The Online Photographer

Best Camera for Carrying All the Time

What's the best camera for carrying with you all the time? Sara Piazza mentioned the Panasonic Lumix LX100 Mark II in her featured comment to the twin calves post, and, after my encounter with Moses and Hope, I had just been idly looking at that very thing last night (I can drift into casual shopping mode at the drop of a hat. It's seldom serious, just diversion, usually late in the evening when I'm too tired to do anything else. For years I have avoided news near bedtime, lest it trouble my sleep).

Looks big. 'Tisn't.

The only time I carried a camera with me all the time was during my three years with the Leica M6, which might have been 1991–4. Then I got the job as Editor of Darkroom & Creative Camera Techniques and I sat in a windowless cube of an office all day, every day, and wearing the Leica day after day at my desk soon became absurd, comical, Kafkaesque.

Seems to me there are two schools. One is that you get the smallest camera you possibly can and stash it in a purse, pocket, briefcase or backpack. The other is that you get a small camera but one that fits your hands and has some weight, the better to carry it on a strap hanging from your shoulder, and that's the way you keep it with you. The latter is what I did with my Leica. "You put it on in the morning and take it off at night, like your shirt," said David Vestal.

I do know photographers who never carry a camera unless they're giving 100% of their attention to photographing. They either want to be concentrating on it fully or not thinking about it at all.

A reader actually gave me an X100s a few years ago, and I found I wasn't using it so (with his blessing) I passed it on (i.e., sold it. There is much churn of cameras when you write about them, and that's been a constant up-and-down for me for 32 years). Isn't that a pretty perfect carry-all-the-time camera, or is it too delicate and fussy? I seem to remember that Michael McCaskey drifted away from his and got something else.

A further step up the ladder of behaviors is when you have a big camera that you only get out when you're photographing deliberately and purposefully. For me there's some mysterious dividing line...a small enough camera, and I will take it with me, hanging from my shoulder. But let it get just a little too big, and I leave it home unless I am going out specifically to photograph. This doesn't seem to be something I consciously decide, but it's been an observable behavior with me. The X-H1 seems to be on the far side of that mysterious divide for me...it's just big enough that I never take it with me unless I specifically mean to photograph. Too much to carry on the off chance of the herpetologist at the Walgreens (per RubyT's featured comment).

Josh Hawkins carries (carried?) a big Canon DSLR with a 35mm ƒ/1.4 all the time, though, so different strokes.

The best camera for carrying all the time for you? Do you even do that, or wish to?

Mike
(Thanks to RubyT and Sara Piazza)

Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Featured Comments from:

BERND REINHARDT: "I actually ended up buying the X100s from you, and after a summer trip, I too sold it to a friend. I quickly realized that whenever I carry any camera with me, it might as well be the best one for the job. The occasions when I would say 'I will take the X100s over my Leica today' just didn't materialize. I remind myself of this anytime I get tempted to buy a 'small' camera now."

Dave Jenkins: "I pick up the X-H1 when I'm going out to photograph. I pick up the Fuji X-Pro1 with the 27mm (42mm equiv.) ƒ/2.8 lens when I'm just going out. I've been doing the 'on with my shirt, off with my shirt' thing for more than 50 years. My family refers to my camera as my 'appendage' or my 'growth.'"

Kenneth Tanaka: "Any relatively recent model of smartphone with a good camera system. Period. For me that’s an iPhone 11 Pro. I know many people grumble and grouse that this is not a 'real,' as you also have done in the past. But the loss from their prejudice is theirs. 'Invest' in a good smartphone and learn to master its camera. That means practice, practice, practice as you did with that old SLR blunderbuss of yore. Third party camera apps are no longer genuinely useful on the iPhone. In fact they don’t have access all the mediative facilities that the camera system offers. Stick with the native camera app.

"Next level up for me: the Sony RX100. Currently for me it's a Mark VII but any recent model is fine. It’s simply a stupendous super cam that can go almost anywhere. Look at some of my own work online as evidence."

Mike replies: I want to get behind the Sony RX100 VII, but it seems just ungodly expensive to me...thirteen hundred dollars for a little 1"-sensor digicam?! That doesn't seem reasonable for anybody but Sony.

Andrew Lamb: "The choice changes with however my back is feeling. I'm the same age as you and in reasonably good health but there are times when the thought of lugging a camera around is too much. There are times when I go walking when the only accessory I want is my dog."

schralp: "For about the same price, you can get the Z50 with the 'pancakey' 16–50mm lens. Although not loved by reviewers (who are hard to please these days) it is a very solid performer and the z mount is promising. It is about the same size, has a built-in flash, an APS-C sensor and allows you to change lenses."

Rob de Loe: "I used to carry a Ricoh GR all the time 'just in case.' It was an excellent camera, very small, very capable. However, I've passed through and out of that phase. I'm definitely in the 'all the way or don't bother' camp. I see countless interesting photographs all the time, every day; I can't turn it off. But I'm just not interested in making random pictures anymore, especially with a phone camera. If I'm carrying a camera these days, it's because I'm trying to make a photograph."

Steve Rosenblum: "Minolta CLE with M Rokkor 40mm ƒ/2 lens or Voigtlander Color Skopar 28mm ƒ/3.5 lens. Easily fits in a jacket pocket, especially with the 28mm which is little rock-solid jewel of a lens. If in a digital mood—Fujifilm X100V. The Fuji X100 series vastly improved once it got to the X100F and the autofocus got fast enough. The earlier models had too much focus lag. Now is is an ideal 'decisive moment digital' carry-everywhere camera."

Bob Hansen: "Sara's comments on her new Lumix LX100 II and your picture of this little gem brought a smile to my face. Being a Sony shooter for many years I have missed the the multiple exposure features of other brands. A friend recently showed a number of wonderful multiple exposure prints and mentioned he used the little LX 100. I tried it and bought it for the multiples but am smitten with what I am getting out of it. I also have the original Sony RX100 and have carried it like an additional appendage for years, however, the LX100 is now permanently attached to my body. I photograph, as you say, deliberately; however, carrying my extra appendage has given me many special images that otherwise would not be in my portfolio.

"Keep safe and well—we'll soon be out and about again."

Sara Piazza: "Gosh, famous on TOP—what fun! Part of what makes the Lumix work for me (aside from its being a great little camera) is the small padded bag that I keep it in, worn cross-shoulder. It's barely noticeable, plus it holds a battery and a couple o' cards. The camera is protected, and always there.

"I have been photographing for fifty years and have been through lots of cameras, but never have I been as pleased as I am with this one for everyday use (and I'd go really nuts if its screen tilted). I thought my top-notch phone camera would be the answer—and the Note 10 Plus does have a great camera, but it's slippery, and I can't even touch the thing without checking email and messages and social media, and I just wanted more pro options. And just so you know, I was out this evening with the EOS R, a 600mm big beast, and tripod, to shoot the paschal moon (wearing the Lumix, of course). Happy holidays. Sara from the Vineyard."

David Raboin: "I was always too careful about my photography purchases to buy a 'go everywhere camera.' Every camera or lens purchase had to go towards building the most capable kit and I ended up with a DSLR and giant, fast lenses. Even though it was big I took my DSLR almost everywhere. Last fall, TOP reader Ned Bunnell loaned me his Ricoh GR II for a long term test. It took me only five days to decide to buy my own GR III.

"Any camera that'll fit in your pocket is going to have compromises. You can tell that Ricoh's engineers are also photographers because they made all the right choices. With the GR you get a moderately fast prime lens coupled to a great sensor. You can operate the camera quickly with one hand. The GR is the only camera I know of that's as convenient to carry as my cell phone yet the controls are so easy that I can easily shoot one-handed, in full manual mode while pulling a suitcase through a crowd. The pictures look as great, killer lens and sensor. And the image stabilization means I can take pics hand-held in the dark. And the best feature is the camera's unassuming body. Nobody notices you are taking photos. It's easier to get street photos as well as true candid shots at home. I love it."

Kristine Hinrichs: "That LX100 II is my walking around camera. The colors are really nice, the mono color JPEGs are very good and I can even get good distance shots with the digital teleconverter. I have custom modes set for the later two and find it easy to use them. It is really pocketable."

There's Mo to Life

I mentioned yesterday that I was feeling out of sorts and intended to go out for some fresh air and exercise. I headed for the hill, where I sometimes walk; the theory is that the uphill trudge is good for my heart, although who knows. When I left the house I actually looked right at the camera, my old X-T1 and the fast 35mm lens for it, and thought, should I take that?

I swear I had just this exact thought: I always see something good up on the hill.

But I only took the phone, the real purpose of which is so I can call somebody if I keel over with the apoplexy from hill-climbing, at my age. It was a beautiful evening, high 40s (about 8 degrees for those of you in civilization) and clear as can be. A nearly full moon risen against the still-blue sky, and gorgeous, delicate clouds. A dissipating contrail rose like a plume from where the road met the horizon.

As I was passing my friend Honeybee Dave's western pasture, I noticed a young cow who's solid brown—how now, brown cow? All the rest are black and white. Further up the hill I spied Dave himself, up by his barn on a higher knoll, turning hay in a bale feeder, so I headed off the road along his fencerow toward him. I hailed him and waved. 

When I got closer I said, "I see you've got a youngster in the lower pasture who's brown."

"A youngster," he answered. "You want to see some real youngsters?"

"You've got a new one?"

"Two new ones," he answered, "Three days old. I'll show you."

His Daisy had thrown twins, turned out. Her third time as a mother. "I didn't see it coming," he said. His first clue should have been when she "blew two bubbles," as he put it, meaning her water broke twice. The second birth was a near-run thing. The two youngsters are Hope and Moses, and Moses, the male, spent too much time in the birth canal, and came out not breathing. Dave himself gave the newborn calf his first breath, and then he and his friend Pam, who was helping, had to keep Moses "roughed up and agitated"—up and moving—for the first two hours of his life while his lungs cleared.

Moses and Hope. At three days old they're about the size
of St. Bernard dogs, and soft to the touch.

Daisy trusts Dave so much that she didn't even have to be haltered and tied during the whole birthing procedure. She just stood for him.

The calves, too, are laid-back as can be, not skittish at all. Hope came right over to me and stood while I patted her head and skritched behind her ears. They played un-selfconsciously in their pen, relaxed as can be.

Hope at age 30 seconds. Taken by Dave right before
all the commotion with Moses began.

Was I ever feeling sheepish, though. I just got accused by a reader of not being a photographer, and there I was taking pictures in the shady barn with a phone. Dang. We need to talk about this thing where you leave your camera behind because you kinda have a camera on you. But more about that at a later time.

Seeing the calves restored my spirits—"made my day," as the saying goes. As Dave and I were talking outdoors, while he worked at the bale feeder, a magnificent sleek raptor came by, flying low and steady. Dave didn't have his glasses on but he thought it was bird called a harrier. A moment later its mate followed across the tops of the trees, against the clouds and the lowering sun. Dave has a thing about raptors, and he lives in the right place, because there are a lot of them around here.

As I started back down the hill, having taken my leave of Dave and his cows, the sun setting behind the high ridge of the bluff across the lake, I saw three deer running stiff-legged along the tree line at the back of a fallow pasture, the smallest one kicking its heels up. It was that kind of evening, when you feel glad to be alive.

Moses, who is fine now, is a handsome young fellow, with a
distinctive white face. The tip of his tail is white too.

"Want to know why I named him 'Moses'?" Honeybee Dave asked. "I'm going to call him 'Mo.'" He paused and then with a peal of a laugh said, "There was one Mo!" 

Mike

P.S. Did you notice the lens flare in the first shot? A faint echo diametrically opposite the bright sunlight coming through the slats, on Moses' leg and below it.

Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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

hugh crawford: "Holstein with maybe some Jersey?

"Cows are pretty stoic about calving. Goats, on the other hand, go completely bonkers. My grandmother used to bring her Sunday school class out to the farm to watch cows calving, because it made sense to her I guess.

The first time one of our goats had a kid, she had her Sunday school girls out to watch, and it was a huge hullabaloo. She called the large animal vet, who said, '...so is she acting like she’s having a seizure or is it more of a possessed-by-demons kind of thing?' and without pausing added, 'they’re like that.'

"That evening my mother asked my grandmother how things went, and she said, 'I don't think they'll even have boyfriends.'"

James: "Re 'I always see something good up on the hill.' OK, so from now on why don't you make a regular point of... a.) going up the hill for your health and b.) taking a camera with you for TOP's health?"

Kenneth Wajda: "Speaking for myself, I am unable to go anywhere without bringing a camera, I can’t leave the house or step out the door for a walk without one. I guess it's just years of repetition. I'm a firm believer that inspiration exists but it has to find you working.

"A year ago I was in a small town at sunset and thought, there is nobody out; it's not going to be good for anything; I should just go home. But then I decided to walk the alleys between the houses and I ended up with photographs that I love that I never would’ve gotten except that I showed up. Taking the camera brings the photo opportunity for you."

James: "Re 'Was I ever feeling sheepish, though.' In a post about cows. Thanks for that, Mike.  ;-)  "

Mike replies:  :-)

RubyT: "This reminded me of last summer. My family had arrived at our motel in Wisconsin, where we would meet with my stepdaughter and grandkids to see Cave of the Mounds. My daughters and I decided to walk next door to Walgreens for the heating pad I'd forgotten to pack. I thought to myself 'there is no chance I will need a camera for Walgreens.' We ran into a herpetologist who was exercising his snakes, many of which we got to hold, and there I was with only my phone."

Mike replies: Oh, ouch. That's certainly something you can't go back for another time.

Sometimes I get the 'umbrella effect' too, when I think that taking my camera causes all the picture opportunities to disappear. (Like, when you take your umbrella, it doesn't rain.) I guess having a camera with you all the time irons out both effects.

Keith Mitchell: "I'm still haunted by the time I left my camera behind when living in Vancouver Canada in 2008. A mother Skunk and her half dozen very young offspring trailed along a wall In front of me when I was out walking. In my family I famously always have a camera with me. Here I am in my home town of Perth Australia, in isolation, still pondering a lost opportunity 12 years later."

Sara Piazza: "The best thing I've done for myself in a long while is picking up a little Lumix LX100 Mark II. It is with me at all times. It is very handy and has all of the professional bells and whistles. It took me awhile to learn all of the settings and knobs and dials and at first it seemed quite a bit like flying a jet plane or maybe flying a jet plane would have been easier, but I love the little thing. For the first time in a long time I feel as though I have a camera that is a true extension of myself, and so much better than the phone (and I have great phone/camera). Yes, I still get the big cameras and lenses out every now and then but the Lumix is always on my hip. Sara on the Vineyard."

Mike replies: I was just looking at that very thing last night! What was the tiny Panasonic that they made a while back? Couldn't find that one.

Cameras Are Always About Lenses for Me

I had thought that, after quite a bit of wonking around, Part the First of the Great Quixotic Medium-Format Film-Camera Shootout was getting set to begin! The formal post, I mean, about shooting with both. Meanwhile, I've been shooting with a lovely OM-2N.

Alas, problems with the medium-format gear still. I cannot induce the otherwise operational Rolleiflex 6008AF to autofocus. Eric Hiss of Rolleiflex USA (see his Addendum to the previous post on this subject, just added) went through some troubleshooting with me, but...nuttin'. It's asleep. He says this is not a common or usual failure. The lens is otherwise all but new.

Of course it still works fine as a manual focus lens. Maybe I'll just use it that way. But you know, once you get a tiger by the tail you just want to hang on—so I'll probably have to send the lens off to a technician to get looked at, in hopes that a fix can be found.

These are great big cameras, even the supposedly cruiserweight Pentax which I have courtesy of a loan from a kind reader (thank you, John). The Rollei is heavier than some 4x5s. As set up here, they both have nearly identical lenses—on the left, the Schneider-Kreutznach Xenotar-AF made for this camera, which Popular Photography called "One of the best 80mm ƒ/2.8 lenses for a 6x6cm camera we have ever tested," and on the right, the Schneider-Kreutznach MF Xenotar for the Exacta 66, my first sample of which was the best lens I've ever tried, adapted to the Pentax 645NII with an Arax breechlock-to-Pentax-645 adapter. Both are 80mm ƒ/2.8's. The lenses are effectively contemporaneous: the Exakta 66 was sold beginning in 1986, and the Rolleiflex 6008 from 1988. Although the AF version did not appear until 2002, it's a direct descendant of the manual-focus mid- to late-'80s Schneider lens of the same specification made for the Rollei 6000 series.

Configured this way, the Pentax is of course only manual focus, and has to be used on metered manual exposure. However the focus confirmation still works. The Rollei is natively just as highly automated, but as shown here has to be used as a manual-focus camera because of the non-working AF, again with focus confirmation available. I really do hope I can get the lens working properly again.

My plan is to run a little film through all the film cameras I have, after bringing them back up to snuff, for the purpose of writing about them. A little journey through the past.

Mike

P.S. It has been nagging at me somewhat that the results from an ordinary Micro 4/3 camera can give these old battle tanks a run for their money! I've been remembering Dave Levingston's B&W prints from his Class of '69 project. Those didn't give much if anything away to medium-format film prints of the same size. But, in for a dime, in for a dollar.

Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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

Malcolm Myers: "I think there's more to film photography than sharpness or detail. It's more akin to driving a classic car or listening to vinyl. You do it because it offers a different experience. Also, for people of my age (51), it allows you to buy and play with the cameras and lenses you dreamed about as a teenager, but could never afford at the time."

Mike replies: That's it.

Dave Levingston: "Thanks for that very kind mention."

Joseph L. Kashi (partial comment): "Not so long ago, film purists laughed at 'toy' cameras using digital technology. Before then, large format film photographers disparaged 'miniature' 35mm cameras, which gradually displaced 4x5 Speed Graphic and other press cameras. Now, film seems to be regaining a strong avant garde niche. Kodak is now reportedly selling twice as much film as in 2014. Working 4x5 press cameras in good condition sell in the $800 range. The more things change...."

Sunday Support Group: Readings (OT)

A few reading suggestions for those who are dutifully sheltering...

The first one is just a few paragraphs long. I tried but couldn't secure permission to reprint those paragraphs, so here's what you'll have to do if you want to read them:

First, go to Amazon and look up The Coming Plague by Laurie Garrett; then click on the book cover to "Look inside"; then scroll down to the Preface, and read down through the paragraph just before the one that begins "Laurie Garrett has written a pioneering book." I was particularly struck by the opening sentence: "We always want to believe that history happened only to 'them,' 'in the past,' and that somehow we are outside history, rather than enmeshed within it." Got that right.

What will be sobering is the book's date of publication: 1994. The short Preface was written by Jonathan Max Mann, MD, a disease researcher who died, with his wife of only two years, when Swissair Flight 111 crashed into the Atlantic southwest of Halifax International in September of 1998. Trump's dawdling, downplaying, dissembling and diverting for two months are not the only tragic squandering of time so terribly affecting the fix we're in—clearly, we wasted time in a general sense, too. For years. And now we all get to suffer for it.

Next up: The book I'm reading currently was written by Daniel Defoe, most famous for Robinson Crusoe...who some of us might feel kinda like right now! (I can feel marooned in my house.) The publication date of that one is an interesting story too—although presented as a first-person account, Defoe himself was actually only five years old when the events he writes about occurred. The book was published in 1722 about events that took place in 1665. The narrator, identified as H.F., might represent Henry Foe, Defoe's uncle, whose journals might have been one of his nephew's sources. Although scrupulously researched, it's not exactly nonfiction; yet it's not exactly fiction either, because Defoe went to great lengths in the service of verisimilitude. You might call it well reported historical fiction.

Whatever section of the bookstore it belongs in, most agree that it's a remarkably vivid portrayal of life in London during the last great visitation of the bubonic plague, also known as the black death. The parallels to the present contagion make its themes, and the narrator's dilemmas, all the more immediate to present-day readers.

Lastly, a book I've always meant to read, and soon actually might...Giovanni Boccacchio's Decameron. Also written in a plague year, the structure of the Decameron consists of stories told by a group of young people, seven women and three men, who are "sheltering in place" from the black death in a villa outside the city of Florence, Italy, probably during the epidemic of 1348. To amuse themselves, each in turn selects a topic for the day, and each tells the others a story on that topic. They do this five nights a week for two weeks, making 100 stories in all.

So it's essentially a collection of short stories. "Collection" has another meaning, too, because, following the tradition of the time, many of the tales are retellings, and Boccacchio collected these from far and wide, from many lands and many sources. Some of the tales were believed to be centuries old even at the time. The Decameron is considered a masterpiece of early Western literature and was an influence on Chaucer, Shakespeare (who based All's Well That Ends Well on Boccacchio's Tale III, 9) and many others.

In one of those strange little coincidences, in the first picture in Part I of our "Baker's Dozen" the other day, the one by Benjamin Kelley of his little daughter in front of a dramatic painting with sunlight falling on it, the painting is by John White Alexander and is titled "Isabella and the Pot of Basil." It illustrates a poem of that same title by John Keats...and Keats based his poem on Tale IV, 5 of The Decameron.

When we read Defoe we simply read the original but with modernized spellings and punctuation, but for English-speaking people reading a book written in the vernacular Florentine of the 14th century, translations loom large. I surveyed the ones I could (meaning, I read the Kindle samples for a bunch of the ones available on Amazon), and preferred the translation of Wayne A. Rebhorn as being the easiest to follow. Wayne, who is 76 and lives in Austin, is Celanese Centennial Professor of English at the University of Texas, where he teaches English, Italian, and comparative literature. His translation came out in 2013. Seeing as the tellers of these tales were also sheltering in place, it seems a perfect time to finally read this. I've got it on deck.

The Decameron is said to be uncommonly bawdy, too.

Cheers to you, and stay safe this Sunday. I'm too stuck in my own head, so I'm going to get out for some exercise.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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

Frank Booth: "Another book concerning our present situation is The Great Influenza by John Barry. The Afterword written in 2018 is especially interesting."

Q: "For anyone interested in an hour's worth of Laurie Garrett's take on the current situation, she's the guest on this week's Radio Open Source. She's not the type to mince words and the conversation gets a bit political, but it also has a lot of intelligent perspective on what we can do and what we should have done to prevent a local outbreak from becoming a pandemic."

Rolleiflex 6008 Batteries

Look what came!

The two black oblong rectangular things in the lower part of this picture, one still in its plastic bag, are Rolleiflex 6000-series rechargeable batteries. Originally they contained NICAD cells of something like 700 mAh (milliampere hour) capacity, but the batteries are no longer made and most of the existing ones are getting pretty old now. I have five, but as of five years ago only two could still hold much of a charge. The two batteries you see here have been expertly re-celled with brand new hand-selected modern NiMH cells. They provide about 1100 mAh of power when fully charged.

You know you're a gearhead when you get all excited over batteries. But then, the Rollei SLX, 6002, 6003, 6006, 6008, and my 6008AF—unlike the mechanical TLR seen in the upper left here—are useless without batteries.

The thing on the upper right, on top of its box, is the new Type D charger sold by Eric at Rolleiflex USA. It's made by DW Photo GmbH in Braunschweig, Germany, which is carrying the torch of the old Rollei medium format tradition (although it no longer owns the rights to the Rollei name). Type C and N chargers made back in the day by Rollei will work with the new NiMH cells, but won't charge them all the way. The Type D charger will charge them fully.

The part of this in short supply are the battery housings, i.e., the fused black outer casings (sometimes called "cassettes") you see here. Those are no longer being made. They're getting rare—a quick check of eBay usually turns up no loose ones, just those being sold as parts of camera outfits.

I would have loved to get out with the 6008AF today—glorious day—but I still have a few issues with the camera to work out. But the batteries were the biggest issue. Now solved.

$20 picture
I stopped to "scout" a picture yesterday. Taking a tip from Carl Weese, I've been scouting locations with digital and returning with a medium-format camera if what I find looks promising. Unfortunately, yesterday I pulled all the way off the road—forgetting momentarily that it had been raining for three days straight.

I was reminded very quickly. The earth by the roadside turned into oozing black mud under my wheels, and in no time I was dead stuck.

But I'll tell you, people are great around here. It wasn't two minutes before a black pickup truck pulled up in front of me and a local man hopped out and asked if I needed help. After exploring the situation, he hooked a tow strap to the back of my car—he didn't have a chain—and, with my car helping, pulled me right back on the roadway. Didn't take five minutes. He didn't ask for money, but I gave him a twenty for his kindness. A bargain for me—after all, he'd saved me a tow fee, and probably more than an hour of my time.

Wasn't that kind of him? Very nice guy. Name of Cody. I hightailed it to the car wash to get all the mud off the undercarriage.

Fizzle
Wouldn't you know it, though, the picture possibility was a dud—as I suspected, there's no way to get a clear view of that particular chasm and waterfall by the roadside because of the trees in the way. You never know until you get out and check it out on foot, though.

Fortunately, that doesn't usually cost $20.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

ADDENDUM from Eric Hiss (Rolleiflex USA): "Mike, Thanks for the shout out! I have a few comments to add: DW Photo GmbH are the same people who have been at the Rolleiflex factory for decades, really not holding the torch so much as carrying on as usual but under a new business name and with a smaller product offering (no TLR's), and smaller staff. They are currently making the Hy6 Mod2 cameras and lenses as well as servicing them. It's the same platform as your 6008AF but two design generations newer.

"With regards to the batteries—there's just a lot of information to share and I'll do that on a separate post on my website. However for now let me just tell people that the NiMH [nickel metal hydride] cells now almost always have higher capacity than the C-type and N-type chargers were designed for, and they will only reach 1100 mAh no matter what. G and M chargers are not compatible with the NiMH cells. The big enemy of the batteries is heat—don't let your batteries get hot in the charger. Higher capacity cells take longer to charge, don't reach full capacity (even if you put them in twice), and get hotter than the originals during charging—even when the rebuilder leaves in the temperature sender (most don't). When you have a G or M charger you can still rebuild your batteries with modern NiCad [nickel cadmium] cells—the modern ones do not suffer from memory issues like the older ones did. If you are using higher-capacity NiMH cells, then the D-type charger will charge them fully without generating excess heat.

"There are a lot of people rebuilding their own Rolleiflex 6000-series batteries which is fantastic! There are battery internals for RC models that fit (although they're a little tight), so someone with modest skills can do it. The problem is that many fail—it's eight cells in series, and only one bad one will take out the whole thing. Each cell needs to be load tested, then the whole thing tested again after assembly and then again after fitting into the pack. Time-consuming! I use Key Camera [1428 Main St., Longmont, CO 80501, 303/772-7690] now to do the rebuilding, and I supply them with 1300 mAh internal cells from the factory. I offer a service from my site to rebuild, but it's also the same price to send your batteries to Key Camera directly.

"I don't deal with any lithium rebuilds because of the liability, and most all I've seen do not come with chargers that monitor each cell individually—with the exception of the ones from Wiese Fototechnik (which are great). But for some reason I've never seen a Lithium solution that works for all 6000 models, so check first.

"Lastly, if you have any dead 6000 battery packs, I'm in short supply ( I don't even have a battery for my own 6008AF!) and would be willing to buy up any that aren't being used for $25 each."

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Featured Comments from:

Niko X (partial comment): "Mike, the Rolleiflex 6xxx series is a beautiful system, but the scarcity of batteries makes acquiring such a system seem like a risky proposition."

Mike replies: I'm not investing in the system now, except to bring it up to working order as described in this post. I bought the Rolleis when they were at their cheapest—I had reviewed a 6008 for Camera & Darkroom and had always coveted one. I don't recall the year I bought them but it was in the first half of the 2000s, when digital was all the rage and film cameras—especially professional film cameras—were going begging. I've never shot with them outside of a few handfuls of rolls. I didn't have access to a darkroom, and it was too frustrating to shoot and develop the film but not be able to print.

Hasselblad had long dominated among professional studio photographers in North America, and Rollei was similarly dominant in Europe. After such long reigns, the downfall of the formerly proud pro marques turned out to be swift and severe. (See this post.) The Rollei stuff seemed almost impossibly cheap to me when I bought it. It was not a wise purchase, but for a few dimes on the dollar I couldn't resist. Well, I didn't, anyway.

Fortunately, though, back then I bought five batteries and two Type C chargers along with the other equipment. I traded in one of the Type C chargers for the new Type D—Eric gives you an $80 credit. The other one is new in the box, still in its shrink wrap...as was one of the bodies and backs I bought. They were advertised as used but they were unsold store stock. It's unfortunate that I only bought one AF lens...those have gotten very expensive now, due to rarity. An 80mm Xenotar AF lens alone now sells for more than I paid for the lens, a body, and a 120 back.

Mark Sperry: "Very nice! Eric encouraged me to get the 6008AF since I'm an all-film guy. However I could not resist the temptation of the Hy6 Mod2, and I haven't regretted it one bit! Fabulous system, the 6008 included."

Sara Piazza: "The same thing happened to me about a year ago. I pulled onto the side of the road, onto what appeared to be solid ground, and was quickly up to my gunwales in mud. Strangers stopped to help, to no avail, so I did end up calling AAA. After three trips to Ireland in the last year-and-a-half I have gotten much better at judging where to pull off on the side of the road—looking for soft spots, hidden ditches, blind curves, and planning carefully for easy re-entry—made slightly more challenging when the traffic is coming from the opposite direction than you're accustomed to. Even now, back home in the US, I am still second-guessing myself when I'm pulling back out onto the roadway. Am I on the right? Or the left?

"And yes, there's the familiar disappointment of discovering that the shot does not turn out to be as imagined. The other side of that coin is seeing a potential photo and saying to yourself, 'I'll come back later for that one,' and then of course every single thing is different. Or gone.

"I've always appreciated your writing, even more so now when we all have more time to think, tinker, and read. Stay well. Sara from Martha's Vineyard."

Mike replies: I think the only reason I don't live in the British Isles is that I know I'd become permanently confused over left and right on the roadways! I've always been slightly dyslexic—when I was six, I formed a club with my friends which was proudly labeled "Mike's Clud." I have fond memories of Ireland, but if I lived there I'd soon be run over, while looking the wrong way for oncoming cars.

Gerard Kingsma: "I can't resist—your adventure immediately reminds me of one of my biggest takeaways from the week-long workshop I was honored to attend with Jay Maisel. He sent us one our merry ways each afternoon with one single assignment: Go Out Empty. Clear your mind and don't think beforehand of the pictures you're going to take. Don't plan. Because the pictures you're looking for won't be there (disappointed!) and you'll likely not recognise the wonderful opportunities that are staring you right in the face. Instead of scouting locations—what if you had had your wonderful Rollei with you, all set and ready to go? You might have had a wonderful portrait of Cody."

Mike replies: Wise words. Jay is a wise man.

Robert Hudyma: "Ifixit has detailed instructions on how to re-build your Rollei battery pack. Just the thing when you are stuck indoors for an indefinite period. Ifixit Rollei 6000/6008 Battery Re-Build."

Mike replies: That's the very page that convinced me to hire somebody else to do it! But I'm sure people who are handy with electronics and soldering would get along okay.

Open Mike: Shut In and Locked Down? That's What Old Movies Are For (OT)

["Open Mike" is the often off-topic, anything-goes Editorial Page of TOP. It appears on Wednesdays.]

-

Cars and music both play big roles in American Graffiti. Mel's drive-in, which was in San Francisco, was demolished not long after the movie was filmed.

This isn't a movie review. It's a review of one guy watching one movie.

I read that people are watching old movies because they're penned in the house by the pandemic, so, on a whim, I decided to get with the program. Clicked on Amazon Prime and American Graffiti popped up. So I watched again a movie that I first saw when I was 16.

It has always been one of my favorite movie memories. Just as an aside, most peoples' favorite movies come from the ones they saw during their formative years. It's a sign of a real movie buff when that's not the case. I have a few older movies on my favorites list, but that's only because of the Dartmouth Film Society, where I saw lots of old classic movies...during, yup, my formative years.

Unlike some old movies that I cherish in memory, this one was just as good from the perspective of late middle age as it was when I was a kid. I thought it was hilarious when I was a teenager—I laughed out loud in the theater when the cop car pops its axle (a scene which was much more subversive and transgressive then)—and now the jokes no longer strike home with nearly the same force. But if anything, the movie is even richer to me now as a period piece, a character study, and a masterpiece of pacing, editing, storyline, casting, and dialogue.

Here's where you stop reading if you don't like spoilers
It's a story of four young men who've graduated from high school and whom life is about to take in separate directions. There's John Milner, the greaser mechanic and hot rodder who plays the tough guy but has a soft side; persecuted but still game and friendly Terry the Toad; and best friends Steve and Curt (Steve dates Curt's sister), who discover they're on opposite sides of their longtime plan to leave their hometown and take their lives higher and farther. In one epic all-nighter, John gradually becomes a tragic figure, a personification of the old Shakespearian line "uneasy is the head that wears a crown," even as he is gradually revealed to be tender-hearted and gallant; and (as the movie's clown figure), luckless, ugly-duckling Terry magically gets everything he ever wanted—great car, beautiful girl—and has the worst night of his life. Steve and Curt start out as opposites—they've worked for months to leave their little California town for college "in the East," but Steve is eager to escape and Curt is having second thoughts. Over the course of the evening, Curt has to confront his desire for something more, something "exciting and dazzling," in form of a fleeting connection with an elusive blonde in a white Thunderbird who he chases for the rest of the evening, and he gets dragged into various crimes and associations that could make remaining in town uncomfortable for him. Meanwhile, it turns out that Steve had probably been gung-ho about escaping because he'd seen his likely future all too clearly: he'd been feeling the tractor-beam pull of marriage and a humdrum small-town life. The appeal of which becomes clear to him when he almost loses it, in the fiery penultimate scene. By morning, the two friends have both accepted their destinies and have switched places—Curt leaves, Steve stays.

And as Curt's plane disappears in the sky (the movie's version of riding off into the sunset), we learn the fate of our four protagonists.

Harrison Ford, who interrupted his chosen career as a carpenter to play John Milner's hot-rod challenger, refused to cut his hair for the part and got drunk on set every night

What I didn't know about the movie is how hard the then-little-known George Lucas had to fight to realize the vision he had for the film. He realized that much of the culture he took for granted in his own teen years had been a candle in the wind, a brief moment between the complacent 1950s and the Kennedy assassination, the "British Invasion," and the counterculture of the tumultuous '60s. He wanted to commemorate it accurately, if also lovingly, and the movie has been widely praised for being a sociological record of what that brief era felt like to live in. His intention was to direct; but the first script he commissioned was cynical and conventional, so he fired the screenwriter he had hired and began to craft the story line himself—the partners he wanted to work with were off toiling on other projects. In the final draft those partners returned, and the trio worked especially hard to rewrite the storyline between Steve and his sweetheart Laurie. It shows. We learn a great deal about those two characters and their relationship through the most economical of means, and as the movie progresses it becomes a romance that's all the more beautiful for being so true to life.

The aging, popsicle-eating disc jockey (Wolfman Jack playing himself) knows he can't live up to his on-air persona, so he stays in the shadows. As with everyone else, Curt has his number.

The film was one of the first to use a series of real pop songs in place of a soundtrack—a commonplace technique since then—and clearing the rights to the many songs was a significant impediment to bringing the project to life. One holdout was Elvis Presley, so there are no Elvis songs in American Graffiti. Matching songs to scenes is also believed to have been an important part of the way George Lucas went about organizing his material.

It was shot in a low-key, unassuming, vaguely verité style on 35mm film. Like Asphalt Jungle, another favorite of mine, most of the action takes place at night, with the exception of the final scene.

Probably the most moving scene in what was designed as a comedy is the final pane, the epilogue as it were, that shows the fate of each of the four friends. Diverge their lives did...one died in Viet Nam while another (it's implied) dodged the draft in Canada, for instance. (I assumed when I was 16 that Curt was the fictional alter-ego of the writer of the movie. Not true, exactly. But in the context of the fictional world of the movie I'm going to keep thinking so.) In any event, knowing in advance the contents of that last pane makes the brief junkyard scene far more poignant—the king foreshadowing his own downfall—and lends retrospective nobility to the hapless Toad.

What's past was prologue
American Graffiti is that rara avis in Hollywood, a work of artistic integrity and authorial vision, and it's very famous now. Ironically, given that it was rejected by no less than four big studios and criticized by studio bosses as a non-starter because it didn't have any stars, many of its then-unknown actors went on to become big names in movies and on television. Even the woman in the Thunderbird, seen only in glimpses, obliquely, went on to star in a sitcom. Director Lucas, who arguably couldn't have made Star Wars if it weren't for the success of American Graffiti, is now one of the most famous and richest filmmakers in history. And the movie itself earned the distinction of having the largest return for the smallest investment of any American film ever: as a low-budget first effort by an unknown, all-in, including its promotion budget, it cost about one and a quarter million dollars to make, and it has earned hundreds of millions worldwide. There have been bigger blockbusters, but none were ever made on such a shoestring. The list of the honors it's been given is as long as your arm—it's included in numerous top-100 lists. It lost out for Best Picture in 1973 to The Sting, a good film on the level of The Grifters and Blood Simple, but which of the two would you call the better movie now?

I'm sure most of you have seen it. But it's a nice movie to rewatch. Seeing it again reconnected me not only to a vanished America I never knew firsthand, not only to my teen self, but to a style of movie-making I miss. A lovely film to revisit.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Featured Comments from:

David Hamilton: "Ironically The Sting was one of the first movies I saw growing up. I still haven’t seen American Graffiti. That’ll be rectified this weekend."

Duncan: "What a great review. Makes me want to watch it again after all these years."

fred fowler: "What a pleasant surprise to see your comments today regarding American Graffiti. It remains one of my favorite movies and was one of those rare but wonderful films that when viewed for the first time with neither knowledge or expectation, one is completely smitten. Having just turned 74 I very much lived many of the automotive and cultural aspects of the movie. Those also being my formative years, many of those same elements remain in essence part of what I value and am entertained by. I have also felt the movie in many ways was a metaphor for the country with the epic all-nighter being the fleeting innocence and rebellious good time of the '50s all too harshly supplanted forever by the dawn of the of the '60s. I agree it has more than aged well and is a touchstone I periodically revisit."

Bruno Gonzalez: "I saw American Graffiti for the first time in the summer of 1976 during my first visit to the U.S.from France (a cross-country Greyhound adventure). The cinema was a small room in an abandoned building in Cannery Row, Monterey; no seats, you had to sit on cushions right on the concrete floor and try to keep for a while some kind of not-too-back-breaking position. I loved the movie, I was 19 and a hot rod enthusiast.

"The abandoned building where the cinema was located was in fact part of the Hovden Cannery, the site of what became eight years later the world-class Monterey Aquarium; that part of the old cannery still exists, just near the entrance to the Aquarium. I had been attracted to Monterey and Cannery Row in the first place because of my interest for John Steinbeck. I had already read all his novels and wanted to experience the places he rendered so vividly in some of his best writings. The yellow Deuce coupe, the old cannery on the waterfront, everything came together—what a cultural shock.

"Serendipitously, many years later, my son Paul moved to Monterey to do his PhD in biology at Stanford University's Hopkins Marine Station, just next door to the Aquarium.... Every time I visited him there, I passed by this building forever culturally linked to so many things that have mattered a lot to me, and still do. Like Curt, I now live in Canada."

David Comdico: "Great film. It was shot in chronological order to which, I think, Ron Howard responded along the lines of: 'George we're actors, we know how to act to a script.' But Lucas wanted the actors to look more tired as the film ran on. It's almost a shame that he got lost in the Star Wars franchise. The use of widescreen along with the cinema verité style create a very unique look that still feels current.

"Another great movie about California/American car culture is Monte Hellman's Two-Lane Blacktop, starring James Taylor."

Mike replies: Re 'It's almost a shame that he got lost in the Star Wars franchise,' couldn't agree more. I would have loved it if he'd gone on to a string of similarly excellent naturalistic movies about real people and real life in the real world. I never would have begrudged him Star Wars, but he got diverted into it (and other popular fantasy) for the rest of his life. And there goes that. You know what they say: Oh well.

Peter: "Although it came out after my first set of 'formative years,' one of my favorites is Animal House, mostly because I spent four malformed years as a member of a college fraternity that was very much like the one in the movie. To this day, I can still put real names to all of the main characters in the movie."

Russell Scheid: "I grew up in Walnut Creek, 75 miles away from Modesto. 'Cruising the Main' was a such a highlight of my high school years. From flirting with the opposite sex at red lights between car windows to dragging between stop lights, the California car culture was unlike any other. Every time I watch American Graffiti I'm transported back to those glory years where instead of Bloods vs. Crips, it was Mustangs vs. Camaros."

The Photographer's Chair

The entirely surprising story of a photographic "meme," or leitmotif, through its history—"the Photographer's Chair."

Mike

Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Paul Duncan: "Fascinating, but dang: yet another of my totally original ideas exposed as the subconscious purloining from the vast cultural meme-yard!"

Robert Newcomb: "Using a chair in a portrait is hard even when they're soft. The more conventional medium high backed sitting or dinning chair will often 'cut through' the subject in an odd place creating an extra appendage as the back extends from the sitter. In a soft plush chair the sitter will often be swallowed as he/she sinks down into it creating an unflattering bad posture slouching look. The very high backed wicker chair pictured serves as a way to seat the subject and act as a portrait background for their body and head without extra appendages. I spent the last 20 years of my photography life doing portraits. In the studio I usually had about a dozen chairs of different sizes, styles, and hues to match the size and style of the person. I hoarded old and odd chairs for these reasons."

Two Beauties

Just wanted to mention that the Olympus M.Zuiko Digital ED 60mm ƒ/2.8 Macro has really nice bokeh. I've been impressed with its rendering again and again, over a long period. (It just happened again—saw a pic, was impressed with the lens rendering, checked the lens and it was this one. It's happened before, repeatedly.)

I don't personally know what I would do with a focal length of 120mm equivalent, but different folks have different strokes in that regard. Anyway this one's a beauty.

If I were doing portraits in a serious way, needed an optimal camera, and could have anything, I'd consider an odd couple: a Sigma 56mm ƒ/1.4 DC DN "Contemporary" on a Sony A7RIV for Sony's best eye focus and IBIS tech. Why the Sigma 56mm? It's a sleeper, a real gem, with wonderful, classic rendering. It's only flaw might be that even wide open it's too sharp. And why the Sony? You can assign APS-C mode to a custom function button for switching effortlessly, and 85mm-e and 26 MP is perfect for portraits. I'd prefer it over a 6000-series camera for its more optimal hand size and so you could have a resolution monster for landscapes and big prints simply by switching to a full-frame lens. A 6000-series camera would work too. The a6500 and a6600 have IBIS.

On Micro 4/3, the Sigma 56mm would be 112mm-e. Too long. I'd get one of the 42.5mms out there (from $89 to $1,597.99). But there again, YMMV.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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David L Glos: "I've had occasion to use several macro lenses over the years that exhibit great bokeh. My Pentax 120mm ƒ/4 macro (for 645) was incredible, and one of my favorite portrait lenses of all time, despite the minuscule focus throw at distance. A friends Leica APO Macro Elmarit-R 100mm ƒ/2.8 was perhaps the best I ever used. They also brilliantly solved the focus throw at infinity issue by requiring almost two full revolutions of the focus ring over the range. On the cheaper end, the 90mm Tamron macro is excellent, and available in several mounts. Recently, I just picked up the 60mm ƒ/2.4 macro for my Fuji gear, and it too has fantastic image quality. They can be found at bargain prices used too, as people complain about the AF speed, which is not a critical issue for my purposes."

Moose: "Re 'I don't personally know what I would do with a focal length of 120mm equivalent....' You are thinking normal distance photography. The lens designers were thinking Macro. It's about working distance. The Oly or Panny 30mm macros have the same FoV on a 4/3 sensor as a 60 mm lens on FF. But, they are still 30mm lenses. And, like all four Micro 4/3 macro lenses with AF, they are internal focusing. The way that works is by shortening the FL when focusing close (for example, the Canon 60mm ƒ/2.8 for FF is about 40mm FL at closest focus).

"Without trying to see if I can get a chart on Typepad, let me just show the far right columns, Working Distance, that is, the distance from physical front of the lens to focal plane at closest focus.

Panasonic 30mm ƒ/2.8: 22mm (7/8")

Olympus 30mm ƒ/3.5: 16mm (5/8")

Panasonic 45mm ƒ/2.8: 68mm (2 11/16")

Olympus 60mm ƒ/2.8: 89mm (3 1/2")

"Close focusing distances of under an inch are fine, when I'm working on a copy stand, with ring light or Lieberkühn reflector. Ordinary flash is also useless, as the subject will be in the lens shadow. For hand held use, even tripod, without artificial light, with things that move, that may be spooked by something so large, so close, they are useless.

"That's why 60mm."

Dumb Rookie Mistake

Have you ever done something dumb?

You remember the other day in the "Old Dreams" post that I bought that Voigtländer 40mm ƒ/2 SLII lens in the rare Contax (C/Y) mount? Well, I blew it. It came, but it immediately became apparent to me that the lens was fogged, so I quickly contacted the seller requesting to return it.

But check out what I missed in the description:

The seller replied to me saying, in effect, "hey, I told you"...and with complete justification. He did. I just missed it.

Damn! Dumb rookie mistake. He also said "Looks Mint"—emphasis mine—not "Mint." And it did look brand new in the photos, with pristine boxes. As indeed it looks in person.

I should know better—I've bought and sold more than 400 items on eBay since it opened for business in 1995. I was so excited to get an alert (after a wait) for the lens in Contax mount that I just clicked on it. I wasn't as careful as I usually am.

Wish I had not done that! Now I have to find a repair shop that will disassemble the lens and clean it. The total cost will no doubt be more than just waiting for a clean one. But now I'm stuck.

You can't step in the same river twice
This is a good time to say something I don't think gets emphasized enough: there's work involved in getting all your stuff set up to work. When you find something you like and that works for you, there's a lot of benefit in sticking to it.

I used to read a lot about audio. I recall one writer who recounted all the work he had done years ago to set up a system he was happy with. It consisted of tube equipment and electrostatic speakers and a turntable with a moving-magnet cartridge, and he described the sound as being "like a warm, wet kiss." Once he got everything matched and calibrated, he decided he was done. He listened to it for a few years. Then he got bored, and dove into the upgrade cycle again to make the system more "accurate." So the old system got dismantled and replaced piece by piece. But, years later, he realized he'd never been quite as happy with any of the subsequent evolution of his systems as he had been with that first good one. He spoke about it wistfully (and sure, his feelings might indeed have been inflected with nostalgia) but he said that from time to time he would wish, yet again, that he had just stuck with that system, the first one he got really right.

I've had to rotate photo equipment constantly, but that's because I write about equipment, so I don't have the luxury of keeping things. But over the years there have been multiple occasions when I've tried to re-buy stuff that I had sold off and regretted selling.

More often than not, those efforts fail.

They fail for a number of reasons—partly it's because the world changes, companies go out of business, what's new becomes old, your tastes change, etc. But they also fail because equipment isn't actually interchangeable. You can understand this in one way by reading Roger Cicala, who will make you aware of sample variation. Sometimes one lens that looks new is fine and another one that looks new has internal fog.

But sometimes it's more inscrutable than that—it's because you "click" (no pun intended) with a certain set of equipment, and learn it, and groove into its feel and its ways, such that when you leave it behind and then try to reproduce it years later it just doesn't feel the same. You've changed, it's changed, the replacement is subtly different than the old thing you bonded with because it's old and yours was new back then...whatever.

And sometimes, like now, it's just because there's a certain amount of difficulty getting set up with serviceable stuff that works. It can take time and effort, and involve frustrations.

To use my Rolleiflex 6008AF, I've had two of my Rollei 6000-series batteries rebuilt with new, tested NiMH cells, and I've procured a new charger that will charge the new cells to capacity. That involved a certain amount of research, discussion with vendors, and expense. It's not automatic, like just going to eBay and buying an old battery. (That's difficult too: because the battery housings are no longer made, they're in demand from 6000-series owners, and cost a fair amount even thought they might not even be working very well, or at all).

My point is that it just takes some doing to get rolling, to get your mojo working, and there's some sense in honoring and respecting the effort and expense of that, and not casually throwing it away later just for the sake of change, or just because you miss shopping.

That's all. Just something to think about. It made me feel a little less stupid to write about it. Signed, your humble[d] dumb-ass Ed.,

Mike

Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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John Willard: "The enemy of good is better."

Christoph Meyer: "Buy and hold. When you have it fixed and enjoy using it, the trouble won't matter. I too own stuff that in the end became more expensive than planned. But then I am not a buy and sell shop that needs to move it with a profit. Just own it to use it."

Sunday Support Group: How Often Should You Weigh Yourself? (OT)

Topic this Sunday: weight loss.

Here's an odd thing. I'm sure if you've tried to lose weight you've seen various recommendations for how often to weigh yourself. The main one used to be (I'm not current with the Zeitgeist) that you should weigh yourself no more than once a week. To avoid discouragement.

Turns out that's wrong. When put to the test and looked at statistically, the people who lose the most weight are those who weigh themselves twice a day—once in the morning and once in the evening.

So I've been doing that. Started it very reluctantly, I must say. But...

Evening weight, December 18th 2019: 250.2
Morning weight today (102 days later): 221.8

That's pretty encouraging!

I have a good scale, which Amazon tells me I bought on Sept. 21st, 2013—that would have been right about at the apex of TOP in terms of popularity and income. You can tell from the price of the scale I had money burning a hole in my pocket. I can't vouch for the accuracy of the thing, but it's certainly consistent—when I was testing it, weighing the same test objects weeks apart never varied by more than 0.2 lbs. And even that much seemed to depend on where on the standing pad the objects were placed.

But here's the really weird thing: who knew that your weight varies so much from evening to morning? My weight last night before I went to bed was 225.4. And this morning it's 221.8! That's a 3.6 pound variance in less than 12 hours. It's not like my net weight loss every day is 3.6 lbs., but it's very consistent that I weigh two to four pounds more in the evenings than I do in the mornings.

Turns out one of the characteristics of plant-based eating is that you have a higher metabolism when you sleep. That might account for some or all of it. It still basically mystifies me that these differences could be so great, however. (I certainly don't pee away 3.6 pounds' worth in the night. That would be 55 fluid ounces!)

I'll delve into more detail about my current experiment in a future post. I just thought this was interesting.

Crisis = dangerous opportunity*
Oh, and by the way—in case you're sheltering in place and working from home and you've wanted to try adding more plants to your diet, this could be an opportunity. The greatest impediment for many people who would like to try plant-based eating is their work schedules. So if you're at home and temporarily don't have to commute, this might be a convenient time to give it a try.

Unfortunately, you can't really switch to a plant-based diet whole hog (wow, pardon the expression!)—it takes your body time to adapt, not to mention the fact that you have to work out what you want to eat, find and test new recipes, etc. The best advice I've seen is to switch breakfast first, then give yourself three weeks to get used to that, then switch lunch, and so on. Beans can be problematic because they can cause flatulence and digestive disruption. The trick is to start very slow—a spoonful of canned beans on a salad, for instance—and then eat more or less the same amount every day, increasing or decreasing only gradually. I eat beans every day with no gas or gut problems.

So how many times in your life have you not had time for a good breakfast because you're racing around trying to get out of the house? You make do with something that's convenient but bad for you. Now that you're at home, you might have more time to develop one, two, or three good go-to plant-based breakfast meals that you can eat going forward.

Don't look to me for specifics. I eat a salad and a berry-and-kale smoothie every morning, varying the ingredient list of both. Most people would not naturally consider that to be breakfast food, although I have learned to love it (yes, really love it). But remember, no dairy, no meat, no oils, and no cheese.

There are lots of good plant-based cookbooks that might give you a start, but I'd rather not give cooking advice—I'm doing much better, but I'm a novice cook. (If you're worried about shopping and deliveries during the coronavirus pandemic, this might make you feel better.)

Bon appétit, but much more importantly, à votre santé—

Mike

*"The Chinese word for 'crisis' is frequently invoked in Western motivational speaking as being composed of two Chinese characters signifying 'danger' and 'opportunity' respectively. While the original meaning of wēijī is 'danger at a point of juncture,' and many linguists and native Chinese speakers highlight the errors in its Western reinterpretation, the term's 'danger-plus-opportunity' meaning has been so widely used by politicians, businesspeople, and in popular culture that its alternative etymology has been picked up all over the world, including by some native Chinese speakers." (Wikipedia, lightly edited)

Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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

Jamie Pillers: "When my daughter prodded the family into going vegetarian about a year ago, I needed to find some recipes to get us started. By luck, we found Meatless by Martha Stewart Living. Easy recipes, no hard-to-find ingredients, relatively small amount of prep time. And everything we've tried from the book so far has made a vegetarian diet seem pretty much like what we'd been eating previously, at least with regards to tastiness."

Dan Khong: "Mike, I am one of those obsessive-compulsive types who weigh themselves twice a day, and I am able to keep my weight to a 67–68kg range +/– 1kg (BMI <22). Once I'm over, I keep my mouth shut."

Kirk: "Check your weight once a year. The waist band on your trousers or the notch on your belt should tell you when you are erring to excess consumption. Weight is secondary to fitness. I weigh myself once a year. It's always 160, 160, 160, 160. When it hits 161 I either swim harder or run longer. Then it goes away. I eat a vague vegetarian diet. I'm never too strict. If I am too strict the temptation to throw it all out is too strong. A burger a month is just about right...."

Mike replies: But Kirk, you and your buddy Rip are beasts and I am naught but a couch potato!  :-)

Rodger Kingston: "Mike, For quite a few years I've weighed myself once a day, nude, upon getting up in the morning. That's the only time each day when everything is the same. I record my weight once a week, and have been doing it since I had a stroke in August of 2016. I've lost nearly 60 pounds since then (75 pounds down from my highest weight), and kept the weight off within a range of five pounds or so during more than three and a half years. It's the first really successful weight loss in my life. I didn't do it by going on a diet, but by making a deep down life change.

"And by the way, I also have a Health O Meter 349KLX, which has been the best—the most reliable—scale I've ever owned. I bought it in 2011 when it was $145."

Mike replies: Good on you Rodger. Impressive.

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

Photo by Benjamin Kelley, Boston, Massachusetts, USA

Photo by Rich Barbara, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA

Photo by Albano García, Buenos Aires, Argentina

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Punctum

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

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

—Urban Dictionary

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

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

Photo by David Mackenzie, Bedford, New Hampshire, USA

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

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

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

Mike

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

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

Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Featured Comments from:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We Are Trooper Strong! (OT)

Dang, I missed the launch time. Sorry. Mea culpa. I woke up unusually late today.

Doesn't really matter...11:00 a.m. was just the time that the link went live for the first time.

Anyway, if you want a nice spirit-lifter, take 21 minutes and 12 seconds out of your day and let yourself get carried along with a small band of kids and their supportive hometown in "The City Behind Us: The Story of the Elmora Troopers," the brand-new short film by my friend the filmmaker Bob Burnett and his friends that had its premier this morning. (Longtime readers will remember Bob's short film about the house in the Edward Hopper painting, among other sundry appearances here.)

Just a great, great short. Yeah, there's more than a bit of the rosey glow on this, but heck, don't we need it right now? This is part of what we want to get back to, after the current crisis is over. It's real America, if you ask me. We're a people who come together. We need reminding right now. We are Trooper Strong!

Enjoy, enjoy. Sorry I was late posting this. I've been behind myself for days. More on it later today or later in the week when I get myself combobulated and catch up with myself.

Mike
(Thanks to Bob)

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Harry B Houchins: "Yah, that hit the spot! As an ex-pat Jersey boy (Passaic 1944, Clifton 1962) it moved me. Thanks very much! Made my day...."

Terry: "As a Williamsport resident I always try to explain what the Little League World Series is like and this explains that very well. Thanks for sharing."