The Online Photographer

Ctein Is Leaving the U.S. Permanently

As you might know, Ctein (it's his only name, and his legal name, and it's pronounced "kuh-TINE") for many years wrote a column for this site. Before that, he published many hundreds of articles in a variety of photography magazines over many years, and was well known as a photo-technical expert. Many of those columns are available in the "Ctein" category in the right-hand sidebar, or his columns (421 of them!) are archived on his website. He also printed, participated in, or administrated many of our Print Sales.

Ctein by Beth Zuckerman. Elmo
is about to become a migratory bird.

As he put it to me, "There's a whiff of 1932 Germany in the air. Probably, very probably, things will not get that bad. But the folks in Germany in 1932 who thought to themselves, 'Things can't get that bad,' well…for the most part they died or fled with the clothes on their back and little more." As you might not know, Ctein is of Jewish extraction, and he's an old-line hippie radical with a long history of civil disobedience, as well as a polyamorist. He and two of his partners, Paula, who I know, and Alaster, who I don't, are decamping to "somewhere East of the Atlantic." The move will be permanent; they're not coming back. The house at 42 Skyline Drive (the address might sound familiar to Douglas Adams fans) in Daly City, California, where he and Paula have lived for 40 years, is for sale.

When I told him I go back and forth as to how to feel about this, he said, "On the odd-numbered days, I think this is the best move I could make in my life and a fabulously good idea. On the even-numbered days, I am terrified and think this is an awful idea and I must be insane to even contemplate it." However, "Staying is more risk than we're willing to take. Everyone does their own risk assessment and acts accordingly."

Mike: So when are you leaving, do you think?

Ctein: We are planning to leave in October. That's about as fast as we can do the immense amount of stuff that needs to be done.

Mike: Where will you go?

Ctein: Probably either Ireland or Portugal.

Portugal because it's ridiculously easy to qualify for retirement visas, which are renewable indefinitely so long as you maintain residence there. It puts you into their national healthcare system as well, and lets you apply for citizenship after three years. The plusses are a great location with wonderful climate—even nicer than the San Francisco Bay Area (because that is what is really meant by "Mediterranean climate"). The minus (for me) is having to learn Portuguese, because while it is an extremely English-friendly country, if I really want to fit in I need to learn the native language, and if I want to apply for citizenship I have to be able to demonstrate that I can converse in Portuguese.

Ireland, because Paula is entitled to birthright citizenship there (her grandfather was born there), and that gets me in on a permanent visa as her "committed relationship" (that is what they quaintly call it) partner. That's our first choice, but if it weren't for that, Portugal would probably be No. 1. We're still evaluating both paths to decide which is going to work best in our tight timeframe.

Mike: Any message you'd like me to convey to TOP readers?

Ctein: Sure—if readers are located in either country, or have friends there who would be happy to advise us, we'd be grateful for any more first-hand information that we can get. Conversely, if any readers have been toying with the notion of maybe getting out, I'm happy to provide resource links. If readers don't feel comfortable posting their advice or questions publicly, they can email me at [email protected].

Mike: But we won't talk the politics in the comments.

Ctein: Right, let's not discuss the pros and cons of the current administration! Topic-adjacent, to be sure, but editorially declared to be off-topic.

So that's the news. Best of luck and Bon Voyage to Ctein, Paula, and Alaster. Part of me wants to congratulate them on a new adventure in life, part of me soberly feels it's a sensible response to current events, and yet another part of me wants to offer consolation at the imminent upheaval in their lives and the loss of their longtime home, community, habits, and friends.

But hey, didn't the ancestors of many of us get here by crossing the Atlantic? Mine did....

Mike

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

Featured Comments from:

Mike Chisholm: "Learn Portuguese? Uh oh.... Check out the names of the days of the week and how to count to 100, freak out, then book a flight to Ireland, and be forever thankful they won't make you learn Irish...."

Adam Isler: "As the son of an English Jew who dodged the blitz as a boy in his siren suit, and wrote a novel about a Jew who waited too long to leave Berlin (The Prince of West End Avenue), I feel the same as Ctein. After returning from a two-year sojourn in England where I earned a photography MFA, just in time to vote, we are returning to England next month to suss out if it has the place for us. I hope my fears are alarmist, feverish imaginings but the risks feel too real to ignore."

Danny Roberts: "Great post, carefully worded. Best wishes to Ctein and partner(s)."

John Camp: "Ctein's a friend. I wrote a novel with him, and none of the science/engineering in it came from me (I contributed the necessary BS.) I have discussed this with him, and urged him to stay. We need people like him to stay here and resist. I think what we're going through is an aberration, and a more egalitarian, Europe-like America will emerge from it. In my humble opinion."

Jim Simmons: "My wife and I made a pros/cons chart of moving from the U.S. to New Zealand in 2004. We saw variations of what is occurring in the U.S. now even back then. We moved to N.Z. in 2005 and have been very happy with our decision. Friends and family have been asking us since the 2016 election how to navigate a similar move, but most of them are past the age limit for getting residency here. All empires have an expiration date, but a sensitive nose can smell the rot long before that date."

Stéphane Bosman (partial comment): "For a European, it is strange to see Americans considering a move from US to Europe. Europe is literally dying, both culturally and economically. We have lost our economic power, our military power, our freedoms, our values, and our way of life is crumbling. The population of all countries in the EU is growing poorer and poorer each year. A large part of our youth is looking to emigrate to other parts of the world because they know Europe has nothing to offer to young generations. Many today consider the US to be more attractive than Europe."

PieterK: "Following the news lately I can understand that people in America are not very happy any longer. Portugal is a beautiful country with beautiful cities. You can see that Portugal was once a very rich country. After Portugal and Spain joined the EC, Europe invested a lot of money in those countries. Good luck with learning the Portuguese language. That can be really tough! I have three friends who moved to Portugal, one from Holland and two from Sweden. Speaking Portuguese is really difficult for them, even after so many years."

Back to Basics by Ctein

Ctein (it's pronounced "kuh-TINE" and it's his entire legal name) was a longtime regular columnist on TOP. This is a somewhat shortened version of a recent recent column from his newsletter, which you can subscribe to here.

Ctein is the author, with John Sandford, of the sci-fi thriller Saturn Run. Recently he has collaborated with David Gerrold on a new sci-fi book called Ripple Effect which you can start reading for free. All the information you need is here.

Guest post by Ctein

One of the things you discover pretty quickly if you're a regular writer of articles and columns for magazines is that you have to repeat yourself. There are two reasons for that: the first is that they are always new readers coming in who haven't read what's been written before. The second is that—remarkably—people don't remember every single word you've ever written.

What inspired me to do this was, in part, the business of posting my old TOP columns (over 300!), wherein I was reminded of this bit of wisdom. Along with the fact that I didn't remember everything I'd written...so how can I expect you to do so?!

Should you find yourself having questions about any of these assertions, please read the linked articles before girding for battle. You might find that I've already addressed your concerns.

+    =    +    =    +

1. Photography Isn't Math...or Physics...

This first one's a bit meta: most of the fallacies (and stupid assertions) that I read online are due to people who think that photography and optics are simple things, amenable to easy calculation. They are not. It's not just that the devil is in the details; the devil frequently dominates! A good rule of thumb is that any time you see someone making an assertion that they back with the phrase "it's simply a matter of physics (or mathematics)"...they will not know what they're talking about. They are appealing to an authority that is nonexistent.

Related to that: Even when something is a matter of physics, it doesn't mean that physical law is limiting the technology. I can state as a matter of physics that rocket engineers can't build spacecraft that will travel faster than the speed of light. At our current levels of engineering, this is not particularly restricting their endeavors!

You may enjoy reading the following for expansion on these points.

—> Further Reading: "Reality Is Not Arithmetic" and "NOT Off-topic: Mathematics vs. Science"

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2. It Doesn't Take 10,000 Hours to Master a Craft

Also kinda meta...

Malcolm Gladwell inserted this dubious notion into the public consciousness with such success that people took it on face value. It was a most definite case of jumping way beyond the available data to a facile conclusion, but its very facilety (yeah, I know—not a word) made it so appealing.

Too bad that it's wrong, and that it has inhibited so many people from pursuing their passions, people who internalize that and say to themselves, "OMG, if I spent an hour a day on this every single day of my life, it would still take me three decades to get really good!"

I will present the counter-example that I happen to be most familiar with…me. (In case you're wondering this is by no means the only counter-example I know of, but it's the one I can document with authority.)

I am universally considered by my peers to have been one of the grand masters of dye transfer printing, although whether anybody truly masters this arcane art is another matter. I keep pretty good records of my time in the darkroom (see the citation below). By the time I hit 1,500 hours of practicing that craft, I was already recognized as one of the best printers in the business. Most certainly before I hit 3,000 hours I had learnt everything about dye transfer printing that I was ever going to.

It's also true that some people will spend their entire lifetime and never master their craft. Not everyone gets to be really good.

I don't think this is a matter of "innate talent" to anywhere near the extent that most people do. I feel people give way more weight to it than they should. I assert this without much evidence, I admit, but I think an awful lot of what people attribute to talent is entirely teachable: It's got a lot more with how you approach the task than what you bring to it.

—>Further Reading: "How Many Hours?"

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3. Focal Lengths Have Equivalents, Apertures Don't

To be sure, there are major advantages to being able to democratize the dialogue, but there were certain advantages to having professional gatekeepers. This particular bit of weirdness never showed up until online conversations took over the discourse.

Focal lengths have equivalents for different formats. For example, my Micro 4/3 format is almost exactly half the size of 35mm AKA "full-frame" format. There are modest differences in the proportions, but not enough to matter. Focal length determines the angle of coverage in a photograph, so it's correct to say that my Olympus M.Zuiko 75mm ƒ/1.8 lens is the equivalent of a full-frame 150mm lens. Both would convey about the same field of view in the photograph.

What is not correct is to claim that this ƒ/1.7 lens is the equivalent of a full-frame 150mm ƒ/3.5 lens! There is a technical term for that—"utter nonsense."

The f-number, along with the shutter speed, controls exposure. If your light meter is telling you that the exposure should be, oh, say, 1/100th of a second at ƒ/4, it's going to be 1/100th of a second at ƒ/4 no matter what format or focal length lens you are using. Assuming all the cameras have the same sensitivity/ISO setting, of course.

The know-it-(not-at)-all's will argue, "Yes, but the full-frame ƒ/1.8 lens collects four times as many photons." Sure, but then it's distributing those little buggers over four times the area, so the flux per square millimeter on the film/sensor remains the same. That's why the exposure doesn't change!

Having failed on that challenge, they will bring up the shallower depth of field in larger formats. The problem with that argument is that the relationship is highly dependent upon the distance to the subject, the focal length of the lens, the f-aperture, and the resolution of the camera. There is no simple equivalency.

Let's put a stake through the heart of this one if we can.

(Caveat for the uber-geeks: absolute aperture—diameter—rather than f-ratio matters when you're photographing point sources, like stars. This is why telescope/lenses intended for astrophotography include both the f-ratio and the aperture of the scope in their specs. The former will matter for photographing extended objects—e.g., the moon, planets, and nebulae—but the latter will matter for photographing isolated stars.)

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4. Zoom Lenses are Not Optically Worse than Prime Lenses

OK, this is one that I believed up until about a dozen years ago—that zoom lenses wouldn't perform as well, optically, as prime lenses. There were just too many design compromises that had to be made to get good performance over a range of focal lengths.

(If size, weight, and maximum aperture are concerns, then primes still hold the advantage. No question of that. I'm only talking about image quality.)

That was old wisdom, and by old I mean it was something I learned very early on. It probably remained true through the 20th century.

As I got more invested in the Olympus system, I found myself with a couple of zooms in my lens kit, along with some primo prime lenses. The zooms filled in the holes in my focal length choices, but I wondered how much I was compromising my picture quality by using them. Time to run tests!

You can read the detailed results in the citations below, but my overall conclusion was that the zoom lenses performed, on average, as well as the primes—in some cases better than the equivalent primes, in others not so much.

In conversations with other photographers, who also know their technical chops, I've heard the same thing. Lens design techniques and materials have advanced immensely in the past 50 years, and zooms have especially benefited from that.

I hope it's understood that I'm talking about averages here. Will any particular zoom beat out any particular prime lens? Who knows...until you run the tests. Some lenses are so spectacularly good that nothing can compare. Others? Meh.

—>Further Reading: "Zooms vs. Primes, Part I and Part II"

+    =    +    =    +

Well, I think that's enough for this time. That's plenty to chew on, especially if you dive into the citations. In future columns you can expect me to attack many more prevalent myths…and more controversial ones; if you want to make sure you don't miss any of these, subscribe to my newsletter.

Ctein

Original contents copyright 2024 by Ctein. 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 (Mike) 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:

Ctein on COVID (OT)

Ctein (it's pronounced "kuh-TINE" and it's his entire legal name) was a longtime regular columnist on TOP. After my update about COVID-19 the other day he offered to let me reproduce this recent column from his newsletter, which you can subscribe to here.

Ctein is the author, with John Sandford, of the sci-fi thriller Saturn Run. Recently he has collaborated with David Gerrold on a new sci-fi book called Ripple Effect which you can start reading for free. All the information you need is here.

Guest post by Ctein

Recently I've run across sufficiently valuable new information and products that I feel it's worth my time to write a column on a subject that we are all heartily sick of (I'm sorry, the bad jokes just won't stay suppressed). It's very likely that most of you know some of this information, but I'd be surprised if more than a handful of you know all of it.

Three questions:

"How can I reduce my chances of getting COVID?"

"How can I tell if I have COVID?"

"If I've gotten COVID, how can I tell when I'm no longer infectious?"

Before I get into it, I have two caveats:

The first is that some of the advice I'll be giving here does not correspond to what you are getting from your public/government health officials. That's not because any of us are wrong (okay, we might be, but not for this reason), but because our circumstances and goals are different. Public health is trying to minimize the overall societal risk by reducing the total number of cases without causing an unacceptable level of social disruption. That's not the same as minimizing personal risk. They also have to live in the world of the political, in contrast to the ideal, so they need to make recommendations that enough people will follow to produce the maximum feasible beneficial result.

In other words, they are trying for a kind of optimal "overall good enough," whereas I'll be talking about things aimed towards minimizing your individual risks.

The second caveat, sadly, relates to that aforementioned world of the political. Ever since our ex wannabe-dictator decided to wage war against rational, factual, scientific discourse, the world has been flooded with what is frankly antiscience and anti-sense bullshit. I do like being right—I've got two epidemiology/biomedical researchers on tap, and I read a whole bunch of primary medical journal articles (and rely on my expert friends to explain them to me when they're over my head). That means I really do want to know when I'm factually wrong! Please let me know if you find something in a primary source (a scientific journal article or an original research paper) that suggests that I am in error. I'd very much appreciate pointers to those, and I promise I will take it seriously. Please, though, no references to popular articles, newspapers, some other authority's pronouncements, etc. I want the source data, not someone's interpretation or opinion.

Now on to the purpose of this column:

"How can I reduce my chances of getting COVID?"

Taffix is an aerosol powder that you squirt up your nose, where it forms a gel coating inside the nostrils that traps viruses for up to five hours per dose. This isn't the first product to claim to do that, and my expert friends have been extremely skeptical of all of them, because none of them have provided studies that confirm that they actually work to reduce infection rates—it's all been supposition. This one has been tested, and although the studies were modest, the results were so striking that they made converts of my experts. They've been using Taffix, as have I. One of them even bought a multi-pack so they could distribute bottles to their friends.

Taffix is not a substitute for an N-95 mask; consider it a second barrier level that catches most of the viral particles that get through or around your mask. If I were to make a very crude guess, I would say it reduces the odds of getting infected by another factor of two or three. Obviously it's a whole lot less effective if you're talking or eating a lot, but seeing as there are no ill side effects and it's very cheap, it falls in the category of every little bit helps reduce your risk. Taffix has not been approved for distribution of the US, although it is in Europe and Israel (where it was developed). You can get it through eBay from distributors outside the US, who will happily ship here. Choose wisely—look for someone who has lots of positive feedback responses. You should be able to find Taffix for about $20 a bottle, including shipping. One bottle will last you two months, if you're using it every day for a full day (one dose is good for about five hours).

Taffix interferes with nasal-swab testing, so I'd strongly recommend that you do your testing (LAMP, PCR, or antigen) before you use Taffix on any particular day.

"How can I tell if I have COVID?"

Antigen tests are not reliable indicators of whether or not one has COVID; they are especially bad at detecting asymptomatic or very low grade infections, the kind you might not even notice. Even worse, in mild cases they're not likely to produce a positive result until you've been infectious for as much as two days. This is, as we technical folks would say, "sucky."

RNA amplification, your PCR laboratory test, can detect the disease quickly, early, and at very low levels of infection. PCR is strictly in-lab, but there is another amplification procedure, LAMP, that is nearly as good and is available in a do-it-yourself home test. Lucira (now part of Pfizer) has a home LAMP test that's very reliable but also very expensive. You'd know within 30 minutes whether or not you'd been infected, but you paid dearly.

That was worth it to me—I just got back from a week's trip to Minneapolis, and I immediately took a LAMP test, so that I could confirm that I hadn't gotten infected on the trip. If it had come up positive, Paula and I would've been able to quickly quarantine from each other so she faced minimal risk. Great...but $75 a pop is outside most people's budgets, including ours for routine use.

There's a new test on the market called Metrix from Aptitude Medical Systems and it's only $25! AMS has been making home blood glucose tests for some years, so they are not new to this business. Like the Lucira test, Metrix produces results within 30 minutes, but it's about six times more sensitive than Lucira. You can also use it with either a nasal or throat swab (Lucira doesn't work with a throat swab—yup, I tried). You can even just spit in the reaction chamber, if you can't tolerate swabs.

At $25 a test, Metrix runs a bit more than twice the price of a two-test antigen kit, but it is sufficiently sensitive that you can test two people at the same time and still have a high degree of confidence in the results. Paula and I have reason to do that frequently, at which point it's hardly any more expensive than antigen testing.

It's important to keep in mind is that a PCR/LAMP test will tell you if you've contracted COVID, but it is not useful for telling you when you've gotten over your infection. Viral RNA can circulate in the body for a considerable length of time after the infection has been vanquished. In the first year of the pandemic there were reports of mysterious cases where people continued to (PCR) test positive for weeks, sometimes months, after they otherwise were entirely disease-free. Now we know why! (That's the opposite of long COVID, where symptoms last for months even though tests say you're clear of infection.)

Which takes me to my last topic:

"If I've gotten COVID, how can I tell when I'm no longer infectious?"

Unfortunately, there is no really clean and convenient answer to this one, although the safety protocols have become considerably less onerous over the past couple of years. Other than just waiting it out for an ungodly length of time, the only test we have is the antigen test. Antigen tests produce a lot of false negatives, to they're not not very trustworthy, especially when you consider mild cases. Nonetheless, it does correlate with infectiousness, so it's not entirely useless.

Consequently, once you've contracted COVID, a single negative antigen test does not assure you that it's now safe to expose yourself to other people. Two tests a day apart, a commonly quoted protocol, is not a very good indicator—really it isn't, no matter what you read on the web! The closest we have to a gold standard (well, more like bronze or pot metal), is three tests separated by 48-hour intervals. Yes, five days is a long time, but it's better than how things used to be, that's all I can say. If you come up negative on all three, the odds are good that you're no longer infectious and you are not going to relapse. It's not even close to perfect, but "good" is as good as it gets for now.

Erring on the side of caution
Lest you think I'm simply being paranoid and overly fussy, here's a not-so-fun coincidence for you!

A couple of weeks back, while I was mapping out this column in my head, one of my sweeties came down with COVID. We were supposed to have a date last Friday. She finally tested negative early last week; in fact, she tested negative twice...but there wasn't enough time between the second test and Friday evening to run the third. Regretfully, I told her we had to cancel the date out of caution. The next day, Saturday, her third test came up positive—the so-called "rebound" infection.

I am well aware of that the plural of "anecdote" is not "data," but that doesn't mean it's entirely ignorable!

I do expect that COVID will eventually catch up with me, being endemic, but that does not mean I hold with the people who say, "It's inevitable that I'm going to get it sooner or later, so why try?"

Death is also inevitable (or so it is rumored—I am continuing to do research and I'll report back when I have definitive conclusions) but that doesn't mean I wouldn't like to put it off just a bit longer.

Your mileage may differ. It probably does.

Still, to quote the police sergeant on an ancient TV show, "Let's be careful out there."

Ctein

Original contents copyright 2024 by Ctein. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate Mike earns from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Ctein and 'Ripple Effect'

Elmo and Ctein, 2015

A brief update on what an old friend of TOP is up to these days: Ctein, co-author (with John Camp AKA John Sandford) of Saturn Run, has written a new book, this time with David Gerrold, who is most famous in fandom for being the guy who wrote the famous Star Trek episode "The Trouble With Tribbles." Ctein and David's new book is Ripple Effect.

Before we get to that, Ctein has been busy cementing his legacy by putting all his old TOP columns online independently, a project that is ongoing, but going well, as you can see:

https://ctein.com/Columns.htm

Some of these columns are dated now (there's not a great hue and cry now for a review of the 2013 MacBook Air), but many of them remain useful and contemporary. A pertinent one at the moment is "It's Never Too Early to Start Planning for an Eclipse." As you probably know, the upcoming eclipse is happening a month from Friday, on April 8th. The article is still on TOP, of course, but now can also be seen Ctein.com.

Ripple Effect
As for the new book, Ctein and David are serializing it online through Patreon. Here's the Home page. Ctein says, "It's a natural disaster thriller, and it's quite the roller coaster ride, all 155,000 words of it. I don't want to spoil the story for you, let's just say it's about a very big wave." You can bet the science in it is going to be accurate.

They plan to publish it over the next year in weekly increments, which you can sign up for at the Patreon page. But, so you can see if you like it and want to keep going, the first 10,000 words are free—more than enough to get a sense of the writing and the story. (That link is to the free part.) The weekly installments are in pleasant-to-read ~3,000-word chunks and the cost is only $3/month. You might want to read a little more at first, though—the weekly postings are already up to Chapter 22.

The authors would be grateful if you'd help pass the word along.

Have a look for yourself. I'm interested in the publishing model and will be curious to see how it works for them, but of course I wish them all the success in the world!

Mike

UPDATE: Ctein has chimed in, in the comments. To see the full Comments section on any post, click on "Comments [#]" in the footer, or click on the post title and scroll down. —Ed.

Original contents copyright 2024 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:

Not THAT Ross Cameron: "Funny you should mention Ctein’s posts. I have the link in my favourites and am slowly working my way through. Just finished reading 'Lazy? Does not compute!' before this article. Hope the book goes well."

Custom Printing: Threat or Menace?

Guest post by Ctein

I'd originally planned this as a comment to one of Mike's previous columns about our current print sale, but then I realized it was better as a standalone column. Still, think of it as a response to some of the excellent questions that several readers asked.

Understand that the questions aren't new ones—we've discussed them in the past, in fact at great length a mere dozen years ago. I am truly surprised y'all don't remember the details of those extended conversations (grin).

For those who are masochistic enough to want to review these longissimus, non legi [too long, didn't read —Ed.] dialogues, the links are at the bottom of this column.

For the rest of us...

There's a very simple answer to the questions in the vein of, "Should or shouldn't I value a print made by the photographer more than a print made by somebody else?"

Do what your heart tells you!

News flash: Art is not a rational process. Loving art is not a rational thing. The marketplace for art is especially not a rational thing. Any attempt to philosophize your way to a logical answer is doomed to failure. All of you are right!

Jim Marshall prints
Let me give you an example of just how irrational the market is. I was Jim Marshall's color printer for the last decade of his life. In the last two years I finally convinced him to let me make digital prints as well as dye transfers. In most cases I was printing the same photographs in both media, because they were the popular ones, so we have a kind of controlled experiment here.

You would probably guess—correctly—that the dye transfer prints sold for many of thousands of dollars more than the digital prints, anywhere from $3,000 to $10,000 more. Because, y'know, DYE TRANSFER (insert "ooooooooohhhh, aaaaahhhhh" here)!

By any logical metric, this should not have been the case. The digital prints were in most cases larger than the dye transfer prints. Technically they were unquestionably better, being more faithful to the tones and colors of the original slides—when that was the goal.

(An aside here, Jim worked almost exclusively with 35mm Kodachrome II and A. Those are Jim's "originals," and they have never been for sale. If you want a Jim Marshall photograph, you buy a print...made by someone like me. Which messes with a whole lot of arguments about originality and ownership, I would think.)

Where was I? Oh yeah. In addition, the prints were more true to Jim's intent and artistic vision, because of course I worked with him and he critiqued what I did. In some cases the changes were subtle, and others they were massive—the print of Johnny Cash in the studio is the only one of this photograph that was ever printed remotely correctly, because the studio had fluorescent lights that photographed as a bilious green.

So we've ticked off size, technical quality, aesthetic intent, and originality boxes. What's left, rarity? Because, you know...dye transfer (ooooohh, aaaahhh)!

Except...because we only got started on digital printing at the end of Jim's life, signed digital prints are far rarer. In most cases there are exactly two in existence—one in my collection and one in Jim's estate. Whereas there are between five and seventy signed dye transfers, depending on the popularity of the particular photograph.

By what logic does a Jim Marshall dye transfer print sell for much, much more than a Jim Marshall digital print of the same photograph? None, because it's not logical. It's not supposed to be.

Art has no intrinsic value—its value lies only in the pleasure it brings to us and we have no way to quantify that. (Thank the gods for that, because if we did some soulless capitalist entity would lock up the property rights and start charging us for it.)

If you did go back and reread all those oh-so-long discussions, you will of notice that they didn't resolve anything and that we are asking exactly the same questions today that we asked a dozen years ago. And, I have no doubt will be asking a dozen years hence.

To quote a great philosopher—"Don't worry. Be happy."

Should Mike print his own pictures?
Now, permit me to address the issues I can answer, raised by more than one reader:

1.) "Mike, you could save a lot of money by doing your own printing."

If Mike were to do his own printing, he would earn more money if he did this sale entirely on his own. The way this works is that he gets 60% of the net proceeds and I get 40%, because both Mike and I firmly believe that the artist should get the lion's share of money for their work. Still, Mike is leaving 40% on the table.

But consider that to get that other 40%, he would have to purchase all the materials, do the printing, do all the order tracking, do all the fulfillment, do all the shipping, keep the books, etc. That takes me about 85% of my time, easily more than half an hour per order when all is said and done. I doubt Mike could do it faster. [Ed. note: Mike certainly could not do it faster! Mike might not even be able to do it at all. That's an experiment you probably don't want us to run. —Mike]

Is that really how Mike wants to spend his time? Money is fungible but the 24 hours in a day aren't. And, as Mike recently wrote, "I'm 65, so the way I figure it, I get to live between zero and 40 more years...."

Mike has talked often about balancing the time he spends doing all the things he wants and needs to do. Do you think he really wants to add running print sales to that?

That is a rhetorical question.

(If you're thinking along the lines of, "Maybe Mike could do all the printing and Ctein could do all the order fulfillment, etc.?" Nuh uh—wouldn't save him much because I'd still need at least 30% rather than the original 40% to cover my time.)

2.) "Mike, you would get a better print, one more true to your artistic vision, if you did your own printing."

Nope. For one really simple reason. I'm a much better printer than Mike is. That's not immodesty speaking, that's accuracy. I do it for a living, and it's one of my areas of expertise. There are rare occasions when I don't do a single thing to the file Mike sends me to improve. It doesn't happen often. The great majority of the time, though, I am improving upon what Mike has created, by his artistic judgment. Not mine, his.

Sometimes the improvements are very subtle. Sometimes they are not. After I went in and "fixed" the "Wet Asphalt" photograph, entirely on my own initiative and intuition, Mike wrote this comment back: "That looks better than mine actually...I think I flattened the tone of the road a little too much. You added some more life to it and it doesn't detract from what I wanted the picture to do. And yours looks more like wetness."

I intuited the need for that wetness and I knew how to get there (it was very easy for me). I helped him realize his own vision for his own picture. It happens with a lot of my clients, even very famous ones.

In short, You won't be getting anything that Mike isn't utterly happy with. In truth, none of my clients ever do.

Because that's my job.

Ctein

Links:

"What is Custom Printing?"

"Do 'Real' Photographers Print?"

"Custom Printing and Artistic Ownership"

"The Importance (or Not) of the Print(ing)"

Ctein was was one of the world's few master dye transfer printmakers for many years. When Kodak announced the discontinuation of dye transfer materials, in 1992, he mortgaged his house and laid in a massive supply of dye transfer materials. He told me in the early years of inkjet that he would switch when digital inkjet could exceed the quality of dye transfer; before his supply of dye transfer materials had run out, he had switched. He closed his darkroom in 2013. He now makes custom digital inkjet prints for a wide variety of professional and private clients.

Featured Comments from:

Bob Johnston [no relation —Ed.]: "Anyone can make a print but it takes an awful lot of knowledge, effort and practice to make a fine print. This is just as true today as it was in darkroom days. Mike is very fortunate to have Ctein print for him."

William Schneider: "I believe that printing benefits from the 'two heads are better than one' principal. It is easy to overlook (or even wistfully ignore!) a printing decision made while working alone. In the past, another printer and I would meet twice a week to look over each other's darkroom prints. A fresh set of eyes could instantly spot issues to which I had become blind."

Jeff: "I’ve always made my own black-and-white prints, darkroom and digital. But I’m just an amateur enthusiast, not a professional requiring volume production. All of photography requires understanding of tools and techniques, but primarily depends on critical judgment and decision making. I would no sooner outsource my printing than I would my shooting. It’s all part of a whole, reflecting my skill and judgment, and the final framed print is my reward for the effort. When a print ‘sings’ (occasionally), that’s special. Sure, someone else might do it differently, or better, but that’s not the point for me. I especially enjoy deciding on the print size, typically smaller than others might prefer, and aspect ratio (where the edges are placed); what feels right for each picture. But the result isn’t final until I custom cut the mat for each print and assemble the framing. All mine, from start to finish, for better or worse. Joy.

"That said, I can surely appreciate why others take a different approach; no right or wrong. Seems that there has always been far fewer great printers than great photographers. I might not qualify as either, but I sure do enjoy the process and the resultant output. Meanwhile, my vintage silver print collection serves as aspiration and keeps me humble."

Daniele: "Thinking about it from my perspective, as a guitar maker, I can't put too much value on the autocracy of the art product: in my field, the end result is the performance (either recorded or live); it really needs both an instrument maker and a musician, both highly specialized in their profession. While technically and actually true that a maker can perform and a player build his own instrument, in practice it produces good results extremely rarely, if ever at all; great results, I can't think of any."

Update on the Previous Sale

Just an update: we're closing the books Ctein's Infrared Print Offer a few days from now, so if there's anything you need to communicate with him about, please do it now!

[email protected]

Thanks again to everyone who participated. We've received many nice compliments about the prints.

Mike

Print Sale Update / Ctein's Thoughts on Mac Studio

I'm still working on the Baker's Dozen, I haven't forgotten. Very wrapped up in this piece I'm trying to put together for that other outlet. I might submit it tomorrow, so that'll be that one done.

Ctein wrote to say that all the infrared prints from the sale have shipped. If you haven't gotten either your print(s) or a notification from USPS that it's on the way, please contact Ctein at [email protected].

I invited him to write a column giving us his thoughts about the new Mac Studio, and below is what he replied—written as a casual email, mind you. I have his permission to share.

Ctein: "I wouldn't mind writing something about the Mac Studio, but at this point I have nothing coherent nor useful to say. My thoughts are too muddled. I need to straighten them out before I'll have anything worth adding to the chatter.

"The two things that are most messing with my head (there are others) is that, first, I have little interest in the M[x] chips. The switchover, in fact, will cause me problems when I'm forced into it. Which is, hopefully, not going to happen any time soon.

"The second is that I am unreasonably fond of the 27" 5K iMac. And I do think it's unreasonable. My last-year's 16" MacBook Pro runs rings around my now-ancient (2014) iMac, along with providing me with a dual monitor setup (I have the LG 5K 27" monitor), which has better color and a larger gamut. Plus having twice as much RAM as my maxed-out iMac. There is no sensible reason why I should prefer working on the iMac. Well, I'm allowed to have my idiosyncrasies, but I don't understand this one and it makes it hard to write usefully about the New Apple Order.

"The likely reality is that if my iMac were to give up the ghost tomorrow, I'd go out and buy the final-generation 27" iMac, either refurbished from Apple or used from one of the reputable dealers, in the minimum RAM configuration, populate it with RAM from Other World Computing, and I'd be spending half as much as a Mac Studio would cost me. And that would likely carry me for another 6–8 years... or until Apple decides to stop supporting the Intel chips entirely."

Note that Ctein does professional printing and restoration, so he falls into the pro user category. I believe he paid top dollar for his 5K 27" iMac when it was the very latest thing, so it's nice to hear that he got his money's worth out of it, both in terms of years of use and his positive feelings for it.

By the way, I'm far from an expert on computers—actually more the opposite—but I read enough of Daring Fireball yesterday to find out that it's pretty well accepted that the 27" iMac is now dead. I had two of them, the second being a 2011 that's still sitting here looking for a home. The only reason I went to a separate CPU and monitor was that I work on a porch, surrounded on three sides by windows, and I needed a monitor that could cope with glare better. I still can't do critical work on photos in the daytime. But my NEC MultiSync PA272W solved the glare problem—it has a non-glare surface and a hood.

And in local news...
It's like mid-Winter here today—five or six inches of fresh snow and 17°F (–8°C). The difference is that we're due for a warm-up tomorrow. The anti-icing wires on the pool table shed are working nicely, so no ice dams! Personally, I count today as the first day of Spring, despite the weather. With Daylight Savings Time newly returned, it should be light till 7:00 or even a little later, and don't think I'm not grateful. Those dark Winter evenings can feel awfully lonely. The seven Temperate Months (capitalized out of reverence), roughly April through October, are the reason to live in the Finger Lakes. Bring it on!

27-inch 5K iMac new at B&H Photo: i5, 8 GB RAM, 256GB SSD, $1,799; i9, 32 GB RAM, 2TB SSD, $3,699 (that's the low end and high end; there are other configurations in the middle).

Mike
(Thanks to Ctein)

Book of Interest this Week

Gregory Crewdson: Alone Street. "Filmic" seems the best single adjective to describe Gregory Crewdson's work; his directed and carefully managed tableau are the still photography version of scenes in movies. As such they are hyper-real; more beautiful than life and more poetic, and more concerted. They're also very easy to enjoy and a pleasure to look at.

This book link is a portal to Amazon.

Today at B&H Photo

Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

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

Thom Hogan: "I'm with Ctein for the most part. A recent 27" iMac 5K Retina configured properly is an excellent tool that should be long-lived (though Apple's yearly macOS updates have many of us living behind the times intentionally).

"Thing is, the 24" M1 iMac fills the need for those who want a lithe all-in-one, and as Mike has noted with his need for a separate monitor to get glare/positioning benefits, a Mac mini or lower Mac Studio model with the proper 4K/5K monitor is probably a perfect replacement for the 27" iMac.

"Those of us with iMac 5K's almost certainly have a small farm of peripherals hanging out on the desk (mine are about 3x the area of a Mac Studio), so the notion of a separate box really isn't an issue. Macsales.com has some very nice boxes that would stack under a Mac Studio and actually take up less space than my current drive boxes when all is said and done.

"As far as I'm concerned, Apple has done a good job of rationalizing the M1 Macs. Portables in 13, 14, 16" sizes, mini, Studio, iMac 24", and later this year a Pro. This is the best set of choices we've had in a long time. I'm not sure that a 27" iMac M1 adds much to the lineup. Indeed, if Apple were to provide one, I'm pretty sure that it would have to be Max/Ultra and the 24" would have to remain plain M1, which is what the mini/Studio distinction is right now."

John Krumm: "My Sierra Juniper just arrived and it looks fantastic. Off to the frame shop."

Bill Beebe: "I certainly understand a strong attachment to any technology or tool, especially if that tool has served you well and allowed you to make a living in your chosen profession. I have experienced the same, but from a pure engineering viewpoint. (I use a camera, and my output can be charitably described as hobbyist).

"What Ctein might be reacting to is the cost of the new M1 variant Mac minis. Let me speak to cost from my perspective.

"I'm fortunate enough that I have a 2019 16" MBP fully equipped with an i9, max memory, and 4TB SSD. That cost $6K. It's a workhorse given to me in 2020 to help complete a contract, and believe me I put it to very good use. Later, I was able to pick up a 2020 13" MPB with the basic M1 (i.e. just 8 cores), on sale for $1.5K. That became my field computer because the idea of carrying $6K of computer out of the house became untenable.

"I can say, without exaggeration, that the 13" will keep up with the 16" with 1/4 the memory, even if the 13" has to hit swap. There are use cases for which the 16" has to be used due to its 64GB memory. But for a lot of other basic use cases, I can't tell the difference in performance.

"But I can certainly tell the difference in battery life. What makes the 13" such a keeper is the speed combined with its very long battery life while out testing in the field. I can run at least eight hours of solid work before I even have to think of hitting the charger. The 16" by comparison sucks down a battery like it's going out of style.

"I understand and appreciate why Ctein uses what he uses, but I hope in the future he'll see that the Apple Silicon based Macs will benefit him even more than Intel based Macs, especially when mobile."

Here's How I Do B&W Infrared: Part 1

Words and illustrations by Ctein

[Since we're in the middle of a print offer featuring five of Ctein's expertly crafted digital IR prints, I asked him to explain his IR equipment, methods, and workflow. The resulting article was so long we decided to break it into two parts; the second half will appear tomorrow. —Mike the Ed.]

Let's start with first principles—my artistic philosophy. As I've written often, it's (deceptively) naïve: I want to make prints that show you what I saw. When I think, "Oh, look at that!" I want you to have the same reaction for the same reasons when you see one of my prints.

The naïveté is deceptive because any of you who have tried doing this know that it's bloody difficult to transform what the cameras sees into what you see. For a wide range of values of "bloody difficult"—sometimes it's terribly easy and on occasion it's impossible. It's my goal, regardless.

This creates a bit of a problem. I don't see in the infrared! Consequently, my goal gets a bit meta-. I want to make prints that show you what I imagine I'd be seeing if I did see infrared. It's no longer purely about understanding human visual perception; there's an element of imagination and a fair dose of physics knowledge in the mix.

It really helps that I can see what the camera sees in the infrared! I can't imagine doing infrared photography without an electronic viewfinder or screen preview (a.k.a. live view). No, I can imagine it, and it would be an exercise in frustration. I'd look at a scene, make a wild (albeit educated) guess as to what it looked like in the infrared, make a photograph, and look at the results on the screen on the back of the camera.

A lot better than in the film days, but still....

I started playing with black-and-white infrared digital photography back in 2008–2009, and you can see that work if you scroll to the bottom of this section on my website.

Back then I was using a Fujifilm Finepix all-in-one camera (I hadn't abandoned film yet) which had a weak-enough IR-blocking filter on the sensor that I could add a visible light blocking filter to the front of the lens and photograph solely in the infrared. At a very low ISO—single digits! But it worked, and the results were quite nice. I'm especially fond of this one:

Ctein, Buena Vista Park Path

Once I moved to more "dedicated" digital cameras, in the Olympus line (where I have stayed to this day), this trick stopped working—their IR blocking filters were too good. But I was hooked, so when I got my second Olympus camera, I had my Olympus Pen digital converted to pure infrared by LifePixel.

That was a real step up in quality, plus now I could photograph at decent ISO's! "Thunderhead over the Sierras" is another of my early favorites, made with that converted Olympus Pen.

Ctein, Thunderhead Over the Sierras

I've had three cameras converted by LifePixel and I've been delighted in every case. The company is responsive, helpful, and affordable, with conversions running between $200 and $300 (and sometimes they have sales). If you don't see your camera on the list, inquire. I cannot recommend these folks too highly.

They will even sell you an already-converted camera if you don't have a spare one to convert. That can run a lot more, because you're buying the cameras as well as the conversion, but an older used model may not cost any more than converting one of your own cameras. New cameras with lenses start at about $450 but most will clock in in the high hundreds for just the body.

About the conversions. LifePixel offers several different options. Go with a straight infrared conversion, unless you are positive you want to play with full spectrum photography. I thought about going that route and then realized that if I also wanted to do pure infrared photography (what I cared about most), I'd have to invest in appropriate filters for all my lenses—a.) inconvenient and b.) expensive!

Once you've made that choice, you'll discover that there are more options. I strongly recommend the Deep B&W Infrared conversion with the 830 nm cut off. It provides a much purer result than the Standard Infrared (720 nm) conversion. It costs you a stop of sensitivity, but with modern cameras (especially with image stabilization) this really isn't a problem.

LifePixel will also program in a custom color calibration (at least they did on my Olympuses) that produces a neutral preview and JPEG. Makes visualizing what you're doing a whole lot easier. I really do like these folks!

In case you're wondering, my current infrared camera is an Olympus OM-D E-M5 Mark II. If I ever replace my E-M1 Mark II with a newer model (no, the Mark III and M1X didn't do it for me), I’ll likely get that converted to IR and sell the E-M5.

Lenses

Okay, you've got a camera body, now what about the lens? This is hit or miss: conventional lenses are not corrected for aberrations in the infrared, nor do the anti-reflection coatings work very well there. The latter is the bigger problem. Poor reflection suppression results in large amounts of flare, a pronounced hotspot in the center of the field, and ofttimes images of the diaphragm blades. You will find that many lenses are simply unusable.

In addition, optical corrections may be a factor. This does not correlate with how well a lens works in the visible light. A lens that is good under normal circumstances may crap out in the infrared.

In any case, there will be differences to take into account. For example, my 12mm ƒ/1.4 Leica DG Summilux is unbelievably good for normal photography, even wide open. The aberration suppression is unbelievable. This is the lens I used for the aurora photography on my website; just take a look at those pinpoint stars! It's still very sharp and well corrected in the infrared—happy, happy me—but it has pronounced curvature of field. Fortunately, I always use this lens at ƒ/3.5–4.5 because outside of that range flare and/or internal reflections become intolerable, and this produces ample depth of field with a 12mm lens. I further cut the error in half by setting the focus window two-thirds of the way to one side of the frame. Works well enough!

In case you're wondering, the three lenses I use for infrared photography are that 12mm, the Panasonic 42.5mm ƒ/1.7, and the Olympus M. Zuiko 75mm ƒ/1.8. They all have their quirks in the infrared but they're all acceptable.

My favorite by far, oddly enough, is the 12mm. Why is that odd? Because I've never been particularly in love with wide-angle lenses. I've always gravitated to the long side. My standard always-on-camera lens for normal photography is the 42.5mm Panasonic. That would be the equivalent of 85mm in 35mm format. I rarely use anything shorter than that. But in infrared? The 12mm is my go-to lens. Don't know how to explain it, it just looks right. That was a big surprise, and it was one of the things that drove me to buy the Leica lens, because Olympus's 12mm lens is pretty punk.

Fine, I've got my equipment. Now I'm off to make photographs!

The viewfinder view is great. Decent contrast, a little bit flat because of lens flare, but good enough for me to evaluate a scene. The image is nice and neutral. When I look at the resulting photograph (well, actually the preview JPEG, as I photograph in raw) on the camera screen, it looks flatter than it did through the viewfinder, but still tolerable. Mostly I depend on what I see in live view; I only go to post-exposure chimping in IR to check focus and sharpness.

I import my raw files into Adobe Bridge and that's where the fun begins. Tune in tomorrow for the thrilling conclusion of my saga!

Ctein

Book o' the Week:

Ernst Haas: New York in Color 1952–1962. "When Haas moved from Vienna to New York City in 1951, he left behind a war-torn continent and a career producing black-and-white images. For Haas, the new medium of color photography was the only way to capture a city pulsing with energy and humanity. These images demonstrate Haas's tremendous virtuosity and confidence with Kodachrome film and the technical challenges of color printing."

This book link is a portal to Amazon.

Today at B&H Photo

Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

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

Peter Komar: "I'm fairly positive that LifePixel will now have a surge of orders for camera conversions. The IR images from Ctein’s website are gorgeous and just ooze silver like traditional darkroom prints but we all know are now inkjet printed, oh he has mastered that as well. Thanks for the print sale and posting the detailed and informative essays on the IR process, can’t wait for part II."

The Virus Is a Hawk

[You can share this essay with friends by mailing or texting them this link: https://tinyurl.com/y228evwn ]

Guest essay written by Ctein

Outside of our bedroom window, at the edge of the cliff that overlooks the ocean, is a very large fir tree* that is home to an unkindness** of ravens. Some years ago it hosted two ravens, then three, as ravens are inclined to make more ravens. Now there appear to be eight or nine; I've lost count. Come trash-collection day they wander up and down the street, methodically checking out trash bins for ones that are overflowing. Ravens are extremely opportunistic omnivores.

They are also carnivores and predators. As such they compete for the same eco-niche as the local red-tailed hawks, and there is little love lost between them. (It's also possible that the hawks attempt to prey on the ravens' chicks, so even less reason for endearment.)

Periodically they also compete for airspace, because the hawks' favorite updraft from the sea is not all that far away from the ravens' tree. For birds, it is not good fences but great distances that make good neighbors. This distance is not great enough.

The hawks and ravens are similar in size (red-tailed hawks are among the largest hawks) but there is no question that ravens are stronger, smarter, and more aerobatically adept. They've also got considerably more attitude. They initiate the aerial conflicts.

Two or three of the ravens will soar above the hawk and swoop down on it, sweeping to one side of the very last moment. Neither species wants actual physical contact, which could prove fatal. It's all about intimidation.***

Sometimes the ravens whirl and loop. There is considerable vocalization. In action and words they say to the hawk, "Look, we are superior in every respect, physically and mentally. You are overshadowed. Take a hike."

The hawk's sole response is to slide to one side in the updraft, issuing an irritated "keeee." The ravens regroup, soar up, and swoop down on the hawk again. They repeatedly demonstrate—in terms that even a groundhugging human could understand—that the hawk is outclassed and should relinquish its airspace. Repeatedly the hawk slip-slides to one side or the other, issuing annoyed cries, and continuing to focus its limited attention and prodigious eyesight on the ground. It is looking for prey, and nothing else is on its tiny mind.

This can go on for as long as 20 minutes. By raven—and human—sensibilities, it shouldn't be any contest. The ravens win on style and points. They are clearly the superior predator, and deserve the win. The problem—for the ravens—is that while the ravens are challenging the hawk to a duel and demonstrating unquestionably superior prowess, the hawk is only thinking, "food, hunting for food, quit bugging me, hunting food."

Finally, the ravens give up—they get frustrated and, worse, bored. They go off to find some more entertaining mischief, and the hawk continues doing what it's been doing all along.

The hawk wins every time because it isn't even playing the game!

I feel like the ravens do. I am tired and I'm bored and I'm frustrated and depressed and, most of all, exhausted by four months of navigating through this Brave New World, of living in Plague Times. God knows I've done my part, more than my part. I need a break.

Unfortunately, the virus is a hawk. It doesn't care that our only ways of suppressing it are socio-political, it doesn't care that some people are wrapping themselves in the flags of politics around this. It doesn't care that we, individually and collectively, are frustrated and bored and figuratively sick of it all, and really badly in need of a f*ckin' break.

COVID-19 is not a raven. Our only tools may be sociopolitical, but it's not a political opponent. Just because we're tired doesn't mean it's tired, or that we've worn it down one bit. It's the same hawk it always was, doing the same hawkish things.

If we go back to "old normal" because, well, we've put in a Really Good Fight, it will reassert itself just as vigorously as it did in March. Incidence doubling times of 4.5 to 5 days. Compound interest being what it is, that becomes a ten-fold increase in two weeks, a hundred-fold in a month. The consequences of that, in humanitarian and economic (both!) terms are so catastrophic that they make the last four months look like a cakewalk.

Well, we're not being quite that stupid; we're not going back to the old normal. We're going to a "new normal." It makes a big difference; these days we're looking at doubling times of 3–4 weeks. That's a whole lot better, except—compound interest! Caseloads don't increase by tenfold in two weeks, but they do in three months. By year's end we're back to catastrophe: humanitarian, economic.

Exponential growth is a bitch. Mongo no like exponent > 1.

We don't have the luxury of letting down our guards and relaxing our extraordinarily inconvenient and uncomfortable protections because we are exhausted (and, make no mistake, we are exhausted). The hawk just hovers in the updraft, thinking its minimal, hawkish thoughts and waiting for hawkish opportunity.

Topic Two! How to tell good science from bad, revisited

I wrote a couple of columns some years back about things that laypeople could do to figure out if the information they were being fed was good science or not, even if they lacked expertise in the area. I offered textual, contextual, and meta- tools that would help sort the wheat from the chaff. Here are links to those two columns:

Bad Science vs. Good Science: A Guide for the Layperson (Part 1)

Bad Science vs. Good Science: A Guide for the Layperson (Part 2)

I'm going to add an additional tip that wasn't in those columns: good scientists will not intentionally lie to you.

Yes, scientists will get things wrong. Science is only an approximation of our universe and one way to think of it is as an ongoing process of error correction, where every step of the way we try to reduce our misunderstandings and ignorance. But it's not like we've found the answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything (actually, I live at that address****), so sometimes they will tell you things that turn out to be incorrect.

But, they will never outright lie to you. If you catch someone lying to you, really lying to you, they are not doing good science. Doesn't matter what degrees they hold, who they are affiliated with, what reputation they have. They are not Good Scientists, they are Bad.

There are people out there telling you that you should not wear masks to reduce the spread of COVID-19. That wearing a mask is, at the least, ineffectual and at the worst, dangerous.

They are liars. This is not a matter of opinion; it is not a matter for debate. There are not "good people on both sides" of this question. Saying masks aren't effective is like saying the earth is flat or that HIV doesn't cause AIDS or that vaccines cause autism. It is a blatant lie, contradicted by real medical knowledge.

Some people are saying this out of woeful, misinformed ignorance. Others are saying it with conscious, malign intent. Irrelevant. Either way, what they are doing is lying to you. If they are lying about something this obvious, there is a good chance they are lying about other things that will not be so obvious. They are untrustworthy and you should not be relying on them for information.

Cut them out of your life. Close the browser tab, delete the bookmark, don't read them ever again. Any information they present that's correct you'll be able to find in a dozen other places. You won't lose a single thing of value and you will reduce your risk of being lied to further.

In the meantime, wear the %^$#@! mask when you go out. Yes it's annoying, and mildly uncomfortable, and a nuisance, and a constant, extremely unpleasant reminder that we are living in Plague Times, like a little finger incessantly poking you in the face repeating, "Don't forget, don't forget, don't forget, don't forget." I hate that!

Well, I don't know anybody who likes it. But, y'know, on the scale of inconveniences and annoyances that this pandemic has subjected us to, it's way down on the list.

This hawk is very single-mindedly focussed on being a hawk, but a mask makes its life considerably more difficult.

That is your Public Service Announcement for this time. In next month's newsletter I will return to less fraught and contemporary matters.

Probably.

pax / Ctein

[Ed. note: Originally published in "Ctein's (New and Improved) Occasional Newsletter," July 9, 2020.Seems Ctein noticed a rush of signups for his newsletter on Wednesday, suspected TOP, came here, and found my mention of his essay. Last night he kindly offered to allow me to republish the essay here. Thanks to Ctein, and I hope you enjoyed this. You can sign up for his future newsletters at ctein.com.]

[ADDENDUM Sunday morning: If this article didn't go into enough specifics about masks for you, see Ctein's reply to Gerard in the Comments section. Both together are a bit long to be Featured Comments but there is useful detail there.]

*Paula says it is a Monterey Cypress. I say if it's got little pointy leaf things and cones, it's a fir tree. OK, not a botanist.

**Yes, that is the collective noun for ravens, in contrast to a "murder" of crows. I'm not sure why; perhaps someone considered ravens—unsupported by observation—to be more genteel.

***I did consider describing it as a game of aerial chicken, but that seemed too groan-worthy. So I didn't, he said contradictorily.

****Ed. note: Ctein's address is 42 Skyline Drive. He is, among many other talents, a writer, lecturer, and fan of science fiction a.k.a. speculative fiction, and the number 42 has implications amongst fans of Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series.

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

Thanks to everyone who supports TOP through Patreon!

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

Andy Holman: "A great piece on COVID and corvids!"

Aashish Sharma: "This article made my day! Reading something new from Ctein usually does, and this one was no exception. Love the clear and direct writing with a hint of humor. I only want to say thanks for the advice on masks, and that I'm delighted to know you are a Douglas Adams fan like me.  :-)  I will eagerly wait for the next one."

Scott: "Living in an area where I watch 'our' crows do this all the time, I was rapt (sorry, had to say it) by your article and then loved the pivot to talking about the virus. A superbly written article in my opinion and also the truth. The virus is truly the hawk. I know this from my pertinent scientific background and also deep study of medical history. Bravo."

Tesla Model X Review (OT)

New and deep blue! Photo by Sandy Stone.

Written by Ctein

I am really loving my new Tesla Model X. I guess I better when I spend close to $100K on a car, but it's nice when there's not any buyer's remorse.

The only thing Paula and I don't like about it is that it's larger than we're used to—it's a standard sedan chassis and we are used to compact cars, so it's taking a little bit to get adjusted to a car that's a foot wider and two feet longer.

A small disappointment—with all the high-speed freeway driving, the range is significantly less than EPA figures. I get about 80% of official. That turns out to be surprisingly significant with the kind of driving I do, but it is what it is. Can't really fault the electric for that; if I were driving an ICE [internal combustion engine vehicle —Ed.] at an average 70–75 mph, I wouldn't get EPA mileage either.

On the other hand, Tesla keeps rolling out software tweaks that improve the efficiency, which is not something that would happen with an ICE.

Quality control is everything you've heard about Tesla. That is, crappy. Fortunately, the D minus they get in manufacturing QC is offset by the A plus they get in servicing. Going in, we were prepared for that, and, yes, we've had two warranty fixes so far. The first was a wire harness obstructing the front camera. Not a common thing—the service manager had never seen that failure before—but one that should never have gotten out of the factory. If any kind of check were done on the cameras it would have been very obvious.

The second was that the actuator arm on the passenger side door popped off the ball joint. That is also uncommon but wouldn't show up in normal QC. I'm guessing the socket or the ball sleeve was slightly out of tolerance. That was something Tesla could fix in the field. Within 48 hours they had a technician out to the house who pulled the door apart and replaced the entire actuator motor assembly. Very probably the problem was only in the socket/sleeve, which would've taken five minutes to swap, but he agreed with me that it wasn't worth the risk of having to make another trip out, so he spent most of an hour replacing the entire assembly.

My unexpected-favorite things are the navigation system display and the heated steering wheel. I didn't imagine that I would care about the latter in California's mild climate, but I chill easily and my hands are what gets cold first. Heating up the steering wheel for a few minutes makes me a lot more comfortable. I know, wimpy Californians.

The navigation display might be the best safety feature in the whole car. It makes use of the in-dash display where the speedometer lives—the navigation map appears right next to the speed. It takes about one second to glance at it for driving instructions, as opposed about three seconds for an off-axis nav display.

The adaptive cruise control works extremely well and does the right thing 99+ percent of the time. It takes a whole lot of the stress out of driving in traffic and works perfectly in stop-and-go traffic. The autosteering/autopilot is not so good. Definitely reduces the stress of driving, and it's entirely reliable in stop-and-go, but normally I have to keep close tabs on it. Because it makes mistakes. Paula's description was to think of it like a horse: Most of the time it will do the right thing, but it lacks common sense and every so often it gets spooked or makes an entirely wrong decision. Me, I think student driver. Still, the two features make my driving a whole lot less difficult.

Also, the sound system, which seems to be the best way I have to listen to music in or out of the house. Sandy, my expert sound-engineer sweetie, says that it's Bose and it's top-notch. I was pretty happy with my Audioengine 5+'s until I heard the Tesla sound.

Ctein and his Tesla Model X in Daly City. Photo by Laura Majerus.

Getting used to everything being automated was disturbingly easy. When I walk up to the car, it unlocks the driver side door. When I get within about two feet of it, it swings it wide open, retracts the steering wheel, and moves the driver's seat all the way back to make it easy to get in. Once in the car, pressing the brake pedal moves the seat and the steering wheel back to the position I saved for them (I can save preferences for any number of drivers) and closes the door.

I didn't realize how used I was becoming to these features until I had to drive the Chevy HHR (which we still have) a couple of weeks ago. I walked up to the car and it took me several seconds to remember how to make it work.

Overall, it's difficult to describe the driving experience. My general comment is that "Friends don't let friends drive Teslas." It's like crack on wheels. The Tesla engineers borrowed a big page from Apple design philosophy when they came up with their luxury models. They thought long and hard about how many things people find annoying about driving and how many of those they could fix with existing hardware and software. It's far from perfect but it must be way ahead of whatever is in second place.

If Tesla ever really does get fully autonomous driving, Paula and I will be in heaven—I paid for the full (nonexistent!) package when I bought the car in hopes for the future. We aren't counting on it, no matter what Elon Musk smokes. Based on the performance of the current software, it isn't remotely close, not even for freeway driving. But Tesla is closer than anybody else, so that's where I've put my money.

I'm still getting used to the performance—this is a luxury car that handles and accelerates like a sports car. It'll pull two thirds of a G and doesn't bank a smidge on tight turns. I've been doing a lot of runs down Highway 1 to Santa Cruz (where Sandy lives) which is two-lane highway for much of the way. South of Half Moon Bay, it's normal to be passing tourists and beach visitors who are driving the 55-MPH speed limit, which nobody trying to get from Point A to Point B observes.

The first time I passed a 55 MPH-er, I did what I would usually do—push the pedal to the metal to get past as quickly as possible. I passed them at 98 MPH! I suppose that's really nice for my safety, but I'm not trying to scare the crap out of other drivers on the road. I'm having to learn to moderate my reactions.

I'm still getting used to the car, climbing the learning curve and discovering customizable settings I didn't know about. Today I figured out that it was possible to set the passenger and driver temperatures differently. God knows what else is buried in the feature set. It's like buying a new computer system with an unfamiliar operating system and user interface...

...That can kill you.

I proceed with caution.

And that's about it from Daly City, where all the photographs are beautiful and all the cars are above average.

Pax,

Ctein

Ed. Note: Readers notoriously ignore bylines, so please note that this review is of Ctein's new car, not Mike's! Mike will continue to drive his paid-fer, 30-MPG, manual-transmission 2014 Acura ILX, made by Honda in Greensburg, Indiana, until it dies, or 250k miles, or his ship comes in, or the cows come home, whichever comes first. (It's got 79k miles currently, at age six.) His next car, far off in the hazy future, is likely to be a hybrid. Ctein's next vehicle will be a spaceship, bound for other precincts of the solar system, or possibly beyond.

(This review replaces "Open Mike" for this week.)

ADDENDUM by Ctein: The Tesla is an absolutely frivolous purchase for me—the one monstrous, frivolous purchase in my entire life. But that does not mean I entered into it frivolously. Paula and I have been looking at eVs since 2010, and we started looking seriously about four years ago. Not seriously in the sense that our Chevy HHR needed replacing, but in that when it did the odds were very high that our next car would be an eV, and there were workable options out there for us. Depending, of course, on money and needs and timing.

But, oh yeah, we've been studying this. And by now you should all know that when I study something, I really study something. Most especially when looking at having to spend $40,000 or more, which is four times more than we spent on the Chevy. A great deal of consideration went into this purchase, not to mention no small amount of planning. Yes, it is a frivolous and an exorbitant luxury. Do not imagine, though, that it was entered into ignorantly. There are many pros and cons to buying an eV these days. They are not panaceas. I'm not asking you to think so. But please give me a little credit—I knew exactly what I was doing.

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

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

Kirk: "Made me chuckle a bit. In Austin they are as common as pickup trucks and Honda Accords...."

emptyspaces: "I have had a Nissan Leaf Plus for about five months now. Couldn’t afford (or drive!) a Tesla during the buying process (Leaf Plus will be $10k less than the off-menu Model 3...before insuring it). Anyway, I love it. It’s quick in that key 25–55 MPH range and can easily merge onto the freeway from any ramp.

"I am happy for anyone who gets to experience an EV for basic driving...none of them are great for long trips but in five months my biggest day has been 85 miles. It’s our second car, and my DD. Congrats on the Model X—I have a hard time believing the sound system is better than Audioengine, but glad to hear the sound doesn’t suck like in my Leaf. Just got done replacing the speakers in it."

Malcolm Leader: "I want one!"

Daniel: "Meanwhile, the old '81 VW Rabbit diesel keeps on going with 50 MPG at highway speeds all day long. In-town driving is 46 MPG. Was made in Pennsylvania, USA. Roomy enough that Wilt Chamberlain (former NBA player) drove one. Parts easy to get and the vehicle still works well. Paid for decades ago and insurance cost is low. Why mess with what works?"

Thomas Mc Cann: "Worth watching:"

Tim Auger: "What’s the depreciation like on a high-end Tesla?"

Dye Transfer Sale Update

Ctein reports that all fully-paid orders from the incredibly successful Black Friday Dye Transfer Sale have been delivered, according to the United States Postal Service. If you haven't gotten your prints yet, please contact him directly at [email protected].

He will review his new Tesla soon!

Mike

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

Please help TOP keep on truckin' through Patreon

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LAST DAY!!

Final UPDATE: SALE ENDED and links removed 12 noon Pacific Time today, 12/6/19. If you need to, you can contact Ctein at [email protected]. Be patient for an answer—he experienced a large volume of last-minute orders and will be underwater for a while.

UPDATE 12 minutes to noon: These are selling very quickly and Ctein is swamped. PLEASE REFRESH YOUR BROWSER WINDOW FREQUENTLY before picking your order, to see which prints are still available. Ctein is pulling sold-out images as quickly as he can. 

 

The Dye Transfer Print Sale ends today at 12 noon Pacific Time.

You really should watch the printmaking documentary if you haven't. I know you probably haven't, because it's kinda long and there's a kinda boring bit (when they're in the dark and the green stills are on the screen and the timer's running) before the good bits start. But you really should. If you don't find it fascinating then I miss my guess.

The thumbnails and ordering instructions are here [SALE ENDED and link removed 12 noon Pacific Time 12/6/19]. We do not take orders after the deadline.

The prints are $650, shipping is $39 to anywhere in the world, your satisfaction is fully guaranteed, and this old process pretty much isn't being done any more—as you will richly appreciate if you watch the video. (Did I mention you should watch the video?)

Noon in San Francisco is 3 p.m. here in New York, 8 p.m. in London, and 7 a.m. Australian EDT in Sydney. After that we'll get back to regular programming. It's been one of the three best sales in TOP's history, and I'm so happy to make so many of you so happy.

UPDATE: After the sale ends you'll continue to be able to buy these archive prints from Ctein at any time. It's just that they'll have gone back to the regular price of $2,000 and up instead of $650. If you do want one in the future, feel free to contact Ctein at any time.

Mike
(Big thanks to 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.

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The Luminous Landscape Videos

Michael Reichmann of The Luminous Landscape interviewing Ctein in 2004

Well this is a nice surprise. Josh Reichmann, son of our late friend Michael of The Luminous Landscape, has given us permission to make available the two videos of MR's visit to Ctein's San Francisco area darkroom fifteen years ago. This is especially generous of him as L-L is now behind a paywall.

Here's the interview. The part about dye transfer begins about 23:50 of the 32-minute video if you want to skip right to it.

The second one is really the priceless one—it's the only video we know of that shows a dye transfer print actually being made. The first fifteen minutes are somewhat simulated (you can't film in total darkness), but the later part is real-time documentary, showing Ctein making an actual matrix and a print, from start to finish. You really should watch this—it's quite fascinating even if you never set foot in a darkroom or never will again. And it's now a valuable historical record, at least in photo-tech history. Finally, it certainly shows you how involved a process it was to make the rare print or prints you've bought in our sale!

Speaking of which, there are now less than two days left. The basic information is here and you can browse the available images here.

Many and most sincere thanks to Josh. I found it emotional to see and hear his father again—I knew MR for many years. It's the first time I've rewatched one of his videos since his passing. He was a pioneer of photography online and is greatly missed in our little corner of the universe.

Enjoy!

Mike
(Thanks to JR)

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.

Please help support The Online Photographer through Patreon

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

Sid: "Fascinating, even spellbinding, videos!"

Rob de Loe: "Best quotation from the second video: 'now we know why not that many people do this anymore.' Yeesh. What an incredible amount of work to make one print. I had no idea. Thanks for posting this Mike."

Mike replies: Incredible, isn't it? Now you can see why I think dye transfer is one of the most amazing processes in photography's history. But unlike some things that are purely difficult, there was a reason for going through all that work: the results were inimitable, especially as regards maximum black and color purity.

However, my second most favorite color process is pigment inkjet. A well-made pigment inkjet print can be really beautiful. It is a wonderful medium too.

...And not quite as difficult, either.  :-)  But one of the salient comments Ctein made in the video is when he talked about the prejudice people have that inkjet printing is just "pressing a button and letting the computer do it." He's right that that's the same prejudice that people leveled against photography itself in the beginning. Inkjet printing is a skill too, and takes knowledge as well as judgement.

As an aside, note also in the videos that Ctein doesn't use junk words and fillers when he speaks. You won't hear him say "um" and "ahh" very often, if at all. And he doesn't use filler phrases like "you know" (unless he really means it) or "know what I'm saying" or "like" or "stuff like that"...or stuff like that. Sometimes he will pause and actually sigh, but he's silent—he doesn't fill his silences with junk. Very unusual manner of speaking these days. No wonder he dictates instead of typing.

Kenneth G James: "Wow! Watched the videos, they are great! Thanks Mike, Thanks Josh."

Kenneth Tanaka: "I actually have a DVD of that second video (from a former LuLa subscription purchase) that I keep near my desk as a greatest-hits reference. I’ve not only watched several times myself but I’ve played it for others. Several years ago I even played it for a lunchtime group of photo curators and conservation interns at a major museum. It’s a wonderfully educational video, a genuine classic."

Mike replies: Genuine classic...I thought the very same thing, Ken, rewatching it last night.

[A different] Mike: "As amazing as the process is to watch—and it really is—it's even wilder to think about how the idea came to be in the first place. Wow."

MHMG: "Some fifteen years later, I listen with interest to Ctein's comments and concerns about print permanence in the first video. Ctein is entirely spot on with some of his concerns about accelerated aging test methods as it was practiced at the time. We have now learned something about modern inkjet prints that weren't predicted by those accelerated aging methods practiced at that time. A new understanding of inkjet print longevity has indeed been determined both by refinements in accelerated test methods and actual observations in real world anecdotal reports at this point in time now that inkjet printing is a much more mature print process. I take comfort that both 'real world' anecdotal evidence of aging issues with modern media and more recent accelerated testing protocols with improved methodologies for these media are now leading to a better understanding of print permanence. The role of optical brighteners and titanium dioxide whitening pigments in modern media, for example, play a more significant role than we knew at the time Michael Reichmann interviewed Ctein in the these videos. Progress is progress!"

David Lee: "Thanks for the videos Mike. I watched the printing process three times already and shared it twice."

Eamon Hickey: "An incredible treat to watch these videos, especially the printing demo. Thanks to all who thought to make it and now made it available for us to see. In addition to being a master printer, Ctein is a master explainer, a skill that is probably as rare and valuable (in the benefit-to-the-rest-of-us sense) as his darkroom skills. A real pleasure to hear and see him describe his work."

Dye Transfer and Me, Part V: So Many Hacks...and Finally, Money!

Part 5 of an Uncertain Number

Words and pictures by Ctein

Part I / Part II / Part III / Part IV

I was turning out excellent dye transfer prints by 1980 (Malcolm Gladwell's nonsense about 10,000 hours notwithstanding), but there were still many parts of the craft that vexed me. Matrix development was a tricky thing—for everybody, not just me. Developing three large sheets of film in two minutes with a fussy developer was not a good recipe for consistency or uniformity. Matrix film's unhardened gelatin emulsion is converted to hardened gelatin wherever it is exposed to light and developed with a tanning developer*. Wash the processed film in hot water and the unexposed/unhardened emulsion goes down the drain. That's what makes the "printing plate" that soaks up the dye.

Tanning developer isn't stable. The stock solutions consist of a developing agent (Part A) that gets mixed with a base activator (B) just before use. By changing the A:B ratio between 1:1 and 1:6, one could get a contrast change of about ±1 paper grade. 1:2 was normal contrast. The stock solutions would last for years, but you had to use the mixed developer within a few minutes, according to Kodak literature Freshly mixed developer was a very pale tan that oxidized within a few minutes to the color of strong tea. After half an hour (or after use) it looked like ink. Definitely not stable!

Fantastic First Day: Print Sale Update, the Morning After

I have splendiferous and terrific news to report. Day One of our current sale [SALE ENDED and link removed 12 noon Pacific Time 12/6/19] could not have gone better—it got off to the best start of any sale we've ever done. I have to tell you, these print offers are truly fun when they take off like this. It's wonderful, and very exciting. I cannot thank everyone enough! (I had to go through this post and edit out a whole bunch of exclamation points.) One truly loyal reader ordered nine, and there have been many orders for more than one print. "Black Friday" lived up to its name here at TOP World Headquarters—it has made my year! (Sorry, there's another one. Never write when you're happy, it makes you sound like an idiot.) I can't wait to see how we've done at the 24-hour mark. 

As you can guess, Ctein got hammered—he worked for fifteen hours straight with only small breaks before exhaustion set in. Just before he turned in, however, he emailed me to report that everyone who ordered by his bedtime late last night has been sent an acknowledgement, and he processed all but the last two dozen orders that came in yesterday. Those will be processed first thing today, in order, before he begins on the orders that await him this morning from overnight. He follows a rock star schedule, staying up late and sleeping late, and he's on the West Coast, so he's not up yet. If you're expecting a response from him, don't worry.

This sale is already a great success and we haven't even hit the one-day mark yet. Remember, it continues until next Friday, and there are plenty of prints left. Thanks again, truly.

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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Master Dye Transfer Print Sale / One Week Only

We're having a most extraordinary Print Offer this week.

Our friend Ctein was for many decades a master custom printer in dye transfer, crafting prints to order for the rock 'n' roll photographer Jim Marshall among many others. He is also a photographer in his own right whose portfolio, prior to the closing of his darkroom in 2013, consisted of several hundred approximately 16x20-inch photographs superbly printed as dyes. After carefully archiving extra copies of his own full-sized dye transfer prints for years or decades, Ctein has decided that it's time to pass along his archive of his own prints.

For the next seven days, he's offering his entire archive for potential sale.

VERY IMPORTANT: We're offering 270 different images but there are only 1–5 copies of most of the prints (the number available is noted next to each thumbnail on the Selection Page). There will never be any more. It's not strictly "first come, first served," but it's heavily weighted that way. It's a good idea to provide Ctein with alternative choices, so he can make as many people happy as possible, but it's very important to get your order in early to stand the best chance of getting the prints you want.

Selection: You can easily appreciate that this is going to be a tough sale to administrate as an un-automated, one-time, one-Ctein-with-no-minions offer. The ordering instructions are a bit complexicated. Sorry about that! Please persevere.  :-)  We are standing by to answer questions should you happen to get confused.

Initially it's easy, though—just go to the

Selection Page

[SALE ENDED and link removed 12 noon Pacific Time 12/6/19]

and follow the two very simple steps—but please read the following before you do!

Cost: The prints cost $650 each, which is high only in the context of our usual sales and quite low in the context of dye transfer. Between the 1930s and 1994, it most often would have cost you more than that—sometimes far more—to have a custom lab make a dye transfer print for you from your own original. (Just the other day one of our readers reported that his company used to have dyes made to order for $5,000 each. That would have been at the very high end, but not crazy.) It is also far below Ctein's normal everyday prices for these exact prints, which are now in the thousands of dollars.

Shipping: Shipping is $39 per order to anywhere in the world, no matter how many prints you order.

Payment: We prefer payment by check (US bank) but you can pay by PayPal if it's more convenient or if you're in another country.

Layaway: Being about 11 times more organized than I am, Ctein is, incredibly, offering a layaway option: you can pay for your print in 13 easy monthly installments. I would never stand a chance at this, but I know the guy. He will pull it off.

Bonuses: There are bonuses for those ordering multiple prints. If you buy three dye transfer prints, you can pick any of Ctein's digital prints as a free bonus; if you buy six dye transfer prints, you can pick a seventh dye transfer print for free.

Ctein

Guarantee: I know you can't see the prints before you buy, so we offer an unconditional 100% guarantee: live with your purchase for a month and if you're not happy, send it back in the original packing for a full refund. You're protected. However, this time we have no way of replacing pictures damaged in shipment. They will be packaged extremely well to minimize possible damage, but in case of shipping damage you'll have to decide either to keep it for full price or send it back for a full refund. In the latter case we'll cover shipping costs.

That's it! Ctein's "Dye Transfer and Me" series will resume tomorrow. In the meantime, have a look for yourself at the beautiful prints! It costs you nothing to browse. We very much hope you will like.

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.

Please help support The Online Photographer through Patreon

Be Ready

Word to the wise—in the Ctein Archive sale that starts in two hours, we're offering 270 different images (count 'em—I did!), but most images only exist in a 1–4 copies or so. Popular images will sell out—single images will sell out if just one person wants it. So if you want to actually be able to buy the image you want, it would be wise to stake your claim early. You can always change your mind later.

Most importantly, you'll need to know what your choice is, so go to the selection page and look through the pictures to see if there's something you particularly would like to have.

In my personal opinion, Ctein's portfolio is strong in...

Sunset under Columbia

...The Space Program...

Lava under Forest Fire Smoke

...atmospheric effects...

Total Eclipse Coronal Streamers

...and astronomy, and I think those prints will go fast. You might recall our sale in 2013 when Ctein stopped taking print orders. He had enough materials left to make 160 new full-sized dye transfer prints to order, and those 160 prints sold out in 6 hours and 2 minutes!

Whatever you want, don't wait till Day 7 of the sale to make your decision. In fact, don't wait till Day 2. We are going to be publicizing this sale at other websites and through other channels, so (jealously?) I want to make sure that as a loyal regular TOP reader you get first crack at what you want.

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.

Please help support The Online Photographer through Patreon

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

Bruce Bodine: "Order link please?"

Mike replies: The sale hasn't started yet and the order link isn't live. It starts at noon San Francisco time today, Friday, which is 3 p.m. Eastern US Time, 8 p.m. in London, and 7:00 a.m. in Sydney.

It's Complicated! (Please Read)

Master printmaker Ctein with his life's work,
much of which will go on sale here on Friday

It's only four days until our fantabulous Black Friday Ctein Dye Transfer Master Print Sale. It'll start at noon Pacific Standard Time on Friday, November 29, and run for exactly one week. This is the only print sale we've ever had for multiple pictures—many of 'em—and there is a severely limited supply of prints of each picture, so it's going to be complicated to try to get you happily matched up with a picture you want.

ALL THE FOLLOWING INFORMATION IS FOR FRIDAY, when the sale starts. It doesn't start until then. This is just so you can familiarize yourself with what going to happen then.

Bonuses
First, all the prints—you can view them here—are $650 regardless of rarity and size, plus a $39 shipping and handling charge for each order regardless of the number of prints you buy (that's higher than usual, but Ctein will be packing these extremely well). There is no limit on the number of prints you can order. There are bonus incentives for multiple-print purchases: digital prints (here's the most complete list) or even an extra dye transfer print of your choice (subject to availability). We'll give you the details later.

Layaways are available!
You'll be able to pay for prints by personal check (which we'd prefer) or PayPal (necessary for buyers who don't have a US bank account or wish to use credit cards). You will also be able to purchase prints on layaway, paying $50/month for 13 months for each print you want to buy (plus a bump for shipping and handling in the last payment). Here are the layaway terms.

What you'll do
Here's how it's going to work (the final and official instructions will be in the live Sales posting here on the 29th):

1.) There will be a request link on TOP and on the print listings page on Ctein's website. Use either of those to send Ctein an email. If neither link works for you (they fail for about 1% of viewers for unknown reasons) email [email protected] and put "My print requests"—exactly those words—in the subject line.

2.) The email should contain ONLY the following information:

• How many prints you want to buy (e.g. "I would like to buy three prints.")
• The titles of the prints you want, including alternative selections, if any. You can rank them by preference as you like, or not. If the photograph is available in more than one print size (if they are, that's indicated on the inventory page), make sure you state which size you want. If there's only one size, just give the title.

That's it. Don't include your mailing address, payment information, any special shipping requests, bonus prints you'd like, anything else at this point. All that will be taken care of when Ctein confirms your selection and directs you to place your order.

3.) Ctein will send you an acknowledgment of your email within an hour of receipt (unless he's asleep—remember he's on Pacific Standard Time and won't be on the computer from roughly 1:00 a.m. until 10:00 a.m.). If you don't get an acknowledgment, send your request again.

4.) Within 24 hours of your request, Ctein will confirm which print(s) you can buy. In all likelihood it will be a lot less than 24 hours, and if none of your choices are available, Ctein will let you know that very quickly (unless he gets totally slammed with orders in the first hours, in which case there will be a notice posted on TOP letting you all know there will be delays). With your confirmation, Ctein will send a link to the order page. You will place your actual order there, following the instructions posted.

Ctein will make an effort to match up people's choices and alternatives with print availability to maximize happiness (and sales), but there will be—of necessity!—a very strong "first come, first served" component.

The earlier you get your request in, the more likely you are to get what you want.

(Did Mike emphasize that enough?  :-) 

Ctein will be updating the webpage showing which prints are still available as orders are confirmed, but as you can appreciate, there's going to be a substantial lag, because there will always be print requests that haven't been processed yet. That's why it's a good idea to provide alternates to your first choices, if you have any. By the time you place your order, the inventory will have changed. Especially overnight (his night, not yours).

We'll tell you all this again on Friday. This is just a heads up.

Meanwhile, between now and Friday, you can check out the prints and make up your wish list in advance. Please do not send it to Ctein before the start of the sale.

Questions
Any questions? Please post them in the comments and we will endeavor to answer them promptly.

—Mike and Ctein

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Dye Transfer and Me, Part IV: Where Most of the Work Is

Fig. 1

Words and photos by Ctein

Dye Transfer and Me: A Meandering Half-Century Journey: As a prelude to the big Black Friday Dye Transfer Sale I'm writing a series of columns talking about dye transfer—how it worked, what it meant to me and other photographers and printers, and our perpetual jousting with Eastman Kodak. (Important note: You cannot put in print orders or requests before the sale. Please don't email me your preferences in advance.)

Part 4 of an Uncertain Number...

In Which There is More Hacking of Process
My first meeting with Frank McLaughlin in 1978 was a high point in my life. Frank was warm and welcoming and knew everybody in the dye transfer world. Frank introduced me to Phil Condax, Louis's son and a curator at the Eastman House—we also became lifelong friends—and Tom Rankin and the other folks at Frog Prince, a commercial dye transfer lab in San Francisco. Frank knew there was strength in networking and he made certain we networked.

Frank brought in Bob Speck, who developed the dye transfer process for Kodak under the direction of its inventor, Louis Condax. Pretty exciting! Bob and Frank pored over my prints and gushed fulsome praise, to a degree that anyone with a smaller artistic ego than mine would have found embarrassing (I coped). They declared they had never seen better dye transfer prints. I expect my feet didn't leave any footprints as I was departing Kodak.

Frank's favors didn't stop with introductions. He put in a word about my work with Kodak's public relations department which, a few years later, produced its own substantial rewards, and he introduced me to my biggest and best clients. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Fig. 2.

Dye transfer changed what I photographed. This print medium could handle anything I could record on film, and that was a lot. Color negative films had an exceptionally long exposure range, well over 10 stops of straight-line curve. I could photograph in the middle of the desert, at noon, and make prints that held detail in the highlights and the shadows (figure 2).

Night photography was—and still is—one of my passions, though not the way it was usually done back in the era of available darkness, pushing films to their max. In college, I'd begun to wonder what kind of photographs I'd get if I went all the way to the other extreme—slow films, processed for minimum grain and maximum tonal quality. The first time I saw what urban landscapes at midnight looked like on Panatomic X, I was hooked.

Fig. 3.

When I moved to color and medium format, it was the same. It demanded patience, a flashlight, and a good book. Occasionally the exposures were only a few minutes; figure 3 ran 45 minutes. I discussed reciprocity failure last column—contrast went up, and the scenes were contrasty to begin with. Well, that's what contrast-control masking and dye transfer were for. I dealt with previously impossible-to-print-well negatives like figure 1. That vein of work continued throughout my film and darkroom career, culminating in the Christmas in California series.

Dye transfer was a "hi-fi" printing process that exposed problems the same way a really good sound system reveals a poor recording. I loved telephoto lenses (still do), and long lenses are prone to lateral chromatic aberration—the color fringing that occurs towards the edges of the frame because the lens produces red, green, and blue images of slightly different magnifications. Before digital image processing, which made the fix simple, it was something you lived with. I could ignore it in smaller prints, but I was printing large in dye transfer. Worse, the high color purity of the dye transfer process made those fringes more obvious. Worst, color fringes in a dye transfer print look like bad technique! It takes a technical eye to distinguish lens aberrations from mis-registered color separations. This would not do.

I measured the exact amount of the color fringing and calculated how much I'd have to raise or lower the enlarger head to compensate. It was a millimeter or so over a throw distance of about a meter. When I printed a negative made with my 300mm lens I carefully adjusted the enlarger head between the matrices to compensate for the aberration. Mostly, it worked. I rarely got perfect results—enlargers really aren't designed to be manipulated that way with any degree of precision alignment—but there was much less color fringing than there would have been if I done nothing.

Other complications—I've mentioned that one of my misconceptions was that dye transfer prints would be technically the equal or superior to chromogenic prints in all respects. Among other delusions, I expected dye transfer prints to be as clean and flawless as a well-executed Ektacolor print.

Oh my, but that is to laugh! We're talking about a process that involves multiple generations, large trays of liquid dyes, rinses and washes and multiple hand transfers. Why in the world I ever imagined that would produce spotless and flaw-free results, I have no idea.

Any bits of dust on my negative or contrast masks produced a white spot in the matrices that would have to be retouched out of every print I made. You can bet I went to great lengths to be as clean as possible, and sometimes I achieve perfection...but more often, not. Further, any bits of dust or air bubbles that got trapped between the matrix and the receiving paper would keep the dye from transferring to the paper, leaving a little bright red (minus cyan), green (minus magenta) or blue (minus yellow) spot that also needed to be retouched.

If a bit of grit got embedded in a matrix or it got scratched, then there'd be a little bright spot or streak to spot out of every print thereafter. Manipulating large sheets of soft, wet emulsion for print after print, stuff would happen. Even careful craftspeople aren't perfect, as much as we'd like to be.

Little particles of dye precipitated out of the liquid baths. If they settled on a matrix and weren't entirely removed in the rinse step, those dye specks would transfer themselves to the receiving paper to create a minuscule pinpoint spot of pure cyan, magenta, or yellow. Fortunately, the yellow specks were invisible to the human eye, but the cyan and the magenta? Not so much. They had to be bleached out, and the cleared spot retouched in with dye.

Sometimes there were only a few. Sometimes there were hundreds. Very rarely were there none. Dye specks like that are so common in dye transfer prints that it's one of the more reliable diagnostics for telling if what you're looking at is a dye transfer print. Peer really closely and the odds are good you'll see a primary-color speck somewhere in the light areas.

So, spotting had to be done. A lot of spotting, and I wanted it to be perfect, because I didn't know any better. Nobody knowledgeable was trying to turn out perfect dye transfer prints. (Okay, almost nobody—Frank Tartaro's lab in New York was as obsessive about this as I was.)

It helps that the dyes used to make a dye transfer print are the same ones you use for spotting and retouching. Any finishing work you do can be flawless and invisible, if you're good enough. And your brushes are good enough. I'd buy six or eight 000 brushes to find one that produced the perfect pinpoint spot of dye. I coddled those perfect spotting brushes, but over the course of my career I wore out several generations. Lots of print spotting!

Potassium permanganate selectively removes cyan dye. Happily, that was the most common dye speck. I tried the finest spotting brushes I had, but they made far too big a blotch. I can't recall what inspired me, but I discovered that toothpicks, whittled down to a needle point, proved ideal. I could take out a spot a tenth of a millimeter across and leave the surrounding area almost untouched.

It also helped that I'm phenomenally nearsighted. In my youth, without my glasses my "infinity" working distance was only four inches from my nose!

Permanganate left a brown stain that I removed with sodium bisulfite applied, again, with a sharpened toothpick. Then I had to quickly wipe off the bisulfite with 1% acetic acid, because bisulfite itself would start to bleach dye if left on the print.

Unfortunately there wasn't a strong selective bleach for magenta. There was a general-purpose bleach that would attack all three dyes—it was Kodak's R-18 B&W film reducer formula. R-18 is a mixture of potassium permanganate and sulfuric acid. It bleached great, but it turned out to have problems that I discovered only when I went after the other "dirty" part of dye transfer—stained borders.

In theory, the totally clear parts of the matrix film, where there is no gelatin emulsion to carry the dye (see process description) should print as pure white. Well, they don't. Usually they'd carry a few CC of dye density over to the print paper. Even though I'd figured out how to get sharp borders on my prints' image areas, the surrounding borders would usually have a faint dye stain. Some people considered it a mark of the process. I considered it unattractive.

After I made a print, I'd bleach the area around the image with R-18 bleach, removing most or all of the dye from an inch or three around the image to provide clean white border suitable for framing. Then I'd wipe that whole area down with sodium bisulfite, rinse it off with 1% acetic acid, and dry the print. Nice.

What I didn't realize was that the sulfuric acid in the reducer was creating residual sulfur compounds in the paper. I was turning archival paper into non-archival paper! The paper started to turn brown and get brittle where I'd applied the bleach. Fortunately for me, the the consequences of that became apparent in less than a year and I hadn't sold any prints yet. I needed a better solution—pun intended.

I dug into the chemistry and decided that it wasn't sulfuric acid in particular that was important, it was that it acidified the potassium permanganate. Perhaps glacial acetic acid would do—it wasn't anywhere as strong an acid as sulfuric but if it drove the pH low enough....

It did. R-18C (for Ctein flavor) worked just as well as the Kodak formula and it meant I didn't have to contaminate my prints with sulfuric acid. Not so incidentally, it also worked just as well as R-18 as a film reducer. I passed that information on to Kodak, although I don't think it ever made it into the literature. Now you know.

Why have I spent so much time talking about print spotting and finishing? Because that's where most of the work is! After the first print, I spend far more time on that than on transferring prints. That's the reason I've had to put something like a thousand hours into preparing prints for the upcoming sale.

Ctein

Original contents copyright 2019 by Ctein. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Dye Transfer and Me, Part III: Sweat and Tears

Words and photo by Ctein

Dye Transfer and Me: A Meandering Half-Century Journey: As a prelude to the big Black Friday Dye Transfer Sale I'm writing a series of columns talking about dye transfer—how it worked, what it meant to me and other photographers and printers, and our perpetual jousting with Eastman Kodak. (Important note: You cannot put in print orders or requests before the sale. Please don't email me your preferences in advance.)

Part 3 of an Uncertain Number...

In Which Our Hero Doth First Engage the Great Yellow Beast with Stealth and Guile
When we left off in Part 2 (and mid-1976) I had written to Frank McLaughlin at Eastman Kodak about my ongoing and unsolvable-by-me problems getting good prints out of the dye transfer process. It was an act of desperation. It paid off.

Frank's reply answered all my questions, included a "DT care package" of every related publication Kodak had, and concluded with "The dye transfer process is complicated and sometimes frustrating, but...keep at it. If I can be of any assistance, please let me know."

Fortified, I plunged back into the learning pool. By the end of the year I had the process under control (no, not "mastered," never mastered). They were small prints and artistically insignificant, to teach me how to manage the process and it. The art would come later, after I learnt craft.

Finally, the big moment—my first full-size (20x24-inch) print for my portfolio. I chose this photograph (figure 1) because I knew it would benefit from dye transfer's unique qualities. I needed a long density range to render everything from the disk of the sun to the near-silhouette Saturn/Apollo 17 vehicle with appropriate brilliance. In addition, the Ektacolor print was monochrome orange. I knew there was more of a range of hues than that, and dye transfer, with its excellent yellow (see Part 2) was the ideal medium for this photograph.

Fig. 1

I ordered a box of 16.5x21.25-inch Pan Matrix Film, the largest sheet size it came in. Not quite large enough for a 16x20 image area, not if I wanted big enough borders to handle the film, but close enough. It would've been nice to have 20x24 film, but it was already fabulously expensive—800 current bucks for 25 sheets.

Into the darkroom! I spent a day making test strips, nailing down the correct exposure and color balance. My first process innovation had been controlling the color balance using the dial-in filtration in my enlarger's color head. The usual way to control color balance was to vary the relative exposures for the red-, green-, and blue-light-exposed matrices. I knew how to color balance this way, but it had disadvantages. I had to do annoying calculations to make fine color shifts as appropriate RGB exposure adjustments. More significantly, exposure times much beyond 90 seconds would induce reciprocity failure.

Photographers think of reciprocity failure in film as being about time. Really, it's about intensity. The lower the light level hitting the film, the less effective the film is at recording it. Reducing the light intensity by a stop reduces the recorded image by more than a stop, because the weaker light isn't recorded as efficiently as the stronger.

Reciprocity failure causes contrast to increase. A one-stop luminance difference in exposure might become a 1.1- or 1.2-stop effective difference in what the film records, or worse. The lower the intensity (the longer the required exposure) the stronger the effect. This would be very bad news for color separations. They all have to have the same contrast or you'll get color-crossover in the highlights and shadows, even if the midtones are correct.

Many of my exposures were going to be a lot more than a 90 seconds. Well, I couldn't get rid of reciprocity failure, but I could equalize the exposure times by dialing color filtration into my enlarger's color head. For example, if the red exposure was half that of the green and blue, dialing 30CC (one stop) of cyan filtration into the color head would make the red exposure time match the other two. Yes, with very long exposures there'd be an overall contrast increase, but I had tools to correct that.

This worked beautifully. My most extreme case was a dense negative of a very high contrast subject which needed a very strong contrast-reduction mask. I wound up with 12-minute exposures, but the print looked gorgeous.

Okay, enough about my cleverness. It's a new day; it's time to make my first big set of matrices.

They are horribly dense, badly overexposed. What happened?!

In my enthusiasm, I'd forgotten to stop the lens down after focusing. There went $100 worth of film.

Matrix Set 2. The exposures are just fine, but two of the sheets of film stick together in the developing tray and I can't get them apart fast enough (developing this stuff was hard). There's a big blotch in one of the matrices.

Another $100 worth of film. Grrr.

Set 3: The exposures are good, the development feels good. As I rinse the magenta matrix in hot water to remove the excess emulsion (see the process description), the entire image slides off the film! I'd accidentally exposed one of the matrices wrong-side up, and that's what happens if you do.

At this point my memory fails me. I can't recall what went wrong after that...traumatic amnesia, I'd guess. All I know is that I went through four —that's right, four—more sets of matrices, and there was something wrong with each and every one and it was different each time.

What I do remember is being in tears. I'd expected that very expensive box of film would get me (optimistically) a half dozen finished prints, but I had zero. I gave up for the day.

The next day, calm and less tearful, I went back into the darkroom, took a deep breath, centered myself as much as I could, and made Matrix Set 8. It was good. My first successful portfolio print, achieved through sweat, blood, and tears.

Okay, no blood—there were enough of the other two, thank you.

Fortunately, I never had another experience remotely like that first one. Occasionally I would screw up a set of matrices—galling, and expensive—but the majority of the time everything went fine. In fact, I can't remember much about my dye transfer printing for the next year, it was so uneventful. It's what they say, no news is good news.

Not that I didn't come up with all sorts of little questions; and in early 1978 I sent a long list of them off to Frank McLaughlin. He courteously answered most of them and encouraged me to continue writing him. I did, and we quickly struck up a friendship that lasted for the rest of his life.

Correction: something noteworthy did happen in June of 1977—my first professional publication, an article on contrast masking color negatives, appeared in Petersen's Photographic, the big photography-craft magazine in the US (circulation: 300,000+). It was an article Bob Nadler at Camera 35 had wanted, but it had taken me a couple of years to get around to writing it and by that time Bob had moved on. That taught me an important lesson—never, ever put off writing an article that an editor has asked for! I sent the orphaned article to Karen Sue Geller at Petersen's, who bought it and launched my writing career.

As I wrote back in Part 1, one of the reasons I had a five-part series for Petersen's Photographic, "Dye Transfer for Beginners," in 1980, was so that no one else would ever have to go through the hell I went through climbing learning curves I didn't even know were there when I started. There was a second reason. I was scheming.

I met up with Bob Nadler in early 1978 when he was in San Francisco on a book tour. On hearing of my success in learning how to make dye transfer prints, he told me that Kodak was thinking seriously about killing off the process or, at the very least, eliminating shipments of anything less than professional-lab quantities of supplies. Think thousands to tens of thousands of current-dollars minimum orders. That would eliminate the likelihood of anyone new taking up the process—a slower path to demise, but no less certain.

That would not do. With Frank's off-the-record and sometimes tacit support, I approached Petersen's later that year with the idea of a five-part series on making dye transfer prints. Karen had also heard the rumors and said she'd be on board with me doing that...but only if I could guarantee supplies would be available in reader-affordable quantities. I said I could. Technically, that wasn't true at that moment.

Okay, nothing technical about it.

My then-partner Terry and I made annual driving trips cross-country each fall, so a few months later I was in Rochester meeting Frank for the very first time. I told him that he could tell Kodak that Petersen's had "committed" (nudge nudge, wink wink) to running a series on dye transfer. Frank was a loyal Kodak employee, but he was more loyal to dye transfer. Our co-conspiracy worked. Kodak management bought it and canceled their plans for discontinuing or drastically restricting product availability.

"Dye Transfer for Beginners," Part 1 of 5, appeared in January of 1980. Through a scheduling SNAFU (Paul Farber's, not Karen's), Part 2 did not appear in the February issue but was delayed until March. The magazine got no fewer than five letters from readers asking what had happened to the second installment, which was incredible!

I know how funny that sounds in these days of instant Internet communication. It was different back then. When all correspondence with magazines was by mail and there was no such thing as a "Web presence," letters from readers were few and far between. It was significant when an article got even two letters from readers. Five? That was unheard of. We had a hit on our hands and dye transfer was safe for another few years.

It was my first joust with Kodak. It wasn't going to be my last by any means, and I won them all, save at the very last. Okay, a few beyond the very last. Yes, friends, more dirt will be dished. Stay tuned to this channel.

Ctein

Original contents copyright 2019 by Ctein. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Dave: "Ctein, Thank you for writing this series! Such interesting tidbits about the dye transfer process, along with a fortuitous series of events that allowed you to learn the process and practice it for years. The columns read as though they were part of fictional story, but you persevered by learning the process, asking questions to your contact at Kodak, figuring out a way to prolong the manufacture of dye transfer materials, and more to come! Even though I know nothing about dye transfer, this series fascinates me with all the twists and turns of the story. I commend you for continuing after the first results were disastrous and expensive! I can almost imagine how you felt when that expensive box of film was depleted without a decent print—'traumatic amnesia' indeed! I'm eager to read the next part in your series."