The Online Photographer

The What ('Bones' Part II)

Old print in a box

Photography is unique among the arts and crafts in that it can't (or mostly doesn't) come from nowhere. There had to be what you might call a "what"—the pretext, the thing the camera was pointed at when the picture was taken. That was the case with photography, defined as any method of dumbly capturing the image cast by a lens. The situation changes with digital imaging, which is ten times or a hundred times more easily and undetectably altered, and now by synthographs, made by "AI," in which a photographical-style illustrative image with no pretext in the real world is generated by a computer. Digital imaging is a different thing than photography, although the two have been willfully jammed up together into one thing ("digital photography," which always struck me as an oxymoron, or at least an oxymoron waiting to happen) because of the fact that it is possible to not alter and manipulate a digital image beyond simple correction, thus making it into a photograph (even though the viewer cannot be reasonably certain it is). But synthography is a different thing altogether, and belongs to a completely different class of imagemaking altogether. It is as unlike photography as linocuts or stone lithography. But put all that aside and pretend that we are talking about an art/craft that involved making pictures by pointing a lens and recording its image—the sort of thing that required a "what."

For the creator, the photographer, the classic big question then was, what is the what?

Pants legs
In photography school I got interested in the question "how many possible photographs are there?", and, as an experiment (ever the empiricist), I shut myself up in the lowest, half-underground level of my mother's townhouse on O Street in Georgetown one dull Sunday afternoon—Mom was away—and resolved to shoot as many pictures as I could find. The entire house was only 11 feet wide, but deep, and five stories high. The lower level consisted of a small dining room with a fireplace and a round table on a pedestal, a tiny kitchen that mother claimed she could cook in without ever moving her feet, which was only a slight exaggeration—it had a fold-down table that blocked the entryway when it was up, such that when she had something going on on that table she had to get down on all fours and crawl under it to get in and out of the kitchen—and of course the descending end of the staircase, under which was a powder room, which is what Mom called a half-bath. French doors opened onto the stone patio and the walled-in garden, but I set the condition that I had to shoot inside. I was armed for the experiment with two six-packs of beer; my robust Gitzo tripod, which I quickly became too lazy to deploy; the small television which was located on that level of her house; of course my camera, a Contax 139Q; and a 100-foot "bulk roll" of Kodak Plus-X that I had just rolled into reusable cassettes using a Watson bulk loader. So I had something like 21 rolls of 35-exposure film—I used 35, not 36, because that way they all fit in a 7-row x 5-frame PrintFile sheet, which in turn all fit on an 8x10 proof sheet. Enough film for 735 shots. For you film-virgin digital shooters out there, that was considered a lot. I had the cost of each shot tracked out to the very farthing, although it's been so long I don't recall what it was: the cost of the film, per frame, the developing chemicals, pro-rated (I developed my film myself, of course), the PrintFile sheet that held the negatives and the sheet of 8x10 paper for the contacts each divided by 35. The per-shot total wasn't much, but it seemed like it was, because I didn't work a job at the time—I was in art school for a living.

Anyway, I took every picture I could think of, and then many more. I wish I could remember how many rolls of film I used up; it wasn't all of them, and, simultaneously, it was way too many. I took pictures of the fringe of the rug, everything on the mantel, every object in the kitchen. I disallowed the television screen, because it imported "pictures" that were not native to that floor of the house. I took self portraits, pictures of cracks in the plaster, ten pictures of a doorknob, etc. I actually got into it for a few hours. The interest faded as subjects became steadily harder to come by. I was down there for more than six hours, and quit due to drunkenness.

I learned the obvious lesson, which is that the number of possible pictures even in the smallest space is infinity. I admit I thought contemptuous thoughts when, later, I read about the artist Robert Rauschenberg's discovery of photography, about which he said something like, "I wanted to photograph everything!" Every square inch of the world. Good luck*. 

Rather remarkably, I ended up getting something out of it, though. I edited all those pictures down, made prints of six of the pictures, and got a critique out of it. It wasn't poorly received, either, by the teachers or the class. They weren't bad, but only one was what I'd call "good," a picture of two silver candlesticks with overlapping shadows from several different lights. One was a picture of the ornate Kleenex-box cover on the back of the toilet (above), another was a picture of my corduroy-clad pants legs looking down at the base of the table, with almost nothing in focus. That one was probably taken when there were only a few beers left.

Here's the point
Anyway, to come down to it: for a photographer, an idea is any intellectual notion that facilitates and motivates working. What else could possibly have set me to taking endless numbers of pictures in a place with no pictures—what else, other than an idea? The idea can last six hours, like my little one just described, or it can last a lifetime, like William Wegman's idea, which I would argue is equally small, though obviously much more flexible and enabling. It can be purely visual, it can be technical, it can be subject-oriented, it can be illustrative of some concept, it can be documentary, it can be some notion of a methodology, it can be the pursuit of a feeling or some kind of stance—I could think of ten more things to say, but that would imply I had made an exhaustive list, whereas that can't be true—the number of possible ideas is as actually large as the number of possible pictures in the lowest floor of my mother's townhouse. It's what enables you. Whatever gets you past not-doing and into doing. Whatever you can think up that answers the question what is the what going to be. A good idea sets you free.

Mike

*By the way, did you know that photography was Rauschenberg's first interest, and he was torn between becoming a photographer or an artist? He ended up being both, in a way, because he used photographs so persistently in his work. David White, co-editor of the posthumous book Robert Rauschenberg: Photographs: 1949–1962 and Rauschenberg's curator from 1980 until he died in 2008, said, "it is surprising how little attention Rauschenberg’s photographs have gotten, considering it was his primary interest."

(Bones Part I)

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

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Music Notes: Stan Getz Needs a Heart (Open Mike)

["Open Mike" is the often off-topic, anything-goes Editorial page of TOP, in which we sometimes touch upon classic art. It appears on Sundays, usually. Sometimes. Every now and then. It aspires to appear on Sundays, let's just say.]

I wanted to alert any jazz fans out there (hi, Steve R. and you 28 other people!) to my latest find—a record by Stan Getz (tenor sax) and Bob Brookmeyer (valve trombone) on Verve entitled simply "Recorded Fall 1961."

First of all, compare the sound quality from two different sources. Here's "Minuet Circa '61" from an uploader called 60otaku4, with sound quality that's vivid and upfront; the whole album is available in gentler, smoother, more distant sound quality from Jazz Everyday! [sic]—here's "Minuet Circa '61" from that source. Very different experiences, no? Yet both are okay in their own way. I prefer the former.

(Portrait of Stan Getz by PoPsie Randolph
[I can't show it here])

Stan Getz was a prolific cool jazz saxophone soloist in the West Coast style, initially known for playing bebop, but he later became a central figure in the jazz / bossa nova craze. Brazilian bossa nova, an offshoot of samba, was only briefly popular in the U.S. (the Beatles were a-comin'), but intensely so while it lasted. You've heard him on the famous "Girl from Ipanema," and the album Getz/Gilberto is one of the all-time evergreen bestsellers in jazz, up there with Time Out and Saxophone Colossus.

He was similar in a way to Charlie Parker, Art Pepper, or Benny Goodman—facile, perfect and effortless in their musicianship, but men who had rather sketchy reputations as people. Getz lived a chaotic, destructive life, leaving ruined families and broken relationships in his wake. He can't have been easy on his children. At one point his second wife, Monica Silfverskiöld, while separated from Stan, was taking care of her children with Getz and his children by his first wife. It was Monica who suggested the collaboration with João Gilberto and Antônio Carlos ("Tom") Jobim. Reportedly Getz was reluctant at first because he had heard that the Brazilian artists had a reputation for being difficult. To which Monica replied, "Well, don't you have a reputation for being difficult?" Getz was a drug addict pretty much his whole life, and never escaped it, even after he started attending AA in '83. He held up a drugstore in Seattle once to get narcotics! Getz inspired one of the most wonderful little paragraphs of any jazz bio on Wikipedia—in its entirety, it reads:

Zoot Sims, who had known Getz since their time with [big band leader Woody] Herman, once described him as 'a nice bunch of guys,' an allusion to his unpredictable personality. Bob Brookmeyer, another performing colleague, responded to speculation Getz had a heart operation with the rhetorical question 'Did they put one in?'

I recalled that from years ago when I re-read it yesterday and it made me laugh again.

If you like or are fascinated by "The Girl from Ipanema," by the way, you owe it to yourself to at least sample Adam Neely's explanation of why it's so weird*. Adam Neely makes me feel like I understand things I definitely don't understand.

As a coda, here's Stan Getz doing a pop turn with Huey Lewis and the News on a minor hit from 1988, "Small World." Three-quarters of the way through the soft-rock tune, up steps 60+-year-old Getz, incongruously inserting a limpid, vaguely truculent cool jazz solo. It reminds me of a line from a Nate Bargatze joke: "You having fun? Because I'd like to put a stop to that." One of the very few times I've ever experienced Stan not quite coming up to his customary very high standard. Lewis is obviously delighted to have him there, however. (He did seem to like horns, as I recall.)

Anyway, give "Recorded Fall 1961" a try if you're partial to classic jazz. Ira Gitler gave it five stars (their max) in Downbeat, writing, "Getz and Brookmeyer are mature players, and everything they do on this record is in perfect balance...the most important factor in the success of this set is the ease with which these men communicate their thoughts and feelings to the audience. It seems to flow out and by the same token, right in," and here's the blip from The Penguin Guide to Jazz Recordings:

Four stars is Penguin's maximum, and they're stingy with it. I didn't even mention that Roy Haynes is the drummer. I've found him a reliable indicator of quality jazz, whether he's the leader or a sideman. Roy passed just last November at the age of 99. I once actually wrote Roy a fan letter, a thing I've almost never done my whole life long.

That was my Saturday morning yesterday.

I love art.

Mike

*Speaking of weird, after Friday's post I had to re-watch David Lean's 1946 version of Great Expectations for the first time since high school. That is just one of the weirdest, most bizarre stories I know—it's as strange as a Wes Anderson movie. It's a purely symbolic movie somehow, like some awkward half-formed myth, but it resists any kind of sense at every turn. No naturalism to it at all. The villain gets run over by a paddle steamer, the deus ex machina Magwitch dies on cue, boy gets girl in the end apparently forgetting that all her life she's literally been trained to be cold and heartless. The whole everlovin' shebang is such a melodrama that it's a parody of melodrama. I would love to hear a psychoanalytical interpretation of the sequence of events and the motivations of the characters.

I used to rather strenuously hate it—the book, the movie, even the Classics Illustrated comic book of it that I read as a boy. Now I simply wish I'd just never been exposed to it. That infernal plot, arising from some swampy place in Dickens' perfervid mind, half ruined fiction for me, by making it seem too obviously like implausible preposterous stuff people just made up. With the notable exception of A Christmas Carol, it soured me on Dickens, too. The plot of GE, which he no doubt made up as he went along (the novel was originally published in installments) ended up a coiled and tangled thing, like a big wad of fishing line. The moment in the movie that made me want to spit-take is when Miss Havisham—Miss Havisham!—says, "What have I done?" What, that's the moment Dickens picks for her to get a little flash of self-awareness?!? In the life she's been living all those years? With the wedding cake and the wedding gown and the fake cobwebs and the thirst for revenge and the vitamin D deficiency?

Maybe Dickens was following some social programmatic intent: the wealth of young snobs coming from the labor of the rough and persecuted, yet secretly devoted, working class, and the aristocratic rich (Miss Havisham) living useless neurotic lives shut away from the sun? I don't know. I certainly don't know why they made prep school students in my day read that ill-begotten lump—it's as strange as forcing Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter on a bunch of high school virgins of both sexes. (We had to read that also, as sophomores.)

/rant. Sorry; I get going sometimes. But hey, do other photography websites give you capsule reviews of Dickens novels in a footnote? They do not.  :-)

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

Featured Comments from:

Terry Letton: "Now you’ve done it, you made me think I’ve missed something. Off to Barnes and Nobel to see if they have a copy of Great Expectations!"

Mike replies: If you think you must! They will have more than one edition. I will take a stab in the dark and guess you will find five different editions at a B&N, and if you look around you might find their own edition in a soft leather-like binding looking very ersatz-posh. It will probably be on a table with more like it. I would however recommend the Folio Society edition, from the UK; it has a nice brown leather spine (if memory serves), and all the original illustrations by Marcus Stone, and a slipcase. You can find one on eBay or AbeBooks.

Peter Wright: "As is not infrequently the case, you have managed to hit on more than one of my non-photographic interests in a single post. I quite like Stan Getz, although he's not one of my major jazz favourites (that would include Dave Brubeck, and Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, and many others before Getz), and I can probably go the rest of my life without hearing 'Girl from Ipanema' ever again.

"When I was in high school, I read (I think) everything by Dickens, simply because I liked his writing so much. Loved him! A Tale of Two Cities, A Christmas Carol, Dombey and Son, Nicholas Nickleby, The Old Curiosity Shop, and more! All classics! The only one where he is clearly writing for installments, and it does get tiring, is Pickwick Papers—a sort of 19th century soap, so I don't recommend that, but all the rest? Dive right in! Including Great Expectations!"

Bryan Geyer: "Perhaps it's of no matter, but do be aware that the formerly independent bookseller AbeBooks is now (since 2008) wholly owned by Amazon. And congratulations on remembering anything from Great Expectations! I recall reading it as a teenager, along with the Bronte sisters' books, but it was C. S. Forester's series on Captain Horatio Hornblower that provided more lasting impact."

Mike replies: True dat, but AbeBooks (ABE originally meant Advanced Book Exchange) is still where most independent used and antiquarian booksellers ply their wares online.

And man, I loved those Hornblower books too! I read the whole series probably three times over by the time I was fifteen. I'm not sure I've ever found any reading that's more gripping or satisfying. But do you have to be a young boy to feel that way? I suspect maybe so....

Steve Rosenblum: "Thanks for the tip, Mike! I've been looking for new jazz (new to me that is) to listen to lately so this is racked up for a listen tomorrow. Also, sadly, Huey Lewis has lost most of his hearing due to Merniere's Disease so he no longer performs. When they were at their peak, Huey Lewis and the News were fabulous to hear live."

Tex Andrews: "What a wonderful column! So, last things first, I love Lean's Great Expectations. He's an underrated director in my opinion. That film is visually stunning and creepy in so many ways.

"On Stan Getz: the Getz/Gilberto album is a must-have for any jazz head. Bossa Nova was so huge in the early '60s, it's hard for me to believe how it's fallen so far off most folks' radar. Getz played at my college (tiny place). I had suggested to the guy who ran the spring concert program that we get out of our rut and get some jazz. For some dang reason he picked Getz. They played in the basketball gym, first mistake. His female pianist insisted they move our one grand piano from the theater to the gym—what a prima donna. Then Getz...was drunk. Basically I agree with Peter Wright above on where I'd put Getz. Important, to be sure. I heard a radio interview with Larry Coryell in the late '70s—also drunk."

robert e: "This post itself read like a nice bit of jazz, footnote and all. Thanks for that, and for all the recommendations! For what it's worth, 'Minuet' on Spotify is more like 600taku4's post, which is good, because I feel like I'm missing things when I listen to the other YouTube post. This recording wasn't on my radar at all, so I appreciate the note. Two other jazz classics you mentioned were old favorites, but weren't in my Spotify library, because I really don't have one place that reflects all the music I own, or all the music I like, or all the music I want, or the music I'm intrigued by, etc., and sometimes that seems like a real problem. What do people do these days to keep track of their music across multiple media?"

Mike replies: Beats me. Mine's all over the place. It's very unsatisfactory.

Bones

"Alas, poor Yorick!" Engraving from a painting by Horace Fisher.

I'm big on "bones."

• Our bodies need bones; skeletons are the framework that hold all our other bits up and together and in their proper places. Our skeletons survive us, too—mainly to scare us on Halloween, or to remind Hamlet of mortality.
• Old houses can be said to have "good bones"—stout, sound framing that can be used again. I live in a house that was built in 1888, but the flesh and guts—the arteries (plumbing), nerves (electrical), fat (insulation), skin (cladding or siding), and eyes (windows)—were mostly replaced in the 2010s.
• A screenplay is the bones of a movie. All the people who make movies are wonderful at their work, performing an infinite number of jobs in symphonic coordination to realize a creative vision, but, no matter how well all that is done, without a good solid script it all falls apart. I like to call beautifully made movies with defective screenplays "jellyfish"—bad bones; weak story. No matter how well realized—acted, directed, set to music—a movie that's a jellyfish can never be anything but a jellyfish.

Somebody here confessed the other day to loving YouTube. It's a new medium—very vigorous, much maligned. The bones of a short-form video—the idea or concept—is not so easy to come up with; already we see rote formulae, and every conceivable form of mistake and error. My favorite is when AI is choosing random illustrations for voiceover and hopefully chooses a generic photograph, but it's of the wrong person, place, or thing. I watched a video about Brian Gottfried the other day—an old-tyme tennis player—and some of the photos were of Vitas Gerulaitis, another tennis star of the same era who superficially resembled Gottfried. Still a few "flaws in the ointment."

I like an old-fashioned and somewhat unpedigreed word for idea generation—ideaphoria. "Ideaphoria is the ability to quickly generate ideas, or to have a creative imagination. It can be measured using a test that assesses the speed and volume of ideas, but not their quality." David Foster Wallace and Robin Williams both had very high ideaphoria.

Pip and...Pip, from David Lean's Great Expectations, 1946

Media are all different and require different ideas
In all new media, it takes some time for people to understand which kinds of ideas work and which fall flat. For example, do you remember in the early days of movies when movies would be adapted from novels, and the novel tracked a character at different ages? Jane Eyre and Great Expectations both track their main characters in childhood and then on into adulthood. In written novels, this works fine—Willa Cather's My Ántonia tracks Jim and Ántonia from childhood to death, for instance—Ántonia dances for just a short interlude in the quick of youth. In movies, though, it's clunky, this scheme. You can't use the same actor for both (there's one early film version of Jane Eyre in which Jane the child and Jane the adult seem to have completely different personalities, mannerisms, and affect; it's hard to imagine how the one became the other), and the audience has to be clued into the fact that, oh yeah, this is supposed to be the same person, only later. That awkward break used to be familiar to moviegoing audiences, who were supposed to have learned to "suspend disbelief" about it, but, soon enough, screenwriters realized it just doesn't work all that well in movies, and they stopped doing it. (Richard Linklater eventually solved the problem in Boyhood [2014], a movie shot over a period of 11 years as the child actors actually grew up! The problem there was that the whole movie couldn't be scripted in advance—the director had to let it evolve as the actors grew into being themselves. Worth seeing, if you haven't.)

But I digress. Anyway, short-form informational videos being a newly dominant media, we're in the period where creators are learning how to generate good ideas, learning what works and what doesn't. Here's a stellar positive example, from a channel called Doctor Mike. The idea is simple, original (at least, I've never seen it before), instantly gettable, yet quite brilliant. He states it in words right from the very outset: "I asked a bunch of different medical specialists, what's the one thing that they would never do given the things that they've seen in their specialty?"

Brilliant idea: succinct, creative, and more or less infinitely flexible. The rest of the video is various specialists naming those things. An orthopedic surgeon, for instance (since we were talking about bones! You see what I did there), says he would never a.) ride a motorcycle or b.) play with fireworks. "My hands," he says, "They're critical. They're precious, I need them, and I don't want to blow 'em up."

The point is that every creative effort in every artistic medium needs bones: a structure to guide the work and give it a framework. A concept. Some kind of guiding set of aims, principles, or ways of proceeding. Even the absence of a framework is a framework! Stream of consciousness* writing, for example, that abnegation of structure, is itself a structure, isn't it? Isn't The Americans in effect stream-of-consciousness photography?

This is the topic I was struggling with two days ago and couldn't organize. I wanted to talk about how we get ideas for still photography and why ideas at their worst can be stunting and restricting and, at their best, enabling and freeing. It's a big, sprawling topic, one in which every specific claim is potentially wrong and yet still could be helpful. Very important and, still, seldom talked about, because it's big and blowsy and not everything will pertain to everyone. Difficult to reduce it to neat little categories and tidy theories stacked like blocks.

And yet. A photographer with a truly great idea can work that goldmine for a decade.

Mike

*William James, one of the most important writers now never read (he's very whitemale, for one thing), is thought to have coined the phrase, in The Principles of Psychology, 1890: "...Consciousness, then, does not appear to itself as chopped up in bits...it is nothing joined; it flows. A 'river' or a 'stream' are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described. In talking of it hereafter, let's call it the stream of thought, consciousness, or subjective life."

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

Featured Comments from:

John Camp: "This might be the most critical question faced by all artists—the question of 'what to do?' and then, secondarily, 'how to do it?' I've given this a lot of thought over the years, and the conclusion I've reached is that people want art (of all kinds) that deals with...people. The Americans has probably a dozen photos that don't have people in them in one way or another, and even those photos refer to people and their artifacts. No pure landscapes. No abstractions. I'm an art freak who has educated himself in a certain way, and so I do like (some) landscapes and abstractions, but in a sort of distant, intellectual art-freak way, not particularly viscerally. The very best photos and paintings, IMHO, have to have a visceral element. Have to evoke an emotional response based on memory and experience and human relationships."

Greg Boiarsky: "A lot of the bones for your ideas can be traced to Marshall McLuhan: 'The medium is the message.' (And, of course, many other clever variants.) Not only do we need to develop a structural language for each new medium (sorry—not media, which is plural), but we also need to find the match between our content and the affordances of the new medium. That is, we need to discover what is inherent or natural to the new medium. Going from print to the moving picture, for example, allows the creator to more easily and fluidly depict the flow of time or causal chain of a process. Going from print or TV to the internet allows the creator to add interactivity to the content. Of course, there are other fits/matches.

"What I find more interesting than what the new medium can do is what it can't do. When I want to do something with my photography that isn't natural to image making, I am forced to be creative within the bounds of the photographic language and limitations of a two-dimensional construct. The very restrictions that limit me also force me to think in new ways. The mother of invention and all that (pardon the sexist trope)."

Deep Concern for Friends in L.A.

This is a helpless and meaningless thing to do, but it feels callous to blithely carry on with no mention of it. Obviously we can't acknowledge many things that happen in the world at large. But today we acknowledge and express concern for all of our friends and their relatives affected by the terrible fires in Los Angeles.

I spoke to my cousin John yesterday, checking on him and his wife—they live near the Pacific west of Torrance. Thankfully there is no danger yet where he lives, but he said the stories there are truly horrible. Thousands of building have been lost and tens of thousands of people displaced. The fires have destroyed homes along the Pacific Highway, and the eastern part of Malibu is ablaze. In Palisades, with limited roads in and out, he told a story of people fleeing who got caught in slow traffic, and, seeing fire on both sides of the road, panicked and fled on foot. Authorities then had to send bulldozers down the road pushing abandoned cars aside to reopen the road. Today fires virtually ring the San Fernando valley. Pierce has not been heard from yet—Pierce (his first name is Bill, but he never uses it) is a good old photo-dawg and photojournalist who used to be a custom B&W printer for the professionals and famous artists in New York City. Given the location of his house he probably had to evacuate. I saw a report that actor James Woods was in tears when he related that his eight-year-old niece offered him her piggy bank to help rebuild his destroyed home.

A friend who works in public policy, in a different specialty, offered wise counsel—"Rule No. 1 for these occasions to ignore all immediate spin from politicians and pundits. Only after all the ashes have literally settled will it be possible to reliably sort out whether and where there have been preventable policy or implementation failures, and what might reasonably be done about them." Amen to that.

A well done BBC page offers perspective on what is happening, as well as many visual illustrations. It's called "In maps: Thousands of acres on fire in LA."

Our thoughts go out to those affected today.

Mike

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

Featured Comments from:

Gordon Lewis: "I was born in Los Angeles and moved almost 20 years ago. The so-called Eaton fire in Altadena, California, just north of Pasadena, has just consumed the neighborhood I once lived in. Old friends who once owned multi-million dollar homes in Pacific Palisades and Malibu are now homeless. This is the paradox of Southern California: the very things that make it so attractive can be destroyed in an instant by fires, mudslides, earthquakes, riots, hubris, you name it. Those of us who live elsewhere shouldn't feel too smug though: climate change is spreading the same seeds of pending disaster worldwide. We just don't yet know what form it will take."

William Lloyd: "As a native Angeleno, I am particularly well-acquainted with the areas lost to these fires in general, and especially in the Pacific Palisades. I have spent much time working in these neighborhoods; I recognise many of the locations we see in the pictures of devastation. I still have family in Ventura and South Pasadena, who remain safe.

"But, in addition to my deep sympathy for those who have lost everything is a startling personal realization: perhaps as much as half my output in my career as a professional cabinetmaker has been lost in this and other recent fires. A trivial loss in comparison to be sure, and yet...I have outlived my legacy!"

Mike replies: I'm sorry to hear that. There are many kinds and forms of loss. The emotional impact of loss (and grief) doesn't follow a rational hierarchy. Many people think it should; they disapprove when someone, say, mourns a pet more than a sibling. Jacques Lowe's photographic archive was stored in a bank vault in the basement of the Twin Towers. That loss was not primary when compared to the lives lost that day and the first responders exposed to toxins that later debilitated them, not to mention the trauma to a nation and the political turmoil that followed. For years it seemed almost disrespectful to even bring it up. Yet I still think of it as a pity.

JH: "Until 3 p.m. this afternoon, the evacuation zone here in Santa Monica was 3.5 blocks from us and the evacuation warning zone across the street. Fortunately, the fires have burned as far S and E toward us as they will but are headed N into the hills where we hike. The fury of these wildfires and the speed with which they spread is unfathomable—until you see it personally. (This was our second one.) In this case there were winds pushing the fire toward densely packed neighborhoods at 40–60 mph (70–100 kph.)

"Here some photos.

"Noon Tuesday from the corner of our block. The fire had started less than an hour before.

"About 4 p.m. Tuesday, view from the oceanside park 10 blocks from us. The fire was gaining intensity fanned by the high winds, headed for the Pacific Coast Highway and the ocean..

"View from our balcony at 1 a.m. Wednesday. The fire was about 2–3 miles away but scary. Hard to get to sleep.

"Today 4 p.m. from the same oceanside park as above. The fire has leveled most of Pacific Palisades and moved North but still burning ferociously in mountain brush in the Santa Monica Mountains.

"Incredible losses—5–6,000 homes, probably average value $4–5 million. Homes and collections of many artists. Lost: a number of famous architect houses, Will Rogers Ranch (where we hiked several times a week...we think the Eames House survived, along with several other Case Study Houses.

"Scary from where we live...."

Abort! Eject! (Blog Note)

Sorry about yesterday. Sometimes I sit down to write, turn the processor on, hit the go button, and nothing comes out. The power's out. I struggled with a piece for a few hours, but the longer I struggled with it the worse it got.

The opposite happens sometimes too. I'll sit down with no idea what I'm going to write about and it it all magically comes together and I create something that people seem to enjoy. You never know what you're going to get. This is my twentieth year of doing this—I'm very accustomed to the patterns, the way it plays out, the warp and woof. This just happens from time to time. No big deal.

Back to work!

Mike, Director of Publications

 

Bittman 'n' Katz (OT)

I completely understand those who take a dim view of my nutrition enthusiasms, and I hope they have noticed (please) that I've gone very light on the subject in the past year or two.

However, in the meantime, many readers have contacted me to report good to outstanding results with their own change of diet, which in more than a few cases has been revelatory and/or health-changing for them.

So click through if you wish; it's short. Otherwise, please feel free to ignore!

Who's Winning: Nikon, Canon, Sony or PanaLeica?

It appears that the PTB (powers that be) want us all to be using full-frame mirrorless (FFM) SLR-shaped cameras with 24- to 60-megapixel sensors now. The main makers of these are all three of the largest camera manufacturers, Canon, Sony, and Nikon, in that order, and the L-Mount Alliance (in which Panasonic, Leica, and Sigma are participants).

It's true that Ricoh (with Ricoh and Pentax cameras), Fujifilm, OM System, and a few others make viable and attractive cameras. But, taken together, Canon, Sony, Nikon, and Panasonic now account for over 90% of the global interchangeable-lens camera market.

So who's winning?

Not in terms of earnings or market share—in terms of cameras that dedicated photographers want to own and use. I have to admit that at this juncture, I don't have enough experience with the various brands and models to make a call. I've never been as interested in cameras for their own sake as my career choice would seem to predict. I'm a serial enthusiast, but it has mainly been self-centered—that is, what's best for me and for what I want to do? What fires my endorphins and nourishes my enthusiasm? If I'm going to look at FFM cameras and imagine which one would be for me, I'd have to at least visit B&H Photo and spend a day learning the lay of the land and holding the various cameras in my hand and looking through their viewfinders. I'd go from there. I used to pick my cars by going to car shows and getting in the darn things. Eventually one would feel right.

With FFM cameras, I'd also have to accept certain hypothetical conditions—I'd have to imagine that a.) I'm not already invested in any camera or system, and b.) money was no object. That would be the only way to level the playing field between Canon, Sony, Nikon, and PanaLeica. The way we used to say it was, "imagine all your cameras got stolen and you got a big insurance settlement...."

This probably sounds odd, and it might tag me as an outsider or a contrarian (which would not be entirely wrong I must admit), but I think what I would choose would be a Leica SL3 and a small (3–4) set of Sigma Contemporary L-Mount lenses.

Simple. (Photos courtesy B&H Photo.)

This appears crazy on the surface, because why choose the one-off Leica body when slicker, more advanced bodies are available from the vastly larger and more technologically advanced Japanese companies? And, if you are going to choose Leica, then why "settle" for lenses that aren't made by Leica, considering that lenses are what Leica has been known for for decades, and that Leica is the company best able to make its lenses cost-no-object?

Here are my answers: because I have come to believe that higher-level Japanese cameras are too complicated and technologically intricate, such that the excessive complexity—for me, this is—gets in the way of an easy, intuitive, natural connection between tool and operator. If cars were so complicated, only fighter pilots could drive. Leica is the one company that has had the courage to go for a sensible simplicity. And mind you, making devices simple is as difficult as making them complicated, and maybe more so. So I wouldn't be getting an SL3 for the build quality, or the prestige, or the viewfinder, or for the high pixel count (well, maybe a little for the famously good viewfinder and the high pixel count). I'd choose it for its haptics, ergonomics, and controls.

I should try one to make sure. (Actually, I should test an SL3 and have a shootout between my Sigma 45mm and a similarly spec'd Leica L-mount lens. That would be wicked fun.)

And as for the Sigma lenses...well, I know the Leica lenses would be a siren song, beckoning as if from Shangri-La. But I don't actually like large cameras, and the sensibly-sized and light Sigmas would serve to lighten the whole package in the hand. Plus, it's been many years since any good top-quality lens wasn't good enough for me. It's not like all lenses are the same now, but I'm just not as convinced as I was in the old days that the lens is where the magic lies.

More testing would be needed, naturally.  :-)

Mike

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

Featured Comments from:

Neil Swanson: "Very interesting to read this now, as just last week I returned a used Leica SL2S and sigma 50mm Contemporary lens. I really just had to try the stuff. I’ve used Nikon for over 40 years. I had a few years with a lot of Fuji gear that I used alongside my Nikon, and then I rented a Sony. For the paying work that I do now it is hard to beat everything the Sony offers. That Leica was nagging at me though, and it is really a very fine camera. As long as you don’t expect it—and you shouldn’t—to do everything a Sony or a Canon or modern Nikon will do. You’ll be fine. Yes that viewfinder is absurdly good. The auto focus is probably a lot like your Fuji XT one; well, maybe a little better. Anyhow, in the end I sent it back for a few reasons, but it’s a fine camera. I’d like to try an SL3 sometime and see how close it gets to the other big brands. I’m also fine with Sigma lenses. They are excellent."

Chris: "I agree completely that the Leica SL3 is a beautiful camera to hold, and indeed part of the reason is that it is so large and wide and yet comparatively thin. I use Sony because of the huge availability of native secondhand lenses from all brands, and in a huge range of quality and prices,. No other brand can match that. In terms of pleasure, though, I use the OM System, which is the only camera that gives me joy all the time when using it. Small and so powerful and well designed. Both Sony and OM systems have notorious menus, but once customized, it's easy."

Christer Almqvist: "I agree that 'higher-level Japanese cameras are too complicated and technologically intricate, such that the excessive complexity—for me, this is—gets in the way of an easy, intuitive, natural connection between tool and operator.' There are ways around that problem. My Sony A7r V has enough progammable buttons to help me avoid diving into the admittedly complicated menu system for day-to-day tasks. For the once-in-a-while situations not covered by the progammable buttons, I press the 'FN' button and I have a dozen easily adjustable menu items selected by me instantly available. When that is not enough, I just ask 'perplexity.ia .' (Remember when the first Sony 'testers' downgraded the camera because you had to insert the memory card the wrong way?)"

Luke: "Re 'If cars were so complicated, only fighter pilots could drive.' Yeah, well, most people on the road CAN'T drive. They rely on traction control and self-steering and radar cruise control and backup beepers. It's like AI controls cars."

Trevor Johnson: "Rather than going to a camera store, renting cameras with a couple of the lenses you would choose to go with it, is what I do. It may take a little longer, but the right choice is more important than living with the wrong one."

Mark: "I have been using the Leica SL2 S with Sigma contemporary lenses, the 17mm ƒ/4, 24mm ƒ/3.5, 35mm ƒ/2 and 65mm ƒ/2. I add in the 20mm ƒ/1.4 for low light city stuff and could not be happier. I suspect one Leica SL APO lens would cost more than all these lenses combined and still would not have an aperture ring.... Sigma is producing wonderful lenses these days. As the SL2-S is about to be replaced you can buy them new for less than a Nikon or Sony top-end body. A lot less."

G Dan Mitchell: "I can't say who is the 'winner' among these brands...and even if I did someone else would make a fine case for why their brand is better for them. The bottom line is that we have excellent cameras from all of these manufacturers these days—cameras that can do things that we could barely imagine a few decades ago. While I understand the appeal of the Leica name, I don't think that would be the right choice for many buyers, regardless of the price. The systems from the other manufacturers provide far more opportunities to tailor the camera to the user—more lens options, more accessories, etc. It isn't that you'll need or want all of them, but it is that you can configure the system almost exactly the way you want."

Then Verse Now

["Open Mike" is the anything-goes, often but not always off-topic Editorial Page of TOP, in which Yr. Hmbl. Ed. skids wildly on the ice and crashes into whatever is in front of him. It appears on Sunday so infrequently that it's useless to say that it appears on Sundays.]

SA*

A newspaper article is classically written "top down," in the so-called inverted pyramid format.

The headline gives the basic information in pithy and hopefully catchy form. For example, "Viral Texas Chain Collision Actually Happened in 2021."

The byline and dateline tell the reader who is responsible for the reporting, the umbrella organization which you will hopefully recognize as trustworthy, and when it was first published, for instance, "By Mike Johnston, The Online Photographer, 5 January 2025."

The lede (pronounced" leed") is a paragraph giving all the essential information contained in the article. For example:

"A video showing cars and trucks smashing into each other on an icy Texas highway has gone viral in the New Year in 2025, accompanied by the false information that it just happened. It was a real accident, but it happened almost four years ago, in 2021, during a Winter freeze that hit Texas particularly hard."

Then comes the body, in which the lede is fleshed out, usually in several paragraphs, if possible answering the traditional "five W's + how" of "who, what, where, when, why, and how." Telling, for instance, why the old news story is being recycled as if it just happened (a craven gambit to pull in social media views, which worked), what weather event caused it (a severe cold snap which led to President Biden declaring an state of emergency in Texas), when it actually happened (February 11th, 2021, the first day of the storm), and where (I-35 in Fort Worth), how many cars and trucks were involved and how many people were hurt or killed (133 vehicles, causing six deaths and 65 injuries), the wider situation it was a part of (power outages were widespread and 246 people died statewide as a result of the storm), what the source of the misinformation was (a wrongly titled video stating that it happened on January 1, 2025), and so on. The body might go one for several paragraphs.

After the body, minor details might be added, for instance, that a dog was among those rescued from the crash scene, that it took firefighters and emergency crews until the next day to clear the highway, perhaps a quotation from one of the survivors or one of the rescue personnel, etc.

What a traditional newspaper article does not have is distractions inline with the text block, especially unrelated diversions that can take the reader away from the article permanently with one click of the mouse!

A newspaper article also doesn't have a concluding or summarizing paragraph, for two reasons. First, all the salient information has already been given at the top; and second, so that compositors can trim the end of the article to fit whatever column space is available without omitting any necessary information—all they'll cut is, perhaps, the part about the dog.

As opposed to
the reason this format evolved this way is based on the way people read newspapers. Few people read newspaper articles all the way to the end. You scan the article headlines and read on if the subject grabs you. If you're only moderately interested you might stop after the lede; if you're engaged by the story you might get into the body, and only if you want the complete picture for some reason will you persist through the minor details at the end.

Efficient. And, one might say, courteous.

Now, of course, if you look at a typical news article online, you might notice that a different paradigm is evolving.

First, the headline is cut off, on the pretext that it's longer than the space available, viz.: "Photographers Missing Out on Free In...", such that you have to click on it just to see the whole dang headline and find out what the freaking article is even about. There's no byline, no name of any umbrella organization as the source of the article so you can get a clue of whether it's trustworthy or not (or a completely anodyne name you don't recognize at all), and the article is undated—which is especially unhelpful if you're looking for up-to-date information. Then, the headline turns out to be a deliberate tease: "Photographers Missing Out on Free Insurance That Could Save Them THOUSANDS!!!" Scrolling down, you come to a brief paragraph with seven typos, wrong words, and illiterate sentence structure, on account of the article has been written by a combination of ChatGTP and a non-native ESL speaker who resides in a distant land—no hate implied; he's making his $7 a day and he both needs it and earns it—bracketed by three large advertisements, including one right below the snippet of text. Your skills at discriminating meat from crud online are constantly improving, of course. Because they must. The text is just some blather about how times are tough and everyone needs to save money and you could too if you only knew to do THIS. You scroll down, blood pressure rising, and get to the second paltry text block, at which point the ads refresh and cause the text block to reset two inches down from where it just was, causing you to lose your place. Doesn't matter, because the second text block contains nothing but renewed teasing promises to get you to keep scrolling.

This goes on until you have seen 19 ads you have absolutely zero interest in and two which you were kinda tempted to click on except you know better because you're smarter than Pavlov's dogs. At which point, the article tells you that you might want to think about putting your cameras on your homeowner's insurance using a rider, which you already knew.

And then to add insult to injury you have to figure out how to get back to the page you were reading before you took the stupid bait and got a sharp fishhook painfully stuck in your lip. Which you do, only to find that the main page itself has refreshed in the meantime and the other articles you kinda wanted to read have disappeared and been replaced by something else.

Ah, progress.  

Mike

*Satire alert.

P.S. Culture and society will figure out the internet eventually. Right now it might resemble the picture above, but newspapers themselves had a "wild west" phase in which there were limitations but few rules. Standards of book publishing had to evolve over centuries. The ethics of good journalism and accepted best practices, such as simple matters of format, had to evolve slowly as practical effects were observed and lessons were learned. The same thing will happen to media online...someday.

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

Featured Comments from:

Ed Otten: "Brilliant expose of the time-wasting machinations of the web. Particularly troubling are the algorithms which dog one between devices. Showing even a modicum of interest in a product results in a lingering cascade of related click baits...sooo annoying and, in a sense, quite frightening!"

Charles Rozier: "The really crazy thing is that these clickbait headlines you describe appear even within paid sites like the New York Times, which supposedly is not competing with itself for clicks. It seems to have become one of those cultural decline things…."

Craig: "I hate the teaser headlines that are becoming common even in mainstream news outlets. The San Francisco Chronicle has an annoying habit of writing headlines like, 'This Bay Area City Now Has Highest Property Values in Northern California,' making you click on it just to find out what city they're talking about, even though the actual name of the city would have taken up less space than 'This Bay Area City.'"

Mike replies: You make a good point: that the bad habits of online writing are spilling over into old-time print media now too.