The Online Photographer

The Sharp Edge

I'm going to be ready for spring. In previous springtimes, I spent most of my time driving around thinking, if I had a camera, and I were photographing, this would be perfect light and a great opportunity. (In fact if I were feeling cynical, which I'm not right now, I might say that's the state in which I have spent my life and in which I have mostly experienced the world.) But this spring, I'm going to be ready. I have my camera and its parameters in place; I've had some practice processing the files; I have an entire protocol worked out, from the kit I carry, to ingestion, to soft display of the results...so bring on the good light. I'm ready this time.

The thing is, though, I have to keep shooting now. Now. Because I need to keep in practice. Shooting with a camera is like shooting pool...every day you have to get over the initial rust and get back into the flow. Real pool players, if they haven't been shooting much, work intensively for some number of days—like, ten to fourteen hours at the table—because that's what it takes to get back "in stroke." Pool skills aren't just something you have and carry around with you and can deploy right away, cold, whenever the spirit moves you. It takes constant honing of the knife edge. Same thing with most skills that have a physical component. Most instrumentalists have to practice every day. Even vocalists. Athletes have to stay in shape by regulating their training. They can't just knock off for weeks and expect to stay right where they were.

Same thing with photographing. Most good shooters shoot every day. And even shooting every day, it takes a while to get back into it. And you still have good days and bad days. If you want everything you do to be natural and easy, you've got to keep your edge. I've heard plenty of stories of great photographers going out and shooting nothing for a while just to keep the hand and eye sharp. It's easy and cheap now, but you've still got to do it.

When I was learning zone focusing by feel with the Leica, I made it a habit to get the camera out every night and practice with it for ten minutes. Look at an object somewhere in the room, focus on it by feel, check for accuracy, repeat. It's not a bad idea with any camera. Take it out, pick out something to photograph, prepare to shoot whatever you're looking at...see how long it takes you to get ready to shoot. What are the sticking points that are slowing you down? Work on those things. If you have a spouse, go for a walk and ask your spouse to point to subjects. "That pine tree, vertical. That church over there, horizontal. Those flowers. That doorway, vertical." Whatever they call out, take a picture of it as quickly as you can—just for practice getting the camera around, holding it correctly, setting it, setting the lens, focusing, getting all ready to hit the shutter. Then put it back over your shoulder or back in the bag and do it over again.

Stay in practice! Whether with actual shooting or with exercises and drills. Shooting is a skill. Camera handling is a skill. They're not something that comes in the box. Touch the camera every day.

I'm going to be ready for spring.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2023 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

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Open Mike: Sleep Apnea

UPDATE: Today I joined a gym that has six different kinds of cardio machines. My insurance covered the entire cost. My son has been very encouraging—he's very athletic and likes to exercise. I'll publish updates every couple of months. Thanks so much for all the good and informative comments—I learned a lot. —Mike 

Just wanted to report for those who might be interested that I'm doing much better after resuming treatment for sleep apnea.

Art Photographers and the Camera Market

[Ed. note: TOP takes the day off on Saturdays, so I can pretend I'm doing housework and paying the bills. Oh boy.]

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To conclude the discussions from earlier in the week, in the posts "I Don't Want to Farm" and "The Rest Is History"—if you're an art photographer or fine-art photographer, you really don't have to worry. (Before I go on, "art photographer" is a useful term and not just a snooty claim-staking one, and I don't mind it. If you do, you can substitute expressive photographer or some other unfamiliar phrase, although if you use uncommon terms you run the risk of people not understanding what you mean.)

I suppose professional photographers of various types have always had to concern themselves with an understanding of a broad range of current mainstream tools, and they're the most likely to be heavily invested in one or more solutions, so they have to care about the camera industry to a certain extent. But art photographers don't. We have always been on the fringes, and we have always gone our own way and done our own thing. Finding the right camera is part of the creativity of creative photography, and it can range from a fanatical and involved pursuit of specific needs, all the way to the other end of the scale, namely, not giving a damn. Plenty of art photographers down through the years have used cameras they built themselves, cast-off cameras from earlier eras, common mid-level commodity cameras, toys, the latest fashion, custom or luxury offerings, or whatever they started out with and got used to. They might switch between formats with abandon like Mary Ellen Mark or use the same camera for decades like Henry Wessel, use a cheap plastic Diana like Nancy Rexroth or oversized 8x20-inch "panoramic" view cameras like Michael A. Smith. Alfred Stieglitz used a shabby old view camera on which the bellows sagged so much he had to hold the middle of it up with a loop of string during the exposure. Joel Meyerowitz might still be using his 8x10 Deardorff that was manufactured the year he was born. On the other hand, Alfred Eisenstadt was ceremonially presented with a custom Leica by the company, and the glamour and pinup photographer Peter Gowland invented and built his own cameras. Then there's the woman whose name I don't recall, who sent me a marvelous portfolio at the magazine I worked for. When I asked her what kind of camera she used, she replied, "I don't really know. Do you want me to go look?"*

With the advent of Internet communication, a lot of people got interested in learning about the camera market, and a lot of today's enthusiasts are deeply into "what's coming next" and the fate of specific companies from a business standpoint. But art photographers have always been a minuscule percentage of the camera-owning population, and we've never been much at the mercy of the direction the mass market is going. When the market switched from rangefinders to SLRs in a big way, a lot of us followed—and some of us didn't. Burt Keppler of Modern Photography said SLRs felt to him like coming home, and he happily made the switch. Were all of us suddenly doomed when point-and-shoots took over the market in the 1980s? Not at all, but Daido Moriyama adopted point-and-shoots and made art with them. Was it a disaster when digital came along? Not at all. Most of us just kept shooting film until we felt like making the switch—a switch that even Charlie Cramer, an expert dye transfer printer, eventually made. But John Paul Caponigro dove into digital right from the very earliest days. And a huge number of people were enabled by digital who hadn't been photographers before. Yet you can still outfit and run a B&W darkroom today, even one based around sheet film and a view camera, if you're one of the few who choose to.

Michael A. Smith with his 8x20-inch view camera.
Photo by Hans Bol.

We go our own way and do our own thing. While occasionally there is a photographer who abandons the work because of some shift in the technical winds, like Frederick Evans did when commercial platinum/palladium paper went out of production because of WWI, and you can't say we're not affected by the camera market at all, we've never been particularly attached to it. And certainly never at its mercy. Nowadays we have all sorts of choices: old film cameras of all types, old digital cameras, a broad range of new digital cameras in a broad range of sensor sizes, phones and other "devices," drones, on and on. If you can't find something to use to get yourself to where you want to be, you'll create some other possibility. Creative people find what they need.

Wherever the industry goes, it won't affect us. It doesn't matter if one company disappears or another does something revolutionary. Right now there are great photographers nobody's heard of quietly building bodies of work made with smartphone cameras; others are doing the same with aging 35mm film cameras. If someone builds a new 35mm camera, a few people will do good work with that. But it won't have much if any effect on the market as a whole. Part of the reason all this doesn't matter is that there will always be choices for those who are alert to them, and there will always be creative people willing to explore what they can do with whatever tools happen to interest them. If they can't do one thing they'll think of another. Their choices will be quirky and idiosyncratic, inventive, adaptive, and innovative. Because they always have been.

So while change might not go our way, it never really has. Is it anything to mourn, or moan, or worry about? Nah.

Mike

*Sadly, I never got to publish that portfolio, and I don't recall now what the reason was.

Original contents copyright 2023 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Bassman: "Artists use the technology that’s available to create the art they want. The manufacturers are often behind the curve on the possibilities offered by their offerings, sometimes way off the mark. An example from the guitar world: when electric guitars were first being used widely during the 1950s and 1960s, most manufacturers were trying to make the electric instruments sound like the acoustic guitars they were replacing. After all, the whole point of electrifying them was to allow them to be louder. That the electric guitars didn’t sound like acoustic instruments was seen as a flaw to overcome. Artists, on the other hand, embraced the electric sound and the distortion the amplifiers exhibited to create the sound of rock and roll. They didn’t care about sounding like the older technology; they saw infinite possibilities with the new technology."

JH: "Bravo to Bassman, driving what he enjoys. People like him were the typical Porsche drivers until the mid-1980s when the new President of Porsche—who came from a US tractor company—started treating it like a brand to be milked for the highest profits. After I retired from racing in 2002 and did a couple of years teaching at track days for car clubs, I refused to take Porsche drivers as students. BMW owners were almost as bad. You could not instruct many of them—they knew it all....

"In several years of instructing, I only had one Corvette owner. After five laps with me driving at California Speedway, he got out of the car looking as white as a ghost and refused to drive the track himself...he'd had enough already. I quit instructing after a couple of years when I decided the majority of my students were trying to kill me. I live in a town full of posers here in California. The new big thing for posers is the 'urban rednecks' driving tarted-up giant pickup trucks. You can always tell a poser: they have pricey wheels and a cover over the bed of the truck to make sure it says perfectly clean."

Pieter Krigee: "On the picture Michael is not using an 8x10inch camera. Probably it is an 11x14inch camera or maybe even a larger one, a 30x50cm!"

Mike replies: It's an 8x20, and sorry. That was a typo. My brain thinks 8x20 and my fingers type 8x10 because that's what they most often do. It's like having a built-in malapropist spellchecker. Fixed now.

Bill Tyler: "I absolutely loved the story about the woman who didn't even know what camera she had, but was producing excellent work. Clearly, she had her priorities straight."

Anti-Posing

Tom Burke wrote about yesterday's post: "Good article! I greatly enjoyed it. I too obsess about things, especially when making a significant purchase (camera, computer). Interestingly, once I’ve made the purchase I tend to relax about it, and all the little pros and cons that I was obsessing about become unimportant as I just use the item."

Truer words were never spoken. Tom's right—it only matters while you can still change the decision. 

I suspect the "optimizing" attitude (which I definitely have, so don't think I'm being holier-than-thou) is usually based on two underlying causes: the desire to control something in our lives by having it be "perfect," because other things in our lives are not perfect (or maybe the flip side, to minimize the chance of buyer's remorse); or, for status: the desire to lend ourselves prestige by having the best of something and thus being the envy of our friends. 

That last impulse backfires, of course, when the possession in question brings an unintended association, as Keith Cartmell points out:

"Once upon a time I was a triathlete. Some of them obsess about bicycles, trying for weight savings measured in grams. They'll use an oval tube in their drink bottle, oriented to cut wind resistance. The bike itself was designed in a wind tunnel, weighs almost nothing, and can cost a substantial fraction of what a nice new car costs. No matter that the rider is by far the heaviest and least aerodynamic component. The best professionals can take advantage of such bikes, but most are sold to well-heeled amateurs who are mid-pack at best.

"We called such people posers."

Would I be a poser if I bought the Ukrainian chess pieces? I guess. Except I'm not sure anyone expects the sight of a chess set on display in the home to mean that the owner is actually a player. You can be an enthusiast of something and love it and still stink at it. I had a friend whose basement was filled with NFL paraphernalia and regalia, and she was never a football player—football was her bond with her Dad. Can you collect chess sets and not be a chess player? I don't see why not. I knew a guy who collected 1950s lunch boxes. People collect all kinds of useless things.

Pedaling faster
I used to really like the attitude that's the opposite of posing, too: the "make-do" or "can-do" attitude. That is, give me anything halfway decent and I'll make do. You don't need a good chess set to work on chess, you just need a serviceable set that doesn't actively irritate or embarrass you. And, pace Keith Cartmell, you don't need the absolute best, lightest bike, but you do need a good one that's light enough.

...And of course you need to be able to pedal it faster. Someone whose skills are top-flight doesn't actually need tools that are the very best. Like a skier whose skis are old and well-worn but who can carve moguls like a pro, or the skilled chef who has only two knives. I recall a story (maybe it actually was a short story) about a wealthy guy who goes with a friend to play golf. They're both outfitted beautifully and own the best of everything, from the latest shoes to the highest-rated golf bags, and they're carrying as many clubs as they're allowed to. Because they're only a twosome, they're paired to go out with a single. The single is a lanky guy dressed in old clothes who only has four clubs—a putter, a pitching wedge, a five-iron, and a three-wood. And he doesn't even have a golf bag; he's carrying the clubs in his hand as he walks. The two duffers with their splendid equipment scorn him and aren't very friendly to him. But of course they both hit in the high 90s despite cheating amicably here and there, and the lanky guy with the four clubs pins their ears back by twenty strokes. Because he's got one thing they don't. He's good.

Call it being an anti-poser. Is it still a pose, though? Maybe. Like the city biker with a fixie, or a barefooted runner.

Chess puts almost all of the emphasis on the skill and very little on the equipment. If you're a rock climber, on the other hand, you don't want anything but the very best equipment! Safety equipment, at least. Still, with many things, the anti-poser idea has a lot of appeal, at least to me. Don't have the best camera; be the better shooter.

Mike
Flickr page / New Yorker author page

Original contents copyright 2023 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Aakin: "Collecting and Using are two totally different activities, with an overlap in that they use the same equipment. To do one, you don't have to do the other."

Aaron: "I think obsessing about perfection might not always be reducible to either compensation or 'posing.' It might just be a misinformed mismatch between expected outcomes and what the thing obsessed over is actually capable of doing. I'll confess this about cameras. In the not-so-distant-past I spent a lot of time obsessing over and even cycling through multiple cameras and formats to get the 'best' one because I thought doing so really would help my photography. It wasn't status (nobody pays attention to my cameras anyway), and it wasn't compensation (I'm under no illusions that the 'perfect' camera would somehow give me control I lacked elsewhere). It was just that I really thought this or that feature really would make a substantial difference in my photography. Of course, in nearly all cases, it didn't. Lesson learned. Now I obsess about cameras less."

David Dyer-Bennet: "I don't think I'm finding the 'perfect' product when I spend weeks researching something I'm going to buy. I think I'm making 'the best choice'—which is very different, in my head. (And that's 'best for me' of course.) I can tell you about the things on my 'fault' lists for cameras I had back to at least 1969, too (two of them were definite mistakes, even). A fair amount of the hemming and hawing and waffling is trying to decide which disadvantages will have less impact on my use of the product. I've probably done this most with cameras, but I also do it with computers and software. Well, and houses and cars and kitchen knives and sets of dishes and flatware and pots and pans and cutting boards and mixing bowls and kitchen scales and pliers and soldering irons. Not absolutely everything, though; the two bicycles I bought myself were both quite quick purchases."

JOHN B GILLOOLY: "Did a workshop in Cuba in 2001 with Antonin Kratochvil. He was using an old Nikon SLR—beat to hell. On it was a beaten, dented, 35mm ƒ/1.4 with scratches across the front element. His schtick, or his pose: None of that sh*t matters. Nor even does nailing the exposure or the focus! 'That's all bullshit, man!' He was certainly the anti-poser, but as you say, it was also his schtick. That's how he carried himself and how he wanted to be viewed as a photographer. And I loved his work. And he was a very valuable teacher to me."

Jonathan Morse: "From John Aubrey's Brief Lives: 'He was so eminently learned that all learned men made visits to him, and many of them would desire him to shew them his instruments (in those days mathematicall learning lay much in the knowledge of Instruments, and, as Sir Henry Savile sayd, in doeing of tricks) he would draw out a little Drawer under his Table, and shew them a pair of Compasses with one of the Legges broken; and then for his Ruler, he used a sheet of paper folded double.' 'He' was Rene Descartes."

Sroyon: "To your two underlying causes, I would add a.) what decision theorists call anticipatory regret, and b.) that some of us actually enjoy the process of researching and obsessing in its own right, even if we may not always admit it even to ourselves. Magnus Carlsen wrote some time back about discovering that he doesn't have a chessboard at home!

"The National University of Singapore Museum recently had an open call for a photography exhibition. Nine photographers were selected, myself among them (I honestly didn't expect it; I'm more of a writer and tinkerer than a photographer). My portfolio was shot with a homemade pinhole camera (cardboard box, Ilford photo-paper instead of film). Anyway, I like using digital cameras too, so I will try not to come across as an annoying anti-poser. But even as I type this comment, I realise how difficult it is.  :-) "

R. Edelman: "The topic of posers made me think of the Country and Western description: 'All hat, no cattle.'"

Benjamin Marks: "This can get pretty 'meta' in our culture of many choices. I am thinking of Rivendell bikes. I am totally susceptible to their anti-elite (but secretly elite) posture. They sell well-designed steel, lugged-frame bicycles, but their approach is to sell the idea that their refined, if traditional, designs and materials are superior to the current top-tech carbon fiber doohickies being sold to those mid-pack riders you mentioned in your post. Their marketing substitutes the concept of authenticity for whatever the other guys' claims are for their materials/designs and then flogs the heck out of that. Only jute twine! Pine tar soap for the real man! Headsets with bearings! Ride in Pro-Keds! It seems to me that in part what they are selling is disdain for the stockbroker who rides a $7K bike to average effect. Hey, I am not knocking it. I actually own one of their solid, steel lugged machines and have logged thousands of miles on the thing. So, yeah. I'm susceptible...maybe even a poster child. On the other hand, I have owned really awful bikes too, and of the two choices, I'd rather be on something that is well made. We have the concept of Velben goods, which is really about the social display qualities of luxury goods. I wonder if there is a similar shorthand for the simple pleasure derived from using the best-made tools."

Andrew Molitor: "In sailboat racing you polish the hull of your boat well past the point where it's doing anything to make your boat go faster. On purpose. We know that something like 800 grit is all you need, but everyone goes to 2000 or 4000. Because while it doesn't make the boat go faster, it makes you faster. It takes things out of the equation, like 'is my hull smooth enough.' You know it is. You put in the sweat, you looked at your own reflection. The hull is good. Now you can focus on some of the other several hundred factors. I've heard the same rationale for the 100-megapixel cameras. It's not that anyone needs those pixels, it's that it makes resolution not matter. You can just let it go; you're not going to run out of pixels. These are not entirely rational decisions, but performance has a large psychological, irrational, component."

Obsessing

I don't think of myself as a particularly obsessive person. There are other times, however, when I suspect that my broad interest in different subjects is just the result of my brain searching for new things to obsess over.

Right—I'm going to "tell on myself" here, at the risk of making myself look foolish. But then, as George Orwell wrote, "autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats."

Long story short: I might not be diligent about physical exercise, but I'm not shy about mental exercise. Some time ago I read that as we get older it's important not to get into mental ruts. The idea is that to keep your brain healthy you've got to exercise it by burning new neural pathways: accepting challenges, grappling with unfamiliar ideas, looking at the world in fresh ways. This notion was freeing for me, because I had always been too results-oriented. If I learned Japanese book-binding, it was because I expected to master it. Many things turn into disappointments that way. In the new regime, however, what's important is not mastery, but struggle. If you start learning Chinese on Duolingo, you're using it as a puzzle, essentially; a challenge for your mind—not necessarily trying to become conversant in tourist Chinese. So in recent years I've delved into a hodgepodge of seemingly disparate pursuits: learning to play simple tunes on the dulcimer, revisiting French, or struggling to learn touch-typing with the Kinesis keyboard—set up for the Dvorak layout no less. I got up to 20 wpm, and it took me months and many hours of working at it.

Most recently, having known since I was about eight that I'm bad at chess, I decided to struggle a bit with chess. It was that or Latin.

I'm taking a simple online course (at learnchess.net). It's been very interesting. I've also done a dive into chess culture, at least as it is presented online. If you want a sample, here's a fascinating video recounting a famous game. If you're not into chess, just follow along—it's not that hard to understand when you're merely observing while having everything explained to you twice, first by Garry Kasparov and then by GothamChess. To me it seems a good illustration, accessible even to rank beginners like me, of the kind of thinking involved in high-level chess. And it's pretty thrilling, frankly.

So then: several teachers recommend to learners that they get an actual physical chess set as they learn, so that they can leave a board set up to study, play against themselves, and so forth. Immediately I think, I am not going to invest money in that. I'll buy some unbreakable plastic pieces and one of those roll-up silicone chess boards.

So then what happens? Five days later, and I've got the basics of the entire universe of chess pieces all sussed out—weighted vs. unweighted, plastic vs. wood, handmade vs. mass produced, contemporary vs. antique, all the major websites, connoisseurs, collectors, aesthetics...and I'm this close to dropping hundreds of dollars on these:

And what are these? Why, I'm surprised you have to ask. Don't you know? It's a modern reproduction of a 1930s Soviet chess set, hand-carved by a husband and wife team of artisans who live in a battle zone in Ukraine who take custom orders on Etsy, of course. With the proper honey-colored white pieces appropriate to vintage Soviet-era Russian sets. Because you need that. Naturally.

So I'm just about to hit the buy button, when—talk about a flexible and resilient brain!—it occurs to me in the very nick of time that I don't know how to play chess. I'm pathetic at chess, presently. Of the 1,327 possible openings listed in the Oxford Companion to Chess, I currently have a grand total of zero memorized. I can't even score 100% on simple little quizzes like how to checkmate using two bishops. Not to mention that I live alone and don't even know anyone else who plays chess.

And there's more: chess pieces aren't even important to the game. They're just symbols. It's not like pool, where balls, cues, and the table have to be true or it will affect play. Chess pieces don't affect play. It's possible to play with a board you drew with a pencil, using scraps of paper with the names of the pieces scribbled on them. It makes absolutely zero difference to the game whether you play with a grubby old plastic set in the park or a £5,000 hand-carved set from Jacques of London.

Be sensible!
So how do we feel about people who obsess over equipage they can't even use? The guitar collector who can't play, the supercar owner who doesn't know how to drive, the hacker with the latest, most fashionable $600 driver? How about the Leica collector who doesn't use his pretties to, you know, take pictures? Has that ever described you? I fight against it, not 100% successfully.

Where photography is concerned, I've had to learn to be tolerant. I've been writing for a wide audience since 1987 when I had my first article published in a magazine. As far as I'm concerned, as long as they're not hurting anyone, anyone can do any tomfool thing they want to. I know people who buy new cameras about as often as most people stock up on toilet paper, people who haven't yet switched to digital, people who own 50 50mm lenses or 200 camera bags, even guys who ruin perfectly good color digital cameras by having the CFA stripped off the sensor at considerable expense. (Who would do that?) I've seen everything. No, scratch that: almost everything. Because I've also learned, if I've learned anything, that there's always one more surprise around the corner, something I've never, ever heard of anybody doing before. It's all good. As long as no one gets hurt.

As for me: no chess set for Mike. If I'm still learning chess one year from today, I'll buy a chess set I can comfortably afford. Somebody remind me, will you? And it will be just the right one. Until then, common sense shall pertain, and calm prevail.

Mike
Flickr page / New Yorker author page

Original contents copyright 2023 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

ASW: "I'm right there with you Mike. If we need an extension cord, I don't just go to the store to buy an extension cord—I feel compelled to educate myself about the relationship between wire gauge and length and safe electrical load. Well, that seems reasonable. Then I start examining the little power sticker on every electronic device or tool that we own to see what sort of extension cord would be appropriate. Again, just being a safe home owner. Then I start to imagine scenarios where I might need to operate some high power tool that I don't even own (but might some day!) at the very edge of our property. Now we're talking about very long, very heavy duty, very expensive specialty power cords that you don't pick up at your local hardware store. Then (hopefully) my wife reminds me that we only need a 10-foot cord to plug in the 60-watt bird-bath heater and I've gone way overboard...again. "

Kenneth Tanaka: "'Obsession' is often cited as a negative, self-destructive trait. But the truly self-destructive disorder is 'obsessive-compulsive disorder' where one has lost self-control of one's obsessive urges and lets those urges run his/her life. Very bad.

"And, yes, plain ol' obsession can be debilitating and destructive, too, burning up all one's intellectual and emotional bandwidth. But, in fact, obsession is the force that has moved humanity (mostly) forward since humans stood erect. What if, say, Marie Curie, Nikola Tesla, Jonas Salk, et. al. had not been 'obsessive'? No, obsession is a very important driver throughout human history. A world without it would be sad to imagine. (Even insects and animals are instinctively obsessed!)

"And what about being an obsessed collector? Same story. Museums would have little to show the public without obsessed collectors disgorging their treasures post-mortem! And how sparse would the used Leica camera gear world be without guys obsessed with getting the 'best' lenses and cameras? (Blushing, as a guy who recently scored the new 35mm Summilux and the wonderful 35mm APO Summicron lenses.)

Albert Smith: "George Orwell wrote, 'autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful...'

"'I'm writing my unauthorized autobiography.' —Steven Wright

"My recent obsession involves this site. Your post from many months ago on watches was a tipping point for me. I had a half a dozen purely functional watches with a combined value of under $300. Since that article, I have 20 watches, and $300 is the average cost of each, some hitting $700-plus. I spend hours on YouTube watching reviews and planning my next purchase. Most of these watches have been worn once or twice, just to confirm operation, but I really don't need 95% of these.

"I never use to understand hoarders, but I may now.

"Good luck with your chess sets."

Carl Coryell-Martin: "Thank you for not linking to the hand-carved-in-Ukraine chess pieces. I have a perfectly serviceable set thank you very much."

Bob G.: "This might be worth perusing: 'Chess Set Made from Camera Lenses: Canon ƒ/2.8 to Nikon ƒ/4, Check!'

Mike replies: Count on LensRentals to be way ahead of us. That's hilarious. And check out that rental price!

Keith Cartmell: "Once upon a time I was a triathlete. Some of them obsess about bicycles, trying for weight savings measured in grams. They'll use an oval tube in their drink bottle, oriented to cut wind resistance. The bike itself was designed in a wind tunnel, weighs almost nothing, and can cost a substantial fraction of what a nice new car costs. No matter that the rider is by far the heaviest and least aerodynamic component. The best professionals can take advantage of such bikes, but most are sold to well-heeled amateurs who are mid pack at best.

"We called such people posers."

Eoin: "Mate with two bishops is hard! I played in leagues and tournaments all through school (even winning a few) and took up chess again recently—and I only just learnt how to mate with two bishops."

SteveW: "Thanks for this. I think. I just (obsessively) made a list of 10 chess books and (obsessively) ranked them in order of preference and will be (obsessively) looking in my storage bins in the garage for my old chess board. Sigh. —Fellow Obsessive"

Cateto/Jose: "On this very topic, I remember reading recently a comment from a doctor, a psychiatrists specialized in older people. He advised that, contrary to the common idea, the best way to keep your brain healthy is not to engage in mental activity, bur rather to keep as much social activity as possible: to interact with other people, be it family, friends, colleagues, and keep that relationship as active as possible, along your whole lifetime. And honestly, I think it makes sense."

Frans Evenblij: "Fantastic to have the intricate details of the Kasparov–Karpov match explained. The funny thing is, your remark that chess pieces are just symbols that do not affect the game sounds perfectly sensible. I expect that for somebody at grandmaster level this is perfectly true. A lot of grandmasters don’t even need a board at all. They do it all in their head.

"And yet…for me, I find that a full-size tabletop chess board with the classic Staunton pieces give me a much more serious presentation of the game than when I would play with small icons on a video screen or an equally small portable travel chess set. Somehow as a beginner level player I do not seem to be able to take the game seriously when the board is small and toylike. Same effect you have with your monochrome-converted Sigma camera. Somehow the camera properties, for you, and the way the chess board looks, for me, changes the way we think. So what would the knowledge about his driver do to the fine motor muscle control of the golf player?"

Mike replies: A good point. We've always placed a high value on simply liking a camera being a good reason to own it. Of course you're also enabling me a little.  :-)

The Story of 'Grace'

A 1918 photograph goes viral in a big way. The story is interesting—even if the truth behind the picture might be a little disillusioning. But then, we all know that things are not always what they seem in photographs, right?

Interestingly, I'm not aware of ever seeing this image before Jay Townshend sent me this video a few days ago. (Thanks to Jay.)

Another link people have been sending me: "You're Pointing Your Camera the Wrong Way," by Margaret Renkl. A quotation: "My son and daughter-in-law, who are frequent campers, have seen people queued up at least 50 deep to take phone selfies at popular national park waterfalls and rock formations."

Mike
Flickr page / New Yorker author page

Original contents copyright 2023 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Jon Peterson: "We had it in our home. As a young lad just getting interested in photography (1970s), I used to joke with my mom that I wanted to steal the frame and put my own photo in it. Decades later, that same water-stained print in the same cheap, chipped frame hangs on my wall. Makes me think of my mom."

The Rest Is History

If you haven't seen this stunning animation yet, you need to. Not a big investment, takes only a few tragic seconds to look at. It tells a tale of many things. From Visual Capitalist, via Dan Carnagey.

Sadness and despond!

But I have my Sigma contraption (I need to name the blunt beastie) armed and ready for the return of the good light in the springtime. Never say die, never give up!

Mike
Flickr page / New Yorker author page

Original contents copyright 2023 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Dogman: "I'm even more of a dinosaur than I thought!"

Greg Adkins: "Interesting, although it's important to note the inherent bias in comparing sales of dedicated cameras to that of a device with many features in addition to a camera. People choose and buy smartphones for a variety of uses that are unrelated to making photos."

Joe: "As long as Nikon keeps repair parts in stock for my Nikon D850, I'm happy."

Nick: "A smartphone camera is still a (very good) camera, and do we really care what sort of cameras are being sold to the masses, as long as the sort we want (flexible, controllable etc) are easily available? The advanced cameras and lenses available today are better than they have ever been, and the total number of photos being taken every day are more than ever before. I don't see anything tragic unless the major specialty camera manufacturers start to go out of business."

R. Edelman: "When I consider some of the tricks that my iPhone 13 can do, for example very low light hand-held images, I wonder why these tricks can't be incorporated in digital cameras. I understand that digital cameras and their lenses have image stabilization, and there are some with pixel shifting, but the iPhone seems to have software that enables it to perform photo miracles, such as taking a photo in very, very low light levels, that, if applied to larger digital cameras, would really add value to those cameras, and perhaps boost their sales to people who would like to move up to the next level of acquiring images."

Keith Cartmell: "Yes, smartphones have dramatically outsold both film and digital cameras. They have also outsold alarm clocks, portable radios, and other devices too numerous to name. But it's a bit of an apples to grapefruit comparison. Many of those phones are forced purchases because the completely adequate in most ways old one cannot run the newest software or is crippled by it, or the network was removed. (It happened to my wife and she's still cranky about it.) Or there is some new gewgaw offered that attracts the attention. (Look, shiny!) For many of them I suspect the camera is just one aspect of the overall functionality, but they didn't buy the phone because of the camera functionality. Maybe I'm wrong. Seems like most of the actual photographers I know are busy switching out their old DSLR for a new mirrorless camera, complete with new lens, and software that can already talk to our new AI overlords. Me? I'm happy carrying around my MMM cameras, metal, manual, mechanical."

Thom Hogan (partial comment): "...The thing no one is talking about in that animation is at the very end: smartphone sales peaked and are in an erosion pattern now. That's the reason why Apple wants to try to sell you a hardware subscription to the iPhone these days (yearly 'free' updates). What goes up, must come down. It's just a matter of time."

Ed. note: The full text of "partial comments" can be read in the full Comments Section, accessible in the footer of the post.

Eamon Hickey: "Miniscule point that nobody but me will ever care about, but the figures in that animation for periods before about 1980 are completely unreliable. The author clearly relied on CIPA historical data, because it's the only such data available, as far as I know. But it counts only Japanese cameras. Millions of cameras from American, European and Eastern Bloc manufacturers are not included. The graph shows 75,000 as the total cameras sold in 1951. That's way, way, way too low. Kodak by themselves would have sold many times that total just in the U.S."

I Don't Want to Farm

I was a Reedie* for a miserable year in the long-lost '80s, and met a Reedie when I was there who had developed a human developmental theory based in Gilligan's Island. The concept was that every human being can be explained by a major and a minor inflection of one of the Gilligan's Island characters. Gender did not have to match. So in his view I was a major of The Professor with a minor of Mary Ann. In other words, mainly distracted and remote, unbalanced in the direction of excessive intellectualism—too "heady"—but with a partially compensating dose of niceness and wholesomeness on the side. I hated to admit it, but....

An alternate theory of aggregated human wisdom is: there's a Mitch Hedberg joke for everything. The one that concerns us today is "Can You Farm?"

The video/stills divide
That's how I'm starting to feel about photography these days. (Oh, you like photography? What do you think of AI?) If you read behind the lines in the recent short interview with Panasonic's Yosuke Yamane published at DPReview (he gives a similar interview pretty much every year around this time), you get the sense he's being careful not to insult still photographers, while at the same time saying that Panasonic cameras will be ever more concerned about video. "Mirrorless, which has a strong affinity with video, is used in a wide range of applications, from professional video production, such as cinema production, to individual video production, such as YouTube. We believe that the need for individual video production will increase in the future." DPReview went on to comment that while there remain people who only take stills, "[Yamane] didn't make it sound like Panasonic would be the company to address that need."

You work your ass off to become a good cook. And then everybody wants you to farm. As Mitch put it, "that's not fair."

Mike

*Here's a recent article by Colin Diver, a past President of Reed College, about the oppressive consequences of the U.S. News and World Report college rankings and Reed's decision to buck the system.

Original contents copyright 2023 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

David Elesh: "As a Reedie myself, one of the things I am quite proud of was Reed's decision not to supply data to U.S. News. It may have been the first to make that decision. Stanford followed. I don't know how many institutions refuse now. When I checked the U.S. News formula some years ago, it placed significant weight on the percentage of alumni who contributed. I found that appalling and still do. It has little to do with academic quality. Yes, it is a significant factor in the decisions of those applying to college (and their parents), but so is the success of their athletic teams. At the university for which I taught, I saw that our basketball teams reaching the final four raised applications and fall enrollments by substantial amounts. I don't recall the exact percentage of the increase in applications, but I think it was around 20%. But the increase wasn't evidence of the students' academic ability."

Arg: "I grew up using Polaroid cameras and took perfectly photographic photos with them...only to discover that everyone wants me to go into a dark room and play with noxious chemicals. Don't want to. That's not photography."

Dan: "I’m going to sound like an old man yelling at the sky, but what improvements in still cameras do we need? They are already so good that even old ones far exceed artistic demands. Perhaps making then more fun to look at, fondle and use would actually be more effective at selling more units. Video is the next horizon and improvements there would be visible and marketable."

Peter Cameron: "I have little interest in video and, to he honest, I don’t even know if the video function worked on most cameras I’ve owned. Over the last 20 years I’ve probably taken fewer than 20 videos and most of those were B roll for the video department of the company I worked for. I realize wanting a stills oriented camera is niche these days, but I do appreciate manufacturers that let you reassign video buttons to other functions (or at least let you disable them so you don’t accidentally end up shooting video)."

Stephen S.: "For anyone chasing views/engagement on Instagram, it has been true for a while that the best way to do that is to forget about posting photos, and instead post short videos. That's right—Instagram is not for photos anymore."

Phishing Message? (OT)

When you get an email that appears to be from a friend, that contains an enigmatic message and a link to an ad or some sort of come-on, and obviously didn't come from the friend, that sometimes has a long send-to list, what is that? What should you advise the friend? Does anyone know? From time to time this happens to me, and I never know whether I need to warn the friend or even inform them. Do any of you computer ninjas out there know about this?

Thanks for any help—

Mike
Flickr page / New Yorker author page

Original contents copyright 2023 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Luci: "The 2FA [two-factor authentication —Ed.] is a very good path to go down. Let the friend know of the email misshap via a different 'channel' (i.e. not email). Always, always look at the actual email address sending the email (in your email client check something like 'Show original' and if the name and email username don't agree—mail from John Smith <some_other_name@gmail.com> —mark it as spam. Let the friend know that an antivirus is useful. If they have one, recommend them to start with a full disk scan."

psu: "For what it's worth, it is very easy to forge email from any sender you want because in most email systems the From and Sender headers are not authenticated in any way. So it's not necessarily the case that your friends' accounts are hacked; it's just that someone else copied their address out from some other source and forged a message to you or others using it. Unless there is some reason to believe that the mail account was actually hacked/stolen somehow, it's probably best to just delete and ignore this kind of forged message."

Open Mike: One More Wee Piece of Advice (OT)

["Open Mike" is the anything-goes, often off-topic Editorial Page of TOP, which used to appear on Sundays and sometimes still does.]

-

Before we leave behind the subject of the advancing years, one wee bit of advice to younger people: never stop exercising. I've come to believe that the important thing about exercise is doing it without stopping. Consistently, over the years, from when you're young to when you're old.

Mostly I say this because it's the opposite of what I've done, and I've had troubles because of it.

My observation has been that people typically exercise in two "shifts" in life: in one period when they're young adults and emphasizing secondary sex characteristics for the purpose of advertising abundant health to attract partners; and in another period when they're "young old people" and it finally hits them that they'd better take care of themselves. Personified by the late-fiftysomething out walking while doing that thing with their arms where they hold their forearms and hands up and swing them back and forth to signify that they're not just walking, they're exercising. In the years in between, life gets in the way and many of us don't exercise much. Except briefly in the wake of resolutions and spells of determination, or on vacations maybe.

...Or maybe that was just me. When I was 57, I reconnected with a woman I had carried a torch for "in another life," twenty years earlier, and we began a relationship. She was a marathoner, and went to the YMCA at a truly ungodly hour (4:30 a.m.) three times a week to exercise. I went with her. She suspiciously dubbed this "courting behavior," to which my reaction was, of course it was courting behavior—I was courting her, wasn't I? I also made the bed every morning after she went to work and did the breakfast dishes, and that was courting behavior too. (The campaign failed despite my exertions, alas.) Long story short, I made repeated attempts, even after she left me, to get back into running, which I had enjoyed throughout my youth in various ways. It began one morning—one very early morning—while she was "spinning" for an hour. ("Spinning" means furiously pedaling a stationary bike going absolutely nowhere.) Left to my own devices, I decided to run around the 1/8th-mile track. I ran hard for one lap, and then walked a lap to recover. It felt marvelous. It reminded me of youth, reconnected me with my long-ago love of running, and powerfully inspired me. So I repeated the process—eleven times. 

The next day, my knees were in such ferocious pain that I could barely make it down the stairs for breakfast. And my knees hurt for so long—like, six weeks—that after three weeks I was convinced I had damaged myself permanently. That's my tendency, I will admit—go overboard with a new idea and overdo it. 

Eventually my knees fully recovered, thank God. Over the next four or five years, I made repeated attempts to get back to running. Again and again, the same pattern repeated: I would start slowly, gain strength and stamina, gradually increase my workout, and then something would go sproing and I'd injure myself somehow. Sprained ankle, aching or "trick" knee, something called "pes anserine pain syndrome," back trouble, inflamed toe, whatever. Then I'd have to take two to five weeks off to recover, and lose whatever progress I had made. It happened again and again. My only success in that period was walking two miles a day interspersed with very short stretches of mild jogging. I made a conscious effort to jog like an old guy, in a sort of shuffle, to minimize impact, and I'd only go one or two hundred feet before resuming a walking pace. That worked, or seemed to.

But it stands to reason that people can run in the their late fifties, sixties, seventies, and even older—you see it and hear about it all the time. Why couldn't I? I finally concluded that it was probably because I had just taken too long a time off in the middle of my life. When I was in my late teens and twenties my habit was to jog three miles a day in the three months of the spring and the three months of the fall. My idea, even at the time, was that it would be good to get into the habit of running regularly and then carry the habit into older ages. But I probably only sustained that for five or six years. Then I didn't run for three decades. By the time I got back to it, it was too late. That was just my experience—"your mileage may vary."

I did the same thing with a car once. Neglected normal upkeep for 40,000 miles in the middle of its first 100k, and then got slammed with everything going wrong at once.

It just seems to me that the people who successfully exercise into their older years are the ones who never stopped. I acknowledge that it's better to exercise than not to, and now is always a good time to start, for any value of "now," regardless of how long you've been a butt in a chair. But if you are young and planning your life, somebody ought to tell you that a little exercise consistently over your lifetime is probably better than a whole lot of exercise for a short period every now and then. Start early and keep at it. Make it a habit. And do it continuously.

Push-ups
A while back I talked to Nick, the kindly young man who used to help me load dog food purchases into the trunk before the True Value went belly-up. On doctor's orders, I'm not supposed to lift more than 50 pounds because I have shoulder impingement in both shoulders—what they would call "rotator cuff injuries" if you happen to be a baseball pitcher. I asked Nick if he did pushups, and he told me a typical story. He said he he had very into doing pushups for a while in high school, and improved for a while, but then he hit a wall at 95(!) pushups, got discouraged, and quit.

That seems typical. Young people get all into something, do it to excess, and then never do it again. It would really be a lot better if you started doing three pushups every day when you're fifteen, and just add one more every year on your birthday. By the time you're forty you'd be doing 28 pushups a day and not thinking a thing of it. It would really be much better for you in the long run.

None of this is science. It's just my belief. "An observation amplified," as Thom put it recently. As to whether it's really true, "more studies are needed," I guess.

Mike
Flickr page / New Yorker author page

Original contents copyright 2023 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Aaron: "I hate running, but there's a history in my family of heart troubles. I'm 46 and so far my heart is fine. I decided that I should start exercising while I can. But, I know myself. I won't stick to a running plan that requires very much of me. So, I decided that I could run for 10 minutes a day. I'll hate every minute of it. But, I can make myself do it for 10 minutes a day. I'm doing it on a treadmill, so I've raised the incline so it's at least hard work. I've started out very slowly—I don't even get to a mile in my 10 minutes. But, so far I've stuck with it because I can make myself do something hard for 10 minutes. Then I'm out. And, while it's still well short of recommended exercise time in a week, it's more than I was doing before! Well, that's not quite true. I love going for walks and do that pretty regularly."

Franz Amador: "I hear you, brother, though I suspect you're going to get a lot of responses from people who have always been active and still are suffering from increasing injuries as they get older. It sounds like you could really use a good physical therapist. Also, something cheaper and more convenient that I really like is Coach Eric's videos from Precision Movement. There are paid options, but he has lots of free content on YouTube. Highly recommended, in some ways even more than a PT."

mark: "Your thesis about old age and exercise is spot-on. My father, who died at age 93, fought diabetes to a standstill for the last thirty years of his life with daily trips to the gym. He was, by decades, the oldest regular there, and garnered support and admiration from youngsters in their 50s. His weights and treadmill regimen was successful, with diabetes and related problems catching up only after a fall prevented him from going to the gym. My own plan involves cycling until I can no longer do it, and then some combination of walking and weights. Maybe yoga, too. I don't think my knees would tolerate much running. As to you own plan, just remember that pool isn't exercise."

DavidB: " I started running in high school. I quit for a few years while in college but have been running...or walking when injured...ever since. Now in my late 60s and so...so...slow that it bothers me if I think about it. So I don't think about it. I just run."

Not THAT Ross Cameron: "Could I please add to your observation. I attend exercise classes run by a woman of similar age to me (mid-40s). She has people in 30s–60s attending. Her view is that in general, you need both exercise and stretching / flexibility. As a sweeping generalisation, men tend to focus on strength and ignore the flexibility, while and women tend to focus on flexibility and ignore the strength. The thirties and forties are the years to establish good habits. It gets increasingly harder to pick them up after that; the body takes longer to get fit, and longer to recover from injuries, with increasing age. I’m still working through some functional issues that result in sore back/shoulder. Having a young child isn’t helping. Trying to establish a routine is an exercise in futility (sorry, pun not intended). I really miss the jogging too."

Kirk: "Walk. Bike. Swim or do something else to get your heart rate up for an hour straight. Start now. Do it every day. Or don't. But the evidence and studies are abundant and clear. Exercising is vital for maintaining health and mobility. No excuses apply. Never stop. Never stop. Never stop. And don't neglect things like yoga to enhance flexibility. Also vital for healthy existence."

Damien: "I'm only 37, but I've had my version of all your injury stories! There is something in there that is not strictly about age. Muscles grow fast and recover in the blink of an eye; tendons and ligaments need way, way more time to adapt and to recover—months or years instead of days. I remember a certain story about patience in the darkroom; well, this also applies to the gym.  ;-) 

"My new rule is, any novel inflammatory joint pain means: ease off until it's gone. That's the only way I've been able to break the cycle of one step forward, two steps back."