The Online Photographer

A New, All-Off-Topic Blog?

The other day, Edward Taylor wrote:

"Mike—this will sound ridiculous to you, but I think you should switch to off-topic posts and sprinkle in a bit of photography. Now that phones exist, interest in dedicated camera photography is dying. You are a writer. People will read your writing. I like your off-topic posts. I already know just about everything about photography.

"Look at how successful blogs have been. They don't even have a 'topic.' They are all off-topic!"

What's your reaction Edward's idea?

I've been amusing myself these past few days with the thought of doing a new, true "all-topic" blog, and I've got more ideas than I know what to do with. I would have a lot of fun with it. Commenting on the news, ranging far afield with gear talk, unleashing my inner opinion columnist, finding quirky things to call attention to, unearthing local goings-on. Plus, I have reams of non-photo-related stories mouldering away in my graying gray matter that are aching to get out.

But I wear two hats. I'm the main content provider here, and that's a creative-side job. But I've also made a living at this for going on twenty years, so I'm the "company strategist" too. Mustn't forget that this is at root a business problem.

Would you who are reading this also come read a general-interest site if I wrote it?

More to the point, if you are a current Patreon supporter, would you be more likely to keep or cancel your pledge if I segued over to an all-new site with general content? I've got a reasonable approximation of Ctein's old "1,000 True Fans" idea—I currently have 688 people who contribute a little (some a lot) each month to help me keep TOP going. That's a lot of people, albeit not quite 1k. But the high was 804. to give you some real numbers, in May I had a net loss of 56¢ in pledges, and of three patrons; in June, a net loss of $31 in pledges and two patrons; in July, a net loss of $8.07 in pledges and three patrons; and in August, a net loss of $61.48 in pledges  and six patrons. You see where that is going. From a high of 804 patrons, there are currently 688 of you. That's enough to keep me in the saddle, but for how long is the question. The trendline has been going only one way.

And second, what's to bring new readers in? The world is beset by a hailstorm of demands for our attention (I find Apple News exhausting, yet at the same time generally unsatisfying), and I'm not sure how a general-interest blog goes about attracting attention. To follow the metaphor unconscionably far, it would be like tapping you on the shoulder in the middle of that hailstorm. How would anybody even tell?

Seems like a risk. But it might also be a risk to try to ride TOP into an inevitable sunset. Looking forward to hearing your take.

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:

Blog Note

Phew! TypePad has been down all day for me. Sorry for the silence.

Back in the morning.

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:

Don't Shoot Film? It's Okay. You Can Relax.

So just a little gentle admonishment. I have lots of readers, and y'all do different things and have different histories. Some of you even photograph flowers and cats, or use Rodinal!

I kid.

All right, all right
Some of my readers shoot film. A few of them, like me, liked darkroom work—we found it a positive pleasure for its own sake. Even if we aren't graced with darkrooms in our current circumstances. This is okay.

Some shoot with view cameras. Because they like the process. I already told you the story of how I got suckered into writing an "anti-view-camera" article once, at, let me see, the original Camera & Darkroom magazine, for Ana Jones who was the editor then. It was proposed to me as one half of a "pro/con" pair of articles, and Ron Wisner of Wisner Classic Manufacturing Co., a builder of bespoke view cameras of high Edwardian style, was supposed to write the counterpart "pro" article. But Ron never came through on his promises, so Ana went ahead and published my "con" article by itself. As a stand-alone article, it made me out to be a hater! It alienated many view camera photographers, understandably, making them think that I was unsympathetic to their beloved niche. Actually, though, I kinda love large format. I certainly have an appreciation for view camera work (what, I'm going to hate Weston and Watkins and all the others?!), and I absolutely have no quarrel with people who choose to center their hobby or their art on large format! Then or now. So using view cameras is okay too.

But if you don't shoot film any more, look...it's okay...you don't have to respond to every film article by saying "I hated/loved film/darkroom but I shoot digital now and it gives me so much more control and it's cheaper and...." It's okay. We know. We all shoot digital now. I adore my handheld digital 4x5 view camera (by the way, "Paddleboarder on the Outlet" now has 9,884 views and 228 Favorites) and I actually adore my iPhone camera too. Digital won. So there's no need to treat every mention of film like it's a call to battle. Maybe it used to be. But not now. The war is over.

So...
If you come across an article on film or darkroom here, and you aren't interested, maybe you could just treat it like it's not for you. It's for somebody else. It's for the people who still like and/or work in film or in the darkroom. If you're not one of those, that's okay; everyone understands. You don't need to rise to the defense of digital.

I'm saying all this with a smile and a chuckle, not at all angrily or stridently, so don't get that wrong. I do like it when we can find something new that everyone wants to talk about for a day or two; but a lot of topics are minority topics. Aren't there a few other topics I cover occasionally that have zero interest for you personally? I know some readers won't read about sports, or hate the WFPB posts, or pool, jazz, Miatas, or vintage stereo speakers. So just treat the film/darkroom posts like one of those. With each of those things, there's some percentage of readers, some small subset of the set of everyone, who enjoy them. How about you, don't you also enjoy one or two of the off-topic subjects? Why lowriders bounce? Romance at the movies? Lee Sandlin? So you can understand that the film/darkrooms posts please somebody, somewhere.

A.V. Shirk in his darkroom, 1974. I had an enlarger like that
once. (I found this picture on Wikimedia Commons.)

So anyway, don't stress. I want to write about film photography sometimes. I don't want it to be off limits. I want to write about vintage eBay film cameras. I want to write about large format. Occasionally, not frequently. I even want to write about ye olde darkroom that apparently horrified so many people (in 1979, the peak of the darkroom hobby, the then-leading magazine estimated that there were 250,000 small private darkrooms in the USA. Soon after, there were not one but two US darkroom newsstand magazines). I don't want to have to field a bunch of comments about how glad you are that film is gone or how superior digital is every time the old ways crop up. If you don't want to read about that stuff, I get it. I understand you might not have any interest any more. But relax. If you don't care, somebody else might! Find a little sympathy in your heart for them.

A blog is like the weather in Scotland. If you don't like it, wait a while, and it will change.

Cheers!

Mike

P.S. Although I get on my high horse every now and then, and sometimes lecture about things, I seldom lecture at people. So if this made you feel lectured at, I apologize!

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:

Our Print Sales Need to Evolve Too

I spoke yesterday of how my writing and comment-moderation workflow here on TOP might need to change. Well, our print sales might need to evolve as well.

I've heard anecdotally from a variety of sources that print sales are slowing across the board, as the tradition of fine printmaking continues to evaporate from the culture of photography. Our print sales have certainly declined. I'm not sure I can ascribe that to anything in the broader culture, however. TOP's audience has constricted to about one-third the size of the audience at peak (2013), although the readers that remain seem much more engaged, devoted, and active—also, they're more dedicated or devoted to photography or however you want to phrase it, more experienced and knowledgeable. TOP doesn't attract hordes of casual visitors looking for shopping advice any more, that's for sure.

Anyway, it might be time for a transition here too. Our old model (taking orders in advance for a limited time and fulfilling them after they were already sold) worked quite wonderfully. But it's a high-volume model. Our best print sale sold ~735 prints, and our most lucrative made $128,000 in profit. Another artist first agreed to make 50 prints, but that 50 sold so rapidly that he agreed to make 100 more. Those vanished as well. Yet another print-sale artist told us that the check we sent her was the largest amount of money she'd earned at one time in her life.

But those days are long gone. Now we struggle to sell 100, and often don't reach 50. And the profits are more modest.

Great good fortune
It's still nothing to sneeze at; not at all. When's the last time you sold 35 prints of a single picture? It's very unusual. The number of photographers who sell 35 prints of one picture in a gallery show are a tiny minority. Most people who have gallery shows would be over the moon to sell 35 total. So I'm grateful we can do that. Looked at objectively, it's still very fortunate that we do so well. Quite wonderful.

It might be time to change the sales model, is all. For one thing, the printer still needs to be paid. The first print is where a lot of the labor is. If we sell 125 prints, the first print is a small proportion of the whole. If the printer is providing 15 prints, it's a larger part of the work. It becomes harder for us to cover that cost. One printer won't work with us unless we can guarantee 100 sales.

So what I'm thinking of is switching to some kind of small-volume model. As you can see from the last post but one, 148 readers put themselves into the category of people who would consider buying a print of "Mennonite Boys Watching Dirt-Track Racing." But how many people actually will buy one? Fifteen per cent? Ten? So call it 15 to 22 sales. And that sounds about right.

So maybe I should have the printer make 15 copies (or 15 and three artist's proofs), and I'll pay him out of my pocket, and then we'll offer the 15 until they sell out. The price would have to be higher doing it that way, but still nothing too onerous. (And sometimes people want to pay more, but that's another post.)

I'd like to try that with reader prints, too. Your prints, I mean. I have in mind three prints by readers. I could ask each person to provide, say, ten copies of his or her print, and then offer them without a deadline. They'd just sell until they sold out. Wouldn't it be nice to make a sale out of the Baker's Dozens, for instance?

I'll have to think about that. Anyway, that's all that this post is trying to say: that I'm thinking about this. The volume model is on the cusp of not making enough volume, so maybe it's just time to change.

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:

Comments I Missed

I've been off my game lately. Here, remedially, are some comments to recent posts that I meant to publish but didn't.

About the Vocal Range video, from Doug Anderson: "There is an important vocal range missing from the video. Just as baritones (like me) are those men who can not reach either the lowest notes of the bass range or the highest notes of the tenor range, mezzo sopranos are those women who can not reach either the lowest notes of the alto range or the highest notes of the soprano range. Baritones and mezzo sopranos are the most common vocal ranges of men and women, respectively."

Comment: Thanks for this clarification. I assume the guy making the video is a member of an a cappella group and was either concentrating on the normal makeup of a cappella groups generally or maybe just his own. But I don't know.

About watching the Wimbledon Final, from James Weekes: "1. I am really sorry that you missed it. A match for the ages. Well worth finding online and watching [assuming I can find the time —MJ]. 2. Have you explored ways to stream events like this? I'm pretty sure that it would have been possible, even up there in Possum Holler by the Lake. 3. The indoor version of tennis, better known as court tennis, is still being played in the U.S. and in England and, possibly, France. A good friend of mine, Haven Pell, is heavily involved and still plays at age 77. It is not played because of the cost of building a court. I grew up on Long Island and my father played in one of the remaining courts, Greentree. It is now idle. I also recommend you look up Haven's book on court tennis, Around the World in 50 Courts [link added by MJ]. Good fun. The game was invented by monks who strung a net across the interior court of their monastery. So there are windows and pitched roofs. I tried to play, having been a decent lawn tennis player, but I am left-handed and couldn't hit a decent serve."

Comment: Seems a bit like three-cushion billiards, which was one of the most popular sports in America in the 1920s and is now vestigial. It's fascinating to watch, though. At least to me.

About not watching television, by ritchie thomson: "Yes, some years ago I largely stopped watching film and TV. I maybe see two or three films/movies a year and then usually old ones. This was for two reasons. The primary being the formulaic and clichéd story lines and scripts (I wouldn't be surprised if we discover that AI has been churning out Hollywood scripts for several decades already). The secondary one was the routine depiction of explicit and sickening violence. I understand that video games take this even further. I know that many psychologist will say that this exposure doesn't lead to acts of violence (at least for most people), and that may be true, but surely at best it desensitises (people are no longer shocked by images which they should be shocked by), and at worst in infects their psyche. Images cant be unseen and come out in dreams and nightmares, thoughts, and feelings. We need international regulation of the internet, games,films and TV."

Comment: This reminds me of my decision when my son was very young to not allow him to watch TV. We watched an episode of Wheel of Fortune, a game show, and, during the half hour, saw seven guns, and saw or heard about four murders and one rape: the murders were in advertisements for TV shows that would be on later, and the rape, which was the worst of all, was an advertisement for the local news program! It actually featured a 911 call by the victim screaming and begging for help. Of the five portrayals of violence during that innocuous game show, it was the worst, disturbing even to me. Awful. So that was it. Until he was five or six, Xander watched only videos of movies for kids on the VCR. And I'm not saying children as young as five or six should watch violence, but there comes a time when you can't protect them from it.

Very curious thing about the Mennonites and Amish around here: they've never been subjected to fictional depictions of violence.

About cameras we missed, by nextSibling: "I prevaricated over getting a [Ricoh] GRIII for quite a while. Wasn't sure if I could justify the cost for a viewfinderless APS-C camera. Having had one about a year I wouldn't be without it and it's by far my most used camera because it's so easy to set up just how I like and to carry and use, and produces images of such lovely quality that such a small camera has no business making but somehow does. So now I'm just another fanboi. Recommend you try it if you get a chance sometime."

Comment: I've heard comments like this for years! Certain cameras are more beloved by users than you would guess, and certain others are less well liked than one would guess. The GR series is in the former category.

About me taking time out to work on my book, by Keith Cartmell: "Writing can be a very circular or recursive process. In order to write it, you have to know the story, and in order to know the story you have to write it. Many writers like doing the first draft. They flail away, putting in everything that comes to mind. They don't care about spelling or grammar or plot holes or anything. They barf it all out onto the page. Then they revise, (and revise and revise and revise) which typically means fixing things and boiling the words away, till you have the exact number of words to tell the story, and not one more or less. It is entirely possible to write it out so you know how it ends and who does what to who, and how, and this version is essentially an unreadable mess. Which is fine. Then you take the same material, and write the actual story."

Comment: I seem to do exactly that with every chapter! Write it once, then throw all that out and write it again like I know what I'm doing.

About the 'Mennonite Boys' photo by David Drake: "Mike, I really like his image! Such a great mood you have captured. The image reminds me of ET or Close Encounters. The two kids on bikes (of course from ET) looking up at those glowing orbs of light. I love mysterious images like this!" 

Comment: That's very nice, and thanks to you and to others such as Lisa O. for the kind compliments.

About the "enshittification" of the Web, by Geoff Wittig: "It's very much worth digging further into your quote above from The Verge. That link in turn links to a brilliant analytic article by Cory Doctorow detailing the 'Enshittification' of TikTok. Doctorow uses 'enshittification' as a technical term. In my humble opinion, he nails what's wrong with web platforms from Google to Amazon to Twitter, and the problem is most definitely not the rise of AI.

"Rather, it's the depressing inability of the owners of these platforms to resist the gravitational pull of terminal greed. He plots their identical trajectory from creating a useful function, attracting a critical mass of users to that function, and linking their users to eager marketers and advertisers. This is followed by a pivot away from providing a function toward feeding their users to their marketers, intentionally corrupting their searches to prioritize the desires of their advertisers, and strip-mining users by selling their data. Doctorow notes that the owners carefully judge how aggressively they can abuse their own users without quite inflicting enough pain to drive them to flee the platform. All so depressingly accurate."

Comment: Very astute like most all of your comments, Geoff, and spot on...unfortunately.

Thanks to all these commenters!

How such great comments get lost is that when I moderate comments late at night when I'm tired, I reserve certain ones to "Feature," but I don't edit them and load them into the post right then because I'm too tired—and then I don't get back to it the next morning as I mean to do. In other words, SNAFU.

I'm not trying to make excuses, but it's not entirely my fault. People complain that comments don't appear quickly enough, but that's partly (only partly) because comments don't come in as quickly as they used to. It used to be that every post on TOP would get a lot of comments right away, so I developed a workflow of putting up a new post in the morning and then, directly afterwards, doing the Featured Comments for the previous day's post. If a great comment came in later, I might add it to the Featured Comments if it was really good—or I might not. Many readers aren't looking for updated comments for older posts, so, when posting Featured Comments late, there's less benefit for readers in general.

Now, however, more and more readers are checking in with TOP at longer intervals, meaning that comments come in more slowly, and great comments can arrive three, four, or even more days after the post is published. Some of these are so good that I reserve them for use as "Featured Comments," but if I don't publish them right away (because it's late and I'm tired) they're outside of my usual workflow and it's easy for them to get overlooked.

I just haven't quite worked out how to handle this yet, is all. I will point out that a daily blog with moderated and Featured comments like this one is a lot to handle, and also that I'm still using a workflow that I developed when a.) I had more energy, and b.) I worked more hours. I'll keep working on this, and thinking about solutions.

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:

Richard Parkin: "Maybe comments are dwindling because they don’t get posted quickly or not at all. It’s a negative feedback loop I think. That will never improve, as you acknowledge in this post I think, unless you change the method of posting or editing comments."

Short Something-cation (Blog Note)

Happy Independence Day for all you 'Murricans.

Little announcement: I'll be taking a something-cation for a few days. Traffic here is way down anyway during these few days around the midsummer holiday. People in the USA are off doing their own thing.

You've heard of a staycation? A vacation where you don't go anywhere? Then there's a workation, which means you travel somewhere but keep working. Well, I'm taking a few days off for a "stay-home-but-work-on-something-else"...er, -cation. 

I'm so underwater it's not even funny. I've spent the last four days working on my book and my photography. Which have both been going great. But I haven't done anything else. Every other aspect of my life I'm way behind on. I need to saddle up the lawnmower in a very bad way, for instance.

I've decided to give in and continue working on the book for three more days. So I'll be taking the next three days off to write. (Well, and mow.) Back on—let's see—Friday morning? We'll see if I can stay away that long.

I love writing
I'm starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel on the book. Tough to say how much is actually done...I've got about 60 pages or 20k words, another 10k words of first draft, and the rest of the book is all blocked out. I've made many, many false starts, but now I've finally got a good beginning. Each time I venture into further first draft, I find I have to first explain to myself in detail everything that happens, then throw out everything I've just written and remake it into scenes with forward-moving action. It's funny, because I've studied fiction and read lots of fiction in my life, but I don't consider myself a fiction reader and I don't read contemporary genre fiction. So along the way I'm doing a lot of research into authors, approaches, and simply familiarizing myself with the proper "tone."

At the same time, I have to be myself. Have you ever heard that old adage that you have to be your authentic self or else you won't know who your real friends are? If you present a false front, you'll just attract the wrong friends. It's the same with writing, I think. You have to be yourself in order to attract your real audience. So I can't just mimic other writers in the genre. I would attract the wrong readers.

I'm slowly learning the way I have to work, working out my own idiosyncrasies and deficiencies. For example, I hate writing first draft. I'm mentally disorganized, for one thing, and get lost easily. Also, first draft is generally bad writing, and I'm insecure enough that "writing bad" makes me feel defeated and pessimistic. I'm odd in that I much prefer to rewrite and polish; it's what I'm best at. (A lot of writers are the opposite.) I'm slowly coming around to the idea that my best bet in book-writing would be to start by writing a 5k-word summary, then make a complete draft, front to back, soup to nuts, in the range of 35–40k words. Then the fun part could begin. In successive rewritings the 40k-word draft would naturally swell to 60k, then 80k, then 100k words without much effort. I'd have fun at that stage. It's just how I am, how I work.

The best thing for me (this just occurred to me) would be to have somebody else write that first 35k-word draft—somebody who's good at plotting and organizing the action into chapters and who likes blocking out first draft. Then I could take over from there in my wordsmith shop, with the fire and the anvil and the hammers and tongs. We'd make a good team, me and that other imaginary writer who's good at everything I'm bad at. But dream on, old boy.

Back soon! If you're on vacation, hope you're having a good one.

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:

Open Mike: Swamp of Molasses (Blog Note)

["Open Mike" is the open-topic Editorial page of TOP. It appears when Yr. Hmbl. Ed. finds the energy.]

-

I just caught up with all the Featured Comments on the last several posts, starting with "Big Camera, Small Camera" (a list of recent posts is in the left-hand sidebar) and the ones newer than that.

I apologize for being tardy with this work, a recurring problem. I get flareups of my mental illness (depression) from time to time, and I get stuck in a state of pessimism, despondency and low energy in which even small tasks feel difficult. (I wrote a short story once in which the hero's nickname is Dragon, "because Mama always told me, boy, you're always draggin', and so I always was.") Just being honest, not looking for excuses. I've learned all sorts of tricks to deal with this over the years, and an intensive five-year course of antidepressants in the early 2000s helped immensely (thank you, David Holloway, M.D., Ph.D.)—I never get as depressed now as I used to get all the time—but the battle never ends, and sometimes it gets the better of me. In my life, the return of an ordinary level of personal energy is an occasion for gratitude and relief.

It's really much better now than it used to be. One reason I like blogging for a living is that it absorbs these periods of inaction pretty well. Severe depression, from which I no longer suffer, can be astonishingly debilitating—all but paralyzing. I had a girlfriend in the '80s whose life was utterly transformed by the then-new wonder drug Prozac. Although she considered her life to be mostly a failure and her accomplishments minimal, actually she had done an impressive job of organizing a life that allowed her to carry on despite her disability. If you're a busy and successful working person in middle age, try to imagine for a moment what your own current life would be like if, at unpredictable but inevitable intervals, you became a complete invalid for agonizingly long stretches of time—a week and a half to three weeks ordinarily, but up to as much as five weeks. That describes her situation, not every depressive's. And it happened two, three, or even more times every year. Not only could you not work during these periods, but you could barely take care of yourself. Each time, the maintenance of your everyday life would slowly start to fall apart. Think that would interrupt and complicate things in your life? That's what she had to cope with. During her periods of depression, she would have whole days at a time when she couldn't even muster the energy to get dressed, shower, brush her teeth, or cook. Every project that had been underway suddenly halted; appointments were missed; the dishes piled up; phone calls went unanswered. All she could do was lie around listlessly. She described a television show ending and not having the energy to get up and turn off the TV. I get that. I've felt that. Normies do not understand it, and people with higher-than-average levels of energy, which includes many professional photographers almost as part of the job description, find it incomprehensible. Yet she was independent and had managed to survive and cope. She had two part-time photography and graphic arts jobs that allowed her to refuse assignments when she had to (claiming to be too busy, which was ironic), and she took freelance work with long deadlines which she could schedule around her stints of inactivity. She got free rent in return for collecting the rent from other tenants in her building, also a job that could stand intermittent pauses followed by flurries of activity. Altogether it was pretty amazing that she did as well as she did. It had taken a lot of cleverness.

When I knew her, she had been on Prozac for a year, and hadn't experienced a single depressive episode in all that time. And she was beginning to trust it. She was beginning to feel hope, and to believe that she could make plans (depression is a great slayer of plans). Something very weird about me—I don't pretend to know why—is that many women I've been involved with have found their forever relationships just after dating me. And that was true of her. After we broke up, she reconnected with a high-school classmate who had carried a torch for her in their younger years, married him, and moved into a big Victorian house as had always been her dream. That's as far as I know.

I do pretty well these days. It's just that every now and then I have to slog through a swamp of molasses.

Anyway, if you get a chance, please check out those belated Featured Comments. I think my curation might have been a little one-sided on the teaching post comments, which I try not to let happen, but there have been a lot of great comments both in the Featured Comments and the regular comments section as well.

I don't feel we've exhausted this whole recent discussion, by the bye. The topic of street photography, for one thing, is fraught with antagonism and disputation. But why? There has to be a post in that. Maybe it's something similar to Sayre's Law, named after Wallace Stanley Sayre, the guy who said, "the politics of the university are so intense because the stakes are so low." I should write a rant/humor piece on that. As soon as I get the dishes done.

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:

Mike Plews: "Thirty years ago I witnessed a murder and got a taste of what real depression feels like. I was miserable, suffering insomnia, and, when I could sleep, I had nightmares that were vivid and bloody. It left me feeling like my body was encased in concrete. It took all I had to drag myself out of bed and stagger through a day at work, at which I wasn't worth a s**t. After about a month, it passed, but it left me with a deep respect for the destructive power of depression, even transitory depression. Good luck. Keeping a good thought for you."

Scott: "I agree very much that it is hard for us high-energy people to understand what depression is like. I had the misfortune to hurt my back a while ago, and the pain medication I was on had an unfortunate side effect: it caused depression. I had no idea what it was until I mentioned to my doctor that I wasn't sure if life was worth living, that I couldn't get out of bed in the morning, that I couldn't be bothered to eat. She told me to immediately stop taking the pain med and within three days I was back to myself. If it hadn't been for that chemical detour into depression, I would have no capacity to understand how debilitating it is, because it is so very far from my normal place of mind. I am heartbroken for anyone who has to go through that."

Mike replies: That's a silver lining to experiencing difficulties: it amplifies compassion. I've never suffered much from depression's twinned polar opposite, anxiety, but I had a series of panic attacks in 2014 that helped me understand what anxiety sufferers go through. I'm not saying it was good to go through that, or that I would have wanted to, but it did increase my understanding and my ability to empathize.

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