)

Scheduled maintenance coming: Lots of problems lately. I'm happy to report that Typepad (TOP's host) has successfully migrated to a new data center. More maintenance is planned, and you might have trouble logging on from Saturday night to Sunday morning, Eastern U.S. Time: "During a window from 9:30 pm U.S. Eastern Time on Saturday, October 29 (01:30 UTC on Sunday, October 30) to 9:30 am U.S. Eastern Time on Sunday, October 30 (13:30 UTC on Sunday, October 30), there may be periods where Typepad blogs are down." That's TOP's least-trafficked time of the week, so it might not be a problem for you, but be prepared for it.

Everyone should be seeing the header again.

In a separate matter, Norton assures me that TOP has officially been declared "Safe" and that its (Norton's) customers will no longer receive a danger warning from them (Norton) when trying to log on to TOP.

All is well. [UPDATE Saturday morning early: I spoke too soon. Typepad suffered DDoS attacks on Friday and was intermittently down. Every time this happens—there have been a few instances over the years—they manage to get it sorted out, so I'm hoping that with the maintenance tonight will solve the various issues. Sorry again if you've experienced any trouble.] Please remember that TOP might be down over Saturday night.

Mike

Scott: "Got the Cloudflare message a few minutes ago."

Mike replies: Apparently you'll have to contact them yourself, because as far as I can tell there's no mechanism for people like me to get in touch with them.

John Krumm: "The Cloudflare thing is likely just the new servers being cautious. I’ve seen it before after DOS attacks. Likely TypePad will have to fix."

The Norton Problem (Blog Note)

We recently had a spate of readers who were getting a warning from Norton saying TOP is not a safe site and that they should keep away. While it might sometimes put your discretionary cash in danger by encouraging you to buy a new lens, TOP is not otherwise dangerous.

(Somewhat suspiciously, all this happened right after an old subscription to Norton's services expired, and I declined to renew.)

If you had that problem, here's the rundown: TypePad tells me you're probably getting that warning because I linked to a site that is considered unsafe. First of all, sorry. Second, I don't know which link caused / is causing the problem, so if you could follow the "full report" link in your warning and let me know if there's any indication of which post is causing the trouble, I'd be grateful.

Third, I went to Google's Safe Browsing site status at Google Transparency Report and ran my URL, and TOP got the little green checkmark: "No unsafe content found." Then I went to Norton Safe Web, and requested a report for TOP, and got the green box with a big "OK" in it and the word "Safe" below it. So as far as I can tell both Google and Norton are now giving TOP the all clear.

So hopefully that means you are not getting the "danger / keep away" warnings from Norton any more. If you are, please let me know. And thanks to those who reported the problem the first time around! I'll try to do better about being careful what I link to.

—Mike, ABSCW (At Best Semi-Competent Webmaster)

Blog Note: Patchy Problems

Something's been going on with TypePad recently. TypePad, launched this month in 2003, is the blogging service I've used since 2007 for The Online Photographer. Various readers have been finding the blogsite down or slow when they try to log on as usual this week, and...so have I. This happens from time to time over the years. The team at TypePad is very responsive to issues (it's the reason I chose them in the first place—TOP was originally on Blogger, Google's platform, but it wasn't manned by humans and when something went wrong there was nothing you could do). These occasional issues have always gotten resolved in the past. The place to go for updates is TypePad on Twitter.

Everything's working for me this morning. But I just wanted to apologize to you if you've had any problems in the past week or so.

TypePad is going to be "migrating to a new data center," whatever that means, later this month. "The maintenance window will be during off hours to minimize the impact." Off hours here in the USA might not be off hours where you are. As I learn more specifics I'll pass them along. Meanwhile, I'll do a fresh site backup to capture any new material since the last backup, and, as usual, keep my fingers crossed.

—Mike, with his Maintenance Guy hat on

 

Good Sleep (COVID Update)

Not everything has a silver lining, but, for me, COVID has had one. I was discouraged that I was still testing positive at Day 16, but I slept around the clock again on Wednesday night...11:00 p.m. to 11:00 a.m.

It's been nostalgic to revisit, in very early old age, the way I used to be able to sleep when I was younger. I'm not into having COVID, but I've enjoyed being able to sleep. I suffer from a form of insomnia called EMA—early morning awakening. I often pop awake at 4:15 or 5:30 or some ungodly early morning hour and, more than half the time, can't get back to sleep. Well, on Thursday morning I got dragged out of sleep at 5:45, looked at the internet for a while on my tablet, conked out again, and enjoyed basically a whole second night's sleep. I haven't slept that late in years.

The oximeter
If you get COVID, a handy device to have around is something called a "fingertip pulse oximeter," or just "oximeter" for short. It's that little clip that goes on your fingertip that measures your pulse and the oxygen saturation, or the percentage of oxygen, in your blood. A normal, healthy adult or child with functioning lungs has a blood oxygen level of between 95 and 100%. My impression from various things I read about COVID early on was that people who are otherwise asymptomatic can have a condition called "happy" (also called "silent") hypoxia, which means you have low blood oxygen levels but you're not aware of it. Fingertip pulse oximeters were widely recommended during the early days of COVID as a way to detect happy hypoxia. However, in poking around on the web, I came across a study at Penn Medicine that indicated that automated text messaging—regularly asking people with COVID whether they felt short of breath—was just as effective in terms of outcomes as patient self-measuring with an oximeter.

However, I don't get automated text messages from my doctor's office asking me about shortness of breath. In fact I've yet to see a sign from them that they're interested in how I'm doing. So I've been using the oximeter. There are a zillion pulse oximeters on Amazon; this is the one I happen to have, not that that matters. I just slip it on my finger a few times a day to check. Mainly reassurance, I guess.

After I encountered that Penn Medicine study, though, I figured I might need to know a little more, from an expert. So I reached out to John Hansen-Flaschen MD, a TOP reader who is also a highly distinguished pulmonologist (as well as, of course, a photographer). Here's what John told me:

Early on, when COVID infection was frequently life threatening, some people were found to have a low blood oxygen level before they developed severe shortness of breath. Other chest infections did not typically do this. Also, there was no quick COVID testing then. So, at that time, we encouraged people to buy a finger pulse oximeter and to test themselves at the first hint of any new respiratory symptoms.

Current omicron strains do not behave this way, so we no longer recommend pulse oximetry for early detection. Instead, when someone is known to have acute symptomatic COVID, a pulse oximeter can be useful in deciding when to go to an emergency room and when to be admitted to a hospital. A drop in oxygen % saturation of greater than 4 mmHg to below 92% is a reason to go to an ED for further evaluation. Below 85–88% may be a reason to admit someone.

So I guess I'm doing the right thing keeping an eye on it. John also told me that I'm at risk for long COVID, mentioning that "our clinic is overrun with people who have this distressing condition." Yikes. But then, I guess we've all known all along that COVID is inherently a "yikes" kind of thing to start with. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that I won't have that.

Finally, I called my doctor's office, and was told by a nurse that people who've had COVID can continue testing positive for up to 30 days even if they've recovered. She told me to stop testing myself, sort of implying that all I'm doing is driving myself crazy. So, okay.

Anyway, I am feeling a lot better—the penultimate remaining symptom, a cough, seems to be almost gone. The ultimate remaining symptom seems to be...good sleep. Not sure if I want that to go away. But I guess I'll know I'm really better when it does.

Good health to you and your family! In all ways, and always.

Mike

Book o' the Week

Migrant Mother, by Sarah Meister. "Each volume in the One on One series is a sustained meditation on a single work from the collection of MoMA." Forty-two pages with many illustrations. An engaging guided tour of the history and lore of "American photography's Mona Lisa."

This book link is a portal to Amazon. You're very kind use our links, as they help support the site.

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:

Tom Burke: "Very glad to hear you're getting better, Mike. Like you, the cough has been the last thing to disappear for me.

"You mentioned above that you're still testing positive. Is that PCR tests, or lateral flow test? It's well known that PCR tests can continue to pick up non-infectious viral proteins anything u to 90 days after infection.

"I think I mentioned in an earlier comment that I had found a reference to a study that looked at when people stopped being infectious. I've dug out the references. First, the summary from the Imperial College site; and this is the link to the study report in the Lancet Respiratory Medicine journal.

"The message seems to be that the study found that less than a quarter of cases were shedding virus before the onset of symptoms; and that lateral flow testing was a poor indicator of the onset of infectiousness, but was very good at spotting the moment when you cease to be infectious. In my case I tested negative on two days in succession at the end of my illness (10 days after symptom onset) so I was OK to go out. Four days after that, however, a PCR test (in connection with a survey I'm enrolled in) came back with a positive result. I decided that the latter result was an example of the problem with PCR test results after you've been ill."