The Online Photographer

Mysterious Missing Airplanes

Amelia Earhart in 1937 in front of her Lockheed Electra

Using the faintest of photographic clues as inspiration, one of history's greatest treasure hunters may be on the brink of explaining one of the 20th century's enduring mysteries. Robert Ballard, the man who found the Titanic, is hot on the case of the mysterious disappearance of aviation pioneer Amelia Earhart, looking for her Lockheed on the slope of an underwater volcanic mountain.

People like mysteries, but people especially like it when mysteries are solved. For instance, the world's attention was transfixed when Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 disappeared from radar without apparent explanation en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing in 2014. Many people (among them comedian Kathleen Madigan, who has made Flight 370 a staple of her stage act) became obsessed with the case. That one is all but solved now—although the main part of the plane hasn't been found, the circumstantial evidence is very strong that it was a case of mass murder / suicide by the plane's "sad and lonely" pilot in command, Zaharie Ahmad Shah, and was planned carefully in cold blood. The evidence is set forth in a June, 2019 article by William Langewiesche in The Atlantic.

Many theories about Earhart's fate have been put forward over the years, ranging from the plausible to the fantastical. One hangs on very slender evidence—a photograph taken near a tiny remote island by a man named Eric Bevington in 1937 (that date is per Wikipedia; an article on Artnet has it as 1940). Then called Gardner Island and now known as Nikumaroro, it is in the Phoenix Islands, lying Southeast of Earhart's intended target, Howland Island. A tiny, blurry object in a corner of the photograph, known as "The Bevington Object," is believed by a group called The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR) to be the landing gear of Earhart's Lockheed Electra. TIGHAR has enthusiastically endorsed the possibility that Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan landed on the island, were marooned, and perished there.

According to that Artnet article, "In order to enhance the blurry speck on the old photograph, TIGHAR’s Jeff Glickman, a forensic imaging expert, reached out to the government for help. The image ended up at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which employed classified technology to better see what Bevington had captured with his lens. An independent review by intelligence analysts at the Pentagon agreed with TIGHAR’s conclusion that the indistinct object looked like the plane’s landing gear."

The Nikumaroro hypothesis is considered the most plausible of the "landed and survived" theories. Most experts and analysts believe the pair ran out of fuel over the tractless reaches of the Pacific and simply crashed into the ocean, and such "crashed and sank" theories perhaps have greater plausibility. TIGHAR's claims that sundry objects discovered on Nikumaroro—including a skeleton and scraps of aircraft aluminum and Plexiglas—could have belonged to Earhart have so far not risen to the standard of proof.

But TIGHAR's numerous search expeditions were not very well funded, and its efforts at underwater searches were hampered by technical difficulties. Enter the celebrated Ballard, whose backer is none other than The National Geographic Society. His search will be very well funded indeed...the "landed and survived" Nikumaroro Theory put to the acid test. Meanwhile, TIGHAR has gone silent. What do they know?

They'll tell us soon...in a National Geographic Special, naturally, set to air on October 20th.

My guess, and of course it's only a guess, is that it will be fascinating as well as entertaining to revisit the great Earhart saga. It always is. She's become a staple of dramatic narrative biographies for young adults, such as Candace Fleming's Amelia Lost*, not to mention the inspiration for romantic pop-culture masterpieces like Joni Mitchell's stunning "Amelia." But it's probably most likely that no new light will be shed on the fate of the woman whom Tom D. Couch, Senior Curator at the Smithsonian's Air and Space Museum, once called "our favorite missing person." The vast Pacific has swallowed her up, along with all the other mysteries it holds.

Mike

*Unlike most adults, I don't scorn to read books for young adults occasionally—they are often excellent brief primers and are usually better illustrated than books aimed at adults. As I mentioned recently, my favorite biography of Mathew Brady is a young adult book, albeit one written by a Brady expert and scholar, George Sullivan.

Original contents copyright 2019 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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Severian: "Mike wrote: 'Unlike most adults, I don't scorn to read books for young adults occasionally....' Good company you are keeping, Mike. The recent massive winner on Jeopardy, James Holzhauer, claimed that children's books were a key part of his strategy to learn a decent amount about a lot of subjects. According to James, 'They are chock-full of infographics, pictures and all kinds of stuff to keep the reader engaged.' Mike, hopefully your reading also leads you to a $2,462,216 payday.  :-) "

Fuji Fire Sale

Here I was, contemplating the notion of writing a post about the Fuji X-H1 possibly being my favorite camera of any kind, ever, and now this. From a fire sale price of $1,299 that I kept harping on and on about as a great whopping bargain—which it was—the Fuji X-H1 and the battery back / vertical grip is suddenly an unbelievable $999.95. (Here it is on Amazon, and at Adorama.)

For a camera/grip combination that debuted at $2,199 a year and a half ago!

Granted, this could well mean that an X-H2 is sitting on the runway waiting to launch. Always a risk.

Regardless of what it means, purely on a "lotta camera for little dollars" basis this is tough to top.

Mike
(Thanks to Dennis Mook)

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Sunday Support Group: The Meatitarian Diet (OT)

People need to eat plants (hear me out. I'm going somewhere with this). We were evolved to eat plants. Our teeth and intestines are formed so we can eat plants. Our nearest animal relatives eat almost nothing but plants. Our bodies function best on plants. Study after study after study closely correlates the health of populations to the percentages of plant food in their diets. All manner of medical outcomes—from the incidence of diabetes, to the health of our veins and arteries, to sleep, to headaches, to joint aches, to longevity—all improve when we eat plants. Plants contain hundreds and hundreds of chemicals that are important or critical to health beyond youth (they're important when we're young too, but, when we're young, the vitality of youth itself often "masks" the health risks and dangers of dietary foolishness). The scientific evidence is growing fast that cancer cells pop up in your body all the time, and that phytochemicals give it the vital ammunition it needs to crush them. If you aren't eating mostly plants, you are not as healthy as you could be. Most humans can survive and thrive indefinitely ingesting nothing but plants and water—a statement that can be made for no other category of food or "foodlike substance."

But it turns out that on a diet adequate in essential plant foods, you can also eat...well, meat.

Make no mistake, meat is poor food. It has low nutritional value. It is high in fat of the worst kind. Of the dietary essential in shortest supply in the appropriately abbreviated SAD—the standard American diet—namely, fiber—meat has none. (Fiber comes from plants.) People like meat because it's savory and it's got all that fat and, as recently as the post-war era, it was still a high-status food enjoyed frequently only by the well-off, and that status lingers in the culture. But it's not healthy. About the only things meat supplies that are good for you are things that the animal itself got from plants and concentrated in its own tissues—such as protein, a nutrient Americans already get way too much of to the detriment of our liver and kidney health. (One cup of broccoli has only 31 calories but 2.6 grams of protein; spinach contains every essential amino acid; etc. You cannot eat a sensible variety of plants and not get enough protein. You'll just get more, faster, from a steak.)

Pam Popper's latest book

But here's the thing. If you are eating a wide range of plants and vegetables and starches and are getting all of the phytonutrients your body needs, a few servings of meat a week won't kill you. Dr. Pam Popper (she is a Ph.D., not an M.D.) is the founder and President of Wellness Forum Health, "a company that offers educational programs to both consumers and providers that facilitate informed medical decision-making, diet and lifestyle intervention, and improved long-term health outcomes." Dr. Popper, who happens to eat no meat herself, defines "a few servings" as up to four ounces of high-quality, organic, non-processed (i.e., not bologna or sausage or Slim Jims!) meat up to three times a week. People who eat meat in low doses like that, as a group, have about the same health outcomes as vegans and people who eat WFPB (whole-food plant-based) diets.

...Which is a notion that is not very popular among vegans and people who eat WFPB diets.

That's rather an understatement, actually. The idea offends many of them. Well, "horrifies" is a word that also works, shall we just admit. Partly that's because "the V-words," vegetarian and vegan, often define not just a diet but an ethical stance toward animals and/or an environmental position...the production of meat, collectively speaking, being among our poor planet's worst environmental nightmares. There is certainly strong merit in those ideas. Partly, also, it might be because people love being true believer types. Most people who believe in plant diets don't see any sense or sanity in not going cold turkey, excuse the term.

In truth, though, the least worst thing about low-dose meat as part of a plant-based diet is merely that it displaces better foods. That is, the more prime rib you eat, the less spinach you'll have room for. The more pork tenderloin you pig out on, the more likely you are to skip seconds of green beans. The more shrimps you scarf down, the more blackberries you'll be deprived of forever.

But it won't hurt you.

Food by itself is not ideology. If you eat for health rather than ethics or ecology, then you can have good-quality meat in sensible amounts now and then if you enjoy it. It's not ideal food, no, and you could do better for your health just upping your portion of watermelon or watercress or yellow split pea soup. But you'll be fine. Your militant vegetarian friends won't like this at all ("never eat anything with a face!"), but, as long as you get all your plants down, you can be a low-dose meatitarian if you want to, and, at the statistical level at least, your health outcomes will still remain as good as theirs.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2019 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 Krumm: "Been doing full vegan Greger ( more or less) for a couple months now. Greger takes pains to emphasize that he’s not really advocating veganism, but of course if you make it through the daily dozen you likely won’t have room for much meat. Sometimes in a world where meat and other bad options surround you almost everywhere, it’s easier stick to full vegan rather than always 'moderating' something I’d like to stuff myself with. Same with cheese especially, my true weakness."

Mike replies: Cheese is the #1 unhealthy food. And it's mildly addictive. Check out Neal Barnard's The Cheese Trap. Or watch How to Magnetize a Baby.  :-)

Jim Pilcher: "Thank you, thank you, thank you!!! This may be the most sensible post you've made in eons, or at least this week. I'm a 95% vegan by choice since 2012 (no agenda other than health) who enjoys a bit of king salmon once or twice a week. I feel great, much better than when I ate a lot of meats. I don't begrudge others having their meat; I just don't do it any longer. Thank you again, Mike. I did not expect such a sane dietary post mixed in among the gear, billiards, photographic philosophies and sensibilities, and print talk."

A Play on Seascapes

Leigh Perry, Car Park

Here's the commentary posted when we first published this week's print sale picture, way back in 2011. The first sentence by Mike, the rest by Leigh:

Leigh, of Sydney, Australia, shot his minimalist masterpiece with an Ebony 45SU 4x5-inch view camera on Fuji Astia, his favorite transparency film, under "glorious fluorescent lighting."

"The commenters who speculated that my photograph was a joke were right," writes Leigh. "It was conceived as a pun on the minimal seascapes I had taken before it. The idea gradually formed itself while I stood for a couple of minutes each day waiting for my car to come out of a car stacker. I eventually became aware that the carpark contained all the elements that would have attracted me to a composition on the coast in the early morning.

"The photograph is typical and atypical of my work in equal measure. I've always been obsessed with symmetry (as a kid, if I stubbed a toe, I'd have to do the same on the other foot!), and this reveals itself in my compositions. You'll see from my other portfolios on my website a consistent obsession with geometric layers splitting the frame into halves or thirds. I can't ascribe any credit to [Andreas] Gursky, although I am a fan of the Düsseldorf School. [Hiroshi] Sugimoto, however, was an influence on the seascapes of mine that morphed into this.

"Although most of my subject matter involves landscape, particularly on the coast, I don't particularly consider myself a landscape photographer. I just shoot what is to hand here in Sydney."

When I asked him to share a bit more about who he is for us, he wrote, "I have worked as a software engineer in Sydney for over 30 years. I find that software creation shares some of the same features as the other obsessions of my life—music and photography. Each of these involves aspects of science and art—both sides of the brain—although some people might be surprised to hear that software does too."

Here's the link to the print again.

Mike

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Chas: "While I’ve frequently been tempted to comment on this site—long time lurker, as they say—I’m moved to do so, having viewed Leigh’s seascapes (through the link provided). Simply beautiful! Although I too gravitate towards symmetry, it’s the wonderful, soft pastel colours and the abstract elements (if you will) that knocked my socks off! Nothing but admiration here."

Lunatic

On August 12th, in the post about the Fuji 100–400mm, I said I once wrote in a magazine article that "there is nothing far enough away to take pictures of with a 180mm—I said even the moon was too close, because the moon filled too much of the frame with the 180mm." So someone suggested that I should take a shot of the moon as one of my test shots with the 100–400mm.

Thursday the 15th was the full moon, so I figured I'd wait. But I'm getting wise to the ways of the weather here—I went out the night before—the 14th—when the moon was visible, in case of clouds on the 15th. And sure enough, I never saw the moon on Thursday. Clouded over.

So here's the almost-full moon on Wednesday.

This is at 400mm (600mm-e), handheld.

The file retained detail in the moon and also in the sparse clouds in the sky, but of course the visual impression is of a brilliantly bright circle against a featureless black sky. The latter would not work in a pictorial representation, with its much lower range of luminances, so I tried to leave just a little cloud detail in the surrounding sky and a little detail on the surface of the moon. Are you seeing that? No idea if you're seeing it that way, because I don't know how your monitor is calibrated, but that's the choice I went with on my monitor.

Here's a detail ("detail" in art means a smaller segment of an image*) of the surface of the moon with the sliders set to show what the sensor recorded. This should be 100% on your monitor after you click on the image to open it.

That's probably not the best picture you ever saw of the surface of the moon, but once again, that's at 600mm-e, handheld.

I'll say again, I lived at just the right time to do what I do. I'm so grateful I started my career practicing basically a variation of 19th-century photography and ended up in the 21st. Because otherwise this might not amaze me so much. And I'm grateful to be amazed. Just blows me away, as we used to say back in the 20th.

Mike

*I've been making an effort to define terms and write out abbreviations occasionally for readers who might not be familiar with them. Don't forget only about 3–5% of readers ever comment. I want to remember as well those who might be quietly lurking.

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Math Problem (OT)

Actually, I'm not even sure this is mathematics. I don't even know what discipline it is. I realize this might be trivial to a lot of you, but my brain has never gotten along with numbers. (We all have weaknesses. The key to success in life is to know how to ask for help with the things we're not good at.)

Say you have four pool players—call them 1, 2, 3 and 4. The person who pays breaks, and each player pays and breaks in a fixed sequence, 1-2-3-4. Each game is two against two, but the teams rotate so that each person takes turns playing with the others. How do you arrange this so both sequences work?

It seems to me that there are four possible breakers, 1-2-3-4, but only three possible teams—that is, 1 plays with 2, then with 3, then with 4. How can both sequences continue? Sitting at the Moose the other day trying to bodge up a score sheet while the others were saying "come on, it's your turn!", I couldn't quite get there. To me it's like one of those odd time signatures that only jazz drummers know how to play.

Mike

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Mark Roberts (and the PDML)

TOP reader and old photo-friend Mark Roberts stopped by Penn Yan for lunch today. He was en route to Rochester on a very red and swoopy motorcycle. I first met Mark in person years ago at Grandfather Mountain in North Carolina. Actually I "e-met" him long before that on the PDML, the Pentax-Discuss Mailing List, where he was one of the most measured, friendly and knowledgeable voices among that chorus of measured, friendly and knowledgeable voices.

I spoke at Grandfather Mountain, at the Camera Clinic, one of two summer PDML group gatherings at the landmark park. I always figured I didn't do a very good job—my talk, about "reification and redacting," was a little dry and short on entertainment—but Mark told me at lunch that some of my comments were part of the inspiration for the PDML Photo Annuals, printed collections of participants' pictures that the mailing group produces every year. That make me feel better. I got to look through three of the recent annuals, and it was both nice looking at so many fine pictures and also seeing names still familiar from my years on the PDML. Back issues are available, and sales benefit the Global Health Initiative of Boston Children's Hospital and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.

The PDML is the nicest forum you'll ever hang out on, and I mean it. And I'll give you a little secret tip—don't tell anyone there I told you—you don't actually need to be shooting Pentax currently to participate. Some PDML denizens are people who just appreciate the low-key, accepting and courteous online community and are only Pentax sympathizers or former Pentax shooters. (You do have to use either a Pentax body or lens to get a picture into the Annual, however. Seems fair.)

As you can see from the picture of Mark, "former Pentax shooter" doesn't describe him. First time I've seen a real K-1 in person so to speak. There's a nice new 35mm lens for that camera, too, I learned just recently.

Anyway, if you'd like to join yourself or just test the waters, the address is PDML.net. It's a nice community.

Mark teaches Photoshop, among other arty and design-y subjects, at Lasell University in Newton, Massachussetts, and he's doing some fascinating and impressive work right now with blended and merged non-HDR HDR images. Good to see you again Mark!

Mike

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Ned Bunnell: "For those who don’t know Mark, he has some wonderful photographs on his Instagram account."

The Case Against Zooms

I’m well known for having a prejudice against zoom lenses. I generally don’t like them, generally don’t shoot with them, and generally don’t recommend them. Again and again, I’m asked to explain this, usually in a sort of bemused way, as if I’m some sort of strange curiosity who can’t get along with the other kids on the playground. Everybody uses zooms, right? Why “limit” yourself? As if I suffer from some sort of cantankerous hard-heartedness and haven’t thought out my opinion. So here, once again, is my case against zooms.

Learning How to Visualize
The only reason not to shoot with a zoom lens is this: a zoom lens has no point of view. A fixed-focal length (a.k.a. "prime") lens imposes its point of view on you, and, consequently, you can learn to impose its point of view on the world. If you routinely photograph with a fixed-focal-length lens, sooner or later you will not need to look through your camera to know what the lens will see—your eyes will know, your mind will know. You won't even need to have your camera with you to organize pictures out of the visual chaos of the world. Your eyes and your brain will be able to visualize without aid from the viewfinder. A zoom is a crutch to aid visualization, but, ironically, it is an impediment to learning how to visualize. If one wants to learn how a camera sees, the best and easiest way is to deal with a lens you can learn, instead of a lens that's a chameleon.

Are there other disadvantages of zooms? Of course. For one, they are usually as large as the largest focal length lens they replace, and as slow as the slowest focal length lens they replace. Plus, they add another control which must be manipulated in between two events that ought to be linked as closely as possible: recognizing a picture and taking the picture. Many times, one might have time for this. But maybe not.

Can good photographers who know how to visualize already use zooms effectively? The answer has to be yes. Are zooms often useful when you can't choose your standpoint, as when you're behind a barricade at a sporting event, or one one side of a mountainous valley taking pictures of the other side? Of course.

Zooms are most especially useful, I think, at the telephoto end of the focal length range—because the longer the lens, the more difficult and time-consuming it is to change your framing by moving yourself.

I've reviewed hundreds of photographers' portfolios, and if I had to guess, I would say that generally, photographers who use zooms don't frame pictures as well as photographers who don't. Does this mean this generalization is true in every instance? Naturally not. Some photographers have such skill or experience that none of this matters much. Just because I say that zooms encourage some students of the art to be sloppy and prevent them from learning visualization easily, can we extrapolate from that that zooms are bad and no photographer can make a good photograph with a zoom? That would be an egregious logical fallacy, of course, and I would never claim such a thing.

I do have a prejudice against zooms, though, for this very simple reason: I don't think they help most photographers do better work. I think they are an impediment to learning how to see better. But do I have a prejudice against people who use zooms, or pictures made with zooms? Not at all. Those two things don’t logically follow one from the other.

Exercises
So how can you tell for yourself? Easy: try it. I don’t know if you’re in the habit of giving yourself exercises, and maybe it betrays my fundamentally teacherish nature that I like 'em. But I do think that exercises help. They help get us in shape, help us "tone our muscles" as it were, help us hone our skills. One great advantage of DSLRs over digicams is that we can choose which lens we want to use. Zooms, found on most (all?) digicams, are perfectly appropriate for them—they add more flexibility into a small, all-in-one package. (A digicam is like a jackknife—useful for many things, perfect for very few.) And a DSLR allows us to add lens capability, it’s true—and this is what most people are concerned about. Can you photograph a gnat’s tooth at one knuckle’s distance? Can you get everything into the picture from one side of a broad room to the other? Can you zoom in on a distant squirrel and cut out all the surrounding clutter? Can you handle every possible situation? That’s what most people think about. And let’s face it, it’s more fun to buy new lenses than it is to learn to use the ones you already have.

A zoom makes sense on 'em since you can’t change lenses. But a DSLR also allows us to limit lens capability, too—if for no other reason than as an exercise. You can pick one single-focal-length lens and use it for a week, a month, or a year, and really learn how to see with it. Try it. I can virtually guarantee it will improve your eye. It’s probably true that we shouldn’t be doctrinaire, and that letting preferences harden into prejudices isn’t a good thing. Even for a photographer who uses mostly primes, one zoom might come in handy sometimes. (I keep meaning to get one.) But, just as surely, every photographer ought to have at least one fixed-focal-length lens in his or her bag.

Mike

This was first published on The Luminous-Landscape in 2003, sixteen years ago, hence the discussion of "digicams" and "DSLRs" which seems a little dated now.

When I grew up, there were two highly prestigious kinds of cameras, both of which were prized and used by serious and ambitious photographers, and neither of which used zoom lenses: Leica rangefinders and view cameras. Professional photographers also widely used medium-format film cameras, and zooms were broadly unsuited for those as well. The attitude was pretty set and widespread in those days: zooms were for amateurs.

It's underappreciated now that Leica film rangefinders and view cameras imparted a certain salutary discipline on lens choice. Leicas were best when used with fixed-focal-length lenses for which the cameras had framelines: 28mm, 35mm, 50mm, 75mm, 90mm and 135mm in the case of the M6. Of those, 135mm was of limited usefulness because the rangefinder wasn't very good at focusing it. In fact, the major reason 135mm is a standard focal length at all is that it was the longest lens that could reasonably be focused on a rangefinder. Of course, humans being humans, people immediately demanded that the Leica be adaptable for things it didn't naturally do well, so various wide-angle lenses were made for it that required the use of external viewfinders temporarily attached to the flash shoe, and various kludges for close-up work were cobbled up.

But really, Leicas were good for focusing five "prime" lenses at distances of a meter or more: 28mm, 35mm, 50mm, 75mm, and 90mm. And you didn't even need all five; two or three would usually serve.

Same thing with view cameras: there was a limited range of fixed-focal-length lenses that made sense on them. Professionals are generally the most competent photographers, but they are also not free: they make their livings solving problems put to them by their clients. So studio pros who shot with view cameras might need a variety of lenses for a variety of purposes. But among view camera photographers who are free to do whatever they want, many own only one lens, and few (except for gearheads) own more than three or regularly carry more than three in the field. Of course some aficionados own view cameras of many formats and enjoy owning big collections of lenses for them, but, given that Edward Weston and Walker Evans each used only one lens for long stretches of their most productive periods as photographers, it's difficult to argue that lots of gear is actually needed.

Cut to now (leaving out a lot of intervening history): many peoples' "cameras" (that is, smartphones) come with...one lens of fixed focal length! Usually 28mm. My two-lensed iPhone 7+ has two modules; one, 28mm, and the other 56mm. It might be surprising that 28mm(-e) isn't noticeably growing in popularity for ILC's, but maybe smartphone shooters are just unaware that that's the focal length they use, or are just unaware of FOV and focal lengths period. I guess the latter is more likely.

One thing I'll bet is true, though: that while many people taking pictures with phones use a fixed 28mm-e now, they're also becoming extremely fluent with cropping. My 13-year-old niece takes a picture and then almost instantly crops it to just the portion of it she wants using a few quick flicks of her fingers. When I remember laboriously cropping yearbook photos with cropping angles and wax crayons it seems positively prehistoric, and surely my high-school students in the 1980s were less practiced at cropping—and less good at it—than my niece and her peers are today.

By the way, I'm sure a case can be made for zooms as well—it's just that I'm not the guy who's going to make it. And naturally, everyone should use what they're most comfortable with and what they like best. There is no right way and wrong way here. But if you've always used zooms and don't know what the fuss is about primes, do try it sometime—use one prime until you really get to know it well. I can almost guarantee you'll learn from the experience, even if you go back to zooms later. —MJ, 2019

Original contents copyright 2019 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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Stan B.: "Can't agree more. I spent at least a year shooting with each focal length between (and including) 50mm through 20mm. As a result, I know how each 'sees,' and what is usually 'best' for the given situation. It's an invaluable tool in your skill set—one that also helps hone the other most important practice in helping one see...cropping in camera."

Michael Perini: "If you are talking mostly about the best way to learn photography, and develop an 'eye,' I agree. Because, I learned that way, when I use a zoom, I tend to use them as two primes—24mm or 70mm, etc. But I now have lots of zooms because modern ones are so good, and they are necessary for lots of professional work. I'm happy to have them."

Mike replies: Yes, it's fair to say I am (or was, in 2003) indeed "talking mostly about the best way to learn photography, and develop an 'eye.'"

rick schermerhorn: "My Panasonic LX5 had defined stops for the common e-focal lengths covered by its zoom. I shot at 28mm-e for one year and 35mm-e for the rest of the years until it broke. I then opted for a Fuji X100S rather than the Ricoh GR. I wish all zooms had these defined stops."

trecento: "I think I've told this story before, but I learned photography—or at least, took my first photography class—using a Soligor 28mm–300m ƒ/3.5–6.8 It worked better than you would think! I learned to compose at 28mm and ƒ/3.5, because that was where I needed to be to get high enough shutter speeds! So it was a very large, very heavy, slow, 28mm prime. Yes, I did other stuff with it, and I learned a bit about the 300mm perspective.

"Years later, when I got my first digicam, a 28mm-e to 85mm-e zoom, I once again parked it at 28mm-e, since it had a blazingly fast ƒ/2.4 aperture, and of course, I was really familiar with that viewpoint. It was a 4MP Canon, and at base ISO, turned out some really nice photos. Likewise, when I got my first DSLR, and later, first mirrorless, I had the same experience: the best grain quality was going to be at 28mm, so I better get in close.

"I can't say what life would have been like with constant ƒ/2.8 lenses, but for me, cheap consumer zooms taught me a lot about framing and the importance of being involved in the picture. Today, I use a 40mm-e prime, but I'm thinking of switching to a 28mm-e for most of my family and friend photography. It's a nice point of view."

JohnW: "To paraphrase the great late Michael Reichmann of LuLa, 'No one ever looked at one of my images and said "You should have used a prime!"' It doesn't matter whether you learn to see with primes or with zooms...as long as you learn to see with the tools you have. I haven't owned a prime in 31 years...though, I keep meaning to get one."

JimH (partial comment): "[I've been] zoom-zoom for 50 years."

Maris Rusis: "After 50 years in photography using view cameras I've never made an exposure with a zoom lens. But zoom I do. First there is foot-zoom: walk to the place where everything lines up right and set the camera there. Then pick a lens that gets everything in and shoot. For the final picture I cut out what I don't want. That's crop-zoom. Big film can be quite generous."

Martin D: "Re: Walker Evans. I don't think it's right to think of him as a one-lens photographer. Many LF shooters are, but Evans not. The archetypical Evans 8-by-10 was produced with one variant or another of a triple convertible, giving him a spectrum from I think around 290mm to 690mm, or roughly 40mm-e to 105mm-e. The introduction to the excellent Walker Evans at Work looks at detailed examples, including cases where he worked with multiple focal lengths on the same object in the same session. The text mentions a Zeiss Protar, and Evans' own equipment list on p. 183 lists both the Protar and a Turner Reich Anastigmat ƒ/7.5 II 15''. He certainly was sparse in the range of perspectives that he adopted, but with Evans there always is the just-about tamed battle between the eye of a slight wide angle and that of a narrower light tele. Incidentally, those triple convertibles really are the forerunners of the Tri-Elmars, aren't they."

Reader Print Offer: Leigh Perry

Leigh Perry, Car Park

I'm very, very happy to bring you this as our Summer Reader Print Sale. For a mere $195, inexpensive for fine art by any measure these days, we're offering this wonderfully subtle signed print by TOP reader Leigh Perry from Australia.

Here's the link to the order page.

Leigh's picture made an indelible impression on me when I first saw it and I've never forgotten it since. It's become one of my favorite "abstract" photographs ever, by anyone; it's also among the top handful of my favorite finds on TOP in its soon-to-be 14-year history. Part of the reason for this sale is selfish: I just wanted a print of it for myself.  :-)

The colors are lovely. Ctein worked with Leigh on the print; I wasn't part of that process. They got it just right as far as I can see. I wouldn't change a thing.

The irony, of course, is that the photograph isn't abstract at all—it's a straight photograph of the wall and floor of a car park (parking lot) that just happened to have those two wonderful echoing marks arranged as if by an artist's hand. That it's also our second straight (!!) sale of pictures of concrete just makes me laugh, that's all. (It just worked out that way. Please don't think this is going to be the policy for all print sales from now on!)

I suppose you'll either like this or you won't. I think it's elegant and evocative and subtle, sere and plain and exquisite. I love it. I'd rather have this on my wall than a Sugimoto (not to detract anything from his accomplishment). 

Here's how it works
You probably already know how our sales work. We take orders for five days, then close the orders, and then the prints are made at one time to fulfill the orders that we've already received and that are already paid for. This way we can keep the prices low for you but still reward the photographer with a nice return.

Let's see, any more details? The image size is right around 15x19 inches (38x48 cm) on 17x22" paper. The shipping price is the same to anywhere in the world. Damaged or missing prints will be replaced at our expense, and you have a complete guarantee—if you don't like it once you see it, we'll send you a 100% refund (minus shipping).

All the rest of the ordering information can be found at the link. More about Leigh, and the print, in days to come.

Note: Unless you need to take your time for some reason, please don't wait to order—the pictures have to go to Leigh in Australia for signatures, and PayPal mandates that we start shipping to customers within 30 days. That's kinda tight. It will be much easier for us if we have a significant number of orders to ship out to him in the first batch. If you order early you'll be doing us a big favor. Many thanks!

Mike
(Thanks to Leigh and Ctein)

Original contents copyright 2019 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:

Bandbox: "It looks like a color field painting with a couple of scuff marks."

K4kafka: "Like Mark Rothko, on a happy day...."

Mike Potter (partial comment): "That photo really doesn't speak to me. At all."

Peter Gilbert: "That's what I call Wabi-sabi at its best. Great shot."

 

Open Mike: A New Favorite Lens?

Fuji X-H1 with XF 35mm ƒ/1.4 (52mm-e)

I've been off trying some more of these Fuji lenses.

For a while there I thought I had a new favorite lens...I tried the new-to-me (but old, almost legacy at this point) Fujifilm XF 35mm ƒ/1.4, and I liked it almost instantly. This isn't too surprising, as it's a modified Planar-type but without the cemented flat surfaces between 4 and 5 that I usually associate with less appealing out-of-focus blur (bokeh). The lens is small and light—barely heavier than the XF 35mm ƒ/2 which I also own—and has a compact lens hood, and makes a very nice combination mounted on the X-H1.

I've used many, many 50mm's (or their equivalents) over the years and don't like very many of them. It's difficult to find a good 50mm(-e). They're typically flawed in some way or another—some have flare or odd ghosting that shows up in certain situations but not others, some render highlights harshly, some have curvature of field that most people can't see in pictures but I can, some have a sort of cold analytical look. Et cetera. I've seen it all. Most have problems at least somewhere with bokeh. My favorites historically (on B&W film!) have been the seven-element Pentax ƒ/1.4's from the Super-Takumar to the SCMP-FA, the OM Zuiko 50mm ƒ/2 Macro, and the 55mm-filter 50mm Leica Summilux-R among others. Have I used 50 50's? Possibly. Am I a completely over-the-top, hopeless, OCD-afflicted connoisseur? Yep. Or at least I was.

It doesn't take me long to get a handle on a lens for myself. It takes longer to put a lens through its paces in order to present review conclusions formally to others, but I've been doing this so long and I know these designs so well that, for my own satisfaction, I can almost intuit what's going on with a lens after a relatively short trial.

The Fuji XF 35mm ƒ/1.4 is gaaaaah. First of all it's got that typical Planar-type variation between the open apertures (ƒ/1.4–ƒ/2.8) and the optimum apertures (ƒ/4–ƒ/8 in this case). The open apertures retain some classic softness in the corners that I think improves pictures taken in "available darkness," the very situations in which you want to use open apertures. Most reviewers treat that like a bug but to me it's a feature. Stopped down it's magnificently sharp—not that razory, analytical, flat, hard, wiry sharpness people are impressed by these days, but the full-bodied, dimensional sharpness you get from lenses with good large-structure contrast and exceptional coatings. In character, this lens most resembles an excellent older Zeiss. I just love it when you're looking at a picture of a thing and your brain can suddenly shift from looking at the properties of the image to the properties of the thing, or the light.

I usually press Mr. Handsome into service as a test-shot model, which is ironic as he actually doesn't like having his picture taken and is uncooperative. The whole file of this picture shows the classic technical beauty of the Planar-type. The Fuji XF 35mm ƒ/1.4 is a very beautiful lens. This could have been made with a Zeiss Contarex lens.

100% detail

It does have some distinct problems in the bokeh, typical of what I associate with single aspheric-element lenses, which this is. With high-contrast objects in the out-of-d.o.f. background, wide apertures at middle focus distances create distinctly ugly, "sick to your stomach" bokeh (anata no i ni byōki bo-ke). (That translation was a joke, son. I take full personal responsibility for all my zany descriptors of bokeh.) Yet the bokeh with softer contrast in the out-of-d.o.f areas and the focus set close is very nice. This is manageable, because you usually want the bokeh to be best when the focus is set close, but it's something you need to know when shooting with this lens. By the way, the modern hobbyist tendency to shoot everything wide open for "maximum bokeh" is mere depravity to any lens connoisseur. Ugh. "Depravity" is way too strong a word, but then, it's an exaggerated sentiment. Heh.

(100% detail after you click on it.) The bokeh shows some distinct bright-ring effects at ƒ/2.8 with the focus set to a middle distance and with a high contrast background. But then, why would anyone shoot a scenic in midday sunlight at ƒ/2.8 anyway?

At the same aperture, but focusing close and with a nearer and less contrasty background, the 35mm ƒ/1.4's bokeh behaves just like a Planar's—smooth but with just a little "interest." Nice. (This is the whole frame.)

So I thought, yeah. This is my lens. I can see why other people can't handle it—can't deploy it properly—but I can. I like a lens that fights back a little, that you have to get to know, that reveals its glories to those who understand it. I started thinking things like, this is the last of my Fuji lenses I would sell; I could do a OC/OL/OY project with this without any problem; etc., etc.

Could be a flaw in the ointment though
Then I started comparing it to the ƒ/2 lens...a lens I have owned for a while and had already decided I don't like very much. And...

...Well, objectively, when I take my connoisseur's [tinfoil] hat off and pretend I'm a normal reasonable human and compare one to the other, there's really...not a whole lot of difference. It's funny, but when you start writing about lenses and talking about this and this property and that quality, it's easy to think that there are huge differences in lenses...when actually, sometimes those differences are exceedingly small. Put up two pictures taken under controlled conditions, look at them next to each other, letting your eyes go back and forth, back and forth, and sometimes...well, there could be a little difference, but the difference doesn't make a difference, if ye ken.

Hmm. Anyway, this matter is going to require more study.

(After I wrote that, I went around the neighborhood and took two dozen pictures twice, once with each lens. I will say this for these lenses: as I switched back and forth, the lens I wasn't using could be temporarily stashed in the top pocket of my shirt when I didn't have it on the camera. Take that, users of this or this.)

One thing I will say, is that the operability of the newer ƒ/2 lens is much better. It doesn't focus all that much more quickly, but it does it with a modern whisper-quietness, and you're not really aware of it when it momentarily "hunts" or adjusts. The older lens seems to work with all the speed of a tall ship coming about into the wind—a great clanking of the wheel, cries from the deck commanders, minions clambering about the foretop, the spanker tugging her stern around into the wind's eye*. Clank, whir, grind, along with seemingly less than fully coordinated movements (the newer lens has internal focus and nothing visibly moves). The 35mm ƒ/1.4's AF is very '90s-ish in sound and gestalt. I really don't think the faster lens is that much slower to focus—a little, probably—it's just that it's louder and grinds and buzzes more and when it adjusts focus with a little secondary zup sound you're more aware of it, so that it seems more labored. Add the weather sealing and lower price of the XF 35mm ƒ/2 "Fujicron" and it becomes tough to prefer the older, faster lens.

Except I still do.

For now. More OCD perseverating to come**, once I get to those comparison pictures I just took.

Mike
(Thanks to JB)

*I can think of a forum where I'd get a very serious reply stating, "You don't know what you're talking about, the 35mm ƒ/1.4 sounds nothing like a square-rigged Napoleonic War frigate. How can we believe anything you say when you don't even know that?"

**But don't hold your breath waiting or you'll turn blue and and die.

Footnote: "flaw in the ointment" is a joke, son, a joke ah say. It's fly in the ointment.

Original contents copyright 2019 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:

Bill: "I love that lens. Use it for 90% of my shots. I’ve had it since there were only four Fuji X lenses and never really tried the 35mm ƒ/2 (but I do have the 23mm and 50mm so I know they are 'smoother.' Since I have it, it is unlikely I will ever get the Fujicron; ignorance is bliss. I don’t like the way it grinds when focusing but loooove the way it renders. Enjoy it and the other; look forward to hearing how you feel down the road since you have the luxury of owning both."

Matt: "I have used both and in AFC mode or in eye-detect mode the XF 35mm ƒ/2 is much more reliable than ƒ/1.4. Even on the X-T2 and even with fw updates the ƒ/1.4 is lagging far behind. For stills or semi-stills it does not matter, but for action with continuous focus the ƒ/1.4 is a frustration. No matter how good the lens is, if it cannot nail focus, it's a liability. Therefore I do not follow the public love and adoration for the original 35mm ƒ/1.4. In terms of haptics I agree that the XF 35mm ƒ/2 feels more solid."

Christopher May: "Re '...Well, objectively, when I take my connoisseur's [tinfoil] hat off and pretend I'm a normal reasonable human and compare one to the other, there's really...not a whole lot of difference.' This reminded me of an article I read one time called 'The 50mm Lens and Metaphysical Doubt.'  ;-)  What's really funny about that article, this article and the seemingly infinite Internet lens discussion is that I understand and appreciate both sides of the whole lens connoisseur debate. I listen to the Classic Lenses Podcast where Simon, Johnny, Perry, the late Karl (may he rest in peace) and a host of guests can wax poetic about this characteristic or that look from some esoteric lens for hours. I like it. I enjoy it. But I also don't find myself going out and picking up every lens mentioned on the show. And sometimes I'm just plain backwards to prevailing sentiment. The old Sonnar version of the Nikkor 105mm ƒ/2.5 is all the rage among classic lens users. My humble Gauss version seems to get no love. The funny thing is, though, that it (and the rest of my relatively humble lens arsenal) produce results that I like even if they're not the latest and greatest or even the oldest and the coolest. I just like taking pictures with what I have. It's still fun to read this post and see echoes of both sides of the debate from your comparison of the Fujicron and the Fujiplanar. And if nothing else, it's got to be a unique opportunity to see one manufacturer manage to create a sort of Leica homage and a sort of Zeiss homage in the same lens lineup!"

Print Offer Coming Up!

On Thursday we'll be having another of our Reader Print Offers. This one is special to me because it's one of my all-time favorite "finds" on TOP. The picture is minimalist and modernist and looks abstract but isn't. The color is subtle and more is implied than can actually be seen. I absolutely love it.

Come back on Thursday to take a look! (You might have seen it before.)

Mike
(Thanks to C. and L.P.)

Original contents copyright 2019 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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No featured comments yet—please check back soon!

Stepping Outside with the Fuji 100-400mm

I went out for a few hours on Saturday with just the X-H1 and the Fujinon XF 100–400mm (150–600mm-e, where "-e" means angle-of-view equivalent) and had a good time. It was the first time I've used the lens, and I must admit it felt a little disorienting at first; I felt like a trained volleyball player who is suddenly asked to play badminton. I'm not a long telephoto kind of guy naturally. In fact I have never used a 600mm or 600mm-e lens before, ever. Canon sent me a 300mm when I reviewed the then-new EOS system* in 1991 or so, and I did shoot with that. For two hours or so. My experience with very long lenses is, shall we say, minimal.

It's quite different, shooting with very long lenses. At least there are more distant pictures up here. The last time I used a long telephoto, in the later 1990s, it was a Nikkor 180mm ƒ/2.8** (a famous lens—they still make one) on a film Nikon, and on the afternoon I used it I was trying to take pictures around Chicagoland. And nothing you can see is far away in Chicagoland***. So I joked (in the subsequent magazine article) that there is nothing far enough away to take pictures of with a 180mm—I said even the moon was too close, because the moon filled too much of the frame with the 180mm.

Ha ha, but that's kind of the way I feel with long teles.

So I fell back into "testing" mode. "Testing" is always easier than taking pictures! The thing I was really looking at was the image stabilization. Naturally you'd find out more about the sharpness potential of the lens with a sturdy tripod and Iridient X Transformer (I did use the latter), but I'm unlikely to have the patience for a tripod except in specific situations, so I wanted to know what the lens would be like to hand-hold. The Fuji 100–400mm ($1,899) has OIS, optical image stabilization, built into the lens, and apparently turning it on or off also turns the in-body image stabilization (IBIS) on and off; when both are on, they work in concert. And boy, do they ever work.

This isn't so surprising:

This is the lens at its short end, 100mm (150mm-e), and the subject (the seagull, that would be) is gliding along lazily, and the shutter speed was a whipcrack 1/1400th of a second.

This detail should be at 100% on your monitor after you click on it to open it. Bear in mind our blog software dulls image sharpness slightly but noticeably.

Here's a considerably tougher test. These gents were seemingly about half a mile away, moving fast. (Sorry I didn't get the color right on this, but oh well.) [UPDATE: I was correcting the JPEG in this case and discovered that the color setting was to "Classic Chrome," which explains the subdued colors here. I'm just getting to know the camera again and was not aware of all the previous owner's settings.]

Detail

That's amazing to me; here the zoom is racked out all the way to 400mm/600m-e, and I'm hand-holding it—poorly—and the shutter speed is only 1/450th. I'm sure an experienced birder could do better—this is a little sfumato—but as I shot this, the image was jouncing around in the viewfinder so badly that I had trouble framing the shot! That I got anything close to a sharp result seems like a modern miracle.

As an aside, you can certainly spy on people with this lens. I captured expressions on the faces of people who were so far away they were oblivious I was there. Like, the length of a football field away. Again, this is all kinda new to me. (Here's an ethical question. Mennonites don't like having their picture taken, but the reason is modesty—they consider it prideful to be the object of attention from others. Would you say it's ethical to take pictures of them if you're so far away they don't know you're doing it? What would you do?)

And finally, here's a test shot from later in the evening. From across my family room, I did some test shots of my handy high-tech grid target at 400mm/600mm-e, but with the shutter speed all the way down to 1/20th. To say I could not hold this steady by myself is an understatement—the image in the viewfinder was bouncing around like Pooh's friend Tigger. Here's the result:

And that's not the full frame, either—that's a center detail! (Again, it should be 100% for you after you open it by clicking on it.)

Are you kidding me? A lens that long, handheld, at a twentieth of a second?!? That's magic, that's what that is. And I got this result over and over again. (I had to keep trying it because I couldn't believe it.)

Magic Fuji XF 100–400mm showing aftermarket foot AKA carrying handle

By the way, the lens was not a pain to carry. The previous owner replaced the OEM foot, which is (obviously) removable, with a Hejnar Arca-type low-profile aftermarket tripod foot, so I just used that as a handle to carry lens and camera. It was quite comfortable walking around with it as long as I had it in my hand.

Of course I was basically working out of the car. As we all know, with heavy cameras there are no pictures more than 300 steps away from your car.

Word to the wise, though—never go out armed with only a supertelephoto zoom! When the sun and clouds are dramatic in the Finger Lakes they are very dramatic, and once I got into the "head" of looking for pictures I saw lots and lots of them, and I lost a lot of opportunities on account of not having a plain-jane 50mm-e or 35mm-e riding shotgun.

Cool stuff going on in the atmosphere—it's a show. I resisted the
temptation to hype this up with the sliders—this is how it looked.

On the other hand, that's my duty—I know myself. If I had had a shorter lens along, I would have spent two-thirds of my time shooting with that and I wouldn't have gotten to grips with the 100–400mm very well.

As it is, I had a blast. It was a beautiful day to be outside, and I enjoyed the challenge of stepping "outside" in another way—outside my comfort zone, that would be. I drained the one battery I had along (I suspect the long lens sucks a fair amount more battery power than a small prime does?) and was forced to quit and drive home because I was out of power.

Two thoughts about that. It has never occurred to me before, but that's an advantage of an optical viewfinder—you can keep framing pictures even with the camera turned off. As my battery was nearing its end, I kept switching off the camera to conserve the juice, and then I couldn't experiment with framing. (You can tell I don't usually drain batteries when I'm out and about.)

Hähnel ProCube2 dual-battery charger

The other thing I wanted to mention under this heading is that I inherited this Hähnel ProCube2 dual battery charger for selected Fuji and Panasonic batteries, and it's really nice. It charges one or two batteries in less than an hour, and it displays the percentage of charge clearly on the front readout as you go. They make them for Nikon, Canon, Olympus and Sony as well, and apparently they're popular because Hähnel is having trouble keeping them in stock. Check to make sure they fit your specific batteries. (There's also a clip-on plate that goes on top that charges four rechargeable AA's.) Nice accessory, one I'm glad to know about.

Honestly, though, you don't need a charger with this particular camera, because the battery grip, which now comes with this camera for a quite low bargain price, is itself a battery charger. Load two batteries into it and plug it in to an outlet via its included cable and you'll be good to go. The camera also comes with the usual single-battery charger in the box. The kit also comes with three batteries, which go for $65.79 each when purchased separately. You do get quite a lot for your money with this Fuji...it was a deluxe product just a year and a half ago at the intro MSRP of $2,199 for the kit with the camera and battery grip, but to get both camera and grip for the current price of just $1,299 really is just a screaming bargain. I know I keep saying that, but really.

Note to self: remember to attach the battery grip when using the 100–400mm.

I would never have bought this lens for myself in this lifetime, so it's great to have the opportunity to get some experience with it. It is, er, expanding my horizons. I'm sure than an XF 55–200mm (84–305mm-e) would be much more useful to me personally in terms of reach 'n' range. But it wouldn't get me outside my comfort zone. And would the OIS on that work as well? Ah, there's always something yet to test.

Mike
(Thanks to JB)

*By the way, did you know that Canon's "EOS" originally stood for "Entirely Organic System"? This is true, I'm not joking. Only subsequently in its development was the meaning of the initials changed to "Electro Optical System."

**A once-famous lens type, dating back to Zeiss's renowned "Olympia Sonnar" that was rushed to completion for the 1936 Berlin Games. Nikon still makes a 180mm ƒ/2.8 although the lens type has long been eclipsed by standard tele zooms such as the Nikkor 80–200mm ƒ/2.8D. Every manufacturer makes its own version; the equivalent lens in the Fuji XF lineup is the XF 50–140mm ƒ/2.8 (76–213mm-e), which by the way is considerably more expensive than the full-frame Nikon FX (full-frame DSLR) or Canon DSLR equivalents.

***The Greater Chicago Metropolitan Area. It goes on forever, and once you get out far enough it all starts to look the same—all kind of closed-in with a scarcity of vantage points and vistas. And nope, you can easily be far enough away from them that you can't see the skyscrapers of downtown. There are more people in Chicagoland than there are in the States of Wisconsin and Iowa combined.

Original contents copyright 2019 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:

Dan Gorman (partial comment): "I've lived pretty much all my life in and around Chicago, and I can attest that very long lenses aren't much use around here for anything besides sports, birding, and spying on your neighbors. I never gave it much thought, but maybe that's why I was never drawn to them. In addition to the attributes you mentioned at the '***' footnote, the landscape is mostly very flat, and the few hills we have (yes, there are some, especially southwest of the city) are heavily forested, which makes vistas like the one in your first image in this post vanishingly rare. In the summer the air tends to be hazy; in the winter, the skies tend to be a leaden gray. Unless you have ready access to a high-rise (like Ken Tanaka, for example), Chicago is definitely not a landscape shooter's paradise. On the other hand, if you like architecture or street portraiture, you've got subject matter to last a lifetime.  :-) 

"Glad to hear you're having fun 'outside.'"

Eamon Hickey: "Mike, I believe you must be pulling our legs with 'Entirely Organic System,' no?

"But for the record, just in case: in more than 30 years in and out of the camera and camera media industries, I've never heard that. And I have known many folks at Canon whose histories go back that far.

"Also it sounds really, really implausible to my ear, for reasons I won't belabor here, since I suspect my leg is being pulled."

Mike replies: Not pulling your leg; that was the development name. I got a lot of insider info fed to me when I wrote "The EOS Revolution" in 1991 or so. Take a look at the Canon Camera Museum History Hall, "The EOS System 30th Anniversary Interviews: Developers Look Back on the History of the EOS System – Part 1," paragraph one.

Eamon: "Okay, well, that's a good source, so I guess I have no choice but to stand corrected. I'll only say that this is the third different story I've seen in official Canon literature. I wonder what 'entirely organic system' is supposed to mean? Too bad they gave up on the adverb of degree, or we could have the Entirely Electro-Optical System, or maybe the Mostly Electro-Optical System or the Partially Electro-Optical System—the PEOS! If only they'd had me to help them in their naming meetings...."

Mike: Well, you might remember some of my early thoughts about Canon camera naming. (And I wonder why Canon doesn't like me....)

Ned Bunnell adds: "Having worked at Canon, I think a slight clarification is needed on the history of the phrase 'entirely organic system.' As many companies do, this was the internal code name for the project. It’s meaning which I was told really didn’t translate well into English was meant to support the goal of the engineers in developing a systematic coordination of components or, if my memory is still good, an organized organic whole ecosystem. It was never intended to be used as an external or marketing name."

Martin D: "Delighted to see how this unexpected lens gift allows you to explore new ways of seeing."

Kristine Hinrichs: "A hint if you plan to be out and about with that lens. With my Olympus 40–150mm Pro I rotated the tripod mount to about the 10 o’clock position. That allows me to slip my hand between the mount and lens, increasing the stability markedly."

Mike replies: Good tip. However, the attachments for the foot on the 100-400mm are two threaded screws, so it's not possible to rotate it. As a carrying handle, the non-low-profile Hejnar foot might work better. [CORRECTION: I'm wrong! The threaded screws attach to a locking collar which allows you to rotate the position of the tripod mount. Good reviewer's rule, which I just violated: always have the actual product at your elbow when you say something about it, and don't go by memory...even if the lens is just in the other room. Thanks to Bob Johnston (no immediate relation) for setting this straight.]

Sunday Support Group: The Class of '69

If you're a regular reader who happens to pay attention to the comment bylines, you probably know the name Dave Levingston. Dave is a retired photojournalist who lives in Springfield, Ohio. He took the last photograph in this post.

Dave and some members of his family visited last Friday, just in time for an epic rain squall that flattened the area and cut power to hundreds. ("Hundreds" meaning "lots"—we're the third least-populous county in New York State. There are hardly any people here.) He showed me several boxes of his work.

My favorite was a group of "environmental portraits" (portraits of people showing their surroundings). He was attending his 50th high school reunion and started making pictures of his classmates. Then he got a good idea, and decided to try to get as many of them as he could, and at that point he titled the project "The Class of '69." Then he got a really good idea, and thought, hey, why limit this to our class?

Since then, he's been finding people who graduated in 1969 wherever he goes.

Isn't that a great idea? It's a very specific project, yet the potential subject matter is functionally limitless. It's a great entrée by which to make contact with people, even strangers, and oh by the way, make photographs of them. It's comprehensible to everyone instantly and most everyone would be happy to participate (you can tell this because all most all of the people in his portraits look genuinely happy and good-natured) and it's a great way to make new friends.

Perfect. I thought it was a little bit of genius.

Great ideas are actually tough to come up with. They have to be flexible but specific, easy for people to grasp but a rich vein to mine, varied enough to keep everyone (subjects, photographer, viewers) interested....and having that entrée never hurts.

The portraits, by the way, were very nicely printed, I'm going to guess about 9x13" maybe? He did the conversions in DxO and took the pictures with a Micro 4/3 camera. I thought they looked like small enlargements from about a 645 film camera.

The beardy guy in the example portrait above is, as you have probably guessed by now, one Dave Levingston of Springfield, Ohio. Self-portrait using the camera's timer. Class of '69, of course.

Mike
(Thanks to Dave)

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this post said Dave was from Canton, Ohio, but that was merely his destination when he passed through here. He lives in Springfield, Ohio. Sorry for the error.

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William Schneider: "Being from the class of '68, I felt a strange tinge of disappointment that I did not qualify. Upon reflection why, I realized that exclusive projects like this have something working for them. Leveraging human nature, they motivate people to become willing subjects. Clever!"

Gary: "I will be attending my 1969 high school reunion in San Diego in September. It was a momentous year: Moonwalk, Woodstock, and great music. The previous year was momentous also, but tragic. Please provide a link to Dave Levingston's project!"

Dave Levingston adds: I can't thank you enough for your very kind words about my Class of '69 project. I really appreciate it. I've been posting this project on Facebook. If anyone would like to see all the photos they can look at them there. But please remember that Facebook does awful things to photos when they are uploaded to their site. The prints I showed Mike were 8.5x11 work prints. I hope to find a venue to do a little show with some of these before this 50th anniversary year is out. I will likely print them to around 11x14 for framing and display.

For those who care about technical stuff, I'm shooting with a pair of Panasonic GX8s and using a 12–60mm Panasonic lens, mostly around 12mm, for these portraits. I use DxO Photo Lab 2 for RAW conversions and black-and-white conversions. I use ACDSee Photo Studio 2 for most other editing tasks. The prints were made with an Epson 4900 on Epson Ultra Premium Luster paper.

And, if anyone reading this graduated from high school in 1969 and would like to be a part of this project, please get in touch.

Martin D: "Class of '69 is a brilliant project idea. It is simple and effective and amenable to all sorts of artistic variations. And as you rightly say, with such simple ideas it is always easy to see their value once you have them put before you, but coming up with them in the first place is where most of us struggle. I will not copy this idea directly, as such transfers never work, but your friendly visitor Dave Levingston has encouraged me to go back to the little black book in which I take notes for potential photo projects...and then to actually pick one and get it started! Really good photograph by Dave in your 2013 competition by the way, of the turkey farmer. I remember being impressed by it at the time, and now there is additional context."

Mike Potter: "That is a wonderful self-portrait. I like it, a lot."

Shootouts

I'm hoping to do a shootout between the G9 and the X-H1 before the former goes the way of all things. (No, not death— eBay.) I also need to do a shootout between the Zeiss 12mm and the Fuji 14mm, because I'm not going to keep two ultra-wides—I don't do enough shooting with ultra-wide focal lengths to justify that. And I need to compare the fast and slow Fuji 35mms for the same reason—~50mm-e is not an often-used focal length for me any more (it was for a long time, but not lately) so I really can't see the sense in keeping both.

I have a nice post planned for tomorrow for "Sunday Support Group"—it's about a photography-related project instead of being off-topic. And then next week, something very unusual for TOP—a post about firearms! (This seems on topic to mention in a post called "Shootouts.") It's by a guest author, and features an interesting photograph.

Enjoy the rest of your Saturday—it's a very pretty day here in the Finger Lakes of Upstate New York, and it's peak season here—we are inundated with tourists and Summer vacationers. They picked the right time to visit.

Mike

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Old and In the Way

The last post made me curious, and I don't think I've asked this question for a while.

What's the oldest digital camera you shoot with regularly? (Don't neglect to give the year it came out if you can.)

Good topic for a Summer weekend. Bonus question: what's the weirdest, most unusual, or most offbeat camera you own and sometimes even use? (Here's how to add a picture to a comment in case you want to. Make sure the picture isn't more than 470 pixels wide.)

For me, my oldest camera in use is my 2014 Fuji X-T1 (2014 was a very good year for TOP and for me). The answer to the second question is surely my Exakta 66.

Mike

P.S. The post title comes from this, as the Deadheads and bluegrass fans amongst ye knew instantly.

Original contents copyright 2019 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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Emil: "I’ve only owned and used one camera since it was released 2011: Fujifilm X100 with its 23mm lens. We make a great team together!"

Dave Levingston: "I have most of the digital cameras I've bought, all the way back to a Sony Mavika that wrote the files to floppy disks, but I pretty much never use any but the most current, which these days are a pair of Panasonic GX8s.

"I have several 'weird' cameras, including a custom-made Fuji Instax Mini camera with a very nice, sharp view camera lens on the front. But the most weird is my 'Speed Holga' which I put together after an argument with a dedicated Holga photographer who was insisting that only a Holga camera could produce the Holga style in photos. I maintained that any crappy camera could take Holga-like photos. I told her I could tape a magnifying glass to the front of a camera and make photos that resembled Holga photos. She was certain that was impossible. So I did it.

"As you can see, no expense was incurred in the building of this camera and lens combo.

"I've taken a number of photos with this setup. The rear shutter of the Speed Graphic makes it easy to use. I used Polaroid and Fuji peel-apart instant film, though sheet film or roll film in a holder would work, but without the quick feedback on exposure, since the 'aperture' is a total unknown.

"Here's one photo done with it. This was grossly overexposed, might have been the first shot I took with it, but that overexposure turned out to be a pretty happy accident."

Andrew Lamb: "I use an EOS 5D II and Nikon D3S regularly for pro work. For personal pics I regularly use a 6x6 Super Ikonta, from 1938, my all-time favourite camera."

Jim R (partial comment): "Jerry Garcia started his musical career playing blue grass in 'jug bands' before making it big with The Grateful Dead, the grandfather of today’s 'jam bands.' I stopped paying attention to the more recent incarnations of The Grateful Dead once Jerry died in 1995. The music just stopped then. I did really like the ties based on his art though. The 'Old and In the Way' stuff is fabulous; thanks for the reminder!"

Use What You Like

By the way, just because we tend to have Fuji discussions here once in a while, please don't think I'm advocating for any particular kind of camera for anyone else. I have a friend who shoots an EOS R, a friend who shoots 4x5 film, several friends who shoot Canon DSLRs, and a friend who treated himself a few years back to a Sony A7RIII. I know a guy who has lately been doing everything with a Leica Q2, a guy who adapts tripod cameras with movements to digital bodies, and a woman who bought one of the Fuji medium-format cameras. I also know lots of people who shoot all kinds of things. Some people buy a new camera every year and some are shooting with digital cameras from 2009. Some people love film and hang around on film forums as well. Some pros rent what they need when they need it. It's all good. It's true that I tend to talk more about the kinds of cameras that appeal to me, but the last thing I want to do is run a site where anyone feels that have to shoot some particular brand or type of gear to be welcome.

Just thought I'd mention that one more time. Lest any newcomer (or recent-comer) think otherwise. We are camera brand and type agnostic at TOP!

Mike

Original contents copyright 2019 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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